Cultural Convolution

Because of misplaced creativity on the translator’s part, the movie Pulp Fiction was renamed “The Dangerous” in Chinese in Hong Kong, which was in a way befitting when one skimps the surface of the story. But it was, as I later discovered, more than what was spelt out. The movie was released in 1994 and I was at the time no more than eleven years old. As the movie was a category 3 movie (which was equivalent to NC-17, the most restricted level in the US movie rating scale), the poster on which Uma Thurman in her iconic hairstyle laid seductively on a bed, holding her head up in a supercilious tilt while smoking a cigarette was stamped with a red warning symbol with the Roman character of the number 3 enclosed inside a solid-colored equilateral triangle that by the weird force of association reminded me of the somewhat triangular (inverted) Caduceus one sees on ambulance. One could only think of the movie as extremely vulgar and violent which were the very characteristics of most gang movies that enticed millions of audience which, me, the child of a righteous man no less protected than the sons and daughters of any southern Presbyterian preacher. Because of these, the Oscar-winning movie has eluded me for a great many years.

Some ten, fifteen years have gone by and I finally got to watch this movie made famous in my social circle more because of the taboos that Chinese film-makers at the time of my teens would not venture touching upon in their movies than the movie itself. Despite the hype that was built up around the movie that I knew, if it wasn’t in the least bit brilliant, would sure to disappoint, I was duly impressed. Scenes in the movie lingered in my mind way after I have finished the movie. I honestly said to Nate, who complained that I was hard to impress when it comes movies (and pretty much everything else as he will soon find out), “Wow, it was really good.”

If you have forgotten about the movie or have never watched it and plan on watching it soon, I must say, please be warned: the movie was far from perfect in its execution. But like the hackneyed saying, the imperfection was what made the movie so impressive, so perfect in its own way. The way how different short stories were shuffled in a seemingly random order and the way how those considerably long but clever and absolutely necessary conversations were dully documented, although they were stretching the audience’s patience a little bit, they made perfect sense when the movie wrapped. There were many prolonged scenes that was intriguing in a way but with the huge production dollars associated with every extra second of the film and the easily lost concentrations of modern days movie-goers, they seemed to some rather daring directing efforts in the movies. For example, why did the camera followed Travolta around in the restaurant for a whole minute? Why did they showed almost the entire dance between Thurman and Travolta in the twisting contest? Those were parts that would be easily skipped in movies nowadays since they didn’t necessarily assist the flow of the story but yet, in that odd minute or two when you see the two danced, their genuine, somewhat awkward interaction made you feel good and really get you into their states of mind. And when the unexpected happened, you get a bigger pang out of it. Your heart beat with that of Travolta not the half-dead Thurman laying in a horrid state on the floor after overdosing on heroine.

My favorite part of the movie was no doubt near the end when Samuel L Jackson made that long speech about his revelation about the purpose of his life. I liked that he tried to redefine the Bible passage from Ezekiel he recited every time before he killed a person over and over again to let us follow the logic of how he finally saw that he was the sinned and he was to repent his life’s wrongdoings by saving another man’s life. It was just rare that any action movie, regardless of whether the story was good or not, would take time to deliver a moral message that was so critical to the movie yet could also be skimped over as easily under another director/writer’s hand.

If you think based on what I said Pulp Fiction was a snob movie, you were absolutely wrong. The story and the characters were extremely colorful. Nate and I were laughing our asses off when Bruce Willis stood in the counter of the black market store trying to pick his weapon. His first picked a rifle, then he saw a baseball bat. Just when he was swinging the bat to prepare himself for battle, he saw a chainsaw. At that point we were already falling off our chairs. Then he laid his gaze upon the Japanese knife set upon the shelf. He unsheathed the knife and went into the backdoor to kill his enemies. It totally foretold the obsessions with Japanese knives Quentin Tarantino has and reminded us of Kill Bill. I was basically in awe looking at Bruce Willis. In his exchange with his fictitious goofy French girlfriend he showed himself as incredibly attractive, funny and more importantly an excellent actor that a simple love scene was no challenge for a man I have thought only capable of demolitions, flying across buildings and driving a truck to a helicopter filled with Russian manslayers that almost never die. Of course, the stabbing people in the heart with needle part and the homosexual cop ass-raping the black guy part (as with the appearance of the Gimp) were more graphic than I hoped. But it’s an American movie after all. These kinds of things were the essential ingredients of most gangster movies. And without some dramatizations, the world probably wouldn’t talk about the movie as much as it did.

One thing I realized after watching Pulp Fiction was that there was absolutely no sex scene in the movie and the promotional photo on all the posters and DVD covers of Uma Thurman lying on the bed was rather misleading. (Not that I would like to watch her. Both Nate and I were befuddled at her popularity for how genuinely ugly she looked.) She wasn’t even in the movie that much.

There was no real, tangible gain one can get from watching movies like that apart from the mental stimulus. Pulp fiction is, after all, pulp fiction. But if I were to say something I learnt, I guess it was not to judge a book by its cover, or more precisely not to based our judgments of things entirely on the advices of a conservative governmental agency.

One of the biggest mystery of classic Hollywood movie was Sammy Davis Jr’s “EEE-O-ELEVEN” in the original Ocean’s 11 movie filmed in 1960 featuring his fellow singers from the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin etc. For those of us who loved or at least enjoyed the remake of Ocean’s 11 as well as the 12th and the 13th, it was a great movie that a fan couldn‘t miss, though with all the respect to the bygone generations of dashing movie stars with captivating voices, the movie was a tad too long and the filming technique a bit clumsy. As with watching any classics, it certainly does make you realize how much both the movie-making and (burglarious) technology have improved tremendously over the years. But for all it’s worth, the acting was satisfactory and the ending was fulfilling. There was one thing, however, that left the youth of the twenty-first century who re-visited this movie that made Las Vegas famous baffled. — What does “EO11“ , the title and lyrics of a song by Sammy Davis Jr. that was played over and over during the movie and eventually wrapped it up, actually means?

The internet community took a wild guess on “askearth.com”. For a forum that was populated by herds of pop-culture and gaming geeks, plenty educated guesses that were nonetheless wrong were proposed.

Someone said that “E means eleven, O means Ocean, 11 is of course eleven”. Now, this guy completely underestimated the linguistic abilities of the script/song writers. What kind of people would be paid millions of dollars to blatantly commit the error of verbal redundancy? If so, who’s were those who paid them? Illiterates or dimwits? One brave member said he couldn’t convinced himself of that explanation. If calling out the band that was led by Danny Ocean was the intention of the title, then it should be called “OE11” instead of “EO11”, he said. Gotta agree with him.

A couple other people suggested that “EO-11“ was the name of the troop that they all belonged to in the military. This explanation was even offered in the movie synopsis in one of the popular movie review websites. It sounds pretty sensible until you recall that at multiple places of the movie, Danny and Jimmy were specifically being called as the Lieutenant and the Sergeant of the “Troops 82“.

Here, I venture as far as offering my own explanation of what it means and I know y’all just can’t wait to hear it —- United States called their space expedition program EO s. In the movie, Danny Ocean (Frank Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford) were trying to convince Vince Massler to join in their operation and Vince was reluctant. He said, “If it’s so fool-proof, why hasn’t somebody done it yet?” and Danny replied him with this legendary exchange: “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon yet - no equipment.”

So there he said it. “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon.” Danny viewed this meticulously planned operation as grand and as breakthrough a feat as man landing on the moon. It then made perfect sense to refer to their operation the same way NASA refer to their spatial expedition. The movie was filmed before 1960, NASA started at 1958, man’s landing on the moon is on 1969. My explanation fits perfectly with the timing. It’s seamless, right?

Though it would have been pretty clever on the writers’ part if this is true, this isn’t the right answer.

“EEE-O-ELEVEN” was basically a way of calling out 11 points in a craps game. The shooters have fancy ways of calling out all the possible numbers that could be rolled by the combination of the two dices and it was habitual that they called 11 as “Yo-leven” which later got reduced into “YO” and eventually got turned into “YEE-OOO-ELEVEN”, a number that could make the shooters win (It was more complicated than that but I‘m obviously not the best person to explain casino games). Ever seen men murmur under their breaths in casino the number that they have just betted on with the concentration of a pious catholic praying with his/her rosary beads? That’s exactly what Sammy Davis Jr. was doing in his song. For a movie about a group of men coming together to win their money from the banks of casinos with high hopes of being the richest men on the US soil, the reference to the number that even the dumbest gambler would pray to get in a craps game was just extremely fitting.