Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...middle-class male. The camera lingers in elegantly immobile, anthropological medium shot--a distance that respects the danger of the creature it is photographing. Chad prowls and roars and claws for us in his cage, separated not by bars but by our final appreciation that this is, after all, fiction. It's all right, the mother says to her panicked child at the end of a bedtime fairy tale; it was just a story. And still the child cries deep into the night...
That's the dilemma that's been facing Quentin Tarantino, whose 1994 Pulp Fiction jabbed a spike into the art of film noir and established him as a big kahuna in Hollywood. But instead of writing another original screenplay, Tarantino has staked his reputation on a different approach: he has acquired rights to a best-selling crime novel from the hot author of Get Shorty and adapted it around the retro-hip personae of the ultimate 1970s blaxploitation babe, Pam Grier...
...only the beginning of a story that quickly spins out of Nelson's and, eventually, everyone else's control, except for the author's, who narrates this trajectory of calamities with noteworthy energy and skill. And Johnson is obviously aiming for something more here than standard-issue pulp-fiction chills. In their reflective moments his whacked-out villains have a tendency to quote Nietzsche, as if to explain themselves to themselves and the reader. But Johnson does not make clear where, among so many burned-out characters, the reader's rooting interests should lie. Nelson seems a poor choice, even...
...divinities were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; after a heart attack; in Lawrence, Kans. Burrough's groundbreaking novel Naked Lunch, first published in Paris in 1959, was both praised as a work of genius and denounced as incomprehensible garbage and pornography. His life was as extreme as the experimental fiction he pioneered, involving alcohol, heroin, homosexuality, a celebrated obscenity trial in Boston and, in 1951, his accidental killing of his wife while shooting a glass off the top of her head. In his last years, he became a recurring pop icon, with cameos in movies and even a Nike...
Andrew Cunanan thought Pulp Fiction was the best movie ever made. A friend remembers how he was "all animated and yelling" when he saw the film at its San Diego premiere, finding particular delight in the scene where a man gets his head inadvertently blown off in the back of a car. It is thus a minor enigma, one of the many Cunanan has left behind, whether his final, apparently desperate act was also an attempted coup de theatre, in which the fugitive of a thousand faces--seen everywhere and nowhere--tries to destroy the only one he has left...