You tell 'em, gobear.
Degrance, I think you’ve changed your point. First you said there was no plot, and in trying to prove that, challenged someone to give you a simple plot synopsis.
When you got one, you said “You can give a simple plot synopsis. See? It’s stupid.”
I don’t think that works. Besides, your “simple is simple-minded” thing doesn’t work. “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl” is a plot. A very respectable one. You can boil a lot of great movies and books down to that one line. The interest, of course, is in how the writer does it–the variations, the different incidents that lead up to the end, the different kinds of people “boy” and “girl” can be and how that affects their lives, what the implications of the specific people and events say about life and relationships. Simplicity of plot or theme is not the same as stupid, simple-minded, or non-existant plot or theme. In fact, it astonishes me that you would think so and be a serious student of literature.
Here, try this.
Man destroys himself chasing whale that injured him. That Melville. What kind of plot is that?
Boy inherits money and blows it all. Well, we all know Dickens was a hack.
Young woman hates a young man, only to change her mind and decide he’s worth marrying after all. Oh, but nobody reads Austen these days.
Of course, the king of insignificant plots would have to be Shakespeare. Two teenagers fall in love and kill themselves. A prince agonizes over whether to avenge his father’s death. A man goes mad when his daughters throw him out of the house. Overconfident in a prophecy, a man kills his king and then is killed himself. Party animal prince becomes king, reforms, and leads his troops to victory.
I could spend all day going down my bookshelf and condensing classics down to 25 words or less. I guess I’d better throw them all out, they’re not real plots.
gobear is absolutely right–there’s only one story in Pulp Fiction. It is, in fact, a very tightly constructed story. The “vignettes” of which you speak are integral parts of that single plot. You need to look past the way it’s presented. If you can only parse a story that is conventionally shown, in chronological order, with everything in its traditional place, then I think you might want to reconsider your field of study.
I can’t speak for any of his other movies–Pulp Fiction is the only QT movie I’ve seen. I can understand not liking it–that’s certainly a matter of taste. But dang, Pulp Fiction just unrelated vignettes? Were you even paying attention?
), I just don’t see how both these statements can be true.