A Blast to the Heart

Onscreen, John Travolta had just raised an Adrenalin-filled hypodermic needle above the comatose body of Uma Thurman and, with desperate force, plunged it straight into her heart. In the audience at New York City's Lincoln Center, where Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction was being shown, a young man watched this scene and passed out. "Is there a doctor in the house?" someone actually asked. The film was stopped for nine anxious minutes before the announcement came: "The victim is just fine."

A Tarantino movie has this effect on people. There's an ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs, the 1992 heist movie he wrote and directed, that revolts some folks who have never even seen it. In True Romance and Natural Born Killers, two Tarantino scripts with identical itineraries (Bonnie and Clyde going to hell in a hot rod), knives skate across faces and guns blow fishbowl holes in stomachs. When a tough wants to leave his mark on someone, he does it with a mutilating flourish. Tarantino's films allow for no idle bystanders; you either get with the pogrom or get out of the way. Thus does he make the viewer a co-conspirator -- and sometimes, as at Lincoln Center, a victim.

Here we go again -- another gore gourmand acting out fantasies of aggression for the grind-house trade. Well, no. For a start, Tarantino's films are energized not so much by violence as by its threat; it's in the air like a balloon ready to explode. More important, Tarantino, 31, sees movie violence as a vivid visual correlative for the internal agitation of urban America, for all those people who believe their lives are a pitched battle for self- preservation. If he romanticizes his gunmen, he also anchors them in vulnerability, stupidity and the blinkered loyalty of men to men. But damn, they're good company. Tarantino knows them inside out, even if most of his gangland wisdom came from a life of movie watching (he worked for five years in a video store). "I've seen what I've seen, and I've met the people I've met," he says flirtatiously. "I've been in weird situations. I'm not a hood, but I've seen fringe things here and there." And what he sees, he translates into sharp words, telling gestures, explosive images.

Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament. They blend U.S. and European styles of filmmaking; they bring novelistic devices to the movie mall. And in Pulp Fiction, a multipart tribute to the hard-boiled books and films of American mid-century, he has devised a sprawling, sturdy canvas that accommodates the high-octane and the highbrow.

Just ask Bruce Willis, one of a half-dozen actors (along with Travolta, Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Ving Rhames and Harvey Keitel) who found some of the juiciest roles of their careers here: "You can say the most intellectual thing about Pulp Fiction and be right. But it also works for the trailer-park kids." It surely ought to work for those viewers lulled these many years by cinema soporifics. For 2 1(R)2 teeming hours it hits you like a shot of Adrenalin straight to the heart.

Here's some of what happens: