Films

9.2Skry

Pulp Fiction

1994

Three storylines — a pair of hitmen on a morning errand, a gangster's wife spending an evening with the wrong man, a boxer who doesn't throw the fight he was paid to throw — run through Pulp Fiction on a fractured timeline that keeps rearranging what counts as before and after. Tarantino structures the film so that chronology becomes a formal argument: scenes land with different weight depending on what the cut has already shown you, and the ending is also, technically, the middle. The register is comedy that keeps violent consequences fully in frame, and the performances, particularly Samuel L. Jackson's, are calibrated to the precise frequency where menace and absurdism occupy the same line.