Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (25 page)

But if violence is the in-your-face feature of all of Tarantino films that’s impossible not to notice, it’s also one of the most complex features that’s easily misunderstood—especially in
Pulp Fiction
. To think that
Pulp Fiction
is an amoral film that celebrates violence for its own sake (or for the sake of our goonish entertainment), and that it thereby reflects the hard-nosed outlook of Nietzsche’s anti-religion philosophy, would be to misunderstand both Tarantino and Nietzsche. In fact
Pulp Fiction
is a film etched with Nietzschean themes, but not for the reason commonly supposed.

Consider the celebration-of-violence charge. This criticism overlooks the anomaly of Jules, Samuel L. Jackson’s character, the hit man who has a mystical experience and gives up “the
life.” Jules’s religious experience helps him refrain from blasting Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in the final moments of the film—in contrast to Vincent, the John Travolta character, who is caught off guard on his return trip from the toilet and finds the idea of not shooting them inconceivable. The fact that Jules’s conversion was chosen to be the climax of the film should make us think twice about how the film portrays violence.

And the fact that religion plays a key role in Jules’s motivations should make us think twice about how we should use Nietzsche to shed light on the film. At first blush, Jules as the hero of the film might make us think it’s a deeply anti-Nietzschean movie. But Nietzsche himself didn’t just celebrate violence and denigrate religion. Nietzsche was aware that religion can no longer provide the locus of meaning in our lives. In that negative sense he was a nihilist: he denied life has any meaning, if what we mean by “meaning” is the ultimate, get-your-rewards-in-Heaven kind. But he was anti-nihilistic in another sense: just because life doesn’t have any ultimate, religious meaning does not mean that it has no meaning at all.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman helps illustrate this point. The superman is able to create new values, and see the meaning in life, in the face of the “ultimate irrationality” of it all. As we will argue, this is in fact just what Jules does, when he has his mystical experience, and it is just what Vincent is incapable of doing. Which is why the real hero of the film is not Vincent Vega the “Elvis man” (as Mia repeatedly calls him), but Jules, the Nietzschean superman.

“Chance governs everything; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later,” writes Luis Buñuel, Spanish film director, whom Tarantino acknowledges as one of the most important influences on his films.
¹²⁴

Indeed, chance governs everything in
Pulp Fiction
. Each subplot of the movie has a critical unlikely event: Vincent has to take a dump on stakeout just at the moment that Butch sneaks
back home; a kid, one of Marvin’s buddies, jumps out of the bathroom blasting six rounds at Jules and Vincent at pointblank range, the bullets missing everything but the wall; Butch and Marsellus run into each other on the street; Mia comes back to life after OD-ing on Vincent’s smack; Vincent accidentally blows off Marvin’s head; Pumpkin and Honey Bunny rob a diner which happens to contain (1) Jules with a portmanteau full of untold riches, and (2) a man with a gun (Vincent) popping out of the toilet.

One tempting way to find meaning in these seemingly chaotic events would be to attribute them to some divine plan. Whether you think that God has a hand in every event, or that some divine clockmaker wound up the universe and now lets it run its course, this way of thinking about these events gives them meaning and purpose. It also gives the universe a set of values, or moral code—a distinction between good and evil.

One of Nietzsche’s key insights is that value systems shouldn’t be taken at face value. Instead of asking straightforward questions, like what’s the value of a certain action (is it morally wrong?), Nietzsche asked once-removed value questions: what’s the value of certain systems of value, like the religious distinction between good and evil?
¹²⁵
In the end he argued that the religious system of values is a bad one because it denigrates life—but we will return to that issue below.

The world of
Pulp Fiction
is certainly not this traditional religious one full of divine purpose. Events of the universe are not part of some divine plan but are just “freak occurrences,” in the words of Vincent. A consequence of this is that traditional values have no force. Killing isn’t morally wrong. Consider, for example, Vincent and Jules’s reaction when Vincent accidentally blows off Marvin’s head. They’re not in trouble because they killed someone—the moral issue is a non-factor, not even worth bringing up. They’re in trouble because they have bits of brain scatter-shot in the back of the car which might get noticed by Joe Blue. The Wolf, not the priest, comes to the rescue.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the characters in
Pulp Fiction
have no values. They are actually obsessed with values, but they are the values of cool rather than religious morality. Here’s a short list of values characters espouse or act upon.

The Nietzschean question would be to ask, what approach to life do these values signify? Value judgments themselves are just the starting point. Those judgments are treated like symptoms of underlying motivations that give rise to them.
¹²⁶
It is those underlying motivations that Nietzsche wants to expose and evaluate. As a matter of empirical fact, Nietzsche thought that secularization was destroying the traditional role of religion as the ultimate source of meaning in human life. To use a common metaphor, religion provided a mythical “narrative” that structured life’s events and gave life meaning. The world of
Pulp Fiction
precisely is this modern world of fractured “narratives”—a theme nicely illustrated by the formal factors of Tarantino’s filmmaking, the fractured temporal sequence and plotting devices—and we can get insight into the film’s characters by seeing how they react to this crisis of meaning.

Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God is dead—but he wasn’t claiming that religious beliefs are false and therefore we should
believe science instead. He wasn’t trying to be provocative at the expense of the faithful. In
The Gay Science
, Section 125, it actually isn’t Nietzsche himself who says “God is dead.” He puts the line in the mouth of a “madman,” who’s shouting it not in the face of churchgoers but to modern, seemingly sophisticated unbelievers. Their reaction: laughter at the madman’s earnestness.

They find it ridiculous that religion should even be taken seriously—as the madman does, and as Nietzsche himself does, because he realizes the monumental role religion has played in giving meaning to our lives. In
Pulp Fiction
Vincent is the sophisticated unbeliever fresh off the plane from Amsterdam. And Vincent has nothing but scorn for Jules when the errant bullets lead Jules to have a mystical experience and to start taking religion seriously.

We can see this aspect of Vincent’s character elsewhere in the film too. He spouts a bit of cultural relativism when he tells Jules that in Paris they call a quarter-pounder with cheese a “Royale with cheese.” At the same time, the film doesn’t portray Vincent as a broad-minded cosmopolitan. He’s not even a broad-minded cosmopolitan with regard to the fast-food in Europe he pontificates about. We immediately see his limitations when he doesn’t know what they call a Whopper: “I didn’t go into Burger King.”

The deeper implications of different systems of measure, like the English pound versus the metric kilo, are a surprise to Jules. He’s further surprised (and disappointed, because he can’t be the know-it-all) when Brett, one of the kids soon to be executed by Jules, guesses why the French don’t use the name “quarterpounder with cheese” (“Check out the big brain on Brett”).

At the beginning of the film, then, both Vincent and Jules are unaware of any deeper meaning to events. At this point Jules thinks the Ezekiel 25:17 line is just a meaningless vehicle of intimidation. But once Jules sees the light, he and Vincent embody different interpretations of the unlikely events that they keep encountering. Jules says we should see the six bullets, and chance itself, as a sign. Vincent says it’s just a low-probability event.

 

Their banter isn’t just hipster philosophical reflection; it embodies two fundamentally different reactions to the existential crisis heralded by the demise of religion. To see this, let’s
return to the religious mode of thinking about the world and values. Religious thinking relies on a kind of duality. On the one hand, there is the created world: the transient, physical world in which we live, full of evil in need of redemption. On the other hand, there is the eternal, all-good heavenly realm. Nietzsche noted that once we posit a second realm, the heavenly, as the source of infinite value, then worldly events by themselves can have no value at all.
¹²⁷
Whatever value some worldly event has is given entirely by its relation to the divine.

As we noted before, this isn’t a picture that anyone in
Pulp Fiction
buys. But, as Nietzsche argues, modern “rationalists” like Vincent do buy some of its metaphysical presuppositions, for they endorse the dualist idea that either the meaning of events in our world is imposed from without, or those events lack all meaning. The rejection of religion, in Vincent’s case, means that he is a nihilist: there’s no meaning to the world whatsoever. A second aspect of this point of view is its “dogmatism.” By this Nietzsche means that, for someone like Vincent, his own viewpoint, and system of value, is universally binding.
¹²⁸
If the bullets are just a freak occurrence and have no meaning to Vincent, they have no meaning, period. They don’t have any meaning to anyone—and if Jules believes otherwise then he’s just wrong. For Vincent, his interpretation is
the
interpretation. It just so happens that the universally right valuation is vacuous—events have no meaning—but Vincent’s view is dogmatic, just like the religious one, because it purports to universal validity.

Nietzsche himself wasn’t fond of either the religious or the rationalist view of values. He thought that both their dualist assumption about meaning and their dogmatic claim to universality were expressions of “sickness”: symptoms of an “unhealthy” view of life, which in turn he thinks is an expression of a certain kind of “weakness.”
¹²⁹
Not weakness in the sense of lacking physical strength, but a sort of weakness that may be called existential: those who are weak in this sense can’t face the chaotic facts of life. Vincent Vega, in spite of his macho image, is extremely weak in this sense.

In contrast to these expressions of weakness, Nietzsche advocated a form of life that has a kind of existential “strength”: this is embodied by someone who can face the fact that the universe has no ultimate, universally binding meaning and value, but who can nevertheless advocate perspective-relative (that is, non-dogmatic) systems of value that are creative and life-affirming. The person capable of doing this becomes a creator of meaning—someone who sees the significance of events and thereby
gives
the events that significance. This new meaning then is not some kind of heavenly meaning coming from a postulated “other” domain; it is immanent, coming from within our world—from the person who creates it. Nietzsche has a lot of names for this form of life; most commonly he calls it the “free spirit” or the “superman.”

And Jules is just such a free spirit. In Tarantino’s world of violence, strength is all-important: not only (and not primarily) physical strength, but also strength in the existential sense. It is discovering meaning in seemingly meaningless and random events that makes one strong. This strength gives Jules the ability to stand up to Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in a way he wouldn’t have been capable of in the beginning of the film, and in a way that Vincent is still incapable of. Recall Vincent’s obstinacy: “Jules, you give that fucking nimrod fifteen hundred dollars and I’ll shoot him on general principle.”

Jules and Vincent have always had physical strength: Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are just small-time heisters looking for an easy score. Jules, by contrast, is one “bad motherfucker.” But once he has his mystical experience he is able to resolve the situation without recourse to violence. Still, the reason why his action is “good” is not because it is the morally right thing to do. That would be simply reverting to the religious system of value. It’s good because it’s an essentially life-affirming and creative act on Jules’s part. It’s an act that breaks free from the hyper-cool and might-makes-right gangster values of the underworld that Vincent is still stuck in. It’s an act that makes Jules a free spirit.

Vincent cannot see the significance of chance events. He’s the one person best placed to see some connection between the seemingly chaotic events of the movie, because his character is
connected to almost every subplot. But, in one of the funniest running gags of the film, he is metaphorically “out of touch” because all the important things that happen to him happen while he (or someone else) is in the bathroom.

Marvin’s buddy is sweating it out in the bathroom with a .357 Magnum before attacking Jules and Vincent. Vincent is in the toilet giving himself a pep talk about loyalty during Mia’s OD and near-death. And he’s in the diner restroom during Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’s robbery. One would think all these eye-openers would make Vincent chary of using the john. But he (unlike Jules) sees them only as low-probability events, and the next time he’s in the bathroom he gets axed by Butch.