Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern by Stuart Jeffries

Author:Stuart Jeffries [Jeffries, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Philosophy, Postmodernism
ISBN: 9781788738224
Google: DfFEEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 58417590
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

The wig is a helpful reminder not to take the film seriously. Quoting Ezekiel sounds cool, but it’s folly to assume it means anything – still less to look for a hidden moral code. Cool, that must-have of post-modernism, is by definition devoid of morals.

In a second scene from the film, post-modernist theory’s tendency to overthink and over-talk gets nicely, if unconsciously, skewered. Vincent, having shot up some heroin he bought from his drug dealer, escorts Mia, the wife of his gangster boss, while the latter is out of town. As he and Mia have dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a 1950s-themed restaurant, the conversation peters out. ‘Uncomfortable silences’, says Mia. ‘Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?’23

Post-modernism, in Pulp Fiction, is all about the yak. Tarantino gluts our eyes and ears with audio and visual yak. The restaurant is an infernal theme park glutted visually with blaxploitation, Shogun Assassin and Roger Corman movie posters, and aurally with the soundtrack of music from a twenty-four-hour oldies radio station.

When Vince and Mia rise from their table to take part in the restaurant’s twist competition, one of the pleasures for the viewer is to see John Travolta dance. Travolta reprises his celebrated Hollywood role in the 1978 homage to disco, Saturday Night Fever. It’s a typical gambit, in Tarantino’s movies in particular and post-modern culture in general: by referencing another movie or novel or painting that the audience is likely to be familiar with, the post-modern artist offers to us the pleasure of recognition – a self-contained system of quotations. This is what the critic Robert Kolker meant when he wrote that post-modernism ‘consists of a flattened spatiality in which character and event are in a state of reminding us that they are pop culture figures and pleasure derives from its self-recognition’.24

We are invited to be pleasurably lost in Tarantino’s hyperreal simulation of a fifties diner, lost to his allusions to other movies and music, to the extent that we are able to anaesthetise ourselves to the venal things that happen in the film.

Pulp Fiction is not without moral interest, whatever James Wood has to say. The film has an ethical code – that of neoliberalism. Human life may be expendable and women may be commodities to be looked after, but behind these self-evident truths of gangster ideology is the influence of globalised capitalism overrun by neoliberal ideals. Pulp Fiction constantly presents its characters in some state of consumption.

In between the conflicts, mishaps and freak coincidences that mark the film’s different storylines, we repeatedly witness consumers who simply eat, watch movies, listen to music, take drugs and read Modesty Blaise in the toilet. And when not consuming, they are talking about consumption. On their way to slaughtering the three men in the flat, Vincent and Jules chat happily about the differences between Europe and America in terms of burger retail. Emblematically, Europe is busted down from the epicentre of civilisation to the continent where they do weird stuff to burgers.

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