It was only by sheer fluke that I wound up watching Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless back-to-back. Pulp Fiction was a whimsical date-night pick, because she hadn't seen it and I likely haven't for a decade; Breathless was in preparation for Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, which the Philadelphia Film Society is screening this weekend and which I didn't want to go into blind. (Histoire(s) is a series of "documentary" episodes, about four-and-a-half hours long in total; I didn't want to subject myself to that without a very recent viewing of something by Godard. I am willing to be a masochist in the name of art, but even I have my limits.)

Tarantino famously worships Godard: his studio is named A Band Apart in homage to Godard's film Bande à part. Godard, in turn, mostly seemed to have contempt for Tarantino. (He once said that Tarantino would have done him a better homage by just giving him some money.) But the two are linked, not just by their playful attitudes towards filmmaking, but by their depictions of violence and psychopathy, and the ironized way they depict them. 

There has been endless debate over whether Tarantino truly cares about morality or humanity or whether he sees them as manipulative plot devices; he has been called shallow, callous, and adolescent. Godard, meanwhile, gave us maybe the iconic depiction of callous adolescence with Breathless, in which a man who casually steals cars and murders a cop is somehow less soulless than his (so-called) romantic (so-called) partner. Describing "the kids" in Breathless, Pauline Kael wrote this, which in retrospect feels disturbingly prescient:

Eric Hobsbawm, writing from 2001, said in The Age of Extremes that the twentieth century seemed retrospectively to be defined by the rise of mass media and individualism as a phenomenon. As a Marxist, he was particularly disturbed by the way that individualism upended the sorts of solidarity necessary to create meaningful communities, let alone meaningful labor movements. The naked pursuit of the self cannot coexist with the pursuit of community, unless it understands that collective organization is its only hope for genuine advancement. Individualism, meanwhile, advocates rebellion, not against a singular source of authority, but against the idea of organization itself. How do you create a meaningful movement when each individual is encouraged to revolt against anything recognizable as a movement?

Hence Breathless, whose protagonist Michel believes in nothing, and whose not-really-girlfriend Patricia believes in even less. Michel is disaffected and disgusted; he wants to look and sound like Humphrey Bogart, but doesn't seem to value much beyond cars, cigarettes, and women. His treatment of Patricia is possessive, jealous, and crass—and somehow that's the closest that he gets to seeming human. Patricia, meanwhile, is best described as listless; nothing seems particularly real to her, whether it's the various men who make passes at her or the newspaper she only pretends to sell. The closest she comes to indicating a desire is when she emphasizes that she'd like her parents to keep sending her money; she watches Michel get shot to death with less passion. 

Rewatching Breathless, my responses to Patricia kept oscillating: I couldn't decide whether or not she had a point. Why shouldn't she react to Michel like the fraud he is, politely accepting his claims to love her in between constant demands that she take her clothes off or let him grope her? Why would she take his offer to go to Rome seriously? It's not that he doesn't mean it—he'd love to take her to Rome—but that Rome, to him, is nothing but a place that isn't here. He claims to love her, not for who she is, but for who she isn't: she manages to be more than one of the faceless women he references sleeping with, but he still makes his way through half a dozen women (real or imagined) before coming back to her. He's a murderer; she gives him up to the police. Why shouldn't she? What does she owe him after all of this?

During the shockingly-long sequence where Patricia and Michel faff about in bed together, she quotes Faulkner's line about how, between grief and nothing, he'd choose grief. Michel responds that he'd rather pick nothing: grief is a compromise, and he'd rather work with absolutes. Later, dying, he manages to eke out the word "Nauseating," which the cop that shot him takes to mean he's calling Patricia disgusting. "What's 'nauseating'?" she asks, and it's unclear whether she simply doesn't know the word, doesn't know how it would apply to her, or doesn't think Michel has a right to judge her in the first place. But then, Michel might not be referring to her at all: while he claims he'd be happy in prison, he decides to flee the police anyway, because he's "tired" with his life; getting shot for no reason is as fine a way to go as any other.

Kael interprets Michel's line about choosing nothing as his giving the honest answer, the one that Patricia won't admit that she agrees with. When he chooses to die after her betrayal, that's him putting his money where his mouth is: better death than heartbreak. But you can replace "grief" with Michel's "nauseation," and a different story emerges: Michel, as alienated and psychopathic about the world as he is, at least cares enough about the world to be disgusted by it. His affectations are shallow, but he at least puts on affectations, and seems repulsed by how little they matter. Patricia, given a choice between nauseation and nothing, chooses nothing: she watches a man die because of her own actions, she hears his dying word, and all she can do is ask, blank-faced, what it means. The only reason she gives Michel is that, when she suspected she loved him, her only choice was to be intentionally "mean" to him. People who love each other aren't mean; therefore, if she's mean to him, she doesn't love him. To her, the hypothetical feeling reflects the action: the possibility of acting on feeling is a non-starter.

As I'm fond of quoting, Harry Frankfurt says in On Bullshit that the pursuit of a "sincere" self is inherently bullshit. The idea that some singular person-specific "truth" exists is basically fatalism: if being yourself consists of searching for some external "real you," you're justified in saying or doing anything that seems "sincere," because to do otherwise would be a "betrayal" of yourself. In the name of individualism, you have somehow managed to find a way to exonerate yourself of any real responsibility. "Sincerity is bullshit," he says; rebellion against authority becomes meaningless, as Hobsbawm puts it, when "rebellion against authority" becomes a brand.

Everything about Michel is insincere, but—perversely—honestly so. His one kernel of genuine feeling becomes the one thing that Patricia rejects in him. Earlier, when she seems so passively adrift between the various men who act on her, it seems that her passivity is a response to (and a rejection of) their insincerities; later, it becomes clear that she welcomes the insincerity, in her passive way. It's the possibility that Michel might "mean" something that she pushes against. Her idea of sincerity is to test whether she is capable of sending him to jail or to his death; the idea that "testing herself" is some meaningful decision, that it will teach her anything whatsoever, is Frankfurt's idea of bullshit. 

One thing that Hobsbawn suggests in The Age of Extremes is that, in an era of capitalist individualism, brands become perversely popular because they mean nothing. Family and culture and ideology and religion all want something out of you: they have expectations of you, ideas of what you might become. Brands want nothing from you but your money; they're cynical, but they're safe. Yet this is not completely accurate—because brands sell themselves, not as an imposition upon the individual, but as an extension of the individual. Your choice of brand becomes a pursuit of self: it either signifies your values, or it holds some personal deep meaning. Therefore, it is an act of sincerity to invest in your brands of choice: your preference of liquor shows either your good taste or your lack of pretension; your preference of pop music shows which young hot singer expresses your feelings the most truthfully.

The fact that all this is explicitly marketed and manufactured, the fact that it's designed to take as much of your money as you're willing to give, paradoxically makes it trustworthy, because it just wants your money and your brand loyalty. If it, in turn, makes you feel like you have a soul, that's you getting something from it that it never intended you to have. You're cheating the system, by finding a way to convince yourself of your own authenticity within it. Individualism as an institution never needs to overtly pressure you into being what it wants you to be: it claims not to be an institution, then freely offers you a number of ways to define and value yourself, each of which comes with a marketing proposal attached. Nobody needs to overtly push you into adhering to this: every person who invests in this flavor of "self-expression" becomes a walking advertisement for it. And individualism as a system is difficult to challenge, because any challenge comes in the form of an ideology or theory or belief that smells suspiciously like a system.

Hence Breathless, a movie released on the cusp of the most radically "individual" decade in existence—one whose styles and techniques were immediately appropriated by none other than the Beatles, in a film that established their primary brand as "skeptical of brands." Breathless, a movie about a generation of people who'd been raised on movies: a film that suggested it was safer to pretend to be Bogart than to actually be Bogart, safer to feign feelings than to actually feel, safer to feign dissatisfaction than to genuinely be dissatisfied. Breathless, an iconic film released at a moment when films were more iconic than ever, about the kind of culture that emerges in a landscape where iconic films are suddenly possible.

Breathless: a movie that offers us two visions of the future: one terminal, one eternal, both fucked.

Whether you love Quentin Tarantino or loathe him, it's hard to argue that his movies aren't iconic.

Pulp Fiction's poster was the iconic movie poster of the 90s. Kill Bill cribbed a tracksuit taken directly from a Bruce Lee movie and made that tracksuit iconic. (Hell, Uma Thurman is an icon because of those two movies and because of Tarantino—Fall Out Boy didn't write a song about her for nothing.) Inglourious Basterds is a movie about iconography, whose "heroes" carve swastikas on the foreheads of Nazis attempting to escape their own brand. Django Unchained? Controversial for its politics of race, but iconically controversial—so much so that you could teach a class on appropriation in art just by covering the debates over whether or not Tarantino should have made it.

Quentin Tarantino, too, is arguably the iconic controversial director. He's critically acclaimed and critically scorned in equal measure. He's either a shallow psychopath or a subtle satirist. He's either masculinity's grossest advocate or its sharpest critic. He either hates women or he writes them brilliantly well. He either rips other movies off wholesale—their soundtracks, their shots, their lines of dialogue—or he's proof that pastiche is an art form in its own right, that collage and curation can create works that transcend their immediate surroundings.

Like Godard, Tarantino makes movies that are oversaturated with pop culture: not movies about movies, per se, but certainly movies about people who watch movies. Godard described his film Masculin Féminin as "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Tarantino prefaces a kung-fu showdown in Kill Bill by quoting an ad for Trix cereal.

Unlike Godard, whose films are overtly a commentary on this culture, Tarantino avoids direct commentary, which is one reason why he's frequently called shallow or insincere. But the commentary is always there if you care to look.

Pulp Fiction opens with a conversation between a couple that could have been Michel and Patricia's children. It's a witty, lively, and intelligent discussion that just so happens to be about robbing the cafe they're in. When they leap to their feet, guns in hand, and start screaming at waitstaff and patrons alike, the scene freezes and they vanish; it feels like the point has been made, and there's nothing more to be said. By the time they reappear, most viewers have completely forgotten they existed to begin with.

Longwinded conversation makes up most of Pulp Fiction's running. Almost none of it advances the plot, or means much of anything at all; instead, Tarantino uses it to depict relationships between his characters, showing their familiarity with one another, the things they are and aren't willing to open up about, the things they do and don't consider worth discussing. Crime and violence are a backdrop more than anything: their lives consist of what they say before, during, and after.

It is far more common, in Pulp Fiction, for violence to be one-sided, armed versus unarmed; there are only two or three instances where two people are genuinely both out for each other's blood, and exactly none of them wind up looking like genuine confrontations. When Bruce Willis's boxer Butch gets informed that he beat his opponent to death in the ring, his response is to scold his dead opponent: "If he was a better fighter, he'd be alive. If he never laced up his gloves in the first place, which he never shoulda done, he'd be alive." Most of the movie's confrontations take place like this: one person can conspicuously kill, and the other person can either avoid their own death or let themselves be killed.

Violence isn't justice: it's the law, and it must be obeyed. Writing about The Godfather, Roger Ebert pointed out that the movie cleverly gives us room to sympathize with criminals by creating a world in which only criminals exist. It doesn't show us innocent victims—only people who have collectively agreed to abide by its code, however crooked. Pulp Fiction has no similar pretense of honor, but its world follows a similar unspoken code: power is absolute, and therefore demands absolute respect.

Pulp Fiction isn't quite a mob movie, but it's neatly positioned, chronologically, between Goodfellas and The Sopranos, both of which were an answer to (and refutation of) The Godfather as surely as Breathless was a response to an earlier, simpler era of mob movie. In Goodfellas, the so-called honor of the Mafia family was replaced by rank hedonism and gleeful violence. The Sopranos, meanwhile, dealt with the contrast of a sociopath exploring therapy, trying to "understand" himself better, while refusing to acknowledge the glaring moral void at the center of his life—not too far off from Breathless itself. And the fact that Pulp Fiction's crime rings are surreal and shapeless hammers home a similar theme: its culture isn't questioned, because there is no culture. Its violence and amorality aren't embraced so much as taken for granted: the possibility that things could be any other way never quite comes up.

Viewed in isolation, you can argue that Tarantino's arguments against violence pale before the adrenaline-fueled way that he depicts (and maybe glorify) it. He seems far less interested in critiquing violence, on the surface, than depicting increasingly-fanciful scenarios in which violence is used for the "right" cause (and it's hard to say he doesn't relish in that violence). But Tarantino becomes much more interesting when viewed as a response to Godard—not as a response to the filmmaker himself, but as a response to the culture that he was depicting, in which superficiality and individual self-pursuit becomes criminally psychotic. He depicts, not a struggle between this worldview and some more traditionally moral one, but the ways in which people caught up in this world catch dim glimpses of something better on the horizon.

Pulp Fiction, after all, is a religious movie—albeit one told cleverly in reverse. It's a movie in which, arguably, God gives two gangsters a sign to change their ways, then gives a second warning to the gangster that doesn't take the first hint, then kills him. It's a movie where Butch's life is ultimately saved, not through his attempts to outmaneuver and outgun Marcellus Wallace, but because he saves Marcellus Wallace's life despite Wallace being out to kill him—forgiving him, in a sense, for living by the rules of his world, when he's faced with a worse fate than even Butch's judgment would allow him.

Why is Pulp Fiction told the way that it is, with its middle section excised? Because the middle section omits the fact that Vincent Vega was warned. When Butch stumbles upon Vincent guarding his kitchen, it's the first time we've seen him since his date with Mia Wallace, and his panicked attempt to save her life. Chemistry between Vega and Wallace aside, Vincent doesn't save her life for any moral reason: the thing that pushes him to the extreme lengths that he goes to is his awareness that, if Mia dies, Marcellus will kill him. Fear of death is the reason he gives himself as to why he and Mia shouldn't sleep together; fear of death is what pushes him to save her from the overdose that he's inadvertently responsible for.

We've followed Vincent longer than we've followed any other character, so we're inclined to empathize with him; we find him plenty likable, even after watching him murder a young man in cold blood. After all, that murder was just him following the rules, just as Michel's murder of the cop is exasperated rather than vicious or desperate. ("The cop caught me speeding, so now I have to shoot him. Man! What a drag.") We're more inclined to think of Vincent in terms of the charming things he says, the conversations that he has, anything but the things he does. Just as Mia would certainly rather Vincent see her as the vivacious wit that she presents herself as on their date, rather than as the bedraggled mess that she is when he drops her off at her house. Image isn't everything—but it's maybe everything apart from smeared blood and shattered skulls.

It's a shock to see Vincent emerge from Butch's bathroom—but why should it be? Only because it feels senseless that he'd die like this, for little reason more than that Butch's Pop Tarts popped at the wrong time. He's not quite the Vincent that we've seen before: he's just a hired thug, a faceless goon. He doesn't even get to speak. (Though his, too, is Butch's answer to the way Vincent treats him when they meet earlier at the bar: Vincent is not his friend, and therefore, they shouldn't expect to speak.)

Knowing that Vincent is fated to die should make us more sympathetic to the road that takes him to his end, shouldn't it? Instead, it does the opposite: it underscores how petty his skepticism of Jules is, how little he seems to care that he blows an innocent man's brains out, how childish and sullen he seems when Jules and Winston Wolf push him to at least cover up his crimes. He can't even be bothered to treat Jimmy's hand towels with respect. Why should he? Vincent, not Jimmy, is the one with the gun.

By contrast, Tarantino doesn't make an effort to make Butch seem likable. He, too, seems unaffected when he learns he's killed a man. He violently destroys a TV in a fit of rage, terrifying his wife in the process. When he rams Marcellus Wallace with his car, it's hard to decide whether you'd really care if Marcellus was the one who wound up killing Butch. Yet somehow, Butch winds up sympathetic—in part because he and Marcellus are faced with a trio of sadistic killers far crueler than anything we've seen from Marcellus and his gang, in part because Butch saves Marcellus when he doesn't have to, but more than anything, because Butch genuinely seems to love Fabienne, his wife. (Their bedroom conversation is as long and meandering as Michel's and Patricia's in Breathless, with one major difference: Butch and Fabienne come across as genuinely in love with each other, which makes Butch seemingly the only man in this universe with a thing worth living for.)

In a sense, Butch plays fair by the twisted views of Marcellus Wallace's world. He cheats Marcellus, sure, but Marcellus was bribing him, and rigging his match, in the first place. He kills his opponent, sure, but beats him fair and square in the ring. He prepares himself to face Marcellus's wrath, and gets the better of Vincent in the process. And he does it all for self-interested reasons, but he's not just doing it for himself: he's doing it for the woman who he loves, and who loves him back. Which doesn't make him any less of an amoral protagonist, but it makes him "merely" amoral rather than outright criminal—which sets him up for the damnation and redemption he finds afterwards, when he saves Marcellus's life. And unlike Vincent saving Mia, Butch genuinely does what he does for more than self-preservation: maybe it's the murkiest act of goodness imaginable, but it's an act of goodness just the same.

Pauline Kael said of Michel and Patricia in Breathless: "There is nothing that they really want to do, and there's nothing they won't do. Not that they're perverse or deliberately cruel: they have charm and intelligence—but they live on impulse." That describes Vincent and Jules and Mia Wallace (and nearly-but-not-quite describes Butch) to a tee—at least, as we first encounter them. They are Michel and Patricia without the "outside" world to hold them in check: Michel and Patricia in a world of Michels and Patricias, drowning in charm and impulse, unable to envision anything more beyond. Against them, we get three foils: Winston Wolf, straight out of The Godfather (which is to say, superficially more honorable and mannered, but still fundamentally a part of an amoral world); Marcellus Wallace, a Satanic figure both in his lust for power and his adherence to his own perverse code; and Jimmy, played by Tarantino himself.

(A generation ago, Jimmy and his married suburban life would have been the orderly "society" whose authority youth and criminals alike would have rebelled against; here, Jimmy's absolutely powerless, not only against the mobsters who show up at his door but against his own wife. The American dream of a house in the suburbs is portrayed, casually, as the purview of the emasculated and weak. Winston flatters Jimmy by showing him respect, but the respect is a veneer; Winston is just better at masking his power than Vincent or Jules. And it's not like Jimmy is an innocent victim either: he's complicit in helping these two cover up a murder, and his "distance" from this world is really just a willingness to overlook it. It's no coincidence that Jimmy appears in a part of the movie that's explicitly about averting your eyes: literally covering up corpses in quilts.

In retrospect, it is extremely questionable for Tarantino to have written and cast himself as a character who, in his brief appearance, says the N word more than any other person in the film. But it surely wasn't an unintentional decision to have Jimmy appear immediately after Vincent shoots a young Black man, which in turn happens immediately after Confederacy-loving men with Southern accents rape a Black crimelord. And if you need further proof that Jimmy sees the slur as a pathetic way for him to assert some power, note that he launches into his infamous monologue immediately after talking shit about how his wife Bonnie has terrible taste in coffee—and that, when we briefly see Bonnie from behind, we learn that the wife Jimmy's terrified of, the wife Jimmy has to hide his own criminal past from, is Black. It is very easy and reasonable to call most any choice that Tarantino makes ill-advised, but at the very least, he constructs his films with considerable intent.)

But the characters who most resemble Patricia and Michel aren't Butch or Jules or Mia or even Vincent. They're Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the would-be cafe robbers, conspicuously love and partway through their own crime spree—a crime spree that very nearly ends in their abrupt, untimely deaths. And if you want proof that Tarantino sees violence as more than just an adolescent power fantasy—that he indulges in cinema's embrace of violence as thrill, violence as rebellion, as an attempt to say something about those violent fantasies—you probably want to start with how Pulp Fiction starts with the thrill of an armed robbery, but climaxes with the thrill of watching a man try and get three violent psychopaths to not shoot.

Jules knows the rules of this world as well as any other. He knows that, in most confrontations, the person with the gun gets to kill, and the person without the gun gets to die. Sure, he and Vince are professional killers, and the man who ambushes them point blank is a terrified kid, but that doesn't matter: the logic of this universe dictates that he and Vince should have their brains splattered across the late Brett's apartment wall, just as Brett's brains are splattered there already. 

If he's alive, then the world must not be the world he saw himself as living in. And that profane epiphany—about as dumb and as crude an awakening as you can possibly imagine—is enough that, a couple of hours later, he finds himself trying really hard not to kill the two violent dumbasses who threaten to kill him, despite not having a clue in the world how to go about doing that.

What's fascinating about that final, terse showdown is how different the emotions are in each of the four people pointing guns at one another. Jules is trying hard to push each of the other three to a place where they'll let him talk, without doing the only thing they ever do that isn't talking. Vincent, as ever, can't be bothered to think much further than: he can kill the people he wants to kill, and therefore he's allowed to. Honey Bunny is terrified, melting down not at the thought of herself being killed but at the thought of her lover dying. And Pumpkin, in turn, is on edge due to the gun in his face, but he's thinking more about Honey Bunny than about himself, talking to her in an even, measured, calming tone that's clearly a struggle for him to maintain.

Samuel L. Jackson's iconic monologue clearly steals the scene, but it's the relationship between Pumpkin and Honey Bunny that makes holds the scene together. There is no contradiction between their two halves: they love one another very much, and they will also rob and maybe murder whomever they please. Jules is mainly talking about himself, but at the same time, he's using their love for one another: pushing them towards that love, away from violence. Hollywood tradition is that criminals can have their spree, but must be punished afterwards; Bonnie and Clyde, cinema's most famous married criminal couple, both go down in a hail of bullets. But here the criminal has already been punished, even if he's still alive in this moment, even if nobody else in this room knows this. Jules isn't trying to save himself: he's trying to save these two. What he's looking for isn't some self-centered redemption, some resolution to his misery and guilt (and notice that Jules never once admits to feeling guilt). His goal isn't to "redeem" himself. It's to do the right thing, which—because it means concrete action, however small—is infinitely harder, in part because it isn't grandiose.

Miracle or no miracle, I lied when I said that Pulp Fiction is a film about God. In fact, it's precisely a movie about there not being any God. There is no outside authority in this universe: no cops hunting down the baddies, no external force pushing anybody towards some higher calling, no real greater good. Butch and Fabienne get a happy ending, but it's a materialist happy ending: one where they can afford to live somewhere sunny and tropical, because of the pile of money Butch made with his double-cross. The power of Jules' epiphany comes from the way it happens within this world, not by his escaping from it. The only miracle is that, just one time, the terrible thing that always happens didn't happen. It's enough for a man whose existence is defined by self-interest and the justified abuse of power to start seeking something, anything, that isn't that. And the fun of Pulp Fiction, and of Tarantino in general, lies in how it develops ingenious ways to transcend that world of puerile, thrill-seeking violence without ever leaving it behind.

When you know to look for it, you can find this as a theme in every one of Tarantino's movies: the inescapability of this violent world paired with the ways in which people escape it anyway. Kill Bill revolves around a woman whose attempt to start a family is interrupted by the criminal who couldn't bear for her to start one with anybody but him; it is bookended, in a sense, by her two attempts to leave him and his world behind. Inglourious Basterds is a propagandistic movie about propaganda, an American war movie made in the style of Nazi war movies, in which a team of psychopathic American Jews tee off against an intelligent, germane Nazi who fully attempts to leave his past behind. The turning point of Django Unchained comes when a plantation owner doesn't just coerce a bounty hunter at gunpoint, but insists that the other man shake his hand: it's the false veneer of civility, more than the abuse of power itself, that pushes the bounty hunter past his breaking point.

It's entirely possible to enjoy a Quentin Tarantino film as a tapestry of rich dialogue, shocking violence, and no moral whatsoever. Some of Tarantino's critics sincerely think of him this way; others are more bothered that he'd make films which let his audiences participate that glibly. It is certainly possible to watch Tarantino without taking anything more away than adrenaline, testosterone, and gleefully skillful pacing. I'm not sure it would be possible to make movies that operate in these escapist, adolescent worlds without allowing for that possibility—not without breaking from that fabric, which Tarantino never does.

But to me, that's what makes Tarantino so interesting as a director, and what makes his philosophy of moviemaking so paradoxically enigmatic. Godard's early movies were a commentary about a disturbing kind of youth culture, and they were eagerly taken up by youth culture, but they were never exactly for youth culture. First he was criticized for the same things Tarantino was: being more style than substance, relishing in vulgarity and violence without moralizing about it. Later, he was criticized for moralizing too much, for being too elite and superior for his own good. Tarantino, meanwhile, sticks to the rules of the cinema he loves: he gets more Hollywood rather than less, he pushes more into the violence, the schlock, and (increasingly) the ahistoricism, allowing Movie Logic to rewrite actual events whenever reality breaks from cinema's rules about good plot. Within that, though, he has found astonishingly varied ways to tell stories about people who are both fully ensconced by this psychopathic worldview and who run up against the limits of that world, breaking from it despite lacking the vocabulary to articulate anything but it. They are characters in movies who think of themselves as characters in movies, two-dimensional beings probing a three-dimensional world without ever gaining a third dimension themselves.

The tricky thing about Breathless is that it's a depiction of two people looking for fun because everything seems meaningless—and it was so fun that people flocked to it and cinema changed because of it, but its fun stuck and its meaning didn't. It's about a man emulating movie mobsters because they're cool, ignoring the part where they die a tragic, inevitable, melodramatic death—and then he dies a melodramatic death, but his girlfriend totally overlooks it. Michel might make pretenses of escaping a world that he despises, but Patricia never does—and neither of them will escape it, because the two of them are that world, whether Michel realizes it or not. You can't escape a meaningless world by being meaningless. You can only escape it by finding something else—and maybe Michel found something or maybe he didn't, maybe his heartbreak was real or maybe he never felt much of anything at all, but either way it amounts to the same thing, which is that, between grief and nothingness, both found nothingness (albeit in contrasting ways).

Tarantino's films are all about senseless, meaningless worlds, but they're never meaningless. They're about people who've been born and raised in these meaningless worlds, people who've never known anything less meaningless, who wind up confronting something meaningful after all. That glimpse of meaning never makes up the bulk of Tarantino's running times: the ratio of schlock-to-insight is about as extreme as the ratio of dialogue-to-violence, which is to say that it serves a similar purpose. Tarantino's artistry is the skill with which he constructs meaningless scene after meaningless scene, conversation after conversation, thrill after thrill, in ways that slowly add up, using two-dimensional planes as facets to construct something larger without your ever noticing—until, in one sudden, shocking outburst, subtext becomes text, before you have a chance to realize there was any subtext to begin with. He states things so obviously that you never stop to notice how un-obvious those things were, even though they weren't at all obvious until he mentions it. And he has the gift of making incredibly unusual choices that, in retrospect, feel like thyeey must have been inevitable. How could they not be, when everything else reveals itself to be pointing, obviously not-so-obviously, to that secret, shocking, and utterly predictable center?

When Jules tells Vincent that he wants to move on and find something better, Vincent scoffs. Why wouldn't he? Most protestations of meaning sound meaningless: it can be hard not to roll your eyes when someone starts talking about higher callings, or finding their purpose, or—hell—love. Especially when you know that person well, you know all their worst moments, you know the various dumb ways in which they get in their own way. Besides, what they're talking about has nothing to do with you—least of all when they're saying it all in the hopes that you'll convert along with them, to whatever cause or romance they suddenly think they've found. Meaning and meaninglessness, on the surface, sound more-or-less the same. And the more bullshit you've heard, the harder it is to hear anything without suspecting it of being more of the same—especially since bullshitters try harder than anyone to seem plausibly sincere.

Breathless is a film about people who think they live in a meaningless world, and either pretend to find meaning in one another or—perhaps more tragically—really do. Pulp Fiction is about people who think their senseless world is really sensible, until one or two of them find something that makes a lot more sense. They both play with the language of cinema, and with the language of drama: are the moments that seem dramatic truly more important, or is that just another fraud? And what lies in those dull, everyday moments, the moments that seem to contain nothing? Are they just ways to fill the time between what truly matters, or ways of papering over the meanings that we'd rather not see, or are they meaningful in and of themselves, in ways we've been conditioned not to notice?

How do you tell a story about the ways our stories shape the world? How do you meaningfully observe people who are constantly observing themselves? How do you depict people whose lives consist of endless stories that they tell themselves, without becoming just another story that they're telling? How do you describe banality without, yourself, being banal?

Watched together, Breathless seems to be a film about a time when people first encountered some of these questions, first reckoned with the reflexive way that movies became about people trying to be people in movies. Pulp Fiction seems like a story about a generation later, after we'd all become so accustomed to endless halls of mirrors that we'd forgotten there was ever anything before it. Both are movies about crime; both are movies about movies about crime. They are both moral fables about crime, and moral fables about the limits of moral fables about crime. Both make points about the dangers of making terrible people out to be sexy and fun, despite making terrible people out to be sexy and fun themselves. And both have interesting things to say, though in both cases, you do have to work a little to make those things out, and in both cases, the films themselves are seductive enough entertainments that you'd be forgiven for not wanting to work at them at all. 

Paradoxical, perhaps, or maybe just inevitable. But to me, both movies ask a similar question in their respective ways: if this is inevitable, if this is just the way that people are, if this is the way that things are going to be... well, what then? What next?