“Tarantino insisted they weren’t flashbacks and got catty when anyone called them so.”
C.S. Lewis claimed not to write allegories. Writers don’t always understand what they’re doing, and can be liars.
“I suppose RD comes close”
That’s fine by me, and for the record I never claim that what we’re seeing in “Pulp Fiction” are flashbacks.
“And the reason for making PF that way was to bolster the connection to the Godard films that influenced it.”
The only Godard movie I ever saw was “Breathless,” and I don’t recall it being out of order. But if that was one of his tricks, that only pushes the question back a generation, becoming what did New Wave films gain by arranging events out of sequence?
By the way, I think it’s more accurate to say that Tarantino was influenced by the American movies of the 70s which were influenced by Godard, than to say Tarantino was influenced by Godard. Or maybe I’m being too cute about the whole thing. I just get more the 70s depresso-Young Turk-Film School-Scorsese/DePalma-Blaxploitation feel from him than the 60s French New Wave feel.
Whhat they gained is a foregrounding of their own artifice. A calling attention to themselves as composed narratives.