It’s a Friday night and a bunch of eighteen to twenty year olds decide they finally want to watch Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic Pulp Fiction. They start the film with their preconceived doubts and get comfortable to sit through the next two and a half hours. It’s a very early Saturday morning, as the film comes to a close and the kids sit for a little while longer, bewildered by what they just watched, but also astonished at the distinctive nature of this wild ride of a film. There’s never a dull moment with certain people, and that’s certainly the case with Tarantino’s visceral characters that saturate the film with life and vibrancy.

Although it wasn’t as huge or successful as its fellow indie film Pulp Fiction, Sean Baker’s Tangerine is just as lively and different; granted it came out quite recently so it has yet to become any sort of “classic” but the film oozes potential.  

Both films premiered just about two decades apart; however, they share minute similarities and were both unique given their times of emergence.

The World of Violence

 Just by looking at the poster for Pulp Fiction, anyone can see that the movie entails the rigid lifestyle that drugs and guns have to offer; however, Tangerine’s gracious reveal was its official synopsis at Sundance film festival:

“It’s Christmas Eve in Tinseltown and Sin-Dee is back on the block. Upon hearing that her pimp boyfriend hasn’t been faithful during the 28 days she was locked up, the working girl and her best friend, Alexandra, embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the scandalous rumor. Their rip-roaring odyssey leads them through various subcultures of Los Angeles, including an Armenian family dealing with their own repercussions of infidelity.” –(from The Gaurdian’s article titled “Tangerine is a big deal, not just because it was shot on an iPhone”)

What makes these films so enchanted, in the most twisted way mind you, is that the violence and cruel realities presented in both films are immediately volleyed with unbeatable humor. In September of 1994, Janet Maslin wrote of Pulp Fiction’s allure stating,

“Surprisingly tender about characters who commit cold-blooded murder, “Pulp Fiction” uses the shock value of such contrasts to keep its audience constantly off-balance…When he offsets violent events with unexpected laughter, the contrast of moods becomes liberating, calling attention to the real choices the characters make. Far from amoral or cavalier, these tactics force the viewer to abandon all preconceptions while under the film’s spell.”

 

Roger Ebert also wrote about the similar violent-comedic tone in his synopsis of Tangerine, writing “the violence is balanced by subsequent scenes of Sin-Dee and Dinah and eventually Alexandra reaching a kind of understanding, and even displaying tenderness toward each other.” The irony in this stems from the fact that Sin-Dee spent about a third of a movie beating up Dinah in the late night streets of LA, but then their relationship changes when they share crystal meth in the nightclub bathroom.

The transition and balance between humor and violence are only part of what makes Tangerine and Pulp Fiction so praised in the wave of unconventional Hollywood cinema; diversity adds to their four-star brilliance.

Intersectionality

The characters in these films are obviously not of the typical passerby essence; Mia from Pulp Fiction is an eccentric drug-addict married to a black violated drug lord with friends of all backgrounds that accidentally blow off people’s heads. Sin-Dee from Tangerine is a black, transgender, drug addicted sex worker that goes on a quest to find the cisgender woman that her boyfriend cheated on her with while she was in prison for a month. To say these films share a common diversity, within characters and storylines, is an understatement.

According Dictionary.com, Intersectionality is “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual (often used attributively)” Both films introduce characters like this to Hollywood cinema in their own ways, making them revolutionary.

 

Interview with Director and Lead Actors

In this interview (which was the shortest I could find, there’s a lot to say about this unique film) actress Kitana Kiki Rodriguez shares her favorite scene in the film which was the final climactic scene in which all of the stories and walks of life come together under the Donut Time roof. She explained that much of the reason behind that particular scene being her favorite comes from the diversity that Tangerine had to offer. Critics and scholars touch on the topic of diversity, most importantly the topic of intersectionality and its representation in Hollywood cinema.

 

Their Own Flavor

Both Tangerine and Pulp Fiction are considered genius in the world of indie films, by filmgoers and most critics. Though both are heavily admired and widely debated over why they’re so special in the Sundance hall of fame, they are both universally deemed unique for their own similar, yet separate reasons. Both movies added their own unique twists to unconventional Hollywood cinema.

One particularly memorable and interesting aspect of Pulp Fiction is how every few years there’s an entirely new wave of young adults that come of age, finally watch the film for the first time and truly appreciate it in its entirety.It’s cool how sensational and timeless a cinematic piece can be.

Interview with Samuel L Jackson (20 years later)