Bret Stephens: America is the land of second chances

The idea, or myth, of America as a land of second chances, is an old one. “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again,” goes the oft-covered song from the 1930s. It’s the stuff of pulpit oratory, addiction-recovery programs, even bipartisan legislation for former prisoners.

And movies. From “The Philadelphia Story” to “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Hollywood loves tales of second chances. But none are as subtle, vivid or relentlessly inventive as Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic, “Pulp Fiction.”

I first saw it in college, when everything about it seemed incredibly cool, like the hilarious repartee between the hit men Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) or Christopher Walken’s epic cameo as a former POW delivering a precious watch to the younger version of Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis). But if all that coolness was enough to get me to watch “Pulp Fiction” a half-dozen times in my 20s, it wasn’t until middle age that I understood what it was really about.

Nearly all the main characters in “Pulp Fiction” are given a second chance. Vincent saves Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) from a drug overdose with a shot of adrenaline to her heart. Butch saves the mobster Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) from the clutches of hillbilly rapists. Marsellus returns the favor by allowing Butch and his girlfriend to skip town alive. Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) comes to the rescue of Jules and Vincent after their killing spree goes awry. And Jules spares the lives of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) during the pair’s attempted stickup of a restaurant.

But the key to the film comes after Jules and Vincent narrowly escape being shot by an assailant with terrible aim.

Vincent chalks up their survival to dumb luck. Jules, who is fond of quoting (semifictionalized) passages from the Book of Ezekiel as a way of terrorizing his victims, attributes it to divine intervention.

Later we learn that Jules doesn’t eat pork because pigs are “filthy animals” that sleep in their own excrement. Vincent, by contrast, is a careless pleasure seeker whose bag of heroin nearly kills Mia. He also happens to love pork chops and bacon. It’s another unmistakable reminder of the Old Testament: Being mindful of what one puts in one’s body — of distinguishing the clean from the unclean — is a requirement of living a moral life and, perhaps, of being worthy of salvation.

So it’s hardly a surprise that Vincent — not unlike the pigs he loves to eat — winds up being killed while coming off the toilet. Little surprise, too, that Jules finds his own redemption by reexamining the deeper meaning of the biblical verses he used to recite without thought. His final act in the movie is to let Pumpkin and Honey Bunny go so that he might begin to atone for his misdeeds. As he says, he’s trying “real hard to be the shepherd.”

“Pulp Fiction” is sometimes described as a postmodern movie, and in its out-of-sequence chronology, it is. But it is also the most classic of American stories, recalling the promise of the country from its earliest days: a place where it remains possible for sinners and misfits to wipe the slate clean, change their perspective and their ways and find a way toward a better, happier, even holier state. Tarantino’s genius is to have delivered this quiet sermon amid a wild entertainment.

Editor’s note: New York Times columnists were asked to pick the one piece of culture that, to them, best explains America. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.