L.A. Alchemy
For web purposes the sonnets have been converted to miniature chapters. They can still be seen in their full sonnet glory in the PDF download below.
1
Pulp Fiction begins and ends with the restaurant incident where Honey Bunny and Pumpkin are brought to the realisation that day jobs mightn’t be so bad. Between times the film shows the events which have led gangsters Jules and Vincent to also happen upon this eatery. And we peer into the future – witness Vincent being shot dead, and the rape of the gangsters’ boss, Marsellus. The film closes with Jules and Vincent pausing at the checkout as if looking for someone to pay, then jamming their guns down their beach attire and exiting to a flourish of surf rock.
2
Vincent (John Travolta) is surely cinema’s most engaging cold-blooded killer. When he strides away into the Los Angeles sunshine it has to wring a pang from the viewer to know that such a mixture of logic-relishing curiosity and goofy candour will soon be lost to darkness. Yet quite as much as the ending dramatizes Vincent’s fate, it clamours for the viewer to note that the gangsters are departing the restaurant to restore to Marsellus a mysterious briefcase, the reclaiming of which has been their morning’s work.
3
On regaining the case Vincent had checked its contents. Not someone who one feels is easily impressed, and already aware what the contents were (or should be), he becomes quite befuddled before assuring Jules that they were ‘happy’. Viewers were kept in the dark – or rather the golden glow which the case emits. The final restaurant scene stokes the mystery. Pumpkin demands that Jules opens the case, pointing a gun at him. The gun is also pointed at the viewer – who gazing down the barrel while told to disclose the case’s contents might feel a sense of heightened ignorance.
4
The mystery crescendoes some more on Jules opening the case. Pumpkin becomes trapped in admiration, his rapacity overwhelmed. He asks if it’s what he thinks it is. This gets an affirmative. He calls it beautiful – Tim Roth’s face the picture of someone suddenly capable of wonderment after all these years. He can’t hear Honey Bunny’s increasingly agog questions about what has gone so right. But then Samuel L. Jackson, as the poor choice to cross even in a transitional phase, seals the mystery at its zenith by grabbing the gun and shutting down the show.
5
The engaging Vincent will soon be shot dead. Marsellus is about to get his mysterious briefcase back. As the film closes these are the two events which it presses upon the viewer. And by doing so it sets the viewer up to ask, however idly or fleetingly: Could Marsellus being reunited with his briefcase somehow lead to Vincent cheating the bullets? The question might the more readily be asked since during the reclaiming of the briefcase Jules and Vincent are shown remaining unhit despite being blasted away at from unmissable range.
6
This episode puts Jules and Vincent at loggerheads about whether they have witnessed a miracle. Jules believes they have – so much so that he resolves to quit gangster life and walk the earth searching for God’s purpose. He transforms from a hoodlum who thunders Old Testament bombast before executing people into a hoodlum who remonstrates with his partner for blaspheming. But even if Jules and Vincent not being hit by the bullets counts as a miracle, Vincent’s future survival would be a greater one. Because Butch’s bullets didn’t miss.
7
We see Vincent slammed back into one of the soundproof bathrooms popular at the time in Los Angeles, before dead as crap. To do him any good the briefcase would have to contain some sort of resurrection kit – Jules sprinkling holy water on him, whatever else is needed, then when he rejoins ‘the life’ saying: ‘Okay motherfucker, you best not be telling me that this doesn’t qualify as a miracle’. Yet – the film does allude to just such success against death, showing two other of its major players – Mia and Marsellus – return from extinguishment.