My Parents Saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in a Theater and the Paramedics Showed Up

Minor spoiler alert! Today’s piece references certain scenes in Pulp Fiction that those of you who haven’t seen it might not want revealed ahead of time, despite it being a sort of unspoilable film. It’s Pulp Fiction, though, so chances are you knew about this scene anyway through cultural osmosis (or, alas, from the header image). But I didn’t want to start the new year with someone mad at me.

My mother and I travel for the holidays most years. My sister and her family of five live in Maryville, Tennessee, which is about four hours away if you don’t stop. But because Chattanooga traffic is an inevitable fact of Southern life and our bladders aren’t that strong, it’s usually closer to five.

Which means a round-trip visit is perfect for a podcast series or two. So this year, I dug up Brian Raftery’s “Gene and Roger,” an eight-part series chronicling the rise of America’s most famous film critics. I learned a lot about the two men, their history as rival journalists in Chicago, and their approaches to film criticism.

I also learned that they were largely responsible for the financial success of certain films. Like My Dinner With Andre, which was wallowing in theaters until their glowing review. Or One False Move, which was almost released straight to video before Roger praised it after a film festival screening and Gene echoed his praise.¹

And then there was Pulp Fiction, which was hotly anticipated by some after Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs and the early buzz out of Cannes but largely a theatrical curio for mainstream audiences.² Mama can’t remember if it was Siskel and Ebert that first put it on her radar, but as she told me, “There was a lot of talk about it. Everybody was recommending it.” Even in Birmingham, Alabama.

So she and my father made plans to go see it. And it wound up being the most memorable movie theater experience of their lives.

Pulp Fiction, as we know, is a bit of a genre conundrum, but it was being called a dark comedy at the time. “I was unsure of what a dark comedy was,” she said. “I thought it should be interesting. But the movie was not at all what I expected.”

She wasn’t the only one in the theater whose expectations were thwarted by the film, though. Because as soon as Vincent Vega plunged a syringe of adrenaline right into Mia Wallace’s heart during her heroin overdose, a man stood up several rows ahead of them and began yelling for help. He staggered toward the aisle clutching his own heart and kept yelling “Help me! Help me!” But no one helped him. A moment later, he’d made it to the row where my parents were sitting, and he slid down the wall and onto the floor, still shouting for assistance.

“I waited for someone to come, but no one did,” my mother said. “So I stood up and asked if there was a medical professional in the audience.” No one responded, so she rushed out of the theater to find the manager…who was entirely unphased. “I told him someone was having a heart attack, but he didn’t seem alarmed at all,” she said. “He told me it’s happened before. That it’s not a heart attack, it’s a panic attack, and he’ll be fine.”³

Eventually, this upsettingly nonchalant manager agreed to call an ambulance. Mama went back into the theater and told the man that help was on the way, and the paramedics arrived minutes later. They came in through the emergency exit and walked right in front of the screen and up the aisle with the crowd looking on. After examining the man, they carried him out the way they came as the film that sent him into a tailspin was projected onto him.⁴ The projectionist never cut the reel throughout the entire event.

As the credits rolled, the manager did come in and apologize. He issued everyone a voucher for a free screening on their next visit to make up for the…interruption. (I guess he’d been through that routine before.)

I don’t know what happened to that man. Hopefully it was just a panic attack and he didn’t die from Tarantino overload. But I’m glad to know that, out of a half-full theater of captivated viewers, my mother was the one who took action and tried to help him. In the best-case scenario, it was a meta moment she’ll never forget—a darkly comedic touch to an unexpected cinematic flavor.

“Now I understand what dark comedy is,” she said. “And I kinda like it.”

Pulp Fiction is now streaming on Max and DirecTV, and it is available to rent elsewhere.

1. If you want to hear me talking about my (new) love of One False Move, my friend Gareth Jones had me on the Sleep In Cinema radio show last month, and we had a terrific one-on-one conversation in his co-host’s absence. (Missed you, Craig!) The show starts around the 18:00 mark!

2. I only buried the lede by about 200 words this time! My editor John is proud of me.

3. Maybe he was simply a bad theater manager, but I will always wonder about the horrors this man witnessed at his job. Was it just Pulp Fiction that was causing people in the audience to have medical episodes? Were people having panic attacks during Speed?

4. Mama corrected me here to say that the paramedics actually carried the man out through the regular exit. But she also added that, as her first husband used to say, “No story should get worse for the telling.” (And then I ruined it with a footnote.)