Bringing the Situation to a Head
Tarantino never makes explicit that it’s a time machine in the briefcase. Where would the fun be in that? Instead he provides a number of substantial hints. And some which are less substantial but nonetheless possess a certain slyly humorous charm – as when the Jack Rabbit Slim’s slogan reads ‘The Next Best Thing To A Time Machine’.
Sometimes both kinds of clue are worked in together. For example there is the business of Marvin’s head. Tarantino takes great pains to ensure viewers keep in mind that this ceases to exist as such. To start with there’s the Marvin’s-eye view of Vincent’s gun carelessness. Then it’s cut to the car looking like an abattoir and Vincent bleating that he’s shot Marvin in the face. Once at Jimmie’s there’s another scene in the car, Jules voicing his indignation at having to clean up bits of brain and skull due to Vincent’s incompetence.
The Wolf plays a key part drumming out the message. On the phone to Marsellus, he writes in his notebook: ‘One body, no head’. While he impresses on Jules and Vincent the need to rid the car of the head’s contents. And shortly before Marvin’s corpse (with head) is glimpsed in the boot, he assures Vincent that a hose down is needed because he and Jules look like they’ve blown somebody’s head off.
So many reminders that the head has been blown to bits. And then we’re shown the head. It’s a pretty hefty hint. To which Tarantino adds another. He shows the gangsters arming themselves from the boot in preparation for taking back the briefcase, the camera in the spot which the head later occupies. He even shows the gun which fires the bullet.
While for any who still won’t see that the head implies divergent timelines, implies a time machine, Tarantino gets geometrical, with the rectangle of the boot (containing an impossibility) set against the rectangle of the briefcase (containing a mystery), and viewers invited to deduce a connection.
And then there are the clues of a slyly humorous kind. As when Jules tells Marsellus about how Bonnie will not react well if she returns home to find gangster stuff going down, and we get some brief footage of Bonnie returning home and reacting as predicted. Of course normal film grammar has this as simply a ‘what would happen’ scenario. But notice how Marvin’s corpse just happens to be obscured from the neck up. One could read the footage as Tarantino being a gangster, and under the nose of viewers (prison guards) smuggling in the timeline in which Marvin retains his head.
More Don Corleone still, there is Jules finding fault with Vincent for bloodying up Jimmie’s towels, telling him it’s the sort of thing which could ‘bring the situation to a head’. If you’re not already persuaded about the time machine, that clue won’t do it. But if you’ve been persuaded, the clue might seem to epitomise Tarantino’s gangster aesthetic, where the idea is to treat meaning as contraband, something snuck past the viewer, and the director’s role generally to be, in the words of Jules’ wallet (which I read somewhere was actually Tarantino’s wallet), a bad motherfucker.
10 February, 2026
