The Departed

THE DEPARTED, written by William Monahan, is quite an interesting script. It’s really unlike any other script that I’ve ever read. It’s extremely fast paced and at times confusing with all the cloak-and-dagger business going on, but at the same time, it also explains what a character might be feeling. Aside from that, I don’t believe this film could be categorized in the pulp genre, but I’ll try and explain everything in the script that could be considered pulp.

To begin, both characters of Costello and Collin are pretty slimy guys. There isn’t really anything in them that the reader can identify with. However, casting two extremely popular and likeable actors to play them does change their dynamic. Jack Nicholson is arguably one of the most popular starts of our generation while the same can be said of Matt Damon. Reading the script, both characters seem less charming and it’s easier to hate them, but watching the film, I was struck differently. I was very aware that I was watching Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson act, and since I like both actors, a part of me liked their characters. No matter how evil they were or some of the things they would say (such as when Costello converses with the priests, “Enjoy your clams, cocksuckers”), a part of me still liked them and hoped that nothing bad happened to them.

This is more of a trait you would see in a pulp film, where the protagonist is someone who, although they are the one we want to see succeed, we don’t really agree with some of their morals, or at the very least they’re morals will be ambiguous and the audience won’t really know what they stand for. In this case, Costello is clearly a bad guy, but we see him enough times making jokes that it’s hard to completely hate the character. The same goes with Damon, except that we actually start to sympathize for his character since he clearly has a lot of issues with his life and having to live two lives.

Another aspect of the film could be its violence. Pulp films are known for having over the top violence that is more important than the story line. This “rule” has actually been bent in the last decade by Quentin Tarantino, among others, for his scripts which often include a lot of gory violence, but often are very important to the story. THE DEPARTED is no exception. It has spurts of violence here and there, but we don’t really see any huge acts of violence until the end of the film, when in the span of 1 minute, we see 3 men get shot in the head. Although it is extremely violent, I don’t believe it’s the type of violence that qualifies it to be considered pulp.

Those seem to be the only reasons why this film could be considered pulp. It had a huge budget, which many pulp films don’t have. Once again, this isn’t a rule that still needs to be followed, there are a lot more pulp films today that have huge budgets. But I don’t think this qualifies as pulp. And since the film really only tends to exploits gangs, I don’t think it can be classified as an exploitation film.

Overall, THE DEPARTED is definitely an entertaining film, but if you’re looking for a pulp film to watch, this should be the last on a list of other pulp films.

Reservoir Dogs

RESERVOIR DOGS, written by Quentin Tarantino, is definitely a pulp film. The main difference between his film and other pulp films is that RD seems to hide some of its cheesiness, and he’s able to mask a lot of his story so that you really can’t recognize it as such. Also, many pulp films aren’t nearly as successful as RD, and so it’s a lot harder to see why this film is pulp.

To begin, the film isn’t very sleazy. For the most part, all the characters, aside from their criminal sides, are pretty normal guys. But I think the fact that Mr. Blonde goes psycho definitely suggests gratuitous violence. But that’s what makes RD so popular, the fact that the violence, although very prevalent, isn’t really there to be exploited. In most pulp films, the violence drives the story, not the story. What’s unique about RD is that while it does have extreme violence, its very character and story driven. There’s a very strong reason for it. It lets us in on who the characters are. What’s also interesting to note is that some of the more intense violence doesn’t even happen on screen. Mr. Blonde shooting all the people in the bank, Mr. Blonde cutting the cops ear off, Mr. White shooting Mr. Orange. None of it is seen, but we can hear it, and that almost makes it worse.

For sure, some of the story ideas are stolen from other works, such as CITY ON FIRE. Tarantino took a good chunk of that film and translated it into his film, which I think works a lot better in RD than it did in CITY ON FIRE. What’s also very pulp about RD is the fact that it was extremely low budget. Almost everything was shot in one warehouse, and there are a couple of small sets that look like they’re inside, which means all they really needed to do was gather some props and get some lights. All in all, most of the money was spent on the cast, which is quite unprecedented in a pulp film, but since they spent very little money on the story, set, costumes, and props (one of the cars was actually Harvey Keitel’s) that it easily qualifies as having that pulp-like budget.

None of the characters are really morally ambiguous, they’re all bad guys. But we start to care for almost all of them, not Mr. Blonde, but everyone else. We know they’re robbers and killers, but we don’t seem to care. Since they like Madonna and the songs of the 70’s, they’re okay in my book. That’s something that only a pulp film can do: take a character that normally wouldn’t be sympathetic and turn them into the protagonist.

The film also has a lot of stereotyping against black people. The film always seems to reference them in negative ways, whether it’s about how black men treat women, how black women treat men, how black men work a job. And I guess you could say that the film does exploit a little of everything the men talk about it. The entire opening scene, when Mr. Pink starts ragging on waitresses because everyone wants him to tip. Although I still tip, Mr. Pink does make a good point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people out there who felt the same way.

RESERVOIR DOGS was really one of the first groundbreaking pulp films to come along in the 90’s. Its one main difference between this film and other pulp scripts is that this one was good. It was good in the sense that it actually had a full story, character arcs and character development, and was shot amazingly well. It’s those three aspects that make it so hard to tell if this is a pulp film or not.

Sin City

SIN CITY seems to scream pulp on every single page. Written by Frank Miller, author of the graphic novels, SIN CITY centers on Marv, a large, not too bright, but powerful man who seeks revenge on the people who killed the woman he has a one-night-stand. Every aspect of the film is amazingly pulp, as if Miller was trying to pull out all the stops. Whether it’s how the characters are written, the locations, or the world itself, Sin City is every bit a pulp film as one can get.

Marv, although not a character who has questionable morals, is very much a pulp character. His driving force seems to be his respect for women, but he’s not a nice guy by any means. He’s an alcoholic and he’s extremely violent. He wouldn’t lay a finger on a woman, but that doesn’t mean he won’t brutally cut off someone’s arms and legs and feed them to a dog while the victim watches. At one point, he’s driving a car holding a man’s face against the road.

Also, his voice-overs are extremely dramatic, their very film noir. He speaks directly to us, the audience. He justifies every move and action in his voice over’s. All the other characters aren’t as well developed, but still bring a lot of pulp to the story. Half the characters we meet are amazingly beautiful (and often scantily clad) women who are either whores are work in a bar. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

The other thing to note about the script is all the locations; they lend themselves well to the story. In one scene, there’s a large windmill, in another, it’s a run-down motel, in another its bar, in another it’s Marv’s room, which is still decorated for a child. None of the locations seem to belong in the story, but it’s how Miller exploits them that they lend themselves to pulp.

The last interesting part of the script is the world that Miller creates. It’s a mix of the post-apocalyptic future and the western. The police force seems like something out of the future, they are an army for whoever runs the city; in this case it’s Cardinal Roark, who although a man of the cloth, is the most evil man in the script.

What’s also interesting is that the bars play to cowboys. Cowboys run the streets looking for bars or for whores, there’s even a scene in the bar with a girl in chaps and a lasso. And what’s more is that all these characters in this world all own revolvers of some kind. None of the weapons in the story are state of the art. It’s either a .357 or a hacksaw or a machine gun. It’s an amazingly different mix of eras, but it somehow works under the grittiness that Miller cloaks everything in.

In closing, it’s Miller’s ability to keep the viewer constantly guessing, constantly surprised by the world he creates. It’s a world that the viewer isn’t too familiar with, and we don’t know where the boundaries are, and the film just keeps pushing them and pushing them, from a man’s face being chiseled off by the street, a boy named Kevin watching with a smile as a dog eats his limbs, or when a man of the cloth proclaims that eating people brought him closer to God. It plays off our fears and exploits everything it can think of, so that there is no question that it setting is Sin City.

THE WARRIORS is most notably a pulp film. Despite it’s huge cult following and the initial reaction to the film (which caused rival gangs to see the film and then fight at the theater), it’s the fact that this cheap film, based on someone else’s work, was supposed to be an exploitation film with graphic violence and gang members as the lead protagonists that truly make this a part of pulp cinema.

THE WARRIORS, written by Walter Hill has got about as much pulp as one film can stand. First off, the film had a low budget. Almost all unknown actors were cast, and much of the filming was done on location. The crew even went as far as hiring real gangs to protect their equipment (for a small fee of 500 dollars). Sometimes, they even had to let gangs have cameos for being in their territory. In general, it was Guerilla filmmaking at it’s finest.

The story, although quite compelling, was adapted by Hill from the novel by Sol Yurick, which in turn was based on Xenophon's The Anabasis. Most pulp films are adapted, and this is no exception. Although Sol Yurick is credited with the novel, more of the film is based on Anabasis than the novel. Many have also compared the film to Homer’s The Odyssey.

The film also deals with exploitation; it basically exploits every race and both genders. And often times this exploitation is done during times of gratuitous violence. And although the film is very plot driven, it must be noted that the plot was formed around the violence and not the other way around. This film was first and foremost a gruesome story about gangs before it was about one gang’s struggle to get back to their turf.

Also, all the characters are gang members. Whether they’re the protagonists or the antagonists, they’re still all gang members. This makes it just a little hard for an audience to identify with them, at least in the sense of what is right and wrong. Most pulp films will have characters whose morals are in question, and this film is a great example of that. Throughout the entire script, they’re running from the cops and gangs and trashing places, they don’t care about society at all. But that’s not the point, at no point in the film do the protagonists get into a moral situation, and so it doesn’t really matter what their morals are.

THE WARRIORS is a very rare kind of pulp cinema. It was cheap, it stole source material, it exploits everyone, is brutally violent, and all of the protagonists you’d want in jail if you ever crossed paths with them, yet the film was and still is very successful and popular. It’s a film that gains more and more fans through late night cable premiers than anything, which can’t be said for all films in this genre.