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The body language and the punchline take a grotesque scene and turn it into dark but genuine comedy. And then Jody says it was "trippy'' and we understand that, as a piercer, she has seen the ultimate piercing. He cuts away to a reaction shot in which everyone hovering over the victim springs back simultaneously as Mia leaps back to life. QT never actually shows the needle entering the chest. In a shot-by-shot analysis at the University of Virginia, we found out why. When the needle goes into the heart, you'd expect that to be one of the most gruesome moments in the movie, but audiences, curiously, always laugh. We meet Lance's girlfriend Jody (Rosanna Arquette), who is pierced in every possible place and talks about her piercing fetish. When Mia accidentally overdoses, Vincent races her to his drug dealer Lance (Eric Stoltz), who brings her back to life with a shot of adrenaline into the heart.Īnd that scene also begins with dialogue that seems like fun, while it's also laying more groundwork. And the story of how Marsellus had a man thrown out of a fourth-floor window for giving his wife a foot massage turns out to be a set-up: Tarantino is preparing the dramatic ground for a scene in which Vincent takes Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) out on a date, on his bosses' orders. The discussion of why Quarter Pounders are called "Royales'' in Paris is reprised, a few minutes later, in a tense exchange between Jules and one of the kids (Frank Whaley). Tarantino's dialogue is not simply whimsical. Finally Jules says "let's get in character,'' and they enter an apartment. They talk about the drug laws in Amsterdam, what Quarter Pounders are called in Paris, and the degree of sexual intimacy implied by a foot massage. Remember the famous opening conversation between Jules and Vincent, who are on their way to a violent reprisal against some college kids who have offended Wallace and appropriated his famous briefcase. It is Tarantino's strategy in all of his films to have the characters speak at right angles to the action, or depart on flights of fancy. Instead, Tarantino uses an apparently irrelevant conversation to quickly establish her personality and their relationship. In a lesser movie, the dialogue in this scene would have been entirely plot-driven Butch would have explained to Fabienne what he, she and we already knew. He will make a lot of money, but only if he escapes the vengeance of Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and his hit-men Jules and Vincent (Samuel L. He agreed to throw the fight, then secretly bet heavily on himself, and won.

The dialogue comes at a moment of desperation for Butch. This is wonderful dialogue (I have only sampled it).

"If I had one,'' she says, "I would wear a T-shirt two sizes too small, to accentuate it.'' A little later she observes, "It's unfortunate what we find pleasing to the touch and pleasing to the eye are seldom the same.'' "You have one,'' he says, snuggling closer. She says she's been looking in the mirror and she wants a pot belly.

He returns to the motel room occupied by his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). The prizefighter Butch (Bruce Willis) has just killed a man in the ring. Like them, he combines utilitarian prose with flights of rough poetry and wicked fancy.Ĭonsider a little scene not often mentioned in discussions of the film. Like them, QT finds a way to make the words humorous without ever seeming to ask for a laugh. Dialogue drives Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction,'' dialogue of such high quality it deserves comparison with other masters of spare, hard-boiled prose, from Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard.