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Pulp Fiction could be considered one of the best films of the 90s, which projected countless memorable sequences for the history of postmodern cinema. A film flooded with gore, nihilism and cultural elements that, beyond serving a decadent buffet of illegal substances, did it with huge amounts of fast food that glimpse his great obsession for it, and help to better understand the audiovisual piece.
All these elaborations reinterpreted a posteriori in all scenarios, both in the real and fictional world, whether in restaurants or in viral recipes on the Internet, include from the Big Kahuna Hawaiian cheeseburger or the $5 American milkshake to pancakes with bacon, Lance’s Fruit Brute cereal bowls or greasy roadside cafeteria dishes. All of them hide behind a common metaphor about what we eat, about fast (and unprocessed) consumption, and about everything that is considered junk, packaged in a tasting menu for the American public.
An ode to ‘junk food’
This symbolism is constantly present in the plot and non-linear scenes of Pulp Fiction, as we can see in one in which Jules and Vince have breakfast in a cheap restaurant that ends up being robbed at gunpoint by their partners in crime, Ringo and Yolanda.
Following the chronology of the film, there is another sequence engraved forever in the collective memory. One in which Vince takes Mia, Marsellus Wallace’s wife, to dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim‘s restaurant. An iconic place set in the 50’s where they order a succulent fast food feast: a steak, a hamburger and a $5 milkshake. One of which, much to Vince’s chagrin, he ends up surprising him after tasting it: ‘Damn, that’s a damn good milkshake!’
The edible metaphor
The way food is approached and talked about in Pulp Fiction is, after all, a metaphor for the film itself, which revolves around how the consumption of fast food or ‘seedy stuff’ has more value than people imagine or approve of at first glance.
The duality between the enjoyment or pleasure of food and, on the contrary, the contempt for it, is symbolically reproduced on screen in the form of gastronomic conversations in which the characters do not appreciate the value of food, and even associate it with something grimy; while others praise how wonderful it really is. Two antagonistic concepts that we can see scripted to perfection in a sequence in which Jules mentions that she is a vegan, while Vince extols bacon and pork chops, and then presses her to define what really constitutes ‘a filthy animal’.
However, what prevails here is this film’s extreme love and/or obsession with those guilty pleasures as a predominant theme that glimpses how Pulp Fiction could very well be the cinematic equivalent of fast food.
