In Which We Make More From The Wallets Than We Do The Register

Walking the Earth

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Pulp Fiction
dir. Quentin Tarantino
154 minutes

It is precisely right that Pulp Fiction begins and ends in a diner. Diners are places where ordinary things happen. Breakfast, small talk, “Garçon, coffee.” But one minute you’re having a Denver omelet, and the next minute somebody’s sticking a gun in your face.

Pulp Fiction is not science fiction, but it does have a sci-fi element of the uncanny. It is about big visuals and big sound, warped reality and warped morality. To watch a Tarantino movie is to be manipulated somehow, and Tarantino manipulates the viewer quite nimbly — after all, a man with a foot fetish is categorically required to convince people that certain unattractive things are attractive. Watching the film can make you believe that everyone should carry a gun, that jobs in offices are boring and not worth having, that cocaine, while dangerous, is an attractive alternative to heroin.

Real life becomes mundane when each scene is peppered with gunshots; real life becomes a space in which all the steaks are either bloody as hell or burnt to a crisp; real life is when Vincent Vega says “We should have fuckin’ shot guns” with the casual swagger of a small-town mayor.

If Seinfeld is a show about nothing then Pulp Fiction is a movie about a little bit of everything — just not in chronological order. Anyone who says Tarantino revolutionized the concept of nonlinear narrative will be beaten to death by James Joyce’s black-hatted ghost, but he took often unfriendly style of storytelling and turned it into something mainstream audiences can swallow. There is something to be said for the way the film artfully skips from Butch’s breezy “Zed’s dead, baby” line to the recapitulation of the Ezekiel 25:17 speech. Time isn’t real! Or maybe it’s real, but it doesn’t matter. “Next time we see each other it’ll be Tennessee time.” “Que hora es?” “Any time of the day is a good time for pie.” “If I’m curt with you, it’s because time is a factor.”

The storyline that is the bread of the Pulp Fiction club sandwich concerns Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta), two hitmen for L.A. kingpin Marsellus Wallace who are responsible for retrieving a glowing briefcase from a handful of strangely yuppie-ish youths. Did these kids really have an appetite for Big Kahuna burgers at 7:22 in the morning? Would a Big Kahuna burger involve some sort of grilled pineapple accoutrement? Having gunned down all the mini yuppies, and having miraculously survived a hailstorm of bullets from a third, hidden mini yuppie, Jules and Vincent leave with the precious cargo only to shoot their underling Marvin in the head by accident. It is a rough day at the proverbial office.

They go to Jimmy’s (Quentin Tarantino) house, put on his nerdy collegiate clothes, scrub off all the blood and let Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) take care of the corpse. The Wolf must be Tarantino’s idea of a deus ex machina — he delegates tasks with grace and a remarkable lack of bullshit, knows which truck repair place can get rid of Marvin’s body (what’s left of it, anyway), and compliments Jimmy on his expensive taste in coffee. A human deus ex machina would definitely wear a tuxedo.

Jules and Vincent hand over the briefcase to Marsellus. He is pleased. There is one theory about the briefcase suggesting it contains Marsellus’ soul — the band-aid on the back of his neck marks the place through which one’s soul would apparently be sucked out by the devil. I like this theory because I don’t think he’s the only guy in Los Angeles with his soul knocking around like the eight ball on a pool table. When I first saw Pulp Fiction I was sixteen and had no imagination; I thought the glow from the briefcase signified gold. Now I see how foolish that idea was. Marsellus is a nasty dude, but no way would he appoint Jules and Vincent to gun down three young guys for mere gold. A briefcase full of gold nuggets has as much value to Marsellus Wallace as a bowl of Cheerios.

Vincent is a facile cheeseball who makes motivational speeches to himself in the bathroom (sort of like Bruce Willis when he guest-starred on Friends), but Jules is the only character who might still be in possession of his soul. He may quote a (fake) Bible passage before obliterating Marsellus’ transgressors, but he’s the one who, post bullet hailstorm, manages to find religion without sounding like he’s been hypnotized at the county fair. Something about Samuel L. Jackson’s mellifluous voice makes conversion seem utterly rational. “You’re judging this the wrong way,” Jules says to Vincent. “You don't judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God's touch. God got involved.” Jules offers a reasonable solution for religious conflict: if you didn’t experience God, that’s okay; if you experienced God, understand that your experience may not be enough to convince others.

Jules finds the redemption, but Vincent gets the fall after his night with Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman). Taking the boss’ wife out should be as innocuous as a five-dollar vanilla milkshake, just not when both parties prepare by getting really high. The film doesn’t glamorize drugs — not with the shot of Mia OD’ing and looking like something out of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One — but it must be said that both characters look their best right after illicit consumption. Vincent has a great, shit-eating heroin grin, and Mia gets this unbelievably sexy gleam in her eye after doing a bump in the restaurant bathroom. Whoever runs D.A.R.E can’t prevent this kind of drug-induced self-confidence, not unless they base all their programs around the image of a vomit-covered Uma Thurman. By the way, a $5 shake in 1994 would be a $7.26 shake today.

Pulp Fiction is a lot like Marsellus Wallace’s house: cool, slick, big stereo, and you can’t find out where the intercom is. Mia and Vincent’s Twist scene has entered our cultural visual lexicon (does anyone have a better word for “visual lexicon”?) but I prefer Mia dancing solo to “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” It is hot and awkward at the same time. Mia Wallace is more than a woman to me, and I would like to know what shade of lipstick she wears.

Butch Coolidge, around whom the third storyline revolves, is the opposite of Mia Wallace. He is not cool so much as he is menacing. He is sweaty and hypermasculine, a boxer who takes fights one at a time which must seem kind of wimpy to Butch, at least in comparison to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, who were all war heroes fighting for America. Butch has one last match in him, and Marsellus Wallace wants to fix it so that he loses. When Butch sits and listens to Marsellus Wallace tell him that ability don’t last, you can practically see in the expression on his just-short-of-craggy face that he would rather be raped by the Gimp a thousand times than let his ass go down in the fifth.

Esmeralda Villalobos, the film’s sexy MacGuffin

The boxing match occurs off-screen but it isn’t difficult to imaging Butch killing a guy with his bare hands. Butch blows the fixed match, arranges to collect on his bets, meets up with his adorable French girlfriend at the motel and gets ready to book it for Tahiti or Bora Bora or wherever rich people go; unfortunately, the girlfriend forgot the fucking watch! The wristwatch that has been passed down through the men of his family for generations is back at home, and so are the men who want him dead.

Butch wears this watch all the time and it probably reminds him of the fact that he’s not a military hero like Grandpops, but he needs it anyway. He risks his life to get the watch back. He ends up in a sex-torture nightmare of a basement with Marsellus Wallace himself in order to get that watch back. Everyone has that watch. Everyone has a watch, or a Mia Wallace, or a gun-induced miracle. Is that what Tarantino is trying to say? That the events in life designed to bring about ruin are those that make life worth living?

Somebody, please, get this lovely young woman some blueberry pancakes

Some movies would rather the audience turn their brain off at the first sign of the opening credits. They’d rather not have people think about what might happen to their characters after the first kiss or the wedding or the heartwarming family hug. (Usually these films star Kate Hudson.) But with Pulp Fiction it is really fun to imagine what is going to happen to everyone after their mini-stories end. These characters are so sexy and repulsive and charismatic and grotesque that they merit much consideration for their futures. Is Marsellus Wallace going to contract some sort of sexual PTSD, or at least a venereal disease? Is Mia Wallace going to kick hard drugs and swan about in a swim cap for the rest of her life? Is Butch really going to enjoy Bora Bora? What if he loses his watch in the tranquil Pacific waters?

Most importantly, is Jules going to walk the earth, as he declares in the diner? The concept of walking the earth probably sounded insane to Vincent, at least in 1994. That was a time when you could get paid in cash for a little dirty work, a time before politicians and cops were felling bosses like Marsellus Wallace left and right. No one in their right mind would have wanted to walk the earth in 1994, but in 2011 “walk the earth” sounds like a better post-college plan than “move in with your parents and bartend at the local Texas Roadhouse.” The sex and the flash of the film are nice audiovisual stimuli as they occur, but the lasting impression may as well be the future Jules, toting a backpack instead of a briefcase, shoes worn out from walking the earth.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington, Vermont. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Justin Bieber. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Turn Your Back On The 1990s At Your Own Peril

Elena Schilder on American Beauty

Elizabeth Gumport on Wild Things

Molly O'Brien on Pulp Fiction

Hanson O'Haver on Airheads

Alex Carnevale on Indecent Proposal

Emma Barrie on While You Were Sleeping

Jessica Ferri on The Devil's Advocate

Durga Chew-Bose on Titanic

Molly Lambert on Basic Instinct

Alex Carnevale on Singles

"Street Halo" - Burial (mp3)

"NYC" - Burial (mp3)

"Stolen Dog" - Burial (mp3)

In Which Shawty Right There She's Got Everything I Need

The Archaeology of Bieber

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Most of the cultural phenomena that surrounds pop music is self-explanatory — it all really boils down to “the men don’t know but the little girls understand” — but sometimes a phenomenon requires further explanation. Evidence: Never Say Never, Bieber’s 3D concert film-slash-documentary, now has both a theatrical-release DVD iteration and a “Director’s Fan Cut” with another forty minutes of footage tacked on. This new version is ostensibly another opportunity for fatigued moms and dads across the country to drive to the nearest Best Buy and buy more Bieber swag for their children.

The name “Director’s Fan Cut” is problematic — is it material chosen by the fans or by the director? Is it implying that Jon Chu, Never Say Never’s director, is himself a fan and that the new cut displays his fandom more prominently than the original? Or did fans film it the way they did in Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That! That would be funny.

Regardless of the imprecise Director’s Fan Cut designation, it is important to note that NSN is receiving the same DVD release treatment as an epic cinematic juggernaut like The Lord of the Rings. Such a packaging assumes that the original viewers will want to spend more money to own the extended footage — those in charge of peddling the DVD must hope that the original viewers are superfans and thus superconsumers. This assumption is, of course, correct.

Never Say Never has a lot more in common with The Lord of the Rings trilogy than one would initially think. Both films depict a tiny, appealing protagonist in possession of something powerful; both films involve rabid fan bases and powerful allegiances; both films use shots of deafening, multi-thousand-person crowds. The Battle of Helm’s Deep : Orcs :: Bieber’s climactic Madison Square Garden show : little girls.

Never Say Never's purpose is slyly twofold: on one hand, the film provides enough audiovisual stimuli ( slo-mo three-dimensional hair flips, soulful camera eye contact) to stoke the flames of Bieber fandom; on the other hand, it gives non-fans an explanation as to why our silky-haired Canadian teen hero has so many fans in the first place.

Watching the movie and seeing its subject through so many lenses can give the viewer a weird sensation of parallax. Half of the movie is documentary-style insight, some of it intimate and familial (Justin’s baby pictures, teary testimonial from grandparents with thick Ontario accents), some of it meant to forecast Bieber’s fame (shots of him drumming on tables with precise rhythm or hitting all the soprano runs in an Alicia Keys song). These parts are raw footage, grainy and unglossed, probably included to help silence the naysayers who insist Justin’s vocals are digitally enhanced.

The other half of the movie is concert footage, and it is glossy as hell. The viewer is assaulted with confetti, glitter, frightening pyrotechnics, and thousands of hysterical, purple-shirt wearing devotees screaming in unison. Bieber’s concert is like a cooler version of those evangelical Christian masses that try to be rock shows: it is communal, powerful, and emotionally manipulative in a way that you don’t even mind. With this many shots of sobbing girls, there is always the potential for weeping-osmosis. Meaning, it is easy to shed tears at this movie just by watching the little Beliebers cry.

More importantly, Bieber’s show is slick and charming. He wears costumes that enhance his youthful cuteness – monochromatic spaceman jumpsuits and purple baseball caps, giant sneakers in which he can complete nimble little hip-hop dance sequences — and those outfits must be made of some magical sweat-absorbing material, because the Bieb doesn’t seem to perspire until the last ten minutes of the film. The backstage bits reveal a typical 16-year-old boy who eats donuts out of the trash can and says his prayers before digging into a slice of Hawaiian pizza (“Thank you God, for the Hawaiians”).

In one scene, Justin grabs an electric razor and threatens to shave his head if his tour manager doesn’t say “I love you Justin.” She acquiesces, looking genuinely terrified he’ll follow through. The Britney moment haunts pop stars still.

Portrait of the artist as a young Bieber

Over the course of two hours we see Bieber’s sudden and jarring transformation from unknown YouTuber (tuber, hehe) to international celebrity. It is the typical A Star Is Born narrative, and it isn’t. The digital twist — namely that Bieber, unaugmented by Disney or Nickelodeon, was plucked from obscurity by a talent manager named Scooter Braun and launched on an Apollo 11-like course to stardom — only makes sense to those who prefer not to consider how large and anonymous and inexplicable the Internet is. Thinking about the integers of Justin Bieber’s success is like thinking about Möbius strips for too long, or trying to put the scenes of Memento in chronological order.

Watching Never Say Never as a neutral non-fan, you can chose to ignore the commercial insanity of how gratis YouTube views translate to millions of dollars in record and merchandise sales and instead focus on what may be the source of Bieber’s success. To put it simply, Bieber is a contemporary knight. Actually, to make the medieval metaphor more accurate, he’s really more like a troubadour who has a title and vassals and a lot of gold doubloons, or whatever they called their money back then.

“I was a playa when I was little/But now I’m bigger”

Bieber’s lyrics are mostly concerned with promises of eternal devotion (I’ll never let you go”), indentured servitude (“I wait on you forever/Any day, hand and foot”), unspecified gifts (“Whatever you want, shawty, I'll give it to you”), and generally the best treatment a 16-to-18-year-old girl could ever ask for. The last time pop musicians were this concerned with unrequited chivalry, Olde English was the vernacular and not yet a popular 40-ounce malt beverage. In an interview with Bieber, Chelsea Handler admonished him for making such promises: “Sooner or later you’re gonna be Justin Timberlake…you’re gonna have to follow up on your flirting, and then you’re really going to have to close some deals.” Though it’s a typically bawdy Handler joke, it can also be seen as an apt analysis of the Bieb’s target audience: this is music for girls who haven’t had their first boyfriends yet.

“Be careful what you wish for, little nugget.”

Listen to Justin Bieber music for too long and you’ll start to notice the prevalence of the word “world.” During his performance of “One Time” at MSG, every time he croons “wooooorld” he draws little circles in the air. He implores a girl to “let me inside of your world” on “One Less Lonely Girl,” bemoans the “cold, cold world” on “Stuck in the Moment,” and on math-themed ballad “Common Denominator” tells the same unnamed paramour, “You're the light that faced the sun in my world.” Bieber’s music — he writes or co-writes most of his songs — draws lines between his world and our world, separating his ideas of place in a way reminiscent of Foucault’s heterotopias. Heterotopias are places that exist between reality and fantasmic utopia, and Foucault’s best example of a heterotopia is the mirror. A mirror is the “placeless place” where you see yourself where you are not, “in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”

Bieber’s world, so seamlessly constructed through pop song lyrics and 3D concert footage, is the placeless place; the lyrics replicate intimacy and the 3D film replaces the real, physical Bieber, but no matter how much a pop star can be made to seem accessible, neutral viewers of Never Say Never see the illusion of access and understand it to be a part of the idol/fan relationship. In other words, to be a squealing Bieber fan is to not yet understand that one can never access Bieber the way he makes you believe he can be accessed.

Foucault concludes his mirror theory with this: “I am over there…a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself.” It’s another way of understanding pop music fandom: getting caught up in Bieber’s world (and his world 2.0) is self-revelatory. Losing oneself in extreme adoration for a pop star is a way of eventually forming identity — just ask anyone who has ever fantasized about George Michael or Justin Timberlake. The pop star isn’t singing to anyone, so he’s really singing to you. That is, until you emerge from the bubblegum k-hole and discover that a pop star and a human being are not the same thing.

A pop star is the person-less person in the placeless place, even if they are reaching their 3D hand out to you and making meaningful eye contact, even if they retweet your tweet that says “I LOVE U SOOO MUCH <3 <3” in a gesture of star-fan goodwill. There is still a vast, insurmountable distance between you and the pop star. This is what the girls learned in 1965 at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium show, and what they learned at Michael Jackson’s Wembley shows in 1988, and what they learned at Madison Square Garden concert in 2010 when Justin Bieber flexed his troubadourian muscles by pulling a young lady onstage for a serenade. Maybe in order for the little girls to understand, they first have to willfully avoid understanding — and in order to do that, they might have to buy both the original cut and the Director’s Fan Cut.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. She last wrote in these pages about exercise videos. She tumbls here.

"Runaway Love (remix)" - Justin Bieber ft. Kanye West & Raekwon (mp3)

"Somebody to Love (remix)" - Justin Bieber ft. Usher (mp3)

"Baby (Dizzy remix)" - Justin Bieber (mp3)

In Which We Get Fit Or Get Out

Better Living

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Shaun T is 5’ 11’’ and 175 pounds, with kind eyes and an abdomen so muscled it appears segmented by the same factory machine that stamps Hershey’s Milk Chocolate into little rectangles. When he was a freshman in college, Shaun T gained 50 pounds and decided he needed to “pull it together quick.” A handful of years later, here he is, grimacing on camera and leading a team of bionic-looking young fitness professionals through various and sundry kicks, squats, jumps, and mock sporting actions which together constitute Shaun’s “Insanity Workout.”

Summer is a time when bodily exhaustion seems to double. We flop around in the sun, our wrinkled tabloid magazines forgotten underneath deck chairs. We will move, but only until we are in range. Heat and humidity sap ambition before it can even germinate, even as those magazines instruct us toward “bikini bodies.” Isn’t there something morbid, sort of corpse-esque about the phrase “bikini body”?

I have been doing the Insanity workouts with my coworkers in the first-floor lounge of our building. We are resident assistants for a program in which high school students get a premature taste of college life; the kids are in class all day but our position affords us more free time than we ever dreamed possible.

Looking back, I feel like my summers were far busier ten years ago: I swam, I rode my bike “around the block,” I sweated on playgrounds all across my hometown. Now I sleep until noon and munch at the iceberg lettuce of the Internet, poking at my computer with an unmotivated figure. I had no bikini body aspirations when first starting the Insanity workouts – I was very, very bored.

Boredom is a surprising motivator. Apparently Schopenhauer thought of life as a pendulum swinging between boredom and pain, and after a single Insanity session, I found myself firmly on the side of pain. Certainly soreness prevents the act of walking from being boring. It becomes a series of skips and hops and wincing, mincing steps, like an uncool version of that RJD2 video of the guy on crutches.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote about the embarrassing nature of having an excretory system. His Tereza has a “sudden desire to void her bowels…desire to go to the extreme of humiliation, to become only and utterly a body, the body her mother used to say was good for nothing but digesting and excreting.” Tereza on the toilet becomes little more than a lower intestine, full of “infinite grief and loneliness.”

The unbearable lightness of a Grand Basset Griffon Vendéen dog

Lined up in the lounge, all of us engaging in comical mummy kicks that set everything from calves to triceps on fire, I thought about communal exercise in the same way. Doing extreme, insane workouts (as designed by the indefatigable Shaun T, whose DVD’s tagline is “Get Fit or Get Out”) in public will invite others to see your body’s basest functions. There are grunts that suggest sex, cavemen, and caveman sex. There are other funny noises, squeals and heavy breathing. There are veritable Tigris-and-Euphrates sweat rivers coursing down each participating person’s face and body. There is also the embarrassment that comes with having others witness your body fail.

Failure and success – are these the two poles that motivate us to complete workout videos? The full Insanity Workout takes 60 days to complete; completion (purported success) should, according to the Insanity website, result in a “shredded athletic look,” with assumed weight loss and so on. You will probably end up with some semblance of a standard bikini body. But Shaun T’s definition of success in his workout videos has no real deadline. You get the sense he’d rather you do this workout every day for the rest of your life. Moreover, his definition of success is not a corporeal concept.

Success does not happen when your abdominal muscles are visible through your spandex tank top. Not once in the middle of squat jumps or suicide sprints or particularly horrible sets of bicycle kicks does Shaun T encourage his devotees to continue their workout because doing so will ensure beachy attractiveness. “Dig deeper,” commands Shaun T. Not, “Keep going if you want to impress people!” Not “If you stop now, it will be to the detriment of your obliques!” Shaun T says only Dig Deeper. It’s almost metaphysical, but not quite.

“Hey Michele…what does this remind you of?”

Workouts are funny. A shredded, athletic man in a pair of spandex compression pants doling out Zen maxims is funny. Romy and Michele snickering at the fornication-like motions of a spinning class is funny. My friend Margaret calling Zumba (a type of class I have never taken, though glowing reviews abound) “code for replacing your dignity with a firm behind” is funny. People look ridiculous when they’re sweating their faces off.

To become “only and utterly a body” is a sad thing, just as eating disorders are sad, just as tabloid magazines making fun of cellulite-ridden celebrities (They’re Just Like Us!) are sad. No one wants to be only a body. It’s why “insanity” is such a creepy way to describe how my mind dissolves into mushy breakfast cereal somewhere between the thirtieth and thirty-first power jack: it’s the terror of having no mind and all body. But we must remember that while Kundera’s image of Tereza in the throes of existential angst is sad, it is also funny – because she’s on the crapper.

Shaun T

The first three days of Insanity, my muscles were so sore that it was difficult to maneuver up and down stairs, difficult even to lower myself onto my own toilet. The simple task of carrying a twelve-pack of Yuengling up a short hill proved almost Sisyphean. I hobbled around campus, newly aware of physical limitations. Of course, I was cheating: the seventy-year-old man hobbling a few yards ahead of me was walking like that because of advanced age, not because he had spent the previous hour doing what Shaun T told him to do.

We moved along the chain of workouts, from Cardio and Resistance to Cardio and Recovery (even the recovery involves cardio) and beyond. In the middle of Extreme Abs, Shaun T changed from high plank to low plank with the agility of a Big Cat, and I wondered how he ever managed to gain 50 pounds in college in the first place. A fat Shaun T seemed about as possible as a skinny Santa Claus. Then Shaun T instructed me to Dig Deeper. I lost my mind and could no longer consider impossible things.

Molly O'Brien is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Burlington. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"The Things I've Seen Today" - Madeleine Peyroux (mp3)

"Fickle Dove" - Madeleine Peyroux (mp3)

"Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" - Madeleine Peyroux (mp3)