From an Old Vaudevillian’s Joke Book
Naturally Vincent wants to know the joke Mia told in her ill-fated pilot. After all she played the deadliest women in the world with a knife and the joke had been supplied by an old vaudevillian. ‘What a gyp’ he scoffs when Mia refuses to tell him the joke because it had been so built up.
The mystery of the briefcase is far more built up. By the end of the film Honey Bunny is speaking for the viewer when, her voice quivering with curiosity, she asks ‘Goddammit, what is it?’ At the end of their evening Mia does tell Vincent the joke. Surely that is Tarantino letting viewers know that he knows that when you build something up you have to deliver, and that hell yes the briefcase mystery does have an answer.
I feel especially sure that this is Tarantino’s intention because I think the answer to the mystery is clear to see – Marsellus sold his soul to the devil for a time machine and this is what the briefcase contains. Dozens of clues point the viewer to this solution. So many aspects of the film are involved, all neatly fitting together, that it’s as if Tarantino was using the intricate mechanism of a watch as his model.
However it has to be acknowledged that, for all this weight of clues, there is no shot of Marsellus twiddling the dials of his laptop Tardis. The film doesn’t insist upon a time machine being the briefcase’s contents. It is there to be inferred or not inferred. Other contents can be (have been) inferred – the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs, Elvis’s gold lame suit (actually not a bad theory). It’s also open to viewers to infer that no contents can be inferred – that the briefcase is a MacGuffin, simply a plot device.
This last solution though does come with the disadvantage that, as well as there being nothing in Pulp Fiction to support it, it significantly diminishes the film. There is that big build-up – why the golden glow? what could induce such awe from Vincent and Pumpkin? what spectacle could have Pumpkin thinking, but only thinking, that he knows what it is? And then – nothing. Tarantino, we are supposed to think, never had any particular contents in mind and pondering those questions was a waste of time.
Vincent would have a word for such directorial chicanery. While anybody might think one should reject a theory which vandalises a masterpiece in such a fashion. Yet if you consult Google AI, or Wikipedia, you are told that the briefcase is a MacGuffin. It is claimed, on very thin grounds (such as videos in which Tarantino says that people need to make up their own minds about the briefcase), that Tarantino has endorsed this view. For myself I will believe that is his view when I see a video of him declaring the briefcase to be a MacGuffin. And even if he were to come out with such a video I would still argue for a time machine, on the basis that we should trust the work of art, not what the artist says about the work of art.
10 March, 2026
