The Big Screen (81 page)

Reservoir Dogs
made its modest money back, though Miramax (founded in 1979) did not market it with gusto. In fact, the film played better in England, where interest in cruelty and video technology seemed ahead of American standards. At that point, sensing a dynamic new talent as well as a practitioner whose taste for guns, language, and music played to a young audience, Miramax said they would finance Tarantino's next film. For just over $8 million they got
Pulp Fiction
, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and grossed close to $300 million across the world.

Pulp Fiction
(1994) was one of the most influential pictures made in America since the advertised death of pictures. It helped excite a new younger generation about movies, rather as
Easy Rider
had done. Its unceasing reliance on classic movie situations, with so many scenes of violence and foul language, was a sneer of rejection for older audiences. But its intricate formal structure as a narrative encouraged the idea that a film was just a set of scenes that had no relationship with closure or meaning. It made a shape, like a snake eating its tail. The film hoped to imitate its title, but it was shot to resemble old Technicolor, still wet from the processing baths. The music was chosen lovingly, the cast was worthy of a poster, but the characters had no backstory or dramatic provenance. They were figures from a movie landscape, frequently caught in the Mexican standoff pose that seems built into Tarantino's DNA and ready to take priority over any other kind of meeting. At least
Pulp Fiction
had a few women:
Reservoir Dogs
had been strictly male, with allusions to homosexual urges. The nonstop rhythm of violence was offset by droll literary conversations about hamburgers, breakfast, foot massages, the Bonnie situation, cleaning the back of a car of blood, brains, and skull fragments, and whether God was there or not.

When Vincent Vega (John Travolta) takes Marcellus's wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), out for the night, the film does not bother with the possibility that they may begin to like each other. There is not enough mind or sentiment in them to reach that conclusion, and Tarantino is not much interested in sex on-screen. But as iconography, their night is a catalogue of pop culture references—in the diner they visit, Jack Rabbit Slim's, where stand-ins represent the stars, and in their slinky version of the twist, where the film nods to Travolta's past. (
Pulp Fiction
did a lot to revive his strange career.)

Every section and nearly every shot is a set piece in a line for which Tarantino takes no kind of realistic or narrative responsibility. That helps account for the energy and freshness of the film, and indicates how many American films at the turn of the century were formally stagnant, and short on excitement. You could not resist Tarantino's own thrill, and it drew attention to the crazy verbosity of his lowlifes. Why do Vincent and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) do the job they do? So they can talk. The actors (notably Bruce Willis) seemed excited that their normal pattern of over-paid and conventional inertia has briefly given way to chatter and danger. Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolfe is not just a master fixer but a drug called spiel. It is a film that might have gone on forever, just as its convoluted structure is available for further loops and intersections. If you ever wonder why your own kids think it's fatuous for a film to seek their emotional involvement, or for its story to be sincere or dramatic,
Pulp Fiction
had the cheerful thrust of getting those archaic hopes to walk the plank.

To talk of this postmodern stress on form for form's sake, and movie trashing literary traditions, it may come as a surprise to note how successful the film was with its wide-eyed detachment. Yes, the actors loved the trick as well as the talk, and the film was as funny in desperate moments as, say,
Some Like It Hot
or
The Shining
. So many ghosts were being given up—and exorcism was dear to the heart of the young movie audience. There had been a picture about that show, ridiculous exploitation, but as gripping in 1973 as
Carrie
's white hand reaching out from the black grave in 1976. The film of
The Exorcist
was a telling case: terrifying and revolting when it opened; addled and comic on rerelease in 2000. It was a sensation you could not preserve, because its impact—the phantom of meaning—depended entirely on the superstition and the anticipation of 1973.

Pulp Fiction
has lasted. It is a beautiful maze as knowing and insolent about the prehistory of films as
Kane
. So it left you wondering if Quentin Tarantino might prove as smart or as doomed as Orson Welles. You remembered that Welles himself had not been able to pull his kid's trick off for long. And
Citizen Kane
had never been the box office coup that
Pulp Fiction
managed.

Tarantino is nearing fifty now, and there have been hiatuses in his career. But has he made progress? He has never found the comedy or the elegance of
Pulp Fiction
again.
Jackie Brown
may be underrated, but the two-part
Kill Bill
seems to me a sign of a general absence of any personal subject matter that doesn't come out of pulp fiction. That problem was glaring with
Inglourious Basterds
(which is Tennessee guys against the Nazis, with a lengthy standoff scene in a bar that is an abyss or interval in the arc of the film). The idea of nitrate film burning Adolf Hitler is full of comic potential, but the film never approaches the soaring, musical brio of
Pulp Fiction
, and it leaves one wondering how much or how little Tarantino knew about the war, as opposed to war movies. There may be a level of education now in which some young people are ready to settle for our slipshod pop-cultural “meanings” of history or what they pick up in the family atmosphere called Facebook. But Tarantino needs more than his merry admission of helplessness in the current climate of filmmaking. Did he deliver everything he had in
Pulp Fiction
? Would it matter if he never made another film?

In case you are uncertain, that is not omniscient, objective history (wherever that treasury is hiding), it's vulnerable opinion. But history has to include opinion, and I am dealing with Scorsese and Tarantino out of an interest in the question how does a director make a career, a living, or even art in unsteady times? How does he or she keep finding the stamina without wondering why survival is so pressing? So it's useful to note that Scorsese had never had an unequivocal hit until
The Departed
(and that was a restrained success), while
Pulp Fiction
trumped its own budget by a factor of more than thirty. The kids and the critics were alike in believing they had seen something so astonishing it redefined the possibility of cinema and its role in our experience. The power of the light show had been reasserted, along with the invitation: come ready to be dazzled but leave your feelings at home. If you look at
Pulp Fiction
now you already feel some of the nostalgia you might get in watching
Casablanca
. But it's not easy to think of a middle-aged Tarantino. He has said he will retire by the time he is sixty, or sooner than that if digital eclipses film—and that is happening. The new kid sensation could soon seem old-fashioned.

David Lynch is sixty-five and increasingly difficult to define. At first he appeared to be an exceptional yet typical example of someone who noticed film during an art school education. Born in Missoula, Montana, the son of a research scientist in the Department of Agriculture, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the American Film Institute Conservatory. He has been a painter all his adult life, and he has talked about the darkness in his painting in a way that helps one watch his films:

The potential slide toward dream in cinema was there from the beginning—and it is present in the work of directors who would hope they were down to earth. An Astaire-Rogers musical seems like a business proposition. People still marvel at how hard Fred worked striving for ease. But if you plunge into one of those films suddenly (in the way the surrealist leaders went to cinemas in the 1920s), you see only the proud unlikelihood of a dance scene so that it's easier to feel the erotic rapture of those two figures in their whirling embrace. Last night I watched
The Searchers
(1956) again. I know the film. I know the places in Monument Valley where it was shot. But coming upon it unexpectedly on television, I saw how the burnished ochre mesas were obviously psychological forces, loaded with the threat of rape and revenge that impel the film. This awareness lasted just a moment, and then the plot reassembled itself and actual landscape resumed. I doubt John Ford felt this, or needed to—he had identified Monument Valley as his world years earlier. I have discovered that David Lynch is generally not comfortable talking about such things. But Lynch is a filmmaker who does not flinch from his allegiance to surrealism. He was also the creator of a primetime series on ABC television,
Twin Peaks
, that was a hit, no matter that its opposition was
Cheers
—until the network destroyed the story's power by insisting that it settle the riddle of who killed Laura Palmer.

At art school, Lynch made short films that were abstract, symbolic, and what we mean by “experimental” when we can't identify the genre or the commercial aim the film believes in. (Of course, it is possible to make a movie that has no commercial aim.) His first feature,
Eraserhead
(1977), was in that same vein. But something in Lynch was attracted to the chance of a regular movie for a large audience, and it seemed to hinge on his abiding sense that appearance screens us off from a world of savagery, ecstasy, and the dreamlike. (He had lived a lot in Los Angeles.) So, at Mel Brooks's invitation, he made
The Elephant Man
(1980), based on both fact and a stage play. It was a heartfelt picture, not afraid of sentimentality, direct and pleading, and reluctant to intrude on John Hurt's fine performance, but it may have helped Lynch discover a release for his own feelings.

Next, he moved on to work for Dino de Laurentiis on the science-fiction picture
Dune
(1984). Dino and Lynch were so different that their partnership seemed arranged as a test. But the tycoon was impressed with the kid, and said he would give him the money ($6 million) to make what proved to be
Blue Velvet
(1986). Dino granted Lynch final cut, and left him alone.

As Lynch described it:

Then there was a test screening, right after a showing of
Top Gun
. His agent told Lynch it had been a great screening, but the next day, when the director called de Laurentiis, the real word came down: “Ah, it is DISASTER. Come to my office. We talk.” Yet Dino held firm. The film was shown selectively to a few critics, without alteration, and they came out raving. At least, I did.

The film frightened or offended many people—and it was heartening to see that threat restored to the dark. Blandness and security spoil cinema the way domestic lighting humbles television.
Blue Velvet
is a violent mystery, but don't expect to follow it in every detail. It is also a parable on coming of age, in which Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), the ideal boy of folklore, encounters dark unknowns and falls into a sadomasochistic affair with a femme fatale—or is she just a woman who feels she is dying?—Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini, who became Lynch's lover afterward), while still clinging to his young sweetheart (Laura Dern). Beyond that, the film resides in the sublimely inexplicable: you cannot say what it “means” when the Dean Stockwell character mimes to Roy Orbison's “In Dreams,” but you can hardly breathe because of his suave mainline into your neurotic imagination. Dennis Hopper's Frank is fearsome, but another child, too, and the unhindered power of the film lets us know that his wildness is as unrestricted as that of the figures in Luis Buñuel's
Un Chien Andalou
. Anything could happen, and we feel exposed as desire and dread roam through that openness like shooters in a video game. Here is a film that knows the Jekyll-and-Hyde brotherhood of those two states. But as in a dream, we are allowed to watch such disturbing rites without flinching: these are just shapes on a screen. Whereas Tarantino sets up the ear scene in
Reservoir Dogs
—he gloats over it—Lynch comes upon his shockers with absolute calm.