Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta are Lee Marvin's wise-fool descendants in Tarantinos Pulp Fiction. The strength of the movie lies in its abundance of hackneyed stories, stereotyped characters and general genre cliches. To try to put a new angle on them all, to make them seem born of the moment, could only be pulled off by a filmmaker with a near-solipsistic belief in his own abilities. The post-credits entrance of Jules and Vincent is by now one of the best remembered (and most parodied) moments in modern cinema history. Hash, cheeseburgers, foot massages are all debated by the two killers in the Chevrolet as if they don't have a care in the world. And most likely they don't. They're on their way to a hit, but there's little sense of anticipated trouble, though they looked like a couple of refugees from Reservoir Dogs - black bargain-rack suit, white shirt, black Slim Jim tie. "When Jean-Pierre Melville was making his crime films, he talked about how important it was that his characters have a suit of armour," explained Tarantino. "His was the snap-brim Fedora and Bogart-like trench coat the black suits in Pulp Fiction, that's my suit of armour." However likeable Travolta's gloriously f***ed-up and gracelessly charming junkie Vincent is, Sam Jackson's Jules remains the Mr Superbad of the partnership. As stone-cold hired killers go, he's a pulp fictitious hero, his roots in the shoot-first-and-jivetalk-later blaxploitation thrillers of the 1970s. "When people see killers for hire," remarked Jackson of the archetype, "they tend to think that they sit at home, they clean their guns, they sharpen their knives, they polish their bullets. But Quentin takes you into a world where you actually find out that they gossip. They talk about their lives outside of what they do. He has a facility for creating everyday language and sensibilities for his characters."
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
