Damned Souls Storage

‘Ah, Faustus,/ Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,/ And then thou must be damned perpetually!’ Faustus is speaking to himself, employing the terrified third person. He’s had his twenty-four years (except for the one hour) of being served by Mephistopheles, provided with all the knowledge and power he lusted after, and now comes the payment. But ill-advised though the deal may have been, he did at least keep his soul for the twenty-four years. There’s no suggestion that it will be removed even after time is up. It seems rather that he’ll be hauled off, soul and all, to acquire further knowledge about brimstone.

Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr Faustus is the classic depiction in English of the person who sells their soul to the Devil. Of course Quentin Tarantino might have decided to change some of the details of the story. Proponents of the theory that the briefcase contains Marsellus’s soul point to the plaster on the back of Marsellus’s head as marking the extraction point. Claims have been made that an obscure religious text refers to such back-of -the-head soul removal. No one though has ever actually identified this text. Nor does the film offer any reason why the Devil should behave so strangely as to place the soul in a briefcase and then leave the briefcase in the possession of the person he removed the soul from. While if Marsellus is keeping his soul in defiance of the Devil, why does the Wolf, who seems to function as the Mephistopheles of the piece, happily keep serving the gangster?

However the plaster does rather demand an explanation. And it does in fact fit very nicely with the theory that Marsellus sold his soul to the Devil. There is a long-established tradition that, as in Dr Faustus, those who make a pact with the Devil have to sign the contract with their blood. And if you’re a bald gangster, what could be more badass then to casually nick yourself on the back of the head? Or after the nick healed (if such nicks ever do heal) to continue to sport a plaster as a memento of the deal?

And it might be noted here that the plaster, on Marsellus’s bald head, gives a striking juxtaposition of the film’s geometric motifs, the rectangle and the circle. And allows one to confidently assert that the briefcase contains not only a time machine but a round time machine.

To sum up, the film provides strong evidence that Marsellus sold his soul to the Devil. But there is a reason that there is no sign on the briefcase saying ‘Damned Souls Storage’, namely that storing damned souls isn’t the briefcase’s business.

8 December, 2025