PLOT FRICTION

PULP FICTION (1994)
dir: Quentin Tarantino

PLOT FRICTION
MAD #335, May 1995
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Sam Viviano

Several seperate stories that are all inter-connected and told out of chronological order.

It begins eith a couple (Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer) holding up a diner before the credits begin. Then we see two mob hitmen, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), on their way to a job, talking about the differnces between Europe and the United States.

Sam Viviano often draws himself and his family in the background of his work, like here in the splash panel. Reference is made to the Tarantino-penned Natural Born Killers, which starred Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.

Vinnie and Jules go to retrieve a briefcase and shoot the people in possession of it. Mob boss Marsellus (Ving Rhames) orders boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) to throw a fight, and while he's out of town Vinnie has to take out Marsellus's wife Mia (Uma Thurman). He takes her to Jackrabbit Slim's, a fifties-themed restaurant.

The Ed Sullivan caricature is based on Bill Elder's caricature of him. James Dean, Buddy Holly, and Marilyn Monroe all suffered tragic deaths at a young age so even though it wasn't intended, “everything was great” could exist as a joke by itself.

After winning a dance contest and bringing her back home, Vinnie excuses himself to go to the bathroom. While there, Mia sees Vinnie's bag of heroin and ODs. Vinnie panics and brings her to the home of Lance (Eric Stoltz), the guy he bought the heroin from earlier. He and Lance and his wife (Rosanna Arquette) all struggle to revive her with an adrenaline needle, after which they vow never to speak of the incident.

The next chapter of the film starts with Butch as a kid being visited by Captain Koons (Christopher Walken), a friend of his dead father from a POW camp in Vietnam, who gives a long story of how he was given a watch that was passed by Butch's family through generations, and how Captain Koons kept it safely in his ass for two years. It's all a flashback Butch has before the fight he promised to throw but didn't, so now must run from Marsellus.

While on the lam, Butch finds out his girlfriend (Maria deMedeiros) forgot to bring the keistered legacy watch with them and he has to go back to his apartment to get it, risking gangsters that may be waiting for him, but luckily Vinnie was on the john when Butch came home and left his gun on the counter. Butch drives back, sees Marsellus, hits him, then tries to avoid Marsellus as he's chased into a pawnshop, and they're both brought into the back room bound and gagged about to be sodomized ala Deliverance. Butch and Marsellus escape the gags and vow never to speak of the incident.


Going back to the earlier scene of Vinnie and Jules at the home of the guy they're retrieving the briefcase from, they kidnap the one guy they didn't kill and end up shooting him by mistake in the car and fill it with blood and guts. They try to hide it at their friend Jimmy (Quentin Tarantino)'s house, but he doesn't want to be involved, especially with his wife about to come home, so they call in Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel), a “fixer”.

In the middle panel is Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior, a movie about a male scientist who becomes pregnant.


Wolfe has the car cleaned up and taken to a chop shop. Jules missed being shot at the job they were just on and takes this as a divine intervention, deciding this job is his last, and is done with crime after finishing the job and returning the briefcase. They decide to get something to eat, and it's at the diner that gets robbed at the beginning, bringing us back around.

Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Alfred Hitchcock, and Woody Allen are all directors who appear in their own films, though Hitchcock only ever appeared for less than a second in a crowd scene or a guy waiting on a line. There was a controversy in the nineties where Denny's was shown to have a bias against black people. Even thirty years ago Woody Allen had a reputation for liking them young.