Publication Date

October 1997

Comments

Studies in Popular Culture is published by the Popular Culture Association, http://pcasacas.org/dir/.

Abstract

Rarely does contemporary film offer any zippy ephemera to grace the office doors of medievalists, since film-makers like Quentin Tarantino do not often look to our discipline's corpus for inspiration. Imagine, then, the mix of incredulity and delight we two professors felt while taking in the pawn-shop scene in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. After being painfully violated--anally raped, to be precise--and then rescued in a most chivalric manner by one of his minions, Marsellus Wallace swears an oath to Zed, his "hillbilly boy" rapist: "I'm gonna git Medieval on your ass" (Pulp Fiction 131). What? we thought: "Medieval"? Why, we asked, "Medieval"? Had we heard correctly? Was this a critical mandate? After discussing this at some length behind closed office doors (still sans Tarantino ephemera) and after trying it out on our team-taught undergraduates, we decided to allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of investigating ways Quentin Tarantino might indeed have gotten medieval on us.

Disciplines

English Language and Literature

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