0. This will all have to do with games, trust me.
1. Pulp Fiction was in a small class of films that changed movies forever. Directors like it, arty people like it and audiences liked it--which is rare enough by itself--but also it changed what Hollywood thought regular people could put up with in a movie. Only a few other movies did that and most were genre movies with special effects showing you something only movies could show you (realistic moving space ships, dinosaurs, demonic possession, etc). Pulp created a director-centric frenzy not seen in a decade that lasted basically until the Marvel movies--which Pulp strongly-influenced.
2. There's no one simple explanation because, as so many peopl-- including QT--have pointed out, all the cool things in it have roots somewhere else. The lurid subjects appear in all kinds of old B movies, Shane Black and Howard Hawks did good dialogue in crime films before Pulp did it, Scorsese did those needle drops and cool characters, Godard and the French New Wave did a lot of the experimental film techniques, the plots were standard potboiler fare (thus the title), etc.
3. A common thesis might be that he did them all at once, but then you've got things like The Long Goodbye which arguably did as well, and a million movies since (including ones with Samuel Jackson, Uma or Travolta), which don't hit as hard.
4. I think I have a piece of the puzzle:
5, For all his interest in genre films Quentin Tarantino has never done a spooky or mysterious movie. Death Proof is mayyyybe a horror movie but it definitely is not spooky.
6. One thing Tarantino does not do is mystery. And not just spooky horror mystery but also another kind of mystery.
7. You've seen the other kind of mystery in a lot of the foreign films that Tarantino loves: a character appears and is doing something and you don't know what. It may turn out to be something banal, like shopping while waiting to hear back from her doctor about a life-threatening illness, or something crazy, like running from the mob or stepping through a time warp to talk to a machine consciousness from the future.
And, crucially, even when you do know what's going on, you aren't told what the interesting part of it is supposed to be. The point is: you don't immediately know what's going on and part of what the film is saying is: I know you're confused, we have to watch other peoples' lives carefully to see what's going on. The mystery around simple plot points is part of the aesthetic. The poetry is in the difficulty of extractng any meaning from anything in this crazy world. David Lynch was an American director who definitely did take on this kind of Euromystery. He could make a diner or a police station as strange and new as a black dimension of evil spirits.
8. Basically these kinds of films trust the audience to eventually notice there is some kind of beauty in what's going on. But it is also possible that the audience won't "get it" because the movie never signals "Alright, here's where its supposed to be awesome". You either notice The Week-End is beautiful and surreal and as absurd as life or you scratch your head wondering where those sheep came from.
9. Often this is when a film critic is brought in to explain the art movie to the audience.
10. So here's my thesis about Quentin, with Pulp as the prime example:
Quentin managed to use all the techniques of arty filmmaking to make a blockbuster by chucking out the mystery and instead making the explaining-what's-going-on part of the movie. The film critic has been entertainingly imported into the movie.
He shows instead of telling---but then he also tells.
But he doesn't do it in a Deadpool way, as a winking meta-comment, he does it by making the explaining part of the movie--sometimes the best part.
Quentin Tarantino made an arty, creative movie that does not trust the audience at all. He tells everyone everything multiple times, but somehow manages to not make it condescending either.
11. The stakes, context and meaning of basically every single big plot event in Pulp Fiction is hyperexplained by characters in the movie--in ways that don't suck:
-A European director would've just let that diner get robbed in the middle of Jules and Vincent's conversation about walking the Earth. This would disorient the audience, making us feel like we were getting robbed of the one thing we now know Jules and Vince reliably supply (great dialogue)--which is fun! But QT is making a blockbuster.
Tarantino doesn't want audiences confused by where this new two-person gun crime is coming from and what it might have to do with the previous two-person gun crime (nothing, but Godard would want that confusion--America is just full of guns and violence and so its absurdly funny for two violent criminals to get robbed at gunpoint just after a crime of their own).
So what does Tarantino do? QT gives us a prologue at the beginning of the movie where the two diner robbers extensively discuss why anyone would rob a diner (Denver omelette, anyone?). We don't know why they're doing it when we see it, but when it pays off, our confusion evaporates.
-J &V discuss Tony Rocky Horror and the foot massage. Why? It sets up the stakes of the Mia Wallace date. Tony stepped out of line and got thrown four stories. Almost every other director would've let us realize for ourselves that touching the boss gangster's wife is a high-risk activity (Hell even I know that), QT makes sure we know, but does it fun, and with swearing.
-At the end of the execution scene, Jules recites a Bible verse and we're left hanging with that--shots fire and the scene ends. Why did he do that? Again, an art movie director would've just let us live with the weirdness of it (David Lynch would've), but no, QT then has Jules explain, scenes later “I just thought it was some coldblooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.” Then his spiritual awakening is because he is thinking about what it means and he explains that.
-Christopher Walken's cameo. What's he explaining? How important the gold watch is. Again: many other directors would've made a scene where the boxer, trying to survive in a world of murder-capitalism, is fixated on a gold watch he used to own for reasons of symbolism alone. Not QT. You're gonna be told and you're gonna be told by the greatest weird-exposition scene guy in film history.
-Butch kills a guy in the ring. Do we see boxing? No. Do we see a scene where the boxer explains to a driver how he feels about killing a man in the ring? Yes we do.
-Willis blows up at Fabiana for forgetting the watch. He then, in the car, explains it all to himself (and us) again. "I didn't explain to her how important the watch was..."
-Now we have the one thing that's not glossed by anyone in the movie: the pawn shop basement grotesquerie. Why is this happening? Well, its in the title at least: Pulp Fiction. This is a lurid story and you came here for violence and cheap thrills. No explanation needed.
-The Bonnie Situation starts with the unlikely end of the execution previously seen and then Jules and Vince discussing the meaning of the previous scene--was it a miracle?
-Marvin gets shot. Grieving Marvin--Jules! friend!--takes a back seat to Jules (to Vincent), then Quentin (to Jules and Vincent), then Jules again (on the phone to boss Wallace), then the Wolf (to Jules, Vincent and QT) all explaining how dangerous it is to be roaming around The Valley in the middle of the day with a dead body.
This sequence contains almost nothing but people explaining to each other how serious the situation is and other people trying to crack jokes while they do it. And did they have to? No. Like 90% of crime directors before 1980 would've maybe spent one line reminding the audience that cops tend to notice shit like you're driving a car drenched in fucking blood, then gone about the business of having these cold-hearted gangsters get to work doing their mysterious, underground business with hatchets and garbage bags and whatever. Watch, say, Sexy Beast or Gangster Number One for great examples.
-The whole film basically ends with an exegesis--Jules explaining the Bible verse.
12. So what's all this have to do with games?
13. Remember: while immersion (mystery! confusion! where are we?) is fun. But the other thing can be, too: just explaining what is going down and why you should care. And in RPGs, with all the numbers, and the players who missed sessions or forgot the rules, or were in bathroom, often requires a lot of explaining--about the story or the stakes or the backstory or the math. But explaining can be fun. Explaining can be the difference between a fun afternoon at the movies and a full-on blockbuster.
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