The ‘Pulp Fiction’ actor who finds the film cringe-worthy: “I didn’t realise how much it was an issue”
In 1994, a very strange film came out. It was an anthology: three interlocking tales of life in the criminal underbelly of Los Angeles. It featured gunfights, a boxing match, $5 milkshakes, Chuck Berry, lectures on Christianity, and a scene involving a gimp that nobody should think about for too long. It should have been a flop, but it ended up becoming one of the most important movies ever made. It was, of course, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
The young director’s second movie assured his place as one of the industry’s new darlings and, combined with the success of his first film, Reservoir Dogs, led to all the acclaim he continues to enjoy today. It gave Samuel L Jackson his first major platform and resurrected the career of John Travolta, who had been stuck in family comedies for the last several years. It revolutionised the way in which independent cinema was financed and marketed, and several of its lines of dialogue are now commonplace in the everyday lexicon. In short, Pulp Fiction is great, and everybody loves it. Well, almost everyone…
Alongside big hitters like Travolta, Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Bruce Willis, the film also features several prominent actors in minor roles. One of them is Rosanna Arquette, who plays Jody, wife of Eric Stolz’s drug dealer character Lance. As she confessed to Variety, Arquette had quite the experience when she first saw the finished product. “I was pregnant when it came out,” she recalled. “And I remember going into it, and it was so violent my mom and I had to leave.”
It took Arquette, who also appeared in Desperately Seeking Susan and David Cronenberg’s Crash, another three decades to finally watch the movie in full. “It’s still this cultural phenomenon,” she admitted. “But also, I still have the issue of, enough with the N-word. For me, that’s always been an issue, and I didn’t realise how much it was an issue until I saw it this last time. It’s still great filmmaking, but there’s cringe-worthy moments, and it’s usually not just the violence. But I do love him as a filmmaker.”
Arquette was far from the only person who took issue with the content of Pulp Fiction. Shortly after the film was released, Republican politician Bob Dole made sly references to the movie when calling out the entertainment industry for glamorising what he called “nightmares of depravity”. In 1996, he actually named the film alongside Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting as featuring the “romance of heroin”. Clearly, Bob never saw the scene where Mia Wallace nearly dies from taking the drug. Nothing romantic about that.
Nevertheless, Pulp Fiction has been constantly praised by film buffs for the three decades since its release. It was nominated for seven Oscars, winning Best Original Screenplay for Tarantino and his writing partner Roger Avary. It captured the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and came first in several year-end lists of best films of 1994. In 2013, it was chosen for preservation by the US Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, putting it in elite company amongst the greatest motion pictures ever made.
As for Arquette, she continues to appear in smaller independent films, such as the 2023 black comedy Ex-Husbands. She is a part of the Arquette acting dynasty, alongside brother David (Scream, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and sister Patricia (Boyhood, True Romance).
