Pulp Fiction — shallow and exploitative or a beacon leading us into the future?

In a revealing article, screenwriting guru Syd Field narrates how he went from seeing Pulp Fiction as a ‘B movie, shallow, exploitative, the epitome of everything I don’t like in the movies’, to seeing it as a ‘new departure, a kind of beacon leading us into the future’.

The change of heart took place as Field sat down and read the script, and discovered that the movie actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that it is actually three stories about one story — in other words that the movie could be squeezed into his system. This line of reasoning is symptomatic of the way some structure-evangelists regard a movie as good to the extent that it conforms to their own system.

Studying structure and reading screenwriting how-to books is something every aspiring screenwriter should do. But adhering to one theory alone, and to actually value films based on how they fit into that theory is backwards. When innovative movies introduce new ways of structuring, you don’t try and squeeze them into existing theories; you change the theories. Theory is secondary, always.

Field’s article.

Pulp Fiction screenplay.