Intertext in film and short stories

Pulp Fiction and Intertextuality

To a great degree , American society is one that is based heavily on pop culture . While most history books ignore the influence that pop culture entertainment has had on people , the reality is that films , television and comic books play a great role in influencing people 's ideologies and perception . There is a reason , after all , why those silly Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Can painting are worth so much money

In Quentin Tarantino 's work , the intertextuality of pop culture plays a huge role . While conventional wisdom would

assume that most of the audience would be Tarantino 's references to B-grade television and film culture , the reality is that Tarantino was far more in tune with the public than people gave him credit

He explores the mythical qualities of movie conversation by always allowing his characters to engage in wordplay that celebrates the art of one-upping . When you watch a Tarantino film , you know that even when his characters have lost all of their ability to act , they will still talk and their words will be all the movement required to push the action forward . You can also rest assured that no matter what characters are featured on screen , all unseen characters are still engaging in brilliant , revealing dialogues , and we want to get back to their conversations as soon as we possibly can , so as not to miss anything important (Griffin

For example , one of the funnier exchanges between characters occurs in the film PULP FICTION where John Travolta 's character admonishes Samuel Jackson about being a bum ' and that he is not Caine in kung fu The reason that the exchange is so funny is because it is somewhat shocking to see a tip of the hat given to a popular television program that has been ignored by critiques and historians despite the fact that the program has forever remained fondly remembered in the public consciousness of millions of television viewers

Jacques Derrida 's substitution of trace ' for sign ' prefigures the discourse of fragment /whole in discussions of hypertextuality . A trace is a remnant of something that once was there , but is no longer : an imprint of a lost object , a marker of both absence and one-time presence . Similarly , the depiction of lexia as fragments ' suggests that the hypertext as it is read is a succession of pieces from a lost whole , registering a phantom narrative that is simultaneously present and absent , evoked by these fragments but not able to be entirely reconstructed from them (and , since the fragments are the work , a narrative that never existed as a whole in the first place (Falcone

In Tarantino 's work , the trace that was once there is the integration of ignored popular culture into the dialogue . The result of this is a unique bond with the audience that allows the audience to ignore the sheer grotesqueness of the actual film . And , make no mistake about it PULP FICTION is one of the more grotesque and...