In the cinema, postmodernism is also a movement, one, which wants to break the old and strong tradition and the rich classical values of the theoretical and rational items. It's difficult to distinguish the postmodern from the modern cinema: we could affirm that all of the last century's cinematography productions appear to be postmodern and we could now return to our analysis of the Adorno and Horkheimer's fight between high culture and low culture.

A good point of start is the Lyotard's distinction between discourse and figure in his book "L'a-cinéma": the French author discusses that on one hand there is a "speaking cinema", which is the logical, rationalist and full of meaning; and on the other hand there is the "figural cinema", which has shape but not substance, a being but not a function. While Barthes discovered the non-representable in the heart of the presentation, Lyotard found it in the presentation, which in a lot of ways overset the apparently established laws.

All that is represented: the mass culture, the values' downfall, the reality fragmentation, and sometimes the extreme and hard reality, the rupture of the distinction between culture and society, the real violence, the abandon of individualism and the lack or the totally new birth of the religious items sets up the baggage of the postmodern cinema.

There is not an exact temporal location in which there exists the birth of the new trend, given that already in Kubrik's A Clockwork Orange (1971), in Bertolucci's La strategia del ragno (The strategy of the spider, 1970) or in Fellini's Satyricon (1969) we can see the rupture, which goes against the traditional ways of cultural cinema. So, the cinema becomes the most proper medium to express the importance of the image like a mirror to the reality.

The postmodern movies present wry and difficult situations, fragmented and reduced to the extreme, in which the actors confront themselves with the real world and with the existential problems, but without every type of linear logic. The postmodern movies are the presentation of the everyday life or of a shallow reality without deep meaning; sometimes the same cinema shows us new values, new beliefs and religions, which are far away the dominant system, as in the Bernardo Bertolucci and Steven Spielberg's movies. The postmodern, above all in films like Spike Lee's Clockers (1995) or Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo (1995), does not want to keep the status quo, which for many centuries was the target of a lot of scholars, does not lead back its reality to rationality or to a first parmenidean being and the totality can be disarray and violence, but is pure reality, not reproduction.

In Pulp Fiction we find all these postmodern aspects. The dialogue about food and mass media products shows the fall of the traditional value and of an old culture; the absurdity of the Vincent and Jules's violence seems to take the place of the legal justice; the superficial relationship among the protagonists, as Mia and Jules seems to stress on the new social parameters. As in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1995) or in Kassovitz's La Haine (1995), in the Tarantino's movie the violence is the primary subject and the way to present is paradoxical and it often gets comic. The postmodern character arises from this violence inside the social system and fully inserted in the reality as well as a normal element of everyone's life. There is no reason why to show only the structure of a hegemonic project, which propose its perfect and clear society without any problems.

In the narrative structure Pulp Fiction has a main characteristic of the postmodern theory: the lack of linearity. Tarantino himself stressed that the use of a word processor gave him more elasticity in the writing of the screenplay, adding to the fragmentation of the novel, already made for example in Altaman's America today, the use of a complex series of flashback and of flash-forward. In this way the filmmaker realize his original idea of a "novel on the screen", linking together three stories. Telling the plot of this movie, it can be an hard task given that the narrative time skip continuously and just at the end it is possible to reconstruct the chronology of the view.

Comedy, thriller, dramatic: which genre we can consider Pulp Fiction of? There are no good answer given that this movie is not created for the audience, who use to follow a linear sequence of frame in a movie. The movie does not have a framework and is not classifiable in a genre because of the Tarantino's aim to remain out of the classical trend and to stress excessively every aspects of today's American society, dramatic and tragic, but in the same time comic and ironic. So, we really don't know if we have to cry or laugh, when Jules kills and prays, when Vince works hard to save the Mia's life, or when Butch risks being killed to go back home for a watch.

The Pulp Fiction movie shows a strong preponderance of the narrative text on the moral subject. Tarantino's heroes do not have credibility, are like the comic personage, stylized and psychologically empty, despite that they are represented through a hyper-reality effect; they have not sociological connotation. They are just some executors without the capacities to place themselves in the system. Tarantino does not want to launch a message, as the movie is just the representation of the cultural reality and of its icons, through the excess.

The last characteristic of postmodernity is the "pastiche"concept: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of the peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic..." (Fredric Jameson, 1983)

According to this postmodern concept: in the Pulp Ficiton movie, as in Lucas's American Graffiti (1983), there are many quotes and allusions from and to famous movies and from mass media culture. For example, the dance in the Jack Rabbit Slim's between Mia and Vince reminds us of the Holliwoodian myth of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Another example can be from, during Butch's escape on the motorcycle, the music is taken ironically from a famous television series named "The Outer Limits".