California, for Tarantino and Others
There is a mythology to the Californian landscape—its rolling hills and urban sprawl, its mix of richness and rusticity, the sudden borders that exist between protected parks and business districts. Some sense still exists that more of California might be discovered in the future, and when people who have never seen the state describe it to me, they make me forget that I grew up there. I’m told of wild forests, empty beaches, tiny bookstores frequented by now-famous poets.
I hadn’t spent more than two months away before starting college, and coming home this summer, distanced from the banality of adolescence, I felt a need to experience the state like a newcomer—a hitchhiker, perhaps, or a hitchhiking transcendentalist. Part of what fueled my romanticizing the place was Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, which is partly set in my hometown of Mill Valley (a ten-minute drive from the Golden Gate Bridge). Early in the novel, the unnamed narrator (a presumed stand-in for the author) camps beside the beach, and asks, “‘Wa? Where am I, what is the basketball game of eternity the girls are playing here by me in the old house of my life, the house isn’t on fire is it?’” He then realizes that he just hears the waves. But he ends up on a long journey of hiking and Buddhist proselytizing, so I guess I also wanted from my time in California a sensory, nature-y, acoustic guitar kind of peace.
That’s what I got. Long drives to towns like Inverness, which resembles the Scottish original, where skater boys put on a concert in a big green backyard. A wooden stage the size of a sedan, amplifiers loud enough to piss off certain neighbors and entice others in. The band was damn good, and they covered “Dead Flowers.” Picnic blankets without picnic food on pieces of coast with black sand and cliffs sharper than knives. Hammocks strung near an abandoned military base and a white dome my friends and I suspected of monitoring aliens.
It was summer, so people were flitting in and out of town, and the groups doing these things shifted more than they did in high school. I was reminded of the spontaneity in films like American Graffiti, where kids hang out not because they know each other well, but because they share a desire to stay out late, to not be bored. And of course we had all seen Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood, the new Tarantino feature, which admittedly favored an Angeleno California, but nonetheless had us driving more, smoking more, seeking out movie palaces and swimming pools that looked like Rick Dalton’s. Asking someone their thoughts about the film emerged as a greeting, or introduction.
Then we thought of Pulp Fiction imagery, because we felt high on auteurist immersion, and really that’s Tarantino’s only other piece that registers with the casual cinephiles and hypebeasts and math whizzes of my generation. We ate in diners, roller-skated in a church whose color scheme matched Jack Rabbit Slim’s, and eventually attended a thirty-five-millimeter projection of the film at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.
The Castro holds a cavernous and extravagantly ornamented auditorium, and seats well over a thousand people. “Due to our unusually large...capacity,” the theatre’s website reads, “the chance of a sell-out performance during our screenings is highly unlikely.” Indeed, one of the only films I remember causing such an occurrence is La La Land, when Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling attended with Damien Chazelle and were interviewed—strangely enough—by Chris Columbus, the man who directed the first two Harry Potter films. During La La Land, my friend and I found ourselves so far back on the pitched mezzanine level that the projection was distorted.
Pulp Fiction’s opening scene played out amidst the cracks and pops, the momentary analog scratches and black holes that I wish were still threaded through every theatrical cinematic experience. Isn’t this what should make a movie a movie—the signs that it is fundamentally a collection of images, a tangible reproduction of the very real spools of film that once captured every performance and setting? It is easy to forget—in fact, it is almost impossible to remember—the marvels of that communication network, by which viewers across countries can empathize and converse and emote with the same faces and locations and storytelling.
The theatre was not overcrowded but not want for noise. The reactions proved generous, the sound system equipped for the nosebleeds. Old showtime posters had been rolled up in cardboard canisters in the lobby, out of which my friend Jesse secured Angry Birds 2, Yonni The Conjuring, and I Steve Jobs. Pulp Fiction was the double of a double feature, the earlier film being Band of Outsiders, and a genial elderly man played an organ during the intermission. The carnival-style ticket stubs given to us at the box office could have been bought at Rite Aid.
I last saw Pulp Fiction in 2015, at the height of my IMdB 250 catch-up period. Consequently, I had made an effort to focus for the three-hour runtime, but that was still easy in the Castro darkness. My feelings about the film haven’t changed in any significant way in four years—my shock at Marsellus and Butch’s torture still visceral, my infatuation with Mia Wallace magnetic. But I experienced a subtler recognition during this screening of nonchalance.
The film’s anti-chronological sequencing prevents the character development to which an audience is accustomed, where a significant event takes place, and we see the effects of the event register in a character’s subsequent conduct. When Vincent and Jules appear in that blood-colored bar to meet Marsellus, supposedly soon after the opening drug shootout, we do not know that in the time between the scenes Vincent has accidentally shot Marvin in Jules’s car, and Vincent and Jules have consulted Harvey Keitel’s Wolf for damage control. The sole evidence for the unexpected detour is the college-student apparel worn by the hitmen—the evidence does not lie in their facial expressions or affected vocal intonations. Those aspects of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s performances are not reactive, it would seem, to the trauma of the crimes around which their lives revolve.
This stubborn coolness presents itself again and again: Mia tells Vincent, in smoky monotone, that she never thanked him for dinner, when she sees him for the first time since almost dying on the floor of his heroine dealer’s living room. When Vincent and Jules are interrupted by a robbery attempt at a diner, Jules sermonizes about his changing attitude toward his work, and also pacifies Honey Bunny, the more neurotic of the criminals, urgently balancing two perhaps equally important objectives. Then he and Vincent leave the diner as if their breakfasting went undisturbed.
Maybe I’m projecting my own recent feelings onto characters whose trajectories share few similarities with mine or my friends.’ We don’t struggle with drug mixups or fatal vendettas. But we’ve experienced our share of automobile crashes and near-collisions, of dangerous inebriation, of conversations that match the headiness and referential specificity of Pulp Fiction’s dialogue. Is it foolish to believe in a Californian indifference, a mentality that encourages carrying on and resetting and shrugging, of pressing forward with our playful interactions and marijuana-induced theorizing, no matter what happens day-to-day? Does it have something to do with the time freeze that eliminated the months I had spent away from home, the sureness I felt that I had only seen that hillside gas station a day or two before, when I hadn’t?
California, whatever its objective truths or characteristics, is easy to dream about, to embellish and alter for the sake of nostalgia or heartache or optimism. Tarantino does this often, and I was doing it in August, in the dwindling summer hours, packing away scenes for future recollection and potential transposition, to silver screens, soundstages, feature-length scripts. We wait, and then we return.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and junior in Columbia College.
