RD and PF didn’t have any flashbacks. The story was simply told in non-linear order. No one calls them flashbacks when Faulkner and other writers did it. It’s just a modernist storytelling device. Flashback has a very specific meaning that doesn’t fit here.
“RD and PF didn’t have any flashbacks. The story was simply told in non-linear order.”
Wrong. “Pulp Fiction” was told in simple non-linear fashion, in a manner of speaking. That is to say, it consisted of a series of somewhat overlapping episodes told out of chronological order. Contrariwise, “Reservoir Dogs,” after the introductory scene in the diner, consisted of one long linear sequence frequently interrupted by flashbacks. Whereas in “Pulp” you’d have to draw a diagram, mentally or otherwise, to put everything in its relative chronological place, most of the action of “Dogs” happens at one time, and everything else at random times but always prior to the main action.
“No one calls them flashbacks when Faulkner and other writers did it”
For the record, I find Faulkner insufferable and vastly overrated.
“It’s just a modernist storytelling device”
Actually, flashbacks are a very old device. What’s modernist is the nonlinear thing, or perhaps I should say the extended and persistently nonlinear thing. Along with tricks like the epiphany I consider it to be sufferable at best and illegitimate at worst. But it would take a long aesthetic digression to explain why, so just leave it at I don’t like them.
In “Pulp”’s case, I wonder, what do you consider the benefit of telling things out of order? What did it accomplish, other than confusing us? You might say that Sam Jackson provided the emotional climax, and his scene happened to take place before Bruce Willis’ journey and John Travolta’s misadventures. But it didn’t have to be that way; that’s just how Tarantino wrote it.
Maybe I’m blinded by a preference for cause and effect and have been erroneously led to believe in a meaning to history by the capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative superstructure, but I still believe stories should consist of a sequence of events building up to something we call a climax. Tarantino lets you have it both ways, in that things fit together, the most interesting part comes at the end, and everything leaves you relatively satisfied, beside lingering confusion over what happened in what actual order, that is. Which I consider cheating, since it’s invoking the ghost of lineality to do your storytelling work for you, without having to acknowledge it, and appearing experimental to boot.
“Flashback has a very specific meaning that doesn’t fit here.”
It fits perfectly. We see Tim Roth being an undercover cop, travel back in time to see how he got to be an undercover cop, then jump back to the original time, bolstered by our knewly found knowledge.
And of course the big thing is that while RD and PF are told non-linearly by the EVENTS they’re actually linear by PLOT. The plot of each scene informs the next and forms a linear narrative, that just happens to skip around in time. You can really see it in PF, if you re-arrange those scenes for chronology the story doesn’t make sense.