'Pulp Fiction,' the movie that made me love movies, came out 30 years ago today

Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece landed, three decades ago, like a mushroom cloud-laying motherfucker, motherfucker.

Was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction the most important film of the 1990s? It was certainly the most influential, the most imitated, and the most monumental. 

Pulp Fiction, which landed in theaters 30 years ago today, had everything: stylized violence, nonlinear storytelling, hitmen who banter at length about everything from fast food to existential questions of the universe, stars of the past plucked from oblivion and delivered back to stardom, and a soundtrack that combined surf rock with more obscure corners of the pop canon. 

Quentin Tarantino did all of these things, and he kept doing them, as did dozens of other filmmakers who aped him in various projects for the next 10 to 15 years, some of whom gave QT himself a cameo in their film. 

It’s Tarantino’s magnum opus, a pure auteurist tour-de-force that he made his second time out, when he was just 31 years old. There’s a lot to say about the Miramax era, a great deal of it not so good, but that exact moment was right for Tarantino to make the exact movie he wanted. 

Here’s what I had to say about Pulp Fiction, when it hit its 25th anniversary five years ago, for Broad Street Review: 

Pulp Fiction, more than anything else, was the movie that got me into movies.

I'd always loved movies growing up, but Pulp Fiction, which is showing Wednesday, June 19, in 35mm at the Philadelphia Film Center, taught my 16-year-old self the possibilities of what movies could do and be. It's the film, more than any other, that set me on the path of thinking deeply about cinema and ultimately to a career as a film and culture critic.

It was funny, it was exciting, and perhaps more than anything, it acted as an anthology of dozens of references to earlier cinema. Tarantino, the legend goes, gave himself a film-school-level education by working in a video store and binging the store's entire collection. During one summer in college I, like many others of my generation, attempted a similar undertaking.