The films of Tarantino and Rodriguez exemplify the capacity of recent American noir to function as a mode for religious inquiry. Bypassing the classic noir aesthetic, Tarantino and Rodriguez return to the roman noir, but cross-fertilize it with other forms of 'pulp fiction' and genre film. This paper investigates the formal film structure of the work of Tarantino and Rodriguez in three religious questions, expressed by means of their visual analogues: God, in the 'cosmos of crime'; evil, in the dialectic between 'guns and guitars'; and salvation, in the either/or of wisdom and compassion. The critical success of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992) underscores a growing academic and popular interest in American noir. Their films also highlight an aspect of American noir which has gone neglected for too long: its capacity as a mode of religious inquiry. This ability is suggested by the intertitle with which Tarantino begins Pulp Fiction, a partial definition of 'pulp' from the American Heritage Dictionary: '1. n. A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter. 2. A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.' The human bridge between the two definitions, which embodies the narrative substance of the film, is found at the end of the dictionary entry but not given on screen: 'pulp' is from the Latin pulpa, or 'solid flesh'. Thus, as both a genre and a specific film, we might define 'pulp fiction' as sensational and unsavory stories of a lurid nature, that is, both physically shocking and spiritually terrifying. But to understand the religious capacities of the films of Tarantino and Rodriguez, we must begin with the aesthetic conventions by which those meanings are carried. As a literary genre, noir has its roots in the crime magazines of the 1920s and '3 os and their paperback successors of the '40s and '50s.1 It was the French who first noticed certain aesthetic motifs which, taken together, characterized what they began to call the roman noir, or 'black novel', typified by the work of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. As a film genre, classic noir is indebted to the roman noir for its © Oxford University Press 1998 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.148 on Sun, 11 Sep 2016 04:07:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms