30 Years of Pulp Fiction - the Film that Changed Everything

On 14 October 1994, 31-year-old director Quentin Tarantino's second film, Pulp Fiction, was released in America and became a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the main prize for Best Picture.

After Pulp Fiction, cinema changed forever - and we can still see the consequences of this revolution in film language on our screens today. For example, the latest hit at the box office, Lone Wolves, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, is directly attributable to Tarantino's masterpiece with its Mr Wolfe, who ‘solved problems’.

The Victory of Postmodernism

The fact that the film shaped cinema fashion for at least a decade to come and had a general impact on mass culture is not new. After Pulp Fiction, it was considered progressive to divide a film into ‘chapters’, give them titles and create non-linear stories by rearranging events. Immoral characters who do not receive fair retribution in the end, as anti-heroes should, became fashionable - people from the criminal underground became heroes for a long time.

The genre of black crime comedy itself has become very fashionable, with films such as Bloody Thursday, Lucky Number Slevin or Henry's Crime becoming box office hits. The striking style of Pulp Fiction inspires many imitators, the most famous and successful of whom is the British Guy Ritchie.

And although pop music has been widely used in cinema before (Martin Scorsese became a pioneer and recognized master in this field, whose films use pop and rock hits to create the soundtrack of the era), and soundtrack discs are bestsellers, it is the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction that has become truly iconic. Although, to be fair, Tarantino borrowed the idea of using dialogue, like all his other ideas, from the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek by Michalis Cacoyannis.

Pulp Fiction finally established postmodernism as the main creative strategy of the era, and the film's title has actually become synonymous with postmodernism.

Cinema About Cinema

The postmodern strategy in cinema allows films to be created as a puzzle consisting of many elements borrowed from other films. For attentive viewers, Pulp Fiction (like Tarantino's other films) can be easily disassembled into its component parts, which has become a kind of sport for the director's fans.

For example, Tarantino borrowed the idea of a non-linear story and the scene of the main antagonists' collision on the road from Stanley Kubrick's classic neo-noir The Killing. The image of Uma Thurman's character with her famous hairstyle is from Robert Altman's Three Women. At the same time, each ‘chapter’ of Pulp Fiction features three female characters, and Tarantino's films are literally stuffed with such extravagant details for his ‘own’, who can also be considered the father of the so-called ‘Easter eggs’ in cinema.

The dance of Uma Thurman and John Travolta's characters, which quotes Jean-Luc Godard's Band of Outsiders, has been written about many times. In a sense, Pulp Fiction is not a film about gangsters, but about cinema and cinema addiction.

Another feature of the postmodern strategy is the ironic rethinking of the cultural layer from which the film's creators draw, not to say parasitize on it. For Tarantino, it is American pop culture in all its diversity, from tabloids with their recognizable images of celebrities and comic books to films and pop songs.

‘Pulp Fiction is a declaration of love for American culture. The creator of a postmodern film has to be a very knowledgeable person, so collecting film tapes and discs, comics, records, pop culture images and trademarks is an integral part of the postmodern aesthetic.

Film critics of the nineties often mistook Tarantino's irony for cynicism: humanity was not yet used to the fact that violence could cause laughter (albeit unhealthy), and that a genre film could be deliberately conventional where viewers were used to believability.

After Tarantino, Andy and Larry Wachowski were the most ambitious implementers of the postmodernist strategy in cinema. Unlike Tarantino, who was more interested in the past, they were focused on the future. The Wachowski brothers have created a perfect cinematic puzzle consisting not only of purely cinematic, genre and stylistic borrowings. There, The Matrix also includes a number of new age ideas - that is, spiritual search in the modern world - and philosophical concepts.

Of course, the film came out at the right time, brilliantly capturing the spirit of the times, when on the threshold of the millennium there was a need to understand the increasingly important role of the Internet. And, of course, The Matrix itself has become a cult phenomenon, whose credibility could not be spoiled even by completely unnecessary sequels.

The First Blockbuster of Independent Cinema

Another important influence of the film is Tarantino's famous dialogues, which predicted a special genre in independent cinema called mumblecore, based on character dialogues (often improvised).

Although Woody Allen, another great American postmodern filmmaker, is rightly considered the father of mumblecore, it was the dialogues in Tarantino's films that became show-stoppers for the first time in the history of cinema. They do not develop the plot, as is customary in drama, revealing the events and actions of the characters where it is impossible to do so visually. Tarantino's dialogues are separate interludes that add nothing to the action but create a unique atmosphere. The characters are, of course, talking about pop culture.

Nowadays, at least two directors of rather marginal mumblecore have made it to the big leagues: Noah Baumbach, who's The Wedding Story became one of the top films of 2019, and his muse Greta Gerwig, whose Barbie became an absolute record-breaker in 2024. 

The impact of Pulp Fiction on the emergence of cinematic universes is less obvious: after all, in the year of Tarantino's triumph, there was at least the Star Wars cinematic universe. But long before the Marvel and DC cinematic universes appeared, the crossover characters, brands, and storylines from Tarantino's films had become a separate pop culture myth. There have also been many writings about this: Red Apple cigarettes, the ubiquitous character Earl McGraw, the brothers Vincent and Vic Vega, the father and son Donovitz from Love Actually and Inglourious Basterds.

But the main thing we have to thank Pulp Fiction for, apart from the sheer joy of watching this amazing film, is the rise of independent cinema in the United States. For which, according to Peter Biskind, an authoritative Hollywood historian, Pulp Fiction ‘became Star Wars, surpassing all expectations of the profitability of an independent film’.

Without the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, David Robert Mitchell, Robert Eggers, Noah Baumbach and others, this world would be a worse place.