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-== THE (PULP) FICTIN SHALL MAKE YOU FREE ==-

Int. Jimmie's Bathroom -- Day VINCENT...I washed 'em. Blood's real hard to get off. Maybe if he had some Lava, I coulda done a better job. JULES I used the same soap you did and when I dried my hands, the towel didn't look like no fuckin' Maxie pad. Look, fuck it, alright. Who cares? But it's shit like this that's brought this situation to a head. If he were to come in here and see that towel like that ... I'm tellin' you, Vincent, you best be cool. 'Cause if I gotta get into it with Jimmie on account of you ... Look, I ain't threatenin' you, I respect you an' all, but just don't put me in that position (PF). But it's shit like this that's brought this situation to a head.
This line reads "to a boil" in the screenplay, but was improvised during the shooting of Pulp Fiction, probably because Quentin Tarantino saw a tremendous opportunity for a hilarious two-way pun. In addition to "head" in the metaphorical sense of "decisive point," the word in this scene can be read as both the "head" of Marvin Nash, which Vincent has accidently blown off, and Jimmie's "head," the bathroom where the two henchmen are cleaning up. Above and beyond the subtle humor of the triple wordplay, this joke distills many of the major concerns of Tarantino's first three films. The linkage of an eruption of violence (the tense head of the situation), with the problem of identity (how to identify the headless Marvin Nash?), and the space-time of the bathroom (Jimmie's head) is the powerful motif that supplies the suspense of "The Bonnie Situation" and energizes Tarantino's other work. From True Romance to Pulp Fiction the integrity of a character's identity is contingent upon the convincingness of his/her performance of a given role, and the space-time of the bathroom is treated as the space-time of fiction in which point of view is always limited and participation/indulgence may lead to death, but will most certainly lead to violence. For Tarantino, violence explodes at the point where identity confronts its own incompleteness, like cracks in a reflection from a bathroom mirror, and his films hinge on attenuated moments of eerie calm before the hail of bullets that returns everyone to cosmogonic mush, leaving them as unidentifiable as the headless Marvin Nash in Pulp Fiction. In short, Tarantino's movies are all about coming to heads.

Before the violence of destroying identity comes the violence of creating it, of picking individuals out from a crowd and assigning names and roles. The naming scene in Reservoir Dogs is an example of this par excellence:
Int. Warehouse -- Day JOE ...When this caper's over, and I'm sure it will be a successful one, hell, we'll go down to the Hawaiian Islands and I'll laugh with all of you. You'll find me a different character down there. Right now it's matter of business. With the exception of Eddie and myself, who you already know, we're gonna be using aliases on this job. Under no circumstances do I want any one of you to relate to each other by your Christian names. And I don't want any talk about yourself personally. That includes where you've been, your wife's name, where you might have done time, or a bank maybe you robbed in St. Petersburg. All I want you guys to talk about, if you have to, is what you're gonna do. That should do it. Here are your names... (pointing at the men as he gives them a name) Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Pink (RD).
A Christian name is a proper name, perhaps the most proper of names, since it is given in a baptismal covenant with God. To make such a pact, to grant an individual a proper name is to partake, as Jacques Derrida puts it, in the "arche-violence" of identity (OG, 112). The next level of violence is the level of the law that restricts the use of the proper name, that creates the prohibition with which Joe assigns code names. The names he gives are colors, accidents in classical philosophy, apparently random and meaningless, unlike proper names -- the perilous pegs on which our identities hang. A proper name is the disappearing thread around which the fabric of identity spins, and as Joe knows and admonishes his crew, it only takes one personal detail to unravel such a tenuous weave. The violence of keeping proper names or identities secret gives way to a third type of violence when the secrets are divulged. According to Derrida, the third type of violence is what we mean when we commonly refer to violence -- war, crime, rape, etc. (OG, 112). This is the violence that lights up Reservoir Dogs, that predicates the film's pressure-cooker atmosphere. The whole problem of Reservoir Dogs is the problem of psychoanalysis: who's the rat (man). In Freud's classic case study, the young man plagued by fears of rats chewing at his anus must find out who the rats really represent. Or, as Mr. Pink puts it: "Somebody's sticking a red hot poker up our ass and I wanna find out whose name is on the handle." The anal fear of penetration is conquered through the power of naming. But as much as exposing a rat involves naming, the act of ratting itself is naming names. The prohibition on ratting runs so deeply that the rat of Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Orange/Freddy, is thrown for a loop by the revelation that those who name names -- even for the police --can never be trusted:
HOLDAWAY How was Long Beach Mike's referral? FREDDY Perfecto! His backin' me up went a long fuckin' way. I told 'em it was Long Beach Mike I did the poker game with. When Nice Guy called him to check it out, he said I was A-okay. He said I was a good thief, I didn't rattle, I was ready to make a move. So do right by him, he's a good guy. I wouldn't be inside if it wasn't for him. HOLDAWAY No, no, no, no, no. Long Beach Mike is not your fuckin' amigo, man. Long Beach Mike is a fuckin' scumbag. He is selling out his amigos. That's what kind of a nice guy he fuckin' is, alright. I'll take care of his fuckin' ass, man. But you get that low-life scumbag out of mind and you take care of business, you hear me (RD).
Since Poe's Dupin, the model of the perfect detective has been the one who can think just as the criminal does and the distinction between cop and con has proved tenuous at best. For the undercover agent, the distinction disappears. The shock to Mr. Orange comes in the realization that he's no different from Long Beach Mike --they both know too many names. A crucial moment in the film comes when White and Pink are discussing what to do with Orange, who is fatally shot in the belly and will die soon without medical attention. Pink finds out that White told Orange his "real" name and also knows where he's from.
MR. PINK One question: Do they have a sheet on you where you're from? MR. WHITE Of course. MR. PINK Well that' s that, then. I mean, Jesus Christ, I was worried about mugshot possibilities as it is. But know he knows: (a) what you look like, (b) what you're first name is, (c) where you're from and (d) what your specialty is. They ain't gonna hafta show him a helluva lot of pictures for him to pick you out. That's it, right? You didn't tell him anything else that could narrow down the selection? (RD).
Needless to say, they do not take Orange to the hospital because he knows too much. Pink and White nearly kill each other as this scene continues, and from here forward (in terms of the story time, not the non-linear, filmic time), Reservoir Dogs only gets bloodier. And all of it comes back to one moment of transgression, a moment of violent intimacy teetering on the brink of death, where identities, once unraveled, intermingle in a desperate state of flux, like Mr. Orange's gut -- half inside, half outside. There is no finer example of this type of boundary confusion than the final shoot-out in True Romance. The entire sequence is rife with meta-cinematic gestures that aim to posit the movies as a place for the dangerously titillating confusion of identities and identification. The scene takes place largely in the Hollywood apartment of big-time movie director-producer Lee Donowitz, who is also a small-time cocaine dealer. Unbeknownst to Lee, his assistant, Elliot Blitzer, is also an informant to the police, wearing a wire as part of a plea bargain deal. Elliot happens to be an actor, like everyone else in Hollywood, which adds another layer of irony to his performance. Indeed, almost every character in the room is an actor in some respect -- they are all hiding some piece of vital information from the others with a duplicitous identity: Clarence and Alabama are lying about where they got the stolen cocaine, Lee's body guards Monty and Boris hide their deep-seeded hatred for cops, and Elliot conceals his wire. A confusion of roles is apparent when Lee interrupts his deal-making with Clarence to periodically ask questions to Dick and Alabama such as "What's your part in this again?"

Indeed, the whole scene is a self-reflexive grand comic farce about performance and spectatorship. The police, listening to the conversation in a room next door, function as internal spectators, stand-ins for the movie audience inside the action of the story. Nicholson and Dimes' constant color commentary on the on-going deal, on which they are always shifting positions ("He knows something's up." He's bluffing. He can't know.), presents a schizophrenic model of identification to the audience which further complicates our identifications with characters who are already split by their own duplicity. The cops' comments push the frenzied energy of this scene over the top. Especially when Clarence and Elliot are in the elevator, Dimes and Nicholson's banter adds an extra dimension to the excitement of the situation, generating a feeling of ecstatic suspense for the audience, of being literally beside oneself on a high wire. This taut suspense of duplicitous identities and ecstatic identifications comes to a head in one moment of transgression before everything goes violently slack. As in Reservoir Dogs, the calm before the storm of bullets lasts only until the prohibition on proper names is ignored:
ELLIOT Officer Dimes? Officer Dimes? Dimes looks at Elliot. ELLIOT This has nothing to do with me anymore. Can I just leave and you guys just settle it by yourselves? DIMES Shut up and stay the fuck put, Elliot! LEE (to Elliot) How you know his name? How the fuck did he know your name? Why, you fuckin' little piece of shit! ELLIOT Lee, understand, I didn't want to -- NICHOLSON Shut the fuck up! LEE Well, I hope you're not planning on acting in the next twenty years 'cause you career is over, as of now. You can take your fuckin' SAG card and burn it! I treated you like a son! And you stabbed me in the heart! Lee can't control his anger anymore. He grabs the coffee pot off the table and flings hot coffee in Elliot's face (TR, 123-124).
This is all it takes to set off everyone's itchy trigger fingers -- the bodyguards, the mobsters and the police keep spraying fire at each other until the room is filled with blood, smoke and couch feathers. In the screenplay, a description of this scene reads, "This is a Mexican standoff, if there ever was one" (TR, 119). However, this description is not entirely apt. In a classic Mexican standoff, everyone is armed to the teeth and ready to die, yes, but there is usually a clear demarcation of bad guys and good guys, at least before the shooting starts. The brilliance of the final scene in True Romance is that such distinctions dissolve into an ambiguity as exhilarating as Dimes' and Nicholson's schizoid commentary. Lee's body guards turn the table on the cops by disobeying him, refusing to drop their guns because they simply "hate cops" (TR); having come all the way from Detroit, the Italian mobsters are equally unwilling to surrender. So the shouts of "Freeze, Asshole!" and other generic threats continue from all sides, still convincing no one to back down (perhaps because no one is addressed personally). For Tarantino, there is life in the adrenalin rush of this wonderful confusion of identities. Death only comes when Elliot attempts to stabilize his role by breaching the prohibition on proper names. The room falls silent as Lee realizes Elliot's betrayal, verbally pegging his divided loyalties to his person, in order to erase Elliot's identity completely.
Make no mistake, scalding coffee in the face, while it be an impetuous choice for Lee, is not at all a random decision for Tarantino. The dialogue that accompanies Lee's act helps to explain that what is meant by his gesture is nothing less than this: total erasure of Elliot's identity. The coffee in Elliot's face is only the physical corollary to the metaphysical insult of tearing up his SAG (Screen Actors Guild) card. An actor's identity, by nature, must be fluid, able to adapt to many different characters and situations. But an actor without the minimal proof of identification a SAG card provides is as fleeting as a ghost, a faceless nobody in a land of glossy eight-by-ten head shots. The cataclysmic violence that follows Elliot's effacement may also be linked to an earlier episode in the film, at Cliff Worley's trailer, where it is revealed by the mobster Coccotti that Clarence, "fuckhead that he is, left his driver's license in the dead guy's hand" (TR). A film set in motion by an overlooked ID (Clarence's), then, is brought to a halt by an ID (Elliot's) perceived all too vividly. An even more interesting example of a similar device is Butch's gold watch in Pulp Fiction. The watch was passed down through three generations of men in his family, with a long and rich history of surviving America's wars. As Captain Koons gives the watch to Butch, he reminds him of three crucial points: (1) that the watch is Butch's "birthright," (2) that it was "made by the first company ever to make wrist watches," and, finally (3) that, before his father died of dysentery, "he hid [the watch] in the one place he knew he could hide somethin'. His ass" (PF). Koons keeps it hidden in the same place on himself for two more years, until he is returned to the states. The watch is Butch's anchor in time, not just a timepiece but a piece of family history, an inherited "birthright," like a name; the watch is simultaneously shit, "an uncomfortable hunk of metal" that exacerbated his father's dysentery. Esmerelda Villalobos draws the two meanings together, by asking Butch what his name means, to which he replies, "I'm an American, our names don't mean shit." Butch is wrong. Remember Tarantino's own character in Reservoir Dogs, puzzling over his name: "Mr. Brown? That's too close to Mr. Shit" (RD). In a weird way, his name does mean shit and so does Butch's -- the shit that is his birthright and identity, the shit that he cannot risk wiping out of his mind, for fear that he become unstuck in time. That the watch was made by the very first company ever to make wrist watches only adds to its significance as a token of bondage; the wrist watch, like the ropes that bind him later in Russell's Old Room, and the handcuffs that lock Marvin Nash to his chair in Reservoir Dogs, bind Butch, along with us, to the space-time of the story.
Listen to the director himself talk about the watch: In Roger Avary's original story, the fact that Butch had a gold watch came out of nowhere. Roger spent all his time trying to sell us on why Butch had to go back into danger, and he did a really good job, but he didn't quite sell it. I thought, well, it's a contrivance, and what you do with a plot contrivance is feature it (SS, 11).
Whether we believe Tarantino's account of the writing or not, his anecdote is remarkable for its insight into his take on the stakes of successful storytelling. What fuels any story is ultimately contrivance, or plot manipulation. The deftest authors (or auteurs, in this case) make us forget or ignore the contrivance. But Tarantino highlights the contrivance, makes it into a masterful joke, a huge uncomfortable belly-laugh at the end of a two-page monologue. Captain Koon's speech is equally hilarious and poignant because it comes out of nowhere, foregrounding the absolute artifice of the story. But it is touching on a deeper level as well. The absolute artifice of the story comes in the form of Butch's identity (the gold watch). For Tarantino, identity is the supreme fiction, and Butch's story works, like a well-made fake ID, both in spite of and because of its artifice. Pulp Fiction audiences laugh uncontrollably at the ridiculousness of Koon's monologue and their laughter opens them to a wonderfully dangerous identification with Butch. In going back with Butch to find the thing he thought was his ID, the audience realizes almost simultaneously with the protagonist, that nothing is what we thought it would be. Butch almost expects to be greeted by heavily-armed thugs at his apartment; instead, he finds a hitman who prefers a book to a gun when he goes to the jakes. The look on his face upon killing Vincent says it all: Shit! Did I do that? The same look recurs again at the pawn shop, when Butch wavers for a second before going back to save Marsellus. Thrown into situations in which he had never pictured himself, Butch's actions and identity (and thus, the audience's identification) become as uncertain as the outcome of the story. Tarantino describes this effect:

What I liked about Roger Avary's whole pawn shop story when I read it and now when I see it, is that it's like you're watching Body and Soul and you turn a corner and all of the sudden you're in the middle of Deliverance. So, really, you're in the exact same position that the characters are in (MC).
The exact same position -- he's not kidding. Butch and Marsellus are stuck in the dungeon of the Mason-Dixon Pawn Shop, the back of the back rooms, bound and gagged in a seated position, waiting for something to happen next. The audience is starring at the screen, bound by the story and gagged (by the non-interactive nature of the medium) in a seated position, waiting for something to happen next. This brand of absurd bondage is both a cruel joke and the absolute truth of (pulp) fiction. Wherever we may be physically, if we're in a good story, we're always transported to a place where anything can happen and the stakes are literally life and death, or worse -- Gimphood. The Gimp in Pulp Fiction might be thought of as someone who wandered into the wrong story forever. For better or for worse, Tarantino understands that at the extremes to be into fiction is to be in fiction -- stuck in the middle. "Stuck in the Middle With You" is the name of the song Mr. Blonde dances to as he mutilates the kidnapped cop (named Marvin Nash the same as the headless corpse in Pulp Fiction) in Reservoir Dogs. No other scene in American cinema has caused such visceral reactions in screenings since the final shoot-out in Taxi Driver. At nearly every public screening there are people who walk out at this point in the film. Yet those that stay, stay for the same reason the others walk out: Mr. Blonde is performing unimaginable cruelties whose images we nevertheless cannot stop watching. There is something in this scene like Butch's watch, a little piece of ourselves whose importance we can't quite articulate without sounding ridiculous, but that draws us back into the story at all costs. The torture scene's power comes from its demand for a very real sacrifice of the viewer. Recall Marvin's position: gagged and bound to a seat, waiting for what happens next. The equation of Marvin with the audience was Tarantino's intent from the beginning, which is clear in his original directions for the scene:
Mr. Blonde just stares into the cop's/our face, holding the knife, singing along with the song. Then, like a cobra, he lashes out. A slash across the face. The cop/camera moves around wildly. Mr. Blonde just looks into the cop's/our face singing along with the seventies hit. Then he reaches out and cuts off the cop's/our ear. The cop/camera moves around wildly. Mr. Blonde holds the ear up for the cop/us to see (RD, 63).
Mr. Blonde's torture, which he forthrightly admits is for no good reason other than his amusement, can be seen as a radicalization of the pact between the audience and the director: lend me your ear, and I'll tell you a tale. One way to read this scene is that Tarantino literally breaks the pact with disgusting brutality -- he doesn't just borrow our ear, he cuts it off. Such a reading, however, fails to explain why the scene remains so gripping; for if it were merely exploitation, everyone in the audience should walk out on the film, and those who stay would be simply too stupid to realize the sadistic insult. But the writer-director's place in this scene isn't nearly that simple. When he writes "the cop's/our face," Tarantino includes himself in the "our." The kind of torture that Mr. Blonde chooses is striking in its similarity to other practices in the history of religion and madness. Vincent Van Gogh is perhaps the most well-known automutilator to severe his own ear. In an essay that uses Van Gogh's automutilation as a point of departure, Georges Bataille demonstrates that regardless of the specific body part -- eyes, ears and fingers have proved popularly interchangeable throughout the centuries -- or the motivating madness, the act of automutilation involves a sacrifice of a religious nature that hinges on "the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself" (VE, 67). But the severing of parts from a whole body, regardless of the one who cuts, inevitably sets something of a self out of a self. It is in this sense that all mutilation is automutilation, an attempt to destroy the selfsameness of the autos, the integrity of individual identity. The sacrifice that drives Reservoir Dogs is just such a sacrifice of the autos, which comes to a head, so to speak, in the torture of Marvin Nash. The scene's brilliant effectiveness derives from Tarantino's supple understanding of the relation of the role of identity in on-screen sacrifice to the role of the audience's identification with the story. A story does not work unless we are able to give ourselves so fully to it that we risk looking different afterward (the best stories almost guarantee this difference), like Clarence with his eye patch at the end of True Romance. Far from having taken from us forcibly what we only meant to loan, we offer "the cop's/our ear" up willingly, as our price of entry into the story. The freedom gained from this initial sacrifice of (the integrity of) the autos is the freedom that permits the audience to survive a movie as nihilistic as Reservoir Dogs. If our place in the story were only figured by Marvin Nash, or by Mr. Orange or by an idenfication with any single one of the other characters, our involvement with the narrative would have an abrupt end with a single bullet. But as it is, Tarantino's scripts are polymorphously perverse, permitting the audience schizoid identifications ten times more complex than the identities of his characters (appropriately listed in the credits to Reservoir Dogs in their split form: Mr. White/Larry, Mr. Orange/Freddy, Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega, etc.). This schism of identification played out in the torture scene begins even before the ear is severed. One of the many reasons few people will walk out during this scene is because of Michael Madsen's remarkable performance as a fascinating homeopath. Mr. Blonde is a psycho, yeah, but he's funny, and charming, and just look at him dance! In the end, the repulsive violence of Mr. Blonde's dance macabre is inextricable from its exhilarating charm.
Just as it is no accident that Lee Donowitz throws coffee in Elliot's face, it is not insignificant that Mr. Blonde chooses to deface Marvin Nash. As we have seen, for Tarantino, an attack on the face is shorthand for an attack on identity. In Reservoir Dogs faces are linked to the fictions that generate identities through the commode story. The commode story is the story-within-a-story of Reservoir Dogs and it works like the Shakespearean device of a play-within-a-play, getting at truth by turning the absolute artifice of the medium back on itself. The commode story, an amusing anecdote about a criminal job he has never done, is the total fiction on which Freddy's identity as Mr. Orange depends. His boss, Holdaway, advises Freddy on how to memorize the story:
HOLDAWAY Now the things you hafta remember are the details. It's the details that sell your story ... Now what you gotta do is take all the details and make 'em your own. This story's gotta be about you and about how you perceived the events that took place. And the way that you make it your own is you just gotta keep sayin' it and sayin' it and sayin' it and sayin' it and sayin' it (RD, 71).
Elsewhere in the scene, Holdaway compares the story to a joke. Stories are weird. Like jokes, they defy simple possession. You keep repeating a story till you know it; you make it your own through the details. And if you can tell your story well enough, you can be anyone you want to be. The danger, of course, is that someone will check your ID, which is where the sheriff's deputies come in. The story-within-the-story of the commode story is the anecdote that the sheriff's deputy is telling his buddies, about a speeder he pulled over and almost shot mistakenly. The supreme irony of the story is that the officer's final threat, "Buddy, I'm gonna shoot you in the face if you don't put your hands on the fuckin' dash!", is what stops the driver from opening his glovebox. Since the driver is only trying to get his vehicle registration (a form of ID), the paradox is that his identity will be obliterated if he tries to verify it. This anecdote occupies a strange place in the movie's narrative. Since Freddy is never shown explaining what the sheriffs were talking about in the men's room, it is never clear whether their story is part of his story. Oddly enough, the glovebox anecdote eventually becomes a pivotal part of Freddy's life story, when he is shot by a female motorist whose automobile he and Mr. White attempt to carjack. Thus, the paradox of identity always comes to a head (decisive moment, face, bathroom). For Tarantino, the space-time of the story is the space-time of the bathroom. A careful viewer of Reservoir Dogs will see that the entire film is set in a warehouse that is at the same time a morgue and a bathroom. During the torture scene, there is a toilet clearly visible behind Marvin Nash, as though it were another empty chair to which he may have been strapped. This scene establishes an equation, between Marvin Nash's bondage, watching a movie and s(h)itting on a toilet, which becomes more explicit in Pulp Fiction. An anecdote Tarantino told in an interview helps to elaborate the stakes of this equation:
I would act like I'd left for school and just go into my bathroom, which was downstairs, and bring a blanket and a pillow and spend those 90 minutes until she went to work just lying down in the bathroom. I would never really sleep because I could hear her walking around the house. It was like hearing a monster walking upstairs (P, 97).
The bathroom, for Tarantino, may be thought of as a stall, both in space and time. In the first sense, as a room with a limited point of view, the bathroom stall is nothing more than an image of the human condition. If Reservoir Dogs is about a robbery at all, it's about the robbery of the robbery, the absence of an objective view of the central event. Much of the power of Reservoir Dogs comes from its portrayal of basic existential dilemmas: people with limited information and point of view, in a restricted space, trying to figure out what's real and what's not by telling one another stories. We can no more see outside our own stalls than Mr. Orange could see the woman grab a gun from her glovebox or Vincent could see Butch coming or Tarantino could be sure that his mother really left for work. The bathroom stall is also a stall in time, a suspension of the normal flow of events in everyday life. Bathroom time exists both inside and outside of the rest of life. Perhaps because of its curious in-between position, bathroom time tends to be left out of most narratives. As Vincent puts it before he heads to the john in the last scene of Pulp Fiction: "I gotta take a shit. To be continued." Only the action doesn't wait for Vincent to return; he is caught with his pants down for the third time in the movie (the first time chronologically), oblivious to the outside world, absorbed in his copy of Modesty Blaise, a famous piece of pulp fiction from the 50s. Bathroom time, for Tarantino, is the time of the story because there the pleasures of reading and shitting are coincident. "If shitting is a consummate pleasure, it is because at a certain moment free will and necessity, what one wants and what one must, precisely coincide" (MS, 91). One need only replace "shitting" with "reading" or "moviegoing" to understand why the bathroom is the perfect space of fiction. Tarantino's movies push the limits of this space by constantly testing the delicate balance between free will and necessity that constitutes the unspoken pact between director and viewer. In Pulp Fiction, the razor-edged suspense of Mia's overdose, which depends on Vincent's being in the bathroom, is the perfect example of the stall of bathroom time at its limit. The same tension is palpable the moment before Butch kills Vincent in his apartment bathroom. Indulgence in stories -- in fiction -- can lead to disfigurement, death, or worse, Gimphood. But for Tarantino, if it is fiction that binds us, it is also fiction saves us and that shall make us free -- Pulp Fiction. Pulp, because pulp fiction is detailed, as luridly particular as each sheet of grainy paper it's printed on. Remember Holdaway's advice from Reservoir Dogs: "Now the things you hafta remember are the details. It's the details that sell your story." In other words, what "Like a Virgin" is really about matters. So does the romantic magnitude of foot massages. And Mia's "Fox Force Five" joke. And why Mr. Pink doesn't tip. And what Jules' future plans are. Perhaps these are the only things that matter. And the only True Romance is Movie Love because the movies, especially Tarantino's, are a place whose fiction annihilates the autos and sets our identities floating freely.Then maybe, just maybe, Tarantino himself is the righteous man and his stories are the shepards protecting our asses in the valley of darkness, and it's the world that's evil and selfish and should just watch more movies. Nah. THE END Credits For ease of reference in the text I have use the abbreviations listed at the end of each entry. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. VE. Biskind, Peter. "An Auteur is Born." Premiere. 8.3 (1994): 94- 102. P. Dargis, Manohla. "Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction." Sight & Sound. 11.6 (1994): 16-19. SS. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. OG. Freud, Sigmund. Three Case Histories. New York: Collier Books, 1963. TCH. Longsdorf, Amy. "Director Tarantino's success is no piece of fiction." Morning Call. 23 October 1994: F1-3. MC. Pops, Martin. "The Metamorphosis of Shit." from Home Remedies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. 86-116. MS. Scott, Tony. True Romance. videotape. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 1993. TR. Tarantino, Quentin. Pulp Fiction. film. Hollywood: Miramax Films, 1994. PF. -- Pulp Fiction. screenplay. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. PF. -- Reservoir Dogs. videotape. Van Nuys: Live Video, 1992. RD. -- Reservoir Dogs. screenplay. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. RD. -- True Romance. screenplay. Studio City: True Romance Productions, 1991. TR. I hereby acknowledge the gracious proofreading assistance of my loving parents.
 

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