Product Description

For many, Quentin Tarantino's films defined American cinema in the 1990s. The films are seen as hard, fast, funny, stylish and filled with clever allusions to other films. Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of "Pulp Fiction". He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #197908 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Review
"A well constructed book that challenges the reader with some interesting twists on old themes."--"6Degrees

Customer Reviews

An offbeat overview of a fascinatingly phenomenal movie
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.

Dana Polin - Pulp Fiction
A cogent, entertaining and highly informative analysis of the mid-nineties modern masterpiece Pulp Fiction.

Polin's text offers an interesting angle on the film - Pulp Fiction is a 'story about storytelling', where the characters' hyper-reality and hardboiled dialogue, the director's chronology-eschewing plotting and the numerous references to pop culture make intimate reference to the fact that it is, of course, fictional. The books looks at many crucial scenes, and assesses in detail the ways in which fictionality is key to the message behind the film, as well as tackling the films huge cult following, notably on the Internet.

This is a world where a knowledge about modern trivialites is just as important as any weapon you might be holding. Which probably makes this book a good starting point, then.