Pulp Fiction is a 1994 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on stories by him and Roger Avary. It stars John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, with Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stolz, Rosanna Arquette, Maria de Medeiros, and Christopher Walken.
Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Jackson) and Actress (Thurman), and Best Film Editing (Sally Henke). It won Best Original Screenplay.
The film is widely considered Tarantino’s magnum opus, and as a cultural watershed, it has influenced many other films and media in terms of style. Pulp Fiction is on many critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time.
Here is a link to quotes from the film.
The main themes of the film are sin and death (as in, “The wages of sin is death“), as well as redemption, or at least attempts at it.
There is a vague sense of these themes already as Pumpkin (Roth) is telling Honey Bunny (Plummer) that he doesn’t want to rob liquor stores anymore because it’s too dangerous: either the couple will have to shoot the owners of the stores, or the owners, like “Grandpa Irving…with a fuckin’ Magnum in his hand,” will shoot them. Sin leads to death. Pumpkin attempts redemption, in a way, by not wanting to rob liquor stores anymore, but fails in that attempt by saying he wants to rob the restaurant he and Honey Bunny are dining in.
Failure at redemption in this film is best summed up in something Manohla Dargis says at the end of the Foreword to the script for Pulp Fiction: ‘When Jules [Winnfield–Jackson], Tarantino’s killer who witnesses divine intervention, says, “I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd,” it’s a miracle that he’s trying at all.’ (Tarantino, p. 4)
The plethora of pop culture references in Pulp Fiction–from its soundtrack, starting with “Misirilou” and “Jungle Boogie,” and continuing with references to McDonald’s burgers and TV show pilots, to all of the many movie allusions–is a reflection of what could be called the sin of idolatry, the worship, as it were, of pop music and movie stars, as well as commodity fetishism. We are all mesmerized by the production of images, sounds, and commodities, oblivious to the effort of workers in making these things all a reality.
Before I continue with the conversation between Jules and Vincent Vega (Travolta) as they approach the apartment where they’ll kill Brett (played by Frank Whaley), Roger “Flock of Seagulls” (played by Burr Steers), et al, I want to discuss my interpretation of who Marsellus Wallace (Rhames) represents. I see the crime boss as God, but in more of a Demiurge, Old Testament sense, than a Christian one.
The stealing of the briefcase by Brett et al is a sin not in the mundane sense of, say, stealing diamonds, but more as a form of blasphemy. Some in the mid-1990s believed that Wallace’s soul was in the briefcase, and I tend to go with that. The briefcase thus is in a way rather like the Ark of the Covenant, its contents representative and associative of God’s presence. The Ark of the Covenant was kept in the Holy of Holies, by the way, which was the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle, where God’s presence appeared.
With these interpretations in mind, we can now begin to understand what’s going on when Jules is telling Vincent why Marsellus had Antwan Rockamora, or “Tony Rocky Horror,” thrown out of a window for having apparently given a foot massage to Marsellus’ wife, Mia (Thurman). According to Vincent, such physical familiarity with the crime boss’s wife is in “the same ballpark” as having performed cunnilingus on her, or, to use Jules’s most apt choice of words, “stickin’ your tongue in her holiest of holies.”
Both offences, Brett’s and Antwan’s, are comparable to the desecration of a holy place, a kind of blasphemy. If Marsellus is God, Mia (a possible pun on Maria) is a kind of ‘Mother of God,’ as it were. Getting too physically familiar with her, given that she, as his wife, is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, is tantamount to getting too physically familiar with him. Fornicating with her is thus comparable to raping him. I’m reminded of the 75th of Martin Luther‘s Ninety-Five Theses: “To consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve a man even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness.” (Lull, page 28)
The juxtaposition of Brett’s and Antwan’s sins is significant, one dealt with immediately after the other. Mia later telling Vincent in Jackrabbit Slim’s that Antwan had only shaken her hand, and that only he and Marsellus knew why the latter had the former thrown out of a window could be the mere denials of an adulteress; and a “foot massage” could be a euphemism for, if you’ll indulge me, foutre, since a direct discussion of adulterous sex with Mia the ‘Queen of Heaven‘ would be a blasphemous taboo.
Remember how Jules compares Brett’s theft of the briefcase, a stealing of Marcellus’ soul, to having “tried to fuck ‘im and Marcellus Wallace don’t like to be fucked by anybody except Missus Wallace” (remember this in light of the later incident with Zed [played by Peter Greene]). Immediately after Jules says this, we get the Ezekiel quote, linking these incidents with God and sin all the more.
Before I go into the Bible quote, though, I’d like to discuss the significance of Jules asking Brett what Marsellus Wallace looks like. Note that there is no image or form for the Jewish or Islamic God, and to give God an image or form would thus be blasphemy. Small wonder Brett is unable to answer Jules’s question until the threat of being shot dead is too urgent to leave unanswered. All Brett can say is “What?”
If you were to look up Ezekiel 25:17, you would find only this: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The rest of what Jules says–inspired by the words of an offscreen narrator at the beginning of an old Sonny Chiba martial arts film, Karate Kiba (The Bodyguard, 1976)–is nonetheless central to Pulp Fiction‘s themes of sin and death. Associating these words with the Bible, and therefore with God as represented by Marsellus, is thus fitting.
The wages of sin is death, Brett. Having read the Bible, you should know that. You may have gone into this thing with “the best intentions,” but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Antwan was luckier: he only got a speech impediment. Still, all this fear surrounding the offending of Marsellus is enough to get Vincent, soon to take Mia out on a date while her husband’s away, very nervous.
Now, I’ve said that Marsellus represents God, but hardly in the Christian sense of personifying absolute good. After all, that briefcase’s combination is 666. As I said above, Marsellus is more like the Old Testament Demiurge, creator of the physical world (remember, Marsellus could give Jimmie [played by Tarantino himself] “a whole bedroom set” to replace the linen being sacrificed to help cover up Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin [played by Phil LaMarr), associated by many Gnostics with Satan.
In other posts–including two analyses I did of Tarantino films–I’ve written of mafia men, criminal businessmen, as being symbolic of capitalists, exploitative owners of businesses. Marsellus owns a large topless bar called Sally LeRoy’s. Religion has routinely been used by the ruling class to keep the masses in check. Many consider God to be protective of capitalism against ‘Godless’ communism. Marsellus is God, and he’s a capitalist.
An example of Marsellus’ exploitative nature is seen when he fixes a fight, paying boxer Butch Coolidge (Willis) to go down in the fifth round of an upcoming fight. A significant moment in Marsellus’ speech to Butch, meant to motivate the boxer to keep his end of the deal and really lose the fight, and thus to be known thereafter as a palooka, is when he says, “Fuck pride!” Pride is a deadly sin not only in the Christian tradition; Greek myth is full of stories of the fall of hubris.
I’m guessing that when Vincent calls Butch a palooka at the bar, the latter feels “a slight sting…pride,” which not only pushes him to win the fight, infuriating Marsellus, but also to shoot Vincent when he emerges from the bathroom.
After this, and just before his “date” with Mia, Vincent goes to buy some heroin off of Lance (Stolz). When we see Vincent shooting up, then driving high as a kite to the Wallace house to pick her up, we see what could be deemed a reversal of Marx’s old dictum: “Opium [or, in this case, heroin] is the religion of the people.” Glory to God in the…highest. When he goes into the house, we hear Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man,” reinforcing the film’s association with religious matters. Mia will “be out within three shakes of a lamb‘s tail.” (In the film, she says, “two,” but in the script, she says “three” [Tarantino, page 44].) When Marsellus’ Queen of Heaven is ready to go, we get to join in on Tarantino’s fetishization of her bare feet.
Their date in Jackrabbit Slim’s, a restaurant that pays homage to 1950s pop culture, demonstrates how capitalism exploits our idolatry of celebrities, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll. Note how an admittedly delicious milkshake in the restaurant costs five dollars. Commodities sold here are so fetishized, they’re named after famous directors, TV hosts, comedy duos, or radio/TV sitcom characters: for example, you could order a “Douglas Sirk steak,” a “Durwood Kirby burger,” a “Martin and Lewis shake” (vanilla), or an “Amos and Andy shake” (chocolate).
Waiters and waitresses do cosplays, if you will, of movie or rock ‘n’ roll stars: Vincent’s and Mia’s waiter is Buddy Holly (played by Steve Buscemi), and another one is dressed like James Dean; waitresses include Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, and…Jayne Mansfield must have the night off. Performers impersonate Ed Sullivan, Ricky Nelson, etc. Of course, getting Travolta to dance is a pop culture reference in itself, even though Vincent’s iconic dance scene with Mia was written before Travolta got the role.
When Vincent and Mia return to her home, her wearing his overcoat, he’s feeling nervous about the temptation to fuck his boss’s wife. She wants drinks and music, which in a way could remind us of Mrs. Robinson’s attempt to seduce Benjamin Braddock in her home. Mia plays a cover of Neil Diamond‘s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” performed by Urge Overkill. The becoming a woman soon sounds a lot like Benjamin becoming a man soon, thanks to Mrs. Robinson. This is Vincent. He’s a little worried about his future.
He goes to the bathroom, the first of three times we see him do so in the film. Whenever he leaves the bathroom, there’s the danger of death. Since the wages of sin is death, using the bathroom–to take a shower, as we’ll see Butch do later, or to clean oneself out (to remove the filth and sin inside you) with the toilet, as Vincent does, and as Jules and Honey Bunny say they’ve got to do–is symbolic of an attempt at redemption, a cleansing of oneself of sin. As clean as you may be when you come out of the bathroom, though, you know you’ll have to return to the water of that Ganges.
Vincent does a monologue in the bathroom to help himself resist the temptation of seducing the drunk and stoned Mia, reminding himself that Marsellus’ wanting him to take her out while he’s away is a test of Vincent’s loyalty to his boss, just as God tested such men as Abraham. In sticking to his commitment not to take advantage of Mia, Vincent thinks he’s leaving the bathroom cleansed of sinful thoughts, redeemed, and safe from death…
…except that Mia, thinking the bag of heroin in his coat pocket is cocaine, has shorted a line of it, is ODing on it, and is dying.
Now he has to redeem himself again by saving her life, so he rushes her to Lance’s house for an adrenalin shot. After all, isn’t her taking his drugs up her nose, making her a “fucked up bitch,” a lot like her taking his d… up her…, as Antwan may very well have done? Ironically, a phallic needle stabbed into her breastplate, jizzing adrenaline into her heart, saves her. Her shock from coming out of it, seeing that needle in her chest, seems comparable to that of the Mother of God if she were violated. Girl, you just became a woman.
The next sequence shows Butch as a child watching a cartoon on TV. It’s one of those low-budget productions, using Synchro-Vox technology, superimposing talking lips on a static cartoon drawing–Clutch Cargo.
Staring in a daze, transfixed before a TV, being lulled into its illusion and suspending disbelief: all of these are so symbolic of the idolater adoring his image, his fetish, imagining there’s the spirit of a god inhabiting the carved piece of wood or metallic statue. And yet the poor quality of Clutch Cargo‘s limited animation is so obviously fake. The impressionable boy is totally immersed in the story, all the same.
Some critics think that Pulp Fiction‘s allusions to TV are more central to the film than its references to other movies or to popular music. Apart from Clutch Cargo, consider the many TV references in the film: Speed Racer, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, and of course, Mia’s fictional TV pilot, Fox Force Five.
All of this TV idolatry reinforces the theme of sin in Pulp Fiction, a movie title inspired by old magazines “containing lurid subject matter.” Butch is told by his mother to turn off the TV and listen to Captain Koons (Walken) tell the story of all the trials and difficulties of getting a watch from Butch’s great-grandfather to his grandfather, then to his father, who gave it to Koons in a POW camp in Hanoi where the two had to hide it in their rectums to prevent it from being confiscated by the Vietnamese, and finally Koons is giving it to little Butch. These men are now the boy’s new heroes, new idols replacing those on the TV for his pagan adoration. Accordingly, the boy watches the captain with as rapt a look on his face, while Koons tells his story, as little Butch must have had while watching the cartoon on TV.
The childhood memory of Koons giving him the watch seems to have been a dream, for immediately after it, we see present-day Butch wake up from it in a shock, as if it were a terrible nightmare. The dream ought to have been disturbing for him, since he’s been reminded of the heroic efforts of the men who passed on the watch to him, while he’s about to let himself be made into a mere palooka.
The disappointment he feels like he’ll be to the men in his family looking down on him from heaven feels like too much for him, so he feels that “slight sting…pride.” The outcome of the boxing match he’s supposed to lose illustrates just how deadly a sin pride can be, for not only does Butch not lose the fight–he beats the other boxer so badly that he actually kills the man.
He rushes away in a taxicab in such a hurry that his boxing gloves are still on. His driver, a pretty Colombian woman named Esmerelda Villalobos (played by Angela Jones), has listened to the outcome of the fight on the radio, and she’s fascinated to have met a man who’s actually killed someone with his fists. Sin and death so permeate this film, not only do we have a plethora of murders, profanity (including outright pornographic dialogue), racial slurs (i.e., Tarantino’s by-now-typical fetishizing of the n-word), theft, idolatry of pop culture, etc., but we also even have admirers of crime.
As far as attempts at redemption are concerned, or at least attempts at repentance, when Butch learns from his driver that brutal beating of his opponent in the ring actually killed him, all he can muster is, “Sorry ’bout that, Floyd.” Then, when she asks him how he feels about having killed the man, he says he doesn’t feel at all bad about it. So much for repentance. “If saying ‘sorry’ ever meant anything, what are the police for?” as my wife would say in Chinese.
Hiding away with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Medeiros), Butch hears her talking about how she wishes she had a pot belly (translation: she wants to be pregnant). He says he’d punch her in her ‘pot belly,’ which, after walking in the shadows of his heroic father (as well as Koons), grandfather, and great-grandfather, sounds like the unconscious expression of a Laius complex. Butch doesn’t want there to be any more sons to have to pass a watch on to.
A symbolic attempt at redemption occurs during his shower (recall the bathroom as a place of purification), but he fails to attain grace when he taunts Fabienne by calling her a “retard,” getting her angry. His ‘taking it back’ sounds as insincere as his having said “Sorry” to Floyd for beating him to death in the ring.
Her forgetting to get the watch when packing all of their things forces Butch to go back to his apartment to get it, risking facing Marsellus’ men, at least one of whom (namely, Vincent) is waiting for him there. Butch’s killing of Floyd, then running away, is cowardly compared to what the previous men in his family went through, especially to keep the watch.
Now, in retrieving the watch from such a dangerous place, Butch can prove that he’s as brave as his dad, and his dad, and his dad. In effect, Butch is redeeming himself here. Indeed, in a scene cut from the completed film, when Butch has driven back to the apartment, he says in a monologue, “This is my war…This watch is a symbol…of how your father, and his father before him, and his father before him, distinguished themselves in war. And when I took Marsellus Wallace’s money, I started a war. This is my World War Two.” (Tarantino, page 114)
Butch goes into his apartment and gets the watch. Thinking he’s safe in there, he goes to the kitchen and puts some Pop Tarts in the toaster (more commodity fetishism, as with the watch), but he sees a small, compact submachine gun on the counter. He picks it up.
Vincent emerges from the bathroom, his second time to do so in the film (because of Pulp Fiction‘s scrambled order of scenes), but his third and last chronologically, of course, because this time he gets killed. Recall how I pointed out above that the use of bathrooms in this film symbolizes only attempts at purification–and therefore at redemption–and yet sin is still there (Vincent’s intention of killing Butch), so the wages of sin is still death.
Fittingly, Butch doesn’t fill Vincent with bullet holes until the Pop Tarts pop up from the toaster and are ready to be eaten. Commodity fetishism is a…product…of capitalism. Capitalism kills.
Butch wipes his fingerprints off the gun and leaves. He is driving back to Fabienne most confidently, but at a stop light, he sees crime boss Marsellus walking by, just as Marion Crane, in her car, saw her boss walk by in Psycho.
Yes, bosses can be that scary.
After Butch rams Fabienne’s car into Marsellus, he comes to and tries to shoot Butch, then Butch runs into a pawnshop, where he and Marsellus fight until the owner, Maynard (played by Duane Whitaker) pulls a gun on them, and the two end up in Maynard’s back room basement/dungeon, tied up and gagged. A corrupt cop named Zed arrives (Peter Greene, as I mentioned above), and he pulls a “squeal like a pig!” routine on Marsellus.
Given how extremely allusive Pulp Fiction is, we can see how this particular scene has references not only to Deliverance but also to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Allusions to the latter film are not limited to Butch’s considering the use of a chainsaw as a weapon to fight off Maynard and Zed; recall how Maynard slams the door shut to the room in which the rape is to occur, similar to how Leatherface slams shut that metal door after having cracked Kirk’s skull open with that big hammer and dragging the body into the back room where other terrible exploitations of the human body will soon occur.
Consider my use of the word exploitation in the context of the rape of Marsellus, who as a crime boss is a capitalist. Maynard, as the petite bourgeois owner of the pawnshop, is also a capitalist. Zed, as a cop, works as a protector of private property, of the capitalist system. None of this, however, means that all of them have to be friends.
As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) In this case, one capitalist fucks many others, that is, Maynard has his cop friend fuck many others, since I suspect that Maynard and Zed have pulled a Deliverance on many people, capitalist or non-capitalist.
As a crime boss, Marsellus represents the lawless, anti-government, “free market” version of capitalism. Maynard, with his cop-friend in Zed, represents the more state-oriented version of capitalism. This latter version isn’t any more ethical than the first, mind you. The differences don’t matter: capitalism is capitalism–it fucks us either way.
The connection of this scene with capitalism should be clearer when we remember that Butch’s and Marsellus’ original offence was having barged into Maynard’s pawnshop, his private property, to fight to the death. Incapacitating them, having Zed arrest them, then haul them off to the police station should be enough. Instead, Maynard and Zed think they have the right to rape them.
The owners of private property have no qualms whatsoever about exploiting the very bodies of those who have no such property. Maynard’s and Zed’s mistake is in assuming that Marsellus is not also an owner of private property…in fact, much more private property than the two hicks combined.
This barging into someone else’s property, only to be subjected to unspeakable horrors, is something Pulp Fiction echoes from Deliverance (the four city men canoeing into the mountain men’s area of the forest), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Kirk et al going into Leatherface’s house), and Psycho (Crane and Detective Arbogast entering Norman Bates’s private world).
Maynard’s and Zed’s even worse mistake is thinking they can get away with raping God, as I see Marsellus. Note that immediately after the Butch sequence, we return to the scene of Jules telling Brett his Ezekiel quote, beginning with him reminding us that Marsellus doesn’t like getting fucked by anyone other than his wife. So when Butch returns with the samurai sword, kills Maynard, and points it at Zed, Marsellus “will strike down upon [Zed] with great vengeance and furious anger…and [Zed] will know [Marsellus is] the LORD…” Zed took away Marsellus’ manhood, so Marsellus takes away Zed’s manhood by taking a gun and blowing his dick off.
Zed’s about to feel the full weight of the wrath of Marsellus (i.e., Medieval, pliers, a blowtorch), but Butch, in having rescued the crime boss from his rapists, has achieved redemption for his sins. Butch has only to leave LA, never to come back, and never to tell anyone about the degradation Marsellus has just been put through.
In ‘The Bonnie Situation,’ when the fourth man (played by Alexis Arquette) comes out and shoots at Jules and Vincent at point blank range, but doesn’t even scratch either of them with the bullets, Jules concludes that God must have intervened and saved His two gangsters’ lives. Well, of course: Marsellus wants his soul back, and he needs Jules and Vincent to bring the suitcase containing it back; they can’t do that if they’re dead, now, can they?
There’s an interesting irony in the fourth man missing his targets, which in turn brings about Jules’s need to repent of his sin and redeem himself. Sin, or hamartia, literally means ‘missing the mark.’ Sin has saved Jules’s soul.
As they’re driving back to give the suitcase to Marsellus, with Marvin in the backseat, Jules and Vincent are discussing the miracle that saved their lives. Skeptical Vincent (who later dies, recall–he of little faith) is swearing, and repentant Jules is chiding him for blaspheming (though later, Jules himself will be cursing and swearing plenty; after all, so much of what we see is only an attempt at redemption).
Marsellus helps Jules and Vincent out of their next predicament, Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin in the car, by sending Winston Wolf (Keitel), a cleaner, who tells the two gangsters how to remove all evidence of the killing. Marsellus is God, and Wolf is one of His angels.
As Jules and Vincent are cleaning up Marvin’s bloody mess in the car, Jules–in spite of his apparent religious conversion–refuses to forgive Vincent for his careless, gory mishap with his gun. Vincent, reaching the limit of how much abuse he can take, tries to get Jules to understand that one should forgive those who admit to wrongdoing (Luke 6:37). In other words, repentance should lead to redemption.
Jules will have none of that (recall Butch’s empty-sounding “Sorry” to Floyd, and his tepid taking-back of his “retard” insult to Fabienne). Vincent’s warning that he could blow if he hears much more abuse only makes Jules nastier. Jules is about to blow up like a nuclear bomb. In fact, not only is Jules more abusive, he also insists that Vincent pay more for his killing of Marvin by cleaning up the victim’s brains and skull in the back seat. So much for even trying to repent and redeem oneself.
The cleaning of the car, as well done as it is, may not purify Vincent of his sin of accidentally…hitting…the Marvin mark, but Winston spraying a hose of cold water to get the blood off of Jules and Vincent just might do it, if only symbolically.
Redemption still comes at a price, that is, to the two gangsters’ pride, in how they have to replace their bloody suits with Jimmie’s dorky-looking T-shirts and shorts.
At the restaurant (where Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny are), Jules explains why he doesn’t eat pig’s meat, which he insists isn’t because of being Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter), though that might as well be why, since he considers the pig to be a filthy animal, and the wrathful God assumed to reign in the universe of Pulp Fiction sure seems to be of the non-Christian Abrahamic type. Indeed, we only hear “Jesus Christ” when someone is swearing. There’s no Divine Rescuer dying on a Cross to bring redemption to the sinful world of this movie. Everyone has to try to achieve it by himself.
A funny thing is that, after Jules hands off the case to Marcellus and quits being a gangster, he says he’s “gonna walk the Earth.” I’m reminded of Job 1:7, when Satan says he’s been “walking up and down in [the Earth].” The suggested association of Jules with Satan (though in Job, he admittedly isn’t the embodiment of radical evil as he is in Christianity) reinforces the sense of how tenuous Jules’s commitment to redemption is.
Vincent’s response to this is that Jules’s wandering of the Earth, perhaps never knowing where God wants him to be (after all, as I see it, Marsellus is God in this film, and Jules imagines his redemption, in all irony, is to leave God!), means that Jules will become a bum. Remember that Marsellus, as a crime boss, is a capitalist, and trying to live outside the capitalist system–especially in the post-Soviet, neoliberal world of Pulp Fiction, is at least to risk homelessness.
The invisible hand [!] of God stopped those bullets from killing Jules and Vincent, but only to get the case with Marsellus’ soul in it back to him, not to make Jules quit working for his boss. Jules thus has a most misguided idea as to what redemption is…and this ties in with the film’s theme of how redemption is so often just attempted.
Still, Jules isn’t completely wrong. Skeptical Vincent stays working for Marsellus, and he’ll be killed leaving Butch’s bathroom. He’ll get a kind of omen of this danger upon leaving the restaurant restroom, as he did leaving Mia’s bathroom.
When, during the restaurant robbery, Pumpkin points his pistol at Jules, telling him to open the case, he has the same look of awe on his face that Vincent had when looking inside it at Brett’s apartment. No, the case doesn’t contain diamonds, or cocaine, or anything ordinary like that. That orange glow must indicate something…spiritual.
When not only Jules is pointing his gun at Pumpkin, but Vincent, out of the restroom, is pointing his gun at Honey Bunny, she’s so scared, she’s “gotta go pee.” Since the wages of sin is death, she’s got to rid herself of the filth inside her by using what Vincent just did.
Jules has Pumpkin get his “Bad Motherfucker” wallet out of the bag of all the restaurant customers’ stolen wallets; he gives Pumpkin all the money in it–“about fifteen hundred dollars.” Jules is buying Pumpkin’s life with it. He’s paying a kind of ransom so he doesn’t have to kill Pumpkin.
Next, we get the third recitation of the Ezekiel quote, but instead of it being an expression of the wrath of God, Jules says it calmly. Now he’s actually thinking about what the words mean, instead of just saying them to sound like a badass before killing someone.
Jules has always said it as a judgement of the sin of the man he’s about to shoot. Now, as he says it, he’s judging himself. He’d like to think he’s “the righteous man,” as we all do when we judge the sins of others. But as much as he doesn’t like to admit it, he has to: Jules is “the tyranny of evil men,” killing for a capitalist crime boss.
His last words are so important, for they encapsulate so many of the themes of Pulp Fiction: he’s trying really hard to be a shepherd. It’s all about the attempt to redeem oneself of one’s sins, not whether one succeeds or not. The attempt at purification could be literal, as it is here with Jules and Pumpkin, or it could be symbolic, like all those trips to the bathroom, to clean oneself out from the inside by pissing or shitting, or to clean oneself on the outside, as Butch does during his shower.
Redemption is never fully attained: Jules hasn’t shot Pumpkin or Honey Bunny, but he hasn’t foiled their robbery of the restaurant, either. The couple leave with their bag of money feeling that robbing people is, if anything, even more dangerous than it was with the liquor stores.
The God of Pulp Fiction isn’t the Christian one, and the lack of Jesus is a conspicuous absence. There is no Good Shepherd: there’s only Jules trying to be one. This trying to be good, when we’re among the most sinful, is often the best kind of good we can hope for. There are no illusions here about a Holy Spirit guiding us down the path of righteousness; we just do the best we can…if we’re even doing that.
These attempts, however bumbling, awkward, and foolish, they make at redeeming themselves are part of what makes the characters of Pulp Fiction so relatable to us–at least on an unconscious level; and this, I believe, is a big part of what makes this film so enduringly popular.
Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, a Quentin Tarantino Screenplay, New York, Miramax Books, 1994
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