Pulp Fiction dialogue is a masterpiece of unique screenwriting. Tarantino totally radicalized this fundamental element of movie scripts and crashed through the boundaries of what dialogue was supposed to do.
John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Screenwriter/Director: Quentin Tarantino. A Band Apart. Jersey Films. Miramax.
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Pulp Fiction Dialogue Is Spikily Salacious and Alarmingly Cerebral
EVERY SCREENWRITER SHOULD READ THE SCRIPT Available Here
And underlying every breath-taking bold and inventive move he made with words is an emotion that drives all great writers.
Tarantino is in love with language. Its boldness, its colour, its endlessly fertile possibilities. And most of all, its fluid, shifting rhythms that can pulse like a cheetah on acid, ripple serenely through ocean waves like a cub seal, and blast like a bullet from a .45 ACP.
Pulp Fiction dialogue is by turns, spikily salacious and alarmingly cerebral, shady, dark and edgy and vulgarly exhuberant. It blasts off like multi-coloured fluorescent rocket, and softly hums like a Bruce Springsteen slowly dying chord.
The pyrotechnic wordsmith is like a kid let loose in a candy shop where everything from huge, day-glo, sickly gobstoppers to smooth, voluptuous dark chocolate are all for the taking.
You never know where Pulp Fiction dialogue is going to turn.
The screenwriting gurus will tell you what you must do and what you musn't do.
THE CONVENTIONAL:
"SHOW, DON'T TELL" - The Screenwriter's "Mantra".
You must use as little dialogue as possible, and most times preferably not at all.
You must show a character's thoughts and feelings by what she or he does, not what they say.
Action rules. Words are the last resort.
THE RADICAL:
Pulp Fiction. Dialogue that explodes the rules.
Tarantino flooded his Pulp Fiction screenplay with words. When it was right for what he wanted a scene to do, he went for 'TELL, DON'T SHOW'.
Take a look at the script of Pulp Fiction. Dialogue in this movie rarely obeys the rules.
Go through the script and you'll find page after page filled with dialogue unbroken by description lines, and long, meditative monologues that go on forever.
Like this one.
Pulp Fiction Dialogue Breaking The Rules: The Never-Ending Monologue
Christopher Walken as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction. Screenwriter/Director: Quentin Tarantino. A Band Apart. Jersey Films. Miramax.
Captain Koon's Speech about the Watch
BUTCH'S POV
We're in the living room of a modest two bedroom house in
Alhambra, California, in the year 1972. BUTCH'S MOTHER, 35ish,
stands in the doorway leading into the living room. Next to
her is a man dressed in the uniform of an American Air Force
officer. The CAMERA is the perspective of a five-year old
boy.
MOTHER
Butch, stop watching TV a second. We
got a special visitor. Now do you
remember when I told you your daddy
dies in a P.O.W. camp?
BUTCH (O.S.)
Uh-huh.
MOTHER
Well this here is Capt. Koons. He
was in the P.O.W. camp with Daddy.
CAPT. KOONS steps inside the room toward the little boy and
bends down on one knee to bring him even with the boy's
eyeline. When Koons speaks, he speaks with a slight Texas
accent.
CAPT. KOONS
Hello, little man. Boy I sure heard
a bunch about you. See, I was a good
friend of your Daddy's. We were in
that Hanoi pit of hell over five
years together. Hopefully, you'll
never have to experience this
yourself, but when two men are in a
situation like me and your Daddy
were, for as long as we were, you
take on certain responsibilities of
the other. If it had been me who had
not made it, Major Coolidge would be
talkin' right now to my son Jim. But
the way it worked out is I'm talkin'
to you, Butch. I got somethin' for
ya.
The Captain pulls a gold wrist watch out of his pocket.
CAPT. KOONS
This watch I got here was first
purchased by your great-granddaddy.
It was bought during the First World
War in a little general store in
Knoxville, Tennessee. It was bought
by private Doughboy Ernie Coolidge
the day he set sail for Paris. It
was your great-granddaddy's war watch,
made by the first company to ever
make wrist watches. You see, up until
then, people just carried pocket
watches. Your great-granddaddy wore
that watch every day he was in the
war. Then when he had done his duty,
he went home to your great-
grandmother, took the watch off his
wrist and put it in an ol' coffee
can. And in that can it stayed 'til
your grandfather Dane Coolidge was
called upon by his country to go
overseas and fight the Germans once
again. This time they called it World
War Two. Your great-granddaddy gave
it to your granddad for good luck.
Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as
good as his old man's. Your granddad
was a Marine and he was killed with
all the other Marines at the battle
of Wake Island. Your granddad was
facing death and he knew it. None of
those boys had any illusions about
ever leavin' that island alive. So
three days before the Japanese took
the island, your 22-year old
grandfather asked a gunner on an Air
Force transport named Winocki, a man
he had never met before in his life,
to deliver to his infant son, who he
had never seen in the flesh, his
gold watch. Three days later, your
grandfather was dead. But Winocki
kept his word. After the war was
over, he paid a visit to your
grandmother, delivering to your infant
father, his Dad's gold watch. This
watch. This watch was on your Daddy's
wrist when he was shot down over
Hanoi. He was captured and put in a
Vietnamese prison camp. Now he knew
if the gooks ever saw the watch it'd
be confiscated. The way your Daddy
looked at it, that watch was your
birthright. And he'd be damned if
and slopeheads were gonna put their
greasy yella hands on his boy's
birthright. So he hid it in the one
place he knew he could hide somethin'.
His ass. Five long years, he wore
this watch up his ass. Then when he
died of dysentery, he gave me the
watch. I hid with uncomfortable hunk
of metal up my ass for two years.
Then, after seven years, I was sent
home to my family. And now, little
man, I give the watch to you.
Capt. Koons hands the watch to Butch. A little hand comes
into FRAME to accept it.
Now watch how it plays:
Christopher Walken as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction.Screenwriter/Director: Quentin Tarantino. A Band Apart. Jersey Films. Miramax.
Now compare this piece of Pulp Fiction dialogue with a traditional movie script and you'll see just how far the writer was breaking with that hallowed mantra of "Show, Don't Tell".
Better still:
Rewrite the scene of Pulp Fiction dialogue the way the screenwriting gurus would tell you to
Exercise: Go back to the script and write the whole scene as the rulebooks dictate.
Remember: Never stay on a character speaking for more than seconds.
Try the the usual tricks. Some suggestions:
Have something distracting going on -
- Make Captain Koons walk around - Jump cut to kid Butch moving around with some toy - Jump cut to Mom washing up and listening 'intently'and looking wistful - Make Captain Koons turn his face away from the kid with a tear in his eye - Make Captain Koons stare into the distant... - FADE TO: FLASHBACK. Grandaddy in the trenches etc etc - Lush, violin music crescendoing with fake emotion to tell the audience what to feel
I'm sure you can come up with many more.
The extended monologue of Captain Koons (played by Christopher Walken) here will strike any scriptwriter who's familiar with the How-To manuals as a colossal No-No. A BIG mistake.
And it's characteristic of Pulp Fiction dialogue in that it violates a good many of the rules of 'good' screenwriting.
I'll just jot down a few, but it would be a useful exercise to go through the script and see how many more transgressions Tarantino committed in his script.
When you spot one, play the movie and watch the corresponding clip. So here are some of those rule-breakers:
1. Obvious - too many words.
2. The writer has neglected to obey one of the most important 'rules' of dialogue - you always have to cut down a long speech into bite-sized manageable chunks.
The gurus' injunction is always split up your speech paragraphs into three, four lines maximum, with double spacing between. Tarantino completely ignores this rule. (Although I wouldn't recommend emulating him here - most screenwriters have to write for industry readers and these 'gatekeepers' of the movie business get very fed up with long continuous chunks of speech because it's tedious to read).
3. The books also say: Never stay on the speaking character throughout a speech. There must be something visually stimulating going on to cut away to, or to have going on in the background.
4. Don't describe action - show it. Don't describe characters - show them.
5. Avoid speeches that focus on something that happened in the past, particularly beyond the past of the film's story.
6. Lengthy speeches might be OK by characters whom we have got to know intimately and care about. But not if the character is suddenly introduced out of nowhere, out of context, and seemingly related to no other character in the movie.
So. Tarantino should go to the back of the class? He rejected most of these strictures. Typical of Pulp Fiction dialogue - a speech describing events in generations past and in a context which, at the time it is uttered, has no apparent relation to anything we've seen so far, delivered in long, convoluted detail about characters who we never see.
Like so much of Pulp Fiction dialogue, the emotion deliberately strays perilously close to the edge of comedy. It's a parody of all those movie scenes where a character explains the whole generational history of a family heirloom.
But the scene is oddly moving - helped, of course, by a fine actor and Tarantino's direction, again staying firmly on the spoken words with no distractions from the speech. Even while we recognise it for being a take-off of an over-used, cliched film convention, somehow, the monologue has the power to engage our emotions.
It's a beautifully modulated and very moving part of the movie. It's a significant example of how the dialogue of Pulp Fiction achieves a high emotional impact.
It actually delivers what the experts demand - 'foreshadowing'. But here, the foreshadowing is not a clumpy, obvious flagging up, but a subtle example of establishing the context for a pivotal strand of the plot later on.
The little boy who is given the watch, we learn, is Butch (played by Bruce Willis), and it is the watch that generates some of the most on-the-edge-of-your-seat moments of the film.
Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction.Screenwriter/Director: Quentin Tarantino. A Band Apart. Jersey Films. Miramax.
Emotional Power in Pulp Fiction Dialogue
Notice how well the contrast between the static scene of Koons' monologue and the high-wire tension of the action scenes of Butch on the run for his life is executed. The threat to his life of the crime lord when he double-crosses him is dramatically overtaken by Butch's desperate emotional need to get his watch, and it's this that fuels the agonising, nail-biting sequences of Butch's story.
This is a great example of the ways in which Pulp Fiction dialogue is made to power the plot - and also make the whole section of the movie which centers on Butch's story more credible. We know, because of this scene that the watch is something Butch is willing to risk his life for.
Among the most quoted lines in movie history are the hilarious ones about the French name for cheeseburgers. Now, this, surely, must be one of the most trivial, dramatically pointless, inane pieces of dialogue in all cinema.
Not if it's Pulp Fiction dialogue.
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