I’ve long admired “Staring Into the Heart of the Heart of Darkness,” Ron Rosenbaum’s 1995 New York Times Magazine essay. In it, he looked at how Tarantino subtly introduced the idea of moral relativism into key scenes of Pulp Fiction. I think ideas of depth are scarce in film right now. Offhand, I can only think of Dogtooth and Exit Through the Gift Shop from last year as being rife with ideas. And certainly the Coens’ A Serious Man from the previous year. But there’s currently little such cinema. Hollywood used to dream the biggest dreams and science-fiction used to predict science, but no more. I try to figure out why there are so many ideas in tech right now and so few in film, since both are aimed at a global audience. I suppose it’s because film is about content and tech about function, and function is more readily translatable if it’s intuitive. Anyhow, an excerpt from Rosenbaum’s essay:

“PERHAPS IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE THAT SO MUCH OF THE critchat discussion about Pulp Fiction has missed the point: the flashy violence, trashy language and bloody brain spatterings are red herrings that easily distract.

In fact, in its own sly but serious way, Pulp Fiction is engaged in a sustained inquiry into the theological problem of the relativity of good and evil. What I love about Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay is how apparently throwaway time-passing dialogue often embodies tricky theological questions.

Consider the much-discussed but little-understood ‘mindless chitchat’ about the French names for Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with cheese that preoccupies the hit men, Vincent and Jules, as they cruise through L.A. on the way to commit a contract hit for their big-time drug-dealer boss.

Just two bored ‘thick-witted hit men’ (as the jacket copy for the published version of the screenplay inaccurately describes them) filling time. No, wrong: the Quarter Pounder exchange is one of the key poles of the sophisticated philosophic argument underlying Pulp Fiction.

Like the discussion of the contextual legality of hash bars in Amsterdam (‘It’s legal, but it ain’t a hundred percent legal’) and the gender-based framework for judging the transgressiveness of giving the boss’s wife a foot massage (‘You’re sayin’ a foot massage don’t mean nothin’ and I’m sayin’ it does. . . . We act like they don’t, but they do’), the exchange about Quarter Pounders is ultimately about the relativity of systems of value.”

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Royale with cheese: