Violent, vibrant, and endlessly quotable, Reservoir Dogs knocked me out and psyched
me up to see how Quentin Tarantino was going to top it, because if there was
one thing I could tell from that audacious debut, it was that the director was
just getting started. When word got out that Pulp Fiction was coming, I went into a state of hyper anticipation.
When I finally got to see it in autumn 1994, it infected me completely. My best
friend at the time and I didn’t just see the movie in the theater five times (which
is more times than I’ve ever seen any other film in the theater during its
first run); we wanted to be Jules and Vincent. Actually, I think we both wanted
to be Jules. He was just too fucking cool. Like a little Fonzie.
I was kind of tickled when Jason Bailey told almost the
exact same tale in the introduction of his new book Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece
(only he saw the movie six times and wanted to be the filmmaker instead of one
of his characters). So from the very start, Bailey had won me over with his
simpatico obsession. By hopping into that obsession with both feet for the next
200 pages, he never let me down. The
Complete Story is indeed that and it’s told in a scatter shot way full of
unexpected side roads that is very much in the spirit of the film it chews
over. The tale of Tarantino’s early life, early work, the movie that made him a
behind-the-camera celebrity, and it’s A-bomb-strength aftermath keeps wandering
down corridors to ponder how QT recycled material from his own scripts and the
scripts of others to piece together Pulp
Fiction, differences between its script and screen incarnations, errors
that slipped into it, and onscreen examples of Tarantino’s foot fetish! The
biographical portion of the book is both thorough and playful as the author
runs down fan theories about what’s in Marcellus Wallace’s brief case
(Diamonds? Marcellus’s soul? Is the briefcase actually Pandora’s Box?), his own
theory about who actually keyed Vincent’s Malibu, and a timeline that lays out the
fractured storyline chronologically. Bailey also makes room for his fellow fans
to get in on the fun, both in the guest essays strewn throughout the book and
the colorful splatter of art pieces inspired by the film. It’s a varied and
eye-popping presentation for a varied and eye-popping movie. With 2013 getting
close to the end, I’m pretty sure Pulp
Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece is going to
be my favorite movie book of the year.
