Forward to the Past
Pulp Fiction is Back to the Future’s evil twin. Both films (as well as featuring time machines) are distinctly exuberant and bristling with ideas. But Robert Zemickis’s opus is a celebration of how life will win through, and in particular the life of skateboarding momentum-bandit Marty McFly, set by the scriptwriters the whimsical task of inveigling his parents into coupledom so that he can be born.
In Pulp Fiction contrariwise it’s a nihilistic bravado which drives the wit. The world now endlessly recycled thanks to Marsellus’s time machine, the tread of generations has come to an end, a state of affairs gestured at by the complete absence of children. Yes, there is the Butch-as-a-child interlude, but that only exists as a memory of the adult Butch (which is why Captain Koons addresses the boy as ‘little man’). Worth noting also is that one of the staff at Jack Rabbit Slim’s is a person with dwarfism – an adult of kids’ height to highlight the lack of kids. While showing conclusively how family-averse life is now, there’s Mia’s ketchup joke about Papa Tomato squishing Baby Tomato.
The Wolf’s DeLorean-like auto is the obvious link to the earlier film, though maybe not all that obvious due to the films being so different in tone (I admit I didn’t get it until the Jimmy Kimmel interview where Tarantino calls Back to the Future ‘perfect’). But there is another reference, where that difference is the whole point – namely the scene where the viewer is ushered down the steps into the pawnshop basement, the clocks on the wall as drastically out of puff as skeletons. This would seem to recall the eager-beaver synchronicity of the timepieces in Back to the Future’s opening scene. After that episode you just know that, however madcap Doc’s antics, the clock tower will manage to channel the lightning strike into the flux capacitor.
In the pawnshop basement, however, time is not your buddy. Time hardly seems even to be time, with the Gimp hanging there like a decommissioned pendulum. While the only thing resembling a clock hand doing any sort of business is the samurai sword which Butch guts Maynard and terrorises Zed with. Nor, evidently, does owning the time machine exempt Marsellus from untoward incidents. One thinks of folk tales about the inadvisability of trying to outwit the devil. Did Marsellus suppose that he could get away with selling his soul for a time machine because since he was never going to die he was never going to have to pay up? If so, perhaps the infernal rebuttal was to make his existence a succession of unendurable indignities needing to be erased.
What is in there? you can see Marsellus wondering, as the Gimp is released from his lodgings. The rectangular shape of these emphasises how Marsellus’s curiosity echoes the question of what is in the briefcase. Could it be that the briefcase contains mini-Gimp? Or at least, when you have the double whammy of time machine and Gimp so closely linked, that gives the viewer a glimpse of a pit from which no hope can emerge and makes for a brutal subversion of the clock tower as beacon of limitless possibilities.
28 July, 2025
