Alan Stone's Pulp Fiction

Analysis of Pulp Fiction by Alan Stone

Alan Stone states his thesis as “Pulp Fiction is already building a cult following, even as its mother-fucker language and graphic violence offends others” (610). Much like Tarantino’s film, Stone’s article biases toward an audience with a high level of tolerance for violence, sick humor, and strong language and his ideas jump around like the scenes in the movie and leave the reader confused with poor organization. Right from the introduction paragraph, people have the potential to put down the article. The first line almost attacks the readers personality with “If you take no pleasure in popular culture, with all its manic excess, then you are likely to be bewildered, even offended, by Quentin Tarantino’s extraordinary film, Pulp Fiction” (Stone 610). Not only does Stone use bias with the negative connotation words like bewildered and offended, but also he shows his own enjoyment in it by saying how ‘extraordinary’ Pulp Fiction was to him. Within twenty words of the paper, you can already tell that Stone supports Tarantino’s overkill of violence and excess. In paragraph twelve, the
author claims that: If violence is a form of pornography, then, like pornography, it presents the same problem of line-drawing between exploiting our passions and edifying them. But as our modern courts have recognized, it is necessary to go beyond that simple categorical distinction and ask whether an admittedly exploitive work of art has redeeming social value. (Stone 613) Since when has man learned anything educational from pornographic material?
And what does pornographic material have anything to do with excessive violence, or have any positive social value? Stone even included in paragraph twenty that Tarantino’s film “is politically correct. There is no nudity and no violence directed against women…” (614) when just earlier he compared Pulp Fiction ’s excessive violence to pornography which is based on sexual relations of some type of violent nature. The only reason Stone put the mention to graphic material in the article was to reach out to the other half of the sick and twisted minds his piece shoots for. If the pointless references were not enough to put it down, the organization will make you spike the book harder than a football after a game-winning touchdown, minus the joyful experience of
winning. Stone’s organization is worse than in the movie, but Tarantino did it on purpose. In his film Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino cuts the story up into two main parts and skips around with time and place, eventually tying everything together in the end. Pulp Fiction essentially does the same thing except with three stories, which eventually end in the middle of the storyline, which was actually the opening scene in the café: confusing, right? Stone seems to be attempting to mimic this behavior, but it is far from entertaining unlike the film. In the sixth paragraph he begins talking about John Travolta’s character in the movie and his innocent soul, continuing by stating, “innocence in depravity is Pulp Fiction’s central theme” (Stone 611). The seventh paragraph, just a short two sentences later, Stone tangents to the origin of the title and the authors who wrote “dark, city crime movies that became film noir” (611). The connection between the two is not even weak; it is non-existent. There is no transition statement at all, and barely touches on Travolta until later on. He does not even mention the innocence again until paragraph twenty-one when talking about how the British couple’s “teddy bear attachment […] establishes Tarantino’s tone of innocence and depravity” (Stone 615). Needless to say, paragraphs seven and twenty-one would work great next to each other but separate are just plain confusing. When the reader gets to the second mention of the supposed central theme of the movie, they can only ponder about that fact they heard that exact phrase just a while back and if it is even relevant. The ending of the article starts where the beginning should have with the characters relevance to his points. He waits until the end of paragraph sixteen to even mention actual plot content talking about the scenes with Travolta and Uma Thurman appealing to the female audience and that the “theme of redemption is present in each of the three stories” (Stone 615) in paragraph twenty-two. The end should be at the beginning, the connection between the parts is weak, and the audience is a small and rather perverse crew. But was I just speaking about the article “Pulp Fiction” or the movie Pulp Fiction? Tarantino’s film is masterfully created, even if it is rather out of the normal, because every little thing was carefully placed into position for dramatic or comedic effect. Stone’s article on the other hand, was thrown haphazardly at an even more narrow audience and makes the reader feel like throwing the book dramatically or laughing at how it seems thrown together overnight.

Works Cited
Stone, Alan J. “Pulp Fiction.” Common Culture, 6th ed. Ed. Michael Petracca and Madeline Sorapure. Pearson. Upper Saddle River, NJ. 2009. Print.