Shot-By-Shot Analysis: Silver Linings Playbook and Pulp Fiction

Part One: Chosen Scenes and Analysis Framework

For the two scenes I analyze, I present one scene from each of the two films, Silver Linings Playbook and Pulp Fiction. They both demonstrate characters participating in a similarly designed scene: two characters—Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), in Silver Linings Playbook, and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), with the waitress (Laura Lovelace), in Pulp Fiction—sitting across from each other at a diner, familiarizing themselves with the personal details of one another, as well as better understanding each other’s own personal philosophies.


In the first film, Silver Linings Playbook, the majority of the scene is dedicated to Tiffany and Pat exploring her sexual history with her colleagues at her previous job. Despite his attempts to stop, Pat continues to probe her to expose more information about the style and circumstances of her sexual encounters with them, only at the end indulging her in his haunting memory, the forever-repeating image of his wife having sexual intercourse with another man in the shower. In Pulp Fiction, on the other hand, the primary focus of their conversation at the diner is of the various advantages and disadvantages of robbing certain institutions, including banks, liquor stores, and even the very diner in which they finish their meal. Pumpkin, who appears to take on the role as the de facto head of their two-person thievery operation, enumerates to Honey Bunny his impressions of the east Asian store owners who wouldn’t be able to understand him, were he to rob their stores at gunpoint; the old Jewish owners who would murder him before he even finds a chance to scavenge cash from the registers; and the decades-old scenario of a man who robs a bank solely with a telephone, by posing a hypothetical—and likely untrue—threat to a third-party victim.

Each of the two-minute segments from which I draw throughout this analysis may be found at the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7AMqikqPWQ3Zi0taW9PNjh6UTQ?usp=sharing.

In this section, I create two tables, one for each scene, with columns segregated by Shot Number, Timestamp, Character Portrayed, Speaker, and Duration. Shot Number differentiates each shot amid the many of each sequence; Timestamp labels when in each sequence the shot begins; Character Portrayed demonstrates the character(s) in the frame; Speaker denotes the voice of the person speaking; and Duration lists how long each shot lasts, in real time. While the justifications for including each Shot Number and Timestamp are all for the ease of analysis and fast understanding of the layout of the scene, the rest are each various codes, built for analysis in their own right. The first, Character Portrayed, is critical, because it shows the character from which the audience gleans a reaction, or lack thereof. We look to the characters shown in the frame for implicit and explicit visual information about their emotions, understanding, interest, and other elements of body language. The Speaker, with a similar role, lets us in on who controls that moment of the conversation, providing the fuel for the conversation to continue, or the breaks for it to halt, and the verbal information into their own thought-processes that give us explicit insights into his or her own mind, as well as how that character portrays his or her modus operandi to the other characters in the scene. The Duration of the shot, multi-faceted in its purpose, as well, lets us in on the intensity of the moment, by either switching between different viewpoints quickly to gauge the entirety of the set all at once, or by maintaining the same shot, out of pure interest in a single element of the scene. Critical to an analysis of each element of this code is the reality that they are most powerful when in combination with the rest: Understanding the role of the speaker is much likelier to yield positive results when that voice is taken within the context of whom the camera shows us, and how long it remains on that single image.

Table One: Pat and Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook

Shot Number	Timestamp	Character Portrayed	Speaker	Duration
1	0:00	Pat	Tiffany	4 seconds
2	0:04	Tiffany	Tiffany, Pat, Tiffany	14 seconds
3	0:18	Pat	Pat	2 seconds
4	0:20	Tiffany	Tiffany	4 seconds
5	0:24	Pat	Pat, Tiffany, Pat, Tiffany, Pat	5 seconds
6	0:29	Tiffany	Tiffany, Pat	3 seconds
7	0:32	Pat	Pat, Tiffany, Pat	5 seconds
8	0:37	Tiffany		2 seconds
9	0:39	Pat (sim…)	Pat (sim…)	3 seconds
10	0:41	T	TPTPT	8 seconds
11	0:49	P	P	2 seconds
12	0:51	T	PT	10 seconds
13	1:01	P	P	5 seconds
14	1:06	T	TPT	3 seconds
15	1:09	P	P	7 seconds
16	1:16	T	T	2 seconds
17	1:18	P	P	2 seconds
18	1:20	T	T	2 seconds
19	1:22	P	T	3 seconds
20	1:25	T	T	18 seconds
21	1:43	P	PTP	16 seconds

Example GIF: Shots 16-18

In this short sequence of shots from Silver Linings Playbook, the camera begins with a close-up focus on Tiffany’s face, taken from the perspective of just behind Pat’s right shoulder. After she states simply, “I don’t mind it,” when referring to their ongoing conversation about her sexual history, the camera immediately cuts to Pat’s shocked visage, seen from behind Tiffany’s left shoulder. Pat, after having been socialized by his ex-wife’s disgust at his sexual banter to think of his sexual curiosities as symptomatic of perversion, is bamboozled, and after widening his eyes, he asks her quietly for confirmation: “You don’t, do you?” After he finishes speaking, the camera once again cuts to Tiffany, who, as depressive as she is throughout the scene, is rather matter-of-fact in uttering, “No.”

Table Two: Pumpkin, Honey Bunny, and Waitress in Pulp Fiction

Shot Number	Time Stamp	Character Portrayed	Speaker	Duration
1	0:00	Pumpkin, Honey Bunny	Pumpkin	14 seconds
2	0:14	Honey Bunny	Pumpkin	2 seconds
3	0:16	Pumpkin	Pumpkin	9 seconds
4	0:25	Honey Bunny	Honey Bunny, Pumpkin	1 second
5	0:26	Pumpkin, Honey Bunny	Pumpkin, Honey Bunny, Pumpkin, Honey Bunny	19 seconds
6	0:45	Honey Bunny	Honey Bunny	2 second
8	0:47	Pumpkin	Pumpkin	3 seconds
9	0:50	Honey Bunny (sim…)	Honey Bunny (sim…)	2 seconds
10	0:52	P	P	3 seconds
11	0:55	P,Hb	P	12 seconds
12	1:07	Hb	Hb,P	3 seconds
13	1:10	P	P	9 seconds
14	1:19	Hb	P	2 seconds
15	1:21	P	P	3 seconds
16	1:24	P,Hb	P,Hb,P,Hb	7 seconds
17	1:31	Pumpkin, Honey Bunny, Waitress	Pumpkin, Waitress, Honey Bunny	16 seconds
18	1:47	Hb	Hb	2 seconds
19	1:49	P	P	6 seconds
20	1:55	Hb	P	3 seconds
21	1:58	P	P	3 seconds

Example GIF: Shots 13-15

In this series of three shots from Pulp Fiction, the camera begins by inching closer and closer to Pumpkin from just a tad to the right of the table, as he continues to lecture Honey Bunny about the negatives associated with robbing a Jewish-owned liquor store. The shot features him, splayed out on his seat in the diner, one arm along the top of his seat and the other resting on the table, as a help for adding emphasis to his words. In the middle of the hypothetical, the camera cuts to a close-up of Honey Bunny’s head, which rests within her arms on the table, as she listens to her partner’s ideas, before she slowly raises her head, all with a burgeoning smile. Upon her gained attention to his words, the camera cuts back to Pumpkin, in the midst of his contention, exclaiming about the “fucking Magnum in [Grampa Irving’s] hand,” with the camera allowing him to take up a minimally enlarged amount of space within the frame.

Part Two: Analysing the Three Cinematic Codes

In this section, I take the scenes I charted and analysed in the previous section, and I attempt to propose a response to the simple-yet-profound question of how each code, individually and in symbiosis with the rest, act uniquely and en ensemble to provide the work with a greater sense of meaning, transcendent of the film itself. This proposition with which I grapple is ultimately a question of life beyond art: How do these two filmmakers—David O. Russell of Silver Linings Playbook and Quentin Tarantino of Pulp Fiction—leverage elements of the globally pervasive cinematic language in their own instillations of emotions and empathy, all through the seemingly conventional mechanism that is mainstream cinema?

Although I previously explained, at the beginning of the first section, some of the many benefits of choosing the three codes by which I segregated and labeled each of these scenes, it is equally important to explain their roles in the structure of the scenes themselves—a critical first step before jumping onto a discussion of their implicit meanings. In the sequence from Silver Linings Playbook, the characters are never shown together in the same frame, if we ignore the presence of one character’s shoulder, or the back of his or her head, which mainly provide physical reference for the audience to locate a sense of perspective, anyway. This strategy presents a back-and-forth quality within the film: We, as the audience, look from one character to the next, back to the first, and over to the next, without any stop to gander at the surroundings. One might take this for granted, that in a conversation between two people, the camera only presents the audience with views of the two people themselves, but it is a helpful reminder of the many ways that cinema clearly diverges from the mundane normalities of reality. Whereas, in a real conversation in a casual, cheap diner on October 31, in Upper Darby, PA, one might daydream over the course of a meal, mentally absenting the conversation to gaze at the hustle and bustle of the waitstaff, the various costumes the patrons of the restaurant must be donning, and the varieties of cuisine served at each table, much unlike the cereal and tea at Pat and Tiffany’s, in this scene, the camera focuses the audience into a strict sense of mindfulness: The conversation is the only element of the scene worth paying any attention to. All pauses are observed, and all sharp breaths and long sighs are accounted for. Without undergoing too great of a tangential analysis, this task of featuring each character individually, back-and-forth, surpasses even greater difficulties, when under the consideration of the reality that the audience can hear the talk of the families and couples at the restaurant and of their waitstaff and cooking staff, the atmospheric music playing from old-aged speakers, and the many other distracting occurrences of the background. And yet, the camera forces us to pay sole attention to what we are shown, to the storytelling and probing and reality-shifting conversational explorations between the two characters.

The role of the speaker in the sequence from Silver Linings Playbook also brings forth powerful ramifications for the film, in terms of defining who presently carries the conversational weight, and allowing the audience to consider the live reactions of the characters as they give and receive bits of personal information. One may look to the fifth shot, for instance, taking place from 0:24 until 0:29 in the scene, for which a GIF would simply not do justice, given the specific power of hearing who utters their lines as the shot progresses, as an example of back-and-forth conversation between Pat and Tiffany, when we only see Pat’s face. He begins by saying, “We don’t need to talk about it,” after which she thanks him. Without hesitation, he asks, “How many were there?” And, she answers: “Eleven,” to which he can only respond with “Wow.” At this moment, we take Tiffany’s perspective, as she watches him interrogate her about the specifics of her sexual escapades in the workplace. This allows us to both empathize more with Tiffany, as we experience the brunt of his constant probing and nearly emotionless responses—if only childishly sexually excited by the supposed craziness of such a relatively high number of sexual partners—as well as giving us a better insight into Pat’s own thought process, as we witness him process such unusual and uncommon information. With this shot, we witness the intense realities of the ties between listening and watching, those that showcase the various genuine emotions and insights we perceive through the camera’s focus on a particular character and his or her own representation of him or herself, as well as our own ears’ ability to dissect engagement and enthusiasm from such simple discourse, all with our experiential intuition that these occurrences are dramatically uncommon, and thus, all the more meaningful, for a first date—despite Pat’s insistence that their relationship is strictly platonic—for a table at a family-oriented diner—at which discussions of sexuality are generally considered profane, at best—and for a Halloween evening—which typically, via explosions of interpersonal expression, in the form of costumes, takes over the whole building, let alone the average conversation. Their insistence on perpetuating such a contentious, emotionally and sexually exciting, and, frankly, spicy conversation is all the more evidence of the reality that, as they look at each other and listen to each other’s words, their interest in one another remains not merely on a level of a basic friendship, but of an intense search for companionship, related through mutual understanding and excitement over shared and unshared experiences between the two characters.

Compared to the series of shots from Silver Linings Playbook that resembles more of an interrogation of Tiffany about her sexual experiences, this sequence from Pulp Fiction presents much more like a one-on-one lecture on crime philosophy. Throughout the scene, Pumpkin talks consistently, explaining his contentions about the various locations the two of them could rob, while Honey Bunny almost exclusively asks follow-up questions when the stated points seem unclear to her. This manifests itself in a sequence of shots that feature the full table, showing Pumpkin and Honey Bunny watching each other, as they converse, as well as individual shots of each member of the couple, taken from behind the other side of the table, almost entirely with the audio of Pumpkin’s pontifications—and the muffled chatter, of course, of the other patrons of the diner, that ensures us that other characters, aside from the two at the table and the waitress who helps them, really do exist in the present scene, even if they are unshown. This is both a statement of the cinéaste’s own craftsmanship, as well as of some of the many societal constraints—and perhaps Tarantino’s own implicit bigotry—placed upon the film and its creation. Firstly, the nearly endless chatter from Pumpkin demonstrates the almost surprising ease with which an audience, when presented with someone willing to speak and theorize, becomes immersed in the hypotheticals of the story. This is true for the diegetic audience, Honey Bunny, who even rests her head in her arms on the table, to experience more physical comfort as she takes in his words, as well as the audience of the film itself, which quietly leans back in comfort, transported into an unknown world of a thievery supported by romance. However, the insistence of Pumpkin to explain his perspective of thievery, without allotting Honey Bunny the conversational time for anything other than small notes of confirmation and quick structural questions, keys into the greater problematic nature of the implicit bigotry that leads to a film’s opening scene featuring a man who explains to his supposedly equal but likely subservient female partner that his modus operandi is more efficient and effective than anything she could have imagined alone. He relies upon unique case studies and far-fetched examples to clarify, and yet not foreshadow, his plan to rob the very diner in which they sit, so that he may hold the conversational power, measured in relative length of time speaking, volume, and even physical expressiveness while speaking, throughout the scene. The need for such a dominant man to exist in the first relationship shown on screen (as well as many others throughout the film, to give grander context) is likely endemic of the misguided wants of the mainstream society that would have accepted this film—Americans in late 1994—and, perhaps, of Tarantino himself, who ultimately held creative control over the film and the characters who compose it. Had he felt strongly enough against “mansplaining,” he likely wouldn’t have written it so predominantly into his own script, in the first place. The duration of the shots in this series continue to support this contention, as the 121-second sequence devotes 36 seconds to exclusively regarding Pumpkin, more than twice the measly 17 seconds given to his counterpart, Honey Bunny. Surely, there are many lessons to glean from this sequence, such as those from watching each character’s set of emotions and capacity for interpersonal empathy, very much on par with my analysis of the sequence from Silver Linings Playbook. And yet, using these codes as a framework to provide proof of the harmful and oppressive gender dynamics in this scene that may seem implicit to the average audience—composed of people without the knowledge to understand the explicit sexism told in the cinematic language with which they may be unfamiliar—very much takes priority in such a brief analysis of only a handful of lines between these critical characters. A focus on the duration of each shot, as well as the person speaking and the one actually shown within the frame, gives way to telltale signs of sexism and bigotry within the film that, plainly, should not be ignored.

Together, these two scenes, specifically when considered in the realms of the three codes with which I have analyzed them—Character Portrayed, Speaker, and Duration—present daring comments on the utility and power of film, as a medium, itself. Despite their many differences in conversational content and relational understanding, the two scenes illuminate audiences to the powers and responsibilities rooted in watching and listening, in fostering empathy and emotions, and in finding one’s own priorities amid engaging and unique characters. Just as Pat becomes so emotionally, mentally, and sexually involved in Tiffany’s exploration of her own escapades, so too do audiences engulf themselves in the many histories, similar and different to their own, of the characters and scenes they witness. And, as Honey Bunny becomes nearly mystified with Pumpkin’s philosophies of discovering the most fruitful locations from which to steal the greatest profits with the lowest risk, so too do audiences become lost in the hypotheticals of the new worlds that personalize a sin they may have never imagined themselves actually pursuing in real life. To write simply, diner conversations may be much more similar than one might imagine to film, as a medium, as they both inculcate an interactive sense of spectacle, by which we nearly force ourselves to engulf ourselves in the stories to which we are exposed, as scintillating, questionable, or oppressive as they may be.

These two sequences add tremendous insight into the age-old question of the role of spectacle, altogether. They present examples of interactive media, in which one may interact with his or her source of seemingly endless information, all within the confines of a larger medium itself. Indeed, they even promote a sense of theatricality throughout their entire works, by reminding audiences of their status as onlookers to spectacle, and forcing us to grapple with the meaning and power of endless listening and watching, without even a glance away from the scene, just as the camera in each scene fails to leave the framework of the table itself. Obviously, the scenes from which these sequences are extracted are longer and more diverse, in terms of visuality, character representation, and conversational priorities. Nevertheless, these sequences allow unmatched insights into the mysterious realm of cinematic mindfulness: When the audience must exclusively focus on the characters at hand and their exact words, breaths, eye glances, and other physical reactions, it must thereby pay each character a potentially previously unknown respect, and, in the process, glean an element of understanding and appreciation—if not also annoyance and frustration—for every character, every moment, and every occurrence displayed in the film. Thus, the once-imagined un-empathizable “cinema of attractions,” as Tom Gunning dubbed it, given its utility of theatricality and unending focus, ultimately becomes a cinema of respect and mindfulness—all before our very own eyes and ears.