Current Works

L.A. Alchemy

In Marsellus Wallace’s Dirty Laundry, his 2021 booklength sonnet sequence, David Beach blew the locks off cinema’s greatest mystery, demonstrating that the Pulp Fiction briefcase contains a time machine – and thereby revealed it as also cinema’s best joke (Butch’s watch hidden from the prison guards, the film concealing a timepiece from viewers). Now, in the spirit of the little differences in hamburger cuisine between the United States and Europe, he offers a variant interpretation, one where Marsellus turned the dial back to halfway through the twelfth sonnet. This version of the critique largely dispenses with thematic implications. It focuses instead on the intricate brilliance (watchmaker’s fantasy) of the logic by which the film establishes that the briefcase has to be, what at first seems so surprising, a laptop Tardis. Notably here the sequence demolishes the beguiling but fool’s gold theory that the briefcase is a ‘MacGuffin’, no more than a plot device and its contents irrelevant. And as well the sequence solves the film’s other great mystery, why Vincent is shown twice on the crapper.