Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

I realize this article is a tongue-in-cheek fan theory. However, it does make me wonder what Tarantino was up to with Pulp Fiction.

The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated. "Finder of lost children" is not an OT motif in general, and certainly not in Ezekiel. Obviously, Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?" Therefore I have to think it was an intentional move on his part, but why?

I think it's a tell that there's a story-under-the-story in Pulp Fiction which lends credence to the other observations. There's obviously something supernatural going on. One of the things I love about the film is that Tarantino doesn't explain anything. He lets mystery stay mystery, as any good story should.

I don't buy the Silmarillion connection. Nor do I think that this movie is a loose retelling of any specific classical tale, ala O Brother Where Art Thou. It's more likely that he doesn't have any specific story in mind, but sprinkled the supernatural element into PF to give it an air of mystery. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

There's nothing supernatural going on, except that the film is a very obvious and self-aware pastiche of, uh, pulp fiction plots. The Ezekiel quote is borrowed from an old martial arts movie, and the characters fully admit they just say it because it sounds cool before killing someone.

I think Tarantino put mysteries into Pulp Fiction for the same reason Scott wrote this post -- the mind likes to make connections where there are none. Scott did this quite deliberately, to entertain us both on the meta-level and on the level. I suspect Tarantino added inexplicable elements so that we as the audience would be entertained by speculation. There's nothing underneath.

If you want to see what happens when the writers lose their nerve and try to explain everything, watch Lost.

> I suspect Tarantino added inexplicable elements so that we as the audience would be entertained by speculation.

Which is exactly what I concluded.

Indeed. I went on a bit too long and buried my point, I'm afraid. What I wanted to draw attention to was the self-awareness of the original post: It's entertaining on both levels because although Scott puts a great deal of sincere effort into drawing out the connections, he's also well aware that there's nothing there.

On the other hand there is X files.

There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms. "The Strain" made an attempt. It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.

Kind of like Mobile Suit Gundam in that sense? Everything matches the rules established and follows logically from it?

>It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.

Zombies, like vampires in the pre-industrial age, are meant to represent the horrors that lurk beyond the limits of human understanding and control. Although I'm sure some author has attempted to "harden" zombies like that, to me the more you try to explain them, the less effective they are as monsters. Because they don't work rationally, they're demons of the Id.

Speaking of monsters from the Id, Forbidden Planet was another excellent piece of SciFi with a consistent logical framework.

(Also: Leslie Nielsen's first starring role).

Also, IMHO, one of the best designed robots ever to appear in cinema[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot

I thought vampires were more about people who feed energetically on other people. Child molesters and the like.

Slow zombies probably don’t pose a huge “where does the energy come from” problem.

in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy

You will enjoy the book "The Girl With All The Gifts"

Spoilers in link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts

People who love this genre hang out at https://www.reddit.com/r/rational They call it "rational fiction".

There is quite some overlap with fan fiction, because people like to "fix" non-rational fiction. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his take on Harry Potter is the prime example. I can also recommend Alexander Wales who also made original fiction.

Probably the oldest related work is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.

Another name mentioned often in this genre is Brandon Sanderson and especially his Mistborn series, but I have not read it personally.

Alexander Wales' rationalist take on Superman, "The Metropolitan Man", is great.

Text: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man

Free audiobook: http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705

I can't thank you enough for this pointer. Just what I had in mind :-)

A slightly better pointer might be the wiki of the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/wiki/index

Zombies which don’t rapidly decay and fail make no rational sense, but that kind of zombie also makes for a lousy zombie tale. Zombies represent anxieties about life, death, disease, being eaten alive, etc.

> There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA

> It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy?

From brains. Duh. ;)

I know someone who once trapped a cockroach in a box and sealed it shut. When the box was opened, years later, the roach was still alive. It had eaten some glue on the inside of the box, and then went into a kind of torpor, simply waiting for either death by dehydration or starvation or an opportunity to escape, whichever came first.

Zombies are like that. They gorge on fatty foods, like brains, bone marrow, and body fat, then go into an induced stasis that outwardly resembles death.

The zombinism vector is undoubtedly an endoparasitic fungus related to Cordyceps. Mycelium spreads throughout the host during the infection, preferentially following existing neural pathways, and flooding the body with antibiotics, to kill native gut bacteria and other possible putrefying factors. The normal digestive functions are destroyed. The regular circulatory system is destroyed. The only elements preserved are sensory organs, muscles, skin, and bones. All other functions are replaced by the fungus. The mycelium, as it followed the existing neurons, actually grows into a replacement brain and nervous system as it destroys the host's nervous system.

The copy isn't perfect, though, and genetically hardcoded structures produce an instinctual desire to seek out and eat more fat. Destroying the head does not actually kill the fungus, but it does remove its ability to create a facsimile of a mammalian brain, by scrambling the template. It could still make the muscles twitch, but would have no means of coordinating them into coherent movements.

I would therefore expect a zombie running low on energy to have almost no fat left, and ascocarps growing out of it all over, like cactus spines. It would probably resemble a spiky mummy. Any rotting appearance would be due to colonies of microorganisms that have evolved resistance to the fungal antibiotics.

So it's not just eating brains, but also not spending as much energy as a human normally does while using the organs evolved to keep a human brain alive.

In 28 days later the zombies all starve to death after six months or so. The hard part is just surviving that long without getting infected. Most zombies in fiction are implied to be supernatural though. So a scientific explanation is unnecessary.

> try to explain everything

Midichlorians

Because he took it from a kung-fu movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYT4JC2dd4

That's awesome. Thanks for that.

It's entirely possible that the Bible in the Tarantinoverse is not the same Bible that we have.

That's an excellent point. In the same way that Tarantinoverse airlines don't bat an eyelid at passengers having a katana as carry-on.

Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?"

This guy did a movie where a Jew kills Hitler. He has shown he has no interest in the question of "What really happened." Re-writing a small bit of the Bible is trivial compared to re-writing the most important event of the 20th Century. His focus is on being interesting and entertaining and he clearly feels that it is fine to put distance between himself and reality to achieve his goals.

> The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated.

The quote comes from a film 20 years earlier, Karate Kiba, not from the OT (despite the attribution in PF).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Kiba#Cultural_reference...

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