Continuity Capers
Vital to the argument that the Pulp Fiction briefcase contains a time machine are two continuity errors which are only masquerading as continuity errors, and in fact serve to point to divergent time lines. There is Marvin’s head, popping up on his corpse’s shoulders despite about half a dozen references to it having been blown off. And there is Honey Bunny’s advice to the restaurant patrons to behave, given pride of place just before the cut to the opening credits but then shown later with a different ending. As regards Marvin’s restored head, the divergent timelines are all about Marsellus turning to his contraption to retrieve the situation after Bonnie returns home and finds the gangsters still mopping up Marvin. As for the alternative versions of Honey Bunny’s rant, these can readily be understood as arising from Marsellus’s wish to erase his rape at the pawnshop.
However there is a third continuity error, even more blatant than these other two, which seems to be for real. This is when just before Bathroom Guy opens fire at the gangsters, two bullet holes can already be seen in the wall behind them. There is not any obvious way to understand these holes in terms of divergent timelines. And it might reasonably be thought that if there are two instances of seeming continuity errors which are in fact signals to the viewer of a time machine at work, special care would have been taken by the director to ensure no actual continuity errors slipped by to muddy the messaging.
If though the rogue bullet holes are looked at from the perspective of thirty years or more ago, they vanish as a problem for the time machine theory. Because when Quentin Tarantino was making Pulp Fiction he can hardly have been expecting that his riddle would roll on unsolved decade after decade. In fact given the number of clues with which he strews the film he’s much more likely to have feared that the mystery wouldn’t survive the first public screening. And he might have been particularly worried that his two faux continuity errors would too easily give the game away.
A continuity error to cloud the implication of those other errors was therefore in fact exactly what was needed. It had to be a bungle which didn’t itself point to divergent timelines. But equally important it had to eventually be able to be seen as consistent with a world in which souls were sold to the devil and where divine intervention in the form of miracles is a possibility. And bullet holes which jump the gun seem admirably fit for this purpose. It’s a mistake which is obvious, even clownish, but not lending itself to plot speculation. And no more a miracle than Jules and Vincent’s bullet-dodging ability. And another example too of how Pulp Fiction is one of those films where one has to be cautious before pronouncing something a mistake.
September 24, 2025
