Narration, according to Thwaites, Davis and Mules (2002, p. 118) is the “process and effects of representing time in texts”. Narratives, as stories of a sequence of events occurring over time are texts structured by time (Thwaites, Davis & Mules 2002, p. 118). Two filmic texts seemingly separated by time, style and ideology are The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Through a textual analysis, this paper compares and contrasts the filmic styles employed in these two texts. In doing so, it is concluded that although these films have quite different approaches, they are both concerned with the construction of narrative over time. The former, as a modernist text, tends to lead its audience through time in an anticipated linear fashion, while the latter, as a postmodernist text, deliberately disrupts normative notions of how time, and therefore, narrative, passes.

Each film begins with a written text, a blueprint of sorts for what is to come. The opening shot of The Maltese Falcon is of the falcon itself – a black statue of the bird – emphatically Gothic in appearance. Lighting casts a dense, domineering shadow behind the bird, suggesting otherness. The words which scroll over this shot provide a brief history of the bird’s origin and its theft by pirates, but do not reveal what became of it. Indeed, the final words of this passage claim “the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day”. Is this the beginning of an end to that mystery? Or is this, as Abramson (1988, p. 115) suggests, just another “episode in the falcon’s colorful written history”? As it turns out, Abramson is correct, but the film becomes less a tale of the falcon and more a humanist narrative that “confirms”, as Mules (2007, p. 180) claims, “the good of human existence … despite the fallenness of the world”.

While the opening shot of Pulp Fiction is not as dramatic as that of The Maltese Falcon, its apparent simplicity hides a complexity indicative of what is to follow. The white text on a black background is a dictionary definition:

PULP (pulp) n. 1. A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter. 2. A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.

One might read this as to suggest the film is not well-formed, perhaps even “unfinished”. Yet the accuracy of these words, as a dictionary definition, indicates the precision of director, Quentin Tarantino’s construction of this work of fiction. Precision and deliberateness are traits both films share.

Huston’s The Maltese Falcon is the third screen version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel and is, claims Maxfield (1989, p. 253), “the perfect and indelible incarnation” of that text. But it is not so much Huston’s accurate translation of novel to film that exemplifies the film’s perfection. This, rather, exists, as Maxfield (1989, p. 253) argues, in the film’s “visual style and the performances of its cast”. Mules (2007, p. 177) claims The Maltese Falcon “is one of the first films of the genre known as film noir”. As such, it displays quite prominently the iconography of that genre: the private eye; trench coats; the conspicuous follower who stands in lit doorways or hides behind a newspaper; constant cigarette smoking and the smoking gun; dark alleys; night rain on city streets; and the treacherous femme fatale. But perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of film noir is its use of lighting, or more precisely, shadow. Cooke (1985, p. 93), citing Schrader, suggests texts of film noir exhibit a “fondness for oblique lines and fractured light”. These oblique lines are often created by light through Venetian blinds or more solid, triangular shadows cast by the eaves of buildings, street lamps, staircases, and standard or table lamps. This technique provides for a visual depiction of the binary oppositions of fact/fiction, honesty/dishonesty, good/evil.

Rather than obscure what might be read from a scene, this technique has a tendency to highlight narrative intent. Huston craftily utilizes this visual style to both predict and confirm events in the story. When Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) first enters the office of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), she approaches confidently at first, then hesitates momentarily. She then passes through shadow before reaching Sam’s desk. It is as though she is physically stepping into the charadic persona of Miss Wonderly. As she tells her story to Sam, the brim of her hat casts a strong shadow over her eyes. If eyes be the window to the soul, this soul is in hiding. A backdrop to her histrionic story-telling is a window on which is painted “SPADE AND ARCHER”. Brigid’s head is positioned over Archer’s name, a hint, or more thematically appropriate, a clue to who will be responsible for the eventual demise of Miles. Later, after Miles is shot, Sam looks across from his desk to that of Miles. The shadow from the window sign falls against the wall behind the unoccupied desk. The shadow of “SPADE” is clearly visible, but the shadow of “ARCHER” is obscured. Through the use of shadow and the precise positioning of actors and objects, Huston has provided a summation of a driving thread in the narrative: the woman is not who she seems; Miles is murdered; ‘who dunnit’.

Another aspect of the mise en scène persistent throughout The Maltese Falcon is the confinement of its characters. As Naremore (1973, p. 243) notes, “Most of the action takes place inside four rooms – Spade’s office, his apartment, and the hotel rooms of Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Casper Gutman” (Sydney Greenstreet). The claustrophobic effect of these “close interiors”, which Naremore (1973, p. 243) considers as important an element of the film noir “as open vistas are to the western”, is further enhanced, again, by the use of lighting and the positioning of actors. When detectives, Dundy (Barton MacLane) and Polhaus (Ward Bond), enter Sam’s apartment to question him over the shooting of Miles, the first thing Dundy does is turn on another light, as if doing so will reveal the truth. But any openness that might be afforded by extra illumination is quickly closed down as Dundy and Polhaus form a tight triangle with Sam, seated on his bed, as the nadir. Sam, however, will not allow himself to be overcome by their dominance. He stands and breaks through them, forming a new triangle where, becoming the apex, he declares: “I know where I stand now”. But does he? Sam must now, as Abramson (1988, p. 112) states, “navigate among the verbal truths and lies of his adversaries” to fill in the gaps and complete the story which will, in the end, provide firmament to his moral standing. As an example of humanist ideology, when Sam finally uncovers the truth and opts for loyalty to his murdered partner over his love for Brigid, the film’s conclusion, as Mules (2007, p. 180) states, “sees the redemption of Sam as a ‘good man’”. The focalisation of “the redemption of humanity … through a male character”, however, as Mules (2007, p. 180) continues, presents women as “obstacles or threats” - the femmes fatale so iconic of the film noir genre.

Pulp Fiction, too, is a film that ends in redemption, though that ending is not the actual conclusion of the narrative - that occurs about two-thirds of the way through the film, when Butch (Bruce Willis) and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) ride out of town on the purloined ‘chopper’, Grace. While The Maltese Falcon expresses modernist concerns with paranoia and corruption, Pulp Fiction is schizoid. As Mules (2007, p. 210) states, “postmodernism mixes the past and the present …[so much so]… it becomes difficult to separate them”. Time in The Maltese Falcon follows a straight line. “Sequences of time outside the plot”, as Mules (2007, p. 210) claims, “are signified by flashbacks … anchored to a specific character speaking in the present”, in this case, Brigid O’Shaughnessy when she first meets Sam, and Casper Gutman when he tells Sam about his quest for the bird. In Pulp Fiction, however, “the distinction”, according to Mules (2007, p. 210), “between the past and the present is collapsed”.

The first scene is really part of the beginning of the final scene, which, as noted earlier, is not actually the end of the story. In an attempt to pull this confusion of time into a more usual narrative structure, Alleva (1994, p. 30) blocks the film into six segments: a prologue followed by chapters - one to five. Tarantino does break the film up into sections, but the overlapping, or ‘inter-lapping’, of the stories destroys any sequential concept of ‘chapters’ as such. It is, as Smith (1994, p. 33) claims, “a structure that scrambles chronology without flashbacks”. Any attempt to shuffle Alleva’s ‘chapters’ into a linear narrative will only end in a convoluted narrative maze. Alleva’s ‘chapter 1’ is the most obvious beginning and should lead into ‘chapter 4’ and ‘chapter 5’, which includes the ‘prologue’, and goes back to ‘chapter 3’, during which is ‘chapter 2’. This “improbably elaborate narrative architecture”, as Smith (1994, p. 33) proposes, “obliges the viewer to contemplate the usually invisible mechanisms of narrative selection”. Yet it is not a confusing text, being “put together”, as Alleva (1994, p. 31) states, “with a jeweler’s precision”. The apparent disruption of normative narrative structure actually tends to speed up the story rather than bog it down in concerns over when what should happen or how events slot into any set timeline. It gives the text fluidity. As Diawara, interviewed by Kolbowski (1998, p. 55), argues, “the movement and acceleration of movement are representations of being conversant with space, of being fluid, of making it easy to do things”.

While Pulp Fiction certainly handles time in a completely different fashion to The Maltese Falcon, there are similarities in visual and directorial style. Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are hitmen in the employ of the mobster, Marcellus (Ving Rhames). They are sent to retrieve a briefcase stolen from Marcellus by some youths. When they arrive at the door of the apartment where the youths are, Jules asks Vincent, “What time ya got?” As it is only 7:22am, Jules decides, “It ain’t quite time yet”. The two walk out of the dark corridor to an area of light. It is as though they have momentarily moved off-stage. Some minutes later, Jules says, “Come on, let’s get into character”, and they walk back into the dark - back on-stage. This is, in a way, reminiscent of Brigid stepping into the character of Miss Wonderly. It also, as with Brigid, enables the characters to be seen in a strong light and a dark light, moving freely from one to the other, giving them the ability, as Mules (2007, p. 219) suggests, to be “both ‘bad’ and ‘good’ at the same time”. Tarantino’s use, throughout the film, of light and dark enables a potential for this text to be considered noir-esque, though it “mixes”, as Mules (2007, p. 219) points out, so many “styles and fashions” to make any clear generic positioning as problematic and tenuous as defining its narrative structure. “It is”, as Jewers ( 2000, p. 40) argues, “a labyrinth of verbal and visual intertexts”, drawing from, continues Jewers (2000, p. 55), “samurai films, the spaghetti Western … vigilante films, musicals, kung fu films … Hitchcock-style horror films, and film noir”. However, as Jewers (2000, p. 55) claims, Pulp Fiction does have at its heart “one image and object [which] dominates the unraveling of the narrative, and visually links disparate parts of the story: the briefcase”. And just as the statue of the bird leads Sam to his redemption, so too, the briefcase, its contents concealed like the real wealth of the bird, leads to the redemption of Jules.

A further similarity between these films is the confinement of characters within the mise en scène. While Huston utilises physical space and the positioning of characters in ever-changing triangles of power, Tarantino uses the camera itself. Numerous close-up shots place characters to one side of the frame with at least one half of the frame empty, suggesting both confinement and the possibility of movement or escape at the same time. But what confines the characters in both films the most is time. Huston’s characters, apart from being confined to a linear timeline, are under pressure by the detectives, yet must wait for the ship, which carries the bird, to come in. Ironically, given Tarantino’s deconstruction of time, it is time that his characters must break to gain freedom. Clocks, watches, and questions of “what time is it?” or declarations of “it’s time” are persistent motifs. Butch must retrieve his father’s watch before he can leave town. In doing so, he also achieves redemption in his saving of Marcellus from the rapist, Zed (Peter Greene). When Marcellus asks Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) to clean up the mess created by Jules and Vincent, when Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin (Phil LaMarr), Mr. Wolf says, “It’s thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten”, an ability which saves what might otherwise have seen the demise of Jules and Vincent. Though it is time, in the form of Butch’s return for his father’s watch which does bring about an end to Vincent’s life. Vincent, even though he has seen ‘the light’ from the briefcase, refuses to redeem himself, as Jules does, and for this he must pay. His time is up.

While produced over fifty years apart, with different social, economic and political contexts - and within quite different periods of artistic, philosophical and ideological development - these quite disparate, yet in many ways, similar films confirm, in their own style, the argument by Thwaites, Davis and Mules (2002, p. 118) that narration is the “process and effects of representing time in texts”. However, narratives need not, as Pulp Fiction shows, be structured by time in a linear fashion. Both films undeniably express a humanist approach through the redemptions of Sam, Butch and Jules. Yet Huston’s text is modernist with, as Mules (2007, p. 210) claims, its “single temporal trajectory”. Tarantino, on the other hand, breaks those bounds to create the mutated body of postmodernism. Even so, though seemingly separated by time, style and ideology, these two films are both concerned with the construction of narrative over time.

Top of Page