Pulp

While I went into this class with some ideas for the screenplay, Significant developments in its form & story transpired as results of Prof. Moss's intriguing monday discussions.

Stylistically my choice to follow all the characters throughout the time the story focuses on stemmed from one of the in class thought assignments. Tom presented his idea to the class which centered around a timeline of his life, and had sections of it where certain people had held influence over his life. This unnerved me because he was claiming that the influence ends when the object/person putting forth the influence becomes removed from the influencee.

Example of why this is wrong:

I became depressed after my girlfriend had dumped me and I had gone off to college, her being now absent in my life effected how I was acting even though she was no longer actively influencing my life.

Tom had additionally drawn lines showing when influence began and ended. They reminded me of the lines of film clips in video editing software, so I began to think about a director cutting a film of life itself. Where certain parts really "expendable"? Since life is simply a snowball of actions, choices, and coincidences is really any part "expendable?"

This brings me to Pulp Fiction. In Pulp Fiction there is a curious scene involving two of the characters. Out of nowhere Bruce Willis stumbles into Ving Rhames who wants him dead. Ving Rhames is out shopping, and crossing a street when Bruce pulls up to the light. What bothers me about this situation is that there is no good explanation of why Ving Rhames is there. His character is a fantastically rich crime boss, yet he is out doing his own grocery shopping on foot. The director doesn't clue us into why he is there but that information is important.

So I made a diagram of the characters in Pulp Fiction cutting in and out of the story, and then I began to wonder what it would be like if instead they all were a solid wall instead of strips that ended and reappeared. I also thought about how different the film could be if they used different sections of this block of action. Could two films derived from the same mass of information reach different conclusions?