Movie Yoga
How Every Film Can Change Your Life

"Pulp Friction" from the "War Zone" Chapter

On one level we can call the primal energy, generated in the War Zone, anger. On another, it’s the biological fury of a fetus struggling to be born. On yet another, it’s power. It could be personal power, could be divine power. Still again, it’s passion, excitement, and creativity. And in the end, it’s just plain energy. There are so many ways this energy manifests in our lives.

Sometimes, it’s not just the subject matter that defines what level of the Hero’s Journey a film is portraying. Every once in a while, it’s the style that gives it away, the way the director does what he does. And this is definitely the case in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. There’s a segment in this movie so filled with mania, that jittery, over-the-top nervousness that so characterizes energy run amok, that there’s no way to watch it without getting triggered.

In our seminars, we’ll be showing movie segments and be just getting through with showing examples of the depression and stuckness of the Trapped Zone in film. Then we’ll play this segment, and the whole crowd just starts giggling and getting fidgety. The temperature in the room goes up a few degrees. And everybody’s squirming and getting wired out. By the end, the room has exploded in unfocused, raw, free energy. It’s a great time to go to lunch, take a break.

This is the vignette where Vincent, John Travolta, has had a night on the town with his gangster boss’s girlfriend, Mia, played by Uma Thurman. Now Vincent’s a junkie, and Mia accidentally OD’s on his heroin, thinking it’s cocaine. So Vincent is totally freaking and drives to his dealer’s to see if he can get some help. He knows if Mia dies, he’s going to be nothing but a “grease spot.”

His dealer, Lance, Eric Stoltz, who’s high as hell, too, gets Vincent’s call. He runs to the window. And in a classic, ‘you’ve-seen-it-hundred-times’ kind of way, he throws up the shade. Or more specifically, like, on the night before Christmas, where the dude runs to the window and “throws up the sash.” Vincent’s car comes crashing onto his lawn. From here on in, it’s high-speed, non-stop repartee, back and forth like Uzi fire, while the camera jerks and dances all over the place catching our heroes like wild-ass, manic-depressive, speed freak puppets hurling gutter language at each other until somebody drops.

But nobody drops. Except Mia, but she’s already down, and foaming at the mouth. Eric’s girlfriend, Rosanna Arquette, adds that perfect bitchy edge to the onslaught. And there’s this nameless goth chick on the sofa, stoned, which, by her dead-ass blankness, only goes to show how crazy speeded up everything else is. The inside of the house flies apart like a Tom and Jerry cartoon on fastforward. What’s going on? They need to find “the little black book,” “THE LITTLE BLACK MEDICAL BOOK!”

Mia needs a shot of adrenalin to start her heart. Everybody else in the scene is moving so fast, I guess the reason is so she can catch up with them. I’ve shown this scene in countries where English is not the native language, and usually there are subtitles, or we have a translator. But sometimes, you just have to go with it, and hope for the best. And even in those countries where just a few people know English, and those who do could in no way keep up with the speed of this rap, this scene evokes the same response. Everybody gets excited, seriously stoked. You swear you can feel the electricity in the room.

Vincent and Lance loom over Mia, who’s fading fast. And as viewers, we are so amped and seduced by the onslaught of words that, when the time comes to plunge that gigantic needle straight into the bull’s-eye painted on Mia’s heart with a magic marker, we’re all ike, “Whoa, wait a minute. Oh hell.” And after this we add, in our horror and squeamishness, “I can’t look, but I have to.”

And then, in the only slowed down moment in the entire scene, the needle’s poised in mid-air, one drop of adrenalin glistening like a diamond from the steel spike, everybody in the audience — that’s us — and somebody onscreen is going, “I wonder what’s going to happen?’’ And somebody else says, “I was kind of wondering that myself.” And then somebody else says, “That’s not funny.” And all of us out there in Movie Yoga land are agreeing all over the place, this ain’t funny, except that it really is.

All we know is we don’t need the adrenalin shot. Because we’re already up. We’re flying. ‘Til the needle plunges. And then, as the camera holds its breath for a second, so do we. And when Mia suddenly sits up like this mad puppet from beyond and gasps, we do too. “If you’re okay, say something,” somebody asks. And even though it’s Mia who finally says, “Something,” it may as well have been us. Because by now, there is no more them and us. We’re all one, the movie and the watchers, in some special zone that only initiates are allowed to enter, when the magic is just one hundred percent, crystal-sharp, perfectly, exactly right.

It’s that energy that I mentioned, where life and death hang in the balance. Well, not exactly hanging in the balance. That would imply more of a Trapped Zone kind of feeling. Here, Mia’s life is vibrating in the balance, so fast you got to rush to keep up. Everything turns out okay. She lives, Vincent gets her home, and Marcellus, his boss, is none the wiser. But all that’s beside the point. That may be the Free Zone, another scene, perhaps, for another chapter, but believe me, the power of this sequence is the energy of the struggle. And when the rest comes, I’m just too wired to catch it.