And it was Pulp Fiction which made the filmmaker one of the defining “indie” talents of his lifetime-even though Pulp Fiction only technically began as an indie project when Tarantino and his co-story writer, Roger Avary, were able to find early financing after producer Lawrence Bender took the project to Jersey Films for development. In truth though, Tarantino had already been able to sell several screenplays to Hollywood by that point, and most would go on to spawn their own cult followings. The movie became an early indie wonder for the new decade and marked its pop culture-obsessed mastermind as one of the most intriguing voices of his then young generation. It was there he debuted his first (finished) film, Reservoir Dogs (1992). The irony of this debate is that a movie as singularly a product of the 1990s as Pulp Fiction could only have ever been made in the ‘90s.Īs has become the stuff of cinephile legend, Tarantino was the movie geek who made good a one-time video store clerk who spent the first half of the 1980s recommending folks movies at the checkout counter before going on to shatter all the rules as one of the first breakout talents of the Sundance Film Festival. Others insist nothing’s changed as indicated by the fact that Tarantino’s own most recent effort, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, was a box office hit in 2019 despite coming under criticism for its depiction of Bruce Lee. Certainly this movie would be “canceled,” some say, because a white character, played by none other than the writer-director, uses the N-word. This current discourse was sparked over the weekend when Tom Nichols, an author and writer of the Peacefield newsletter at The Atlantic, took to Twitter and ignited film nerds with the following prompt: “I’m watching pulp fiction right now and wondering, 28 years later, if you could make this movie today.” The usual reactionary deluge of social media hand-wringing followed. In this case though, the very touchstone quality of Pulp Fiction belies the futility of such a thought exercise. Take the current “debate” occurring on Twitter: would a young Quentin Tarantino make (and find the same level of success) today with a movie like his seminal 1994 cultural touchstone, Pulp Fiction? Perhaps for this reason it’s easy to fall into the especially deceptive trap of contrasting “then” versus “now,” and assuming the differences occurred in a vacuum. After all, does anyone doubt Mel Brooks when he says he couldn’t make Blazing Saddles now as he did nearly half a century ago?īut by and large, these arguments appear to be couched in nostalgia-a wistfulness which naturally occurs when comparing the icons of your past to the ones that seem ready to displace them in the present. Sometimes there is a kernel of truth at the root of this argument. It’s a sentiment as old as the movies themselves, with folks ever eager to note how the next generation of storytellers is not telling stories in the same way that the last one(s) did.
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