The film starts with the American Heritage Dictionary's definition of the term "pulp" with a clear reference to pulp literature, a popular genre of magazines and books developed during the '20-'40s which was printed on shoddy papers. From that 'pulp' and containing literary materials not really good, such as the publication of the first paperbacks and comics of the Marvel and of the pulp detective stories.

Pulp literature and comics represent together the cinema and the gramophone, the first steps of the sequencialization of the culture, which was the central content of the pop movement in the '60s and was criticized, from Horkeimer and Adorno as low culture. Andy Warhol, with his icons of the stars and of the status symbols, and Roy Liechtenstein, with his enormous comic strips, gave a clear example of the serial. Pop art often emphasize on junk elements, old useless things like a Coke can.

In this approach to recycle low-quality elements, Tarantino start with his task of building up a postmodern and pop movie. But there is no obvious ideology or social aim in Pulp Fiction, the movie represent an heterogeneous construction, which bases his language, his irony and his representation modality on the mix of the popular narrative and the mass-media fictions.

In Pulp fiction, which approaches to the comic modality of the sit-com, the capacity to break the most predictable moments of the narration is an artifice that Tarantino uses to keep the attention on the audience on a not so interesting subject and to construct an atmosphere of hyper-reality in the day life situations.

For example, when Mia Wallace, talking to Vincent Vega in his red convertible car, draws with her finger in the air a sketched rectangle, breaking the reality of the scene and putting the two protagonists in a comic view.

The protagonists don't appear psychological definite, but just figures on which are placed stereotypic and stylized characterization. We can consider Pumpkin and Honey Bunny an ironic recall to Bonny & Clyde and the Jule's hairstyle, typical of the black boys of the first '70s, a recall to the police serials like Starsky and Hutch.

Pulp fiction shows a clear knowledge of the American youths' languages, manners and customs in the same way that they are represented on the media, overall in the scope of such a fiction as Happy days, of Hanna & Barbera and Warner Bros.' cartoons. The protagonists' language is one of the televisions, rock songs, commercials, as well as in the last scene Jules said to Honey Bunny to be cool like Fonzie athwart the dramatic situation.

The language is stereotype, full of quotation and comparison terms without any sense; the dialogues are clearly filling space, the player talk about commonplace, they are without human sensitive characterization in the way of reason, everything appears as ingenuously aseptic and sometimes ridiculous. For example, the long monologue of Captain Koons, who turns up to talk to the little Butch in the clock episode, while in the background a broadcast of the famous cartoon Speed Racer, it is into a surrealistic and funny rawness that could be linked to the cartoon itself.

The pop culture in Pulp fiction misses the most important feature, which define it a theory and a trend and take it out of and without an exact context. The scene of the Jack Rabbit Slim's shows clearly this process, where Vincent and Mia dance in a real gallery of Junk culture mixed to the pop iconography, kitsch style, sit-com recalls and '50s' music. Jack Rabbit Slims appears as an extremely artificial place, spouting the neon sign "Like Being in a Time Machine", which wants to call the attention on the realism of the setting. Inside cinematography posters of the '50 cover the walls: Rock all night, High School Confidential, Attack of the Crab Monster, Machine Gun Kelly... The color of the place and the ambience are very intense, the booths and the tables are from bodies of the epochal cars: Mia and Vincent sit in a red-cherry Edsel of '59, a dream for the Americans of the post-war.

Mc Luhan defines the "phoenix syndrome" as the recycling of junk and trash materials for using again like decorative elements, or like works of art, in the pop culture and in the postmodern thought. But in this case, the phoenix syndrome doesn't produce some original things: the Jack Rabbit Slim's is a messy mix of stuff and icons of the popular culture. This approach, however, doesn't build up as a product of a reaction to the hegemonic culture, but as a representation of a surrealistic reproduction without any critique and far away from any kind of modern theory.

The Pulp Fiction's protagonists don't live in a normal reality, but they are in a constructed world, full of stereotypes and of formal modalities following the mass media rules. Waiting on the tables of Jack Rabbit Slim's, there are not simple waiters, but the double of the big famous actors of the fifties: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Buddy Holly. These stars take the connotation of public persons, like pop icons represented on the television and on the newspapers.

These pop icons, which in the USA reach a real mythological dimension, are out of the context without the traditional stereotypic connotations only to cover a superficial role adapted to the ambient functions. They are not a cultural representation, but simply formal and superficial items, A good example are Mia and Vincent, who discuss without any real subject and no aim: vanilla coke, steak and trash cinema.

As Tarantino said in an interview: "Pulp Fiction is a spaghetti western rock'n'roll".