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Book Review
DOWSE Guide to the
Movies
by Tony Lee editor of
Pigasus
Press
BFI Modern Classics: Pulp Fiction
Dana Polan
BFI Publishing chapbook, 95 pages £7.99
review by Tony Lee
An offbeat overview of a fascinatingly phenomenal movie, Dana Polan's book tackles issues
of celebrity worship inspired by Hollywood outsider Quentin Tarantino, and alleges it's
impossible to find any kind of traditional movie-message in the writer and director's most successful film.
From an examination of Tarantino's widespread idolisation on many hopelessly
devotional websites, to the film's tangential relationship to postmodernism (a
relationship Tarantino seems uneasy with), Polan charts the origins of urban myths
behind the man, while searching for any convincing explanations for the - largely
masculine - appeal of Pulp Fiction. Of the director as heroic icon, Polan's
text suggests that Tarantino represents not only cultism incarnate within a high
church of cool, but also that he is more than just a media and pop culture literate
talent and limelight junkie. Of Tarantino and Pulp Fiction on the Internet,
Polan states:
"...we might well want to make some correlations between
the style and structure of the film and a visual literacy that
is particular to the cyber-moment of our technologically
inflected modernity. If you understand mouse-clicks and
web-links and hypertext, you're in the same structural
mindset as Pulp Fiction, with its disjunctions, its loops
of narrative, its dramatic shifts of tone and image." (pg.37, 2nd para.)
The surface brilliance of Pulp Fiction is unquestionable, of course, and Polan
has few doubts about the importance of Tarantino's achievement with this immensely
popular and entertaining black comedy drama. But, thankfully, I did detect a note of
caution in the author's considered estimation of Tarantino's (so-far) brief career
which takes great care to register the underexposed facts buried in the astonishing
work of fiction.
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