Pulp
Fiction

Banksy’s Pulp Fiction first appeared near London’s Old Street underground station in 2002. It was one of his earliest stencil murals. Previously, Banksy preferred working freehand, but an incident hiding from the police made him realise “I had to cut my painting time in half or give up altogether. I was staring straight up at the stencilled plate on the bottom of a fuel tank when I realised I could just copy that style,” he wrote in his book Wall and Piece.

Banksy’s Pulp Fiction depicts an iconic scene from American director Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film of the same name. The movie still shows the lead characters, played by actors Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, pointing firearms at an off-screen character. Banky’s adaptation shows the characters pointing bright yellow bananas.

Perhaps the most obvious other cultural reference is the Monty Python skit, titled “Self-Defence Against Fresh Fruit”, from the comedy troupe’s TV show Monty Python’s Flying Circus as well as their film And Now For Something Completely Different. The scene features a character, played by John Cleese, teaching a class how to defend themselves against a “man armed with a banana”. At the end of the scene, the student posing as the attacker is shot by Cleese using a real gun.

The comparison between the Pulp Fiction movie and the Monty Python banana skit in Banksy’s artwork highlights the ridiculousness of unnecessary violence, and how accustomed we have become to seeing it on television and cinema.

Warhol’s stencil-like silkscreen technique, and his banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico album cover in 1966, could have both been an inspiration for Banksy. But the banana in Pulp Fiction might also have been Banksy’s reference to his own work, as he often uses monkeys to shine a light on human folly.

In 2007, Transport For London painted over Banksy’s original Pulp Fiction mural, citing that graffiti “an atmosphere of social decay”. This is an ironic stance given that Banksy has replaced the original guns with fruit. Despite the artwork being painted over, the image can still be seen through Banksy’s print series of the same name – not to mention the numerous t-shirts and merchandise created by bootleggers.

The mural’s removal triggered a reaction from a local artist, who spray-painted the words “Come Back” in the space where Pulp Fiction had been. Banksy responded to the artist (and perhaps Transport for London too) by painting a second version of Pulp Fiction on top. This time, the image showed Tarantino’s characters wearing banana suits and pointing real guns.

Not long after Pulp Fiction (version 2) appeared, graffiti artist Ozone tagged his name on top of Banksy’s work, along with the words “If it’s better next time I’ll leave it”. Tragically, just two days later, Ozone was killed by a London Underground train. Banksy painted over his Pulp Fiction mural with a tribute to Ozone, showing an angel wearing a bulletproof vest, holding a skull wearing a cap. He said: “When we lost Ozone we lost a fearless graffiti writer and as it turns out a pretty perceptive art critic.”

Banksy released screen prints of Pulp Fiction in 2004, two years after the original mural was created, in 150 signed and 600 unsigned editions, along with 8 artist’s proofs.

The current auction record price for Banksy’s Pulp Fiction is £159,900 (including fees), paid for a signed edition of the print in March 2021. In 2012, the original stencil for Pulp Fiction sold for £10,600.

Banksy made anti-violence statements in his later murals and prints, including Love Is In The Air (flower thrower), in 2003 in Bethlehem, shortly after the West Bank Wall was constructed. The image shows a man poised to throw a grenade but, as with Pulp Fiction, the weapon is replaced with a non-violent object – in this case, a bunch of flowers.