Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

Moving Image for Digital Media
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the Use of Popular Music in Film
Introduction
While the use of popular music has been a mainstay of film throughout its history, its contemporary use has often been to “play the hits”, i.e. mainstream chart-topping songs with great commercial appeal; obvious and overdone crowd-pleasers. Rather than creating or adding to the film score, the choice of these popular songs has been to “create a false sense of energy…or to create a sense of period that they’re investing in the picture.” (Bailey, 2013, p.114) Avoiding this “cheap and annoying” (Ibid) technique, director and writer Quentin Tarantino has been an innovator of popular music as a substitute for score. A pioneering example
of this is in his seminal 1994 film, Pulp Fiction. In this essay I will explore Tarantino’s use of popular music in Pulp Fiction, by looking at popular music in film throughout its history, exploring Tarantino’s style and philosophy of soundtrack in motion pictures, analysing the diegesis of the music throughout the film, as well as the use of popular music as leitmotif in Pulp Fiction, establishing themes, characters and style.
Historical Use of Popular Music in Film
Popular music and film have always been intimately entangled. Partially, this is because of their nature, in that “all popular music contains visual elements; all film relies, in varying degrees, on musical elements.” (Inglis, 2003, p.3) However, the two areas also have a entwined history: the technologies for both were developed through the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries; both appealed to a new type of unparalleled mass audience; both started off as unorthodox, but rapidly became enshrined as the dominant cultural media; both spawned massive and powerful industries; and “both have been approached and consumed from perspectives that have allowed them to evolve from simple tools of popular and mass culture into examples of more high and elite culture“. (Inglis, 2003, p.1) Due to their shared origins, history and natures, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between the two, which comes to a peak in the form of the ‘compilation score’.
The use of ‘compilation score’ actually predates the bespoke film score.
In the early days of film, popular music was widely used as accompaniment. Books containing collections of excerpts from classical music were available, listing compositions by effects – an emotional or narrative state – rather than in categories of composer or genre. (Rodman, 2005, p.121) However, as the industry and technology grew, as well as budgets, the “compilation score came to be considered inferior to the originally-composed score.” (Ibid) Popular songs continued to be used in the ‘sound era’ of film, but more in the form of film musical, from The Jazz Singer (1927) through numerous Elvis and Beatles films in the 1950s and 1960s. Films often relied on popular song as a signifier – for example, using “a pastiche of popular songs to portray youth culture” (Ibid. p.123) in films such as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). It was only by the late 1980s and 1990s that directors saw the potential in “linking popular tunes to the narrative meaning of films”, allowing the popular compilation score to “replicate many of the functions of the composed ‘classic’ film score.” (Rodman, 2005, p.121) Such soundtracks offers audiences music that is immediately familiar, and yet its use can transcend that familiarity. “[B]eing valued for it's ability to redefine and recycle itself”, the found score establishes styles, moods or meanings that “transcend it's original form, and find new merit within the context of the image.” (Ibid,
p.135)