Okay here we go. Why Pulp Fiction is a good movie and I will continue to defend it.

Let's first get the whole non-linear story line stuff out of the way. Is it a gimmick? Yes, is it a gimmick used by great film makers? Yes.

(I am sure you, kleinbl00, know most of what I am about to present here, but I'm spelling it out a bit for the sake of having others be able to see where I'm coming from)

Okay so Tarintino's production company "A Band Apart" is a play on the Godard film "Bande à part" a dark French New Wave film.

The reason I bring this up is because of Godard's quote:

"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."

So obviously, Tarintino is going to play with this idea of non-linear story telling because French New Wave is awesome and pretending to be a French New Wave director is fun. If I could get people to pay me to pretend to be Truffaut, I would be elated.

So my thesis is this:

The title "Pulp Fiction" gives us the real insight. Pulp fiction is a description of a genre, not a description of anything that happens in the movie. This would be like calling a movie "Adventure Non-fiction". Tarintino isn't even hiding the fact that he's copying and pasting things, he's embracing it.

Given Tarintino's background as a film buff, along with his obvious fandom of pop culture, the entire movie is an homage to the Pulp Novels and the French New Wave movement. He's taken something generally considered to be vapid and empty and mixed it with something that is considered to be deep and philosophical. All of the drugs, sex, and violence in those novels but through the lens of a film buff.

I understand why people don't like it I think, but it also opened a huge world of movies and cinema to me which I didn't know existed. He's done this afterwards too, the whole Grindhouse thing, and then Kill Bill which is basically a revenge flick where even the characters names are from other movies. article

Oh hey do you like 12 monkeys? La_Jetée

What about Indiana Jones? Secret of the Inca's

So you are right 100% it is a morality play it has no value in the story. The characters are over the top extensions of the narrative and none of them grow. But for me, it works it works because of the gimmicks, it works because the motivations are often secret or lazily put together on weak strings. It works because I bought exactly what is on the box "Pulp Fiction".