Pulp Music

I'm posting the opening credits to Quentin Tarantion's Pulp Fiction for two reasons. First, because it very clearly demonstrates how a film can take a pre-existing piece of music (or two pieces, in this case) and culturally reassign them so that forever after, we relate that music to the visual experience. And second, because it always impressed me how perfectly the simple placement of these two songs sets the tone for the entire movie, in particular for our two leads--John Travolta and Samuel Jackson. These are two dangerous-sounding songs that are threatening in their own unique ways. And even the simple fact that during one continuous opening credit sequence we have a cut between two very different songs sets up the expectation that the film we're about to see will have a non-traditional format, i.e. edited in a non-linear fashion, shuffling back-and-forth through points in time.