Six Reasons Why the Pulp Fiction Briefcase Contains a Time Machine

1/ The film’s scrambled chronology makes a time machine the obvious answer to the briefcase riddle. That the obvious answer is the right one is given support by how Marsellus is portrayed as a director in his opening scene, where he impresses upon Butch the importance of following the script and taking a dive in the fifth.

2/ A time machine aces the film’s three ‘tests’. As a way to outwit time it’s like the old-style alchemists seeking immortality via the transmutation of base metals into gold, and the golden glow from the briefcase reflects that ambition. Vincent and Pumpkin gaze with awe at the contents because a time machine probably would look spectacular. And Pumpkin asks if it’s what he thinks it is because it could well look like a timepiece, just unlike any timepiece you have ever seen (while Jules replies in the affirmative because as far as he knows it is simply a particularly striking timepiece).

3/ A time machine’s impossibility fits with the film’s most impossible moment, Mia drawing a rectangle on the screen, the rectangle, like a time machine, making a breach in reality. As a hint at this connection, moments after Mia’s rectangle we see the Jack Rabbit Slim’s slogan ‘The Next Best Thing To A Time machine’. A time machine’s impossibility also fits with the film’s supernatural elements, such as the devil’s-number combination lock. The famous old theory, and all honour to it, has Marsellus selling his soul to the devil and the briefcase containing said soul. I agree with the selling his soul part, but think it makes more sense for the briefcase to contain what he sold his soul for. And that this is a time machine is suggested by how the Wolf, Marsellus’s fixer, himself seems no stranger to time travel, driving a car resembling a DeLorean and making statements like ‘I’m thirty minutes away. I’ll be there in ten’.

4/ It fits very well with Butch’s watch being hidden from the prison guards to have a time machine (a different sort of timepiece but a timepiece nevertheless) being concealed from viewers. Apart from the fun of viewers being likened to prison guards, and Los Angeles to the lower reaches of the alimentary canal, there’s how a time machine and the watch bounce off each other at moments such as when Captain Koons hands the watch to Butch-as-a-child, who then wakes up as Butch the boxer. He’s had a dream, of course – but there’s also a nod to time travel.

5/ Disguised as a continuity error the film provides an example of divergent timelines, after Marsellus uses his time machine to erase his rape by Zed. He goes back to just before his meeting with Butch at the nightclub, choosing that re-entry point in order to warn himself to be careful of Butch (he gasps awake, like Butch from his dream, or Mia after the adrenalin shot, but has no knowledge of the future, which after all hasn’t happened). Jules and Vincent arrive at the nightclub while this meeting is still taking place. Very likely immediately prior to Butch turning up they were at the restaurant discussing Green Acres and Kung Fu. And Marsellus could well have reverted to an unravished state just before Honey Bunny informs the customers ‘Any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you’. This repeats, at the end of the film, as ‘Any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll execute every one of you motherfuckers’. Honey Bunny’s rant, first time round, crashes into the opening credits. After it’s been highlighted in this way a continuity error slipping by would seem unlikely.

6/ The sixth reason is another example of divergent timelines, one where its even harder to point to continuity bungling as the explanation. In this instance Marsellus uses his time machine to cancel the chaos which ensues after Bonnie arrives home to find Marvin’s corpse still being fussed over. The film actually shows footage of Bonnie’s return in this earlier timeline (footage usually interpreted as being of what might happen). The Bonnie crisis is caused by Vincent shooting Marvin and so Marsellus goes back to just before that – upon which Vincent shoots Marvin again, but this time blowing his head off. This might seem too much of a coincidence but consider Marvin’s last words – ‘Man, I don’t even have an opinion’. Clearly he is never going to survive long around Jules and Vincent. Consider also how the action of the time machine itself might have been a factor, causing a bump in the cosmos rather than Jules driving over one.

In the footage of Bonnie arriving home, Marvin’s head is concealed. But when the Wolf opens the car boot in Jimmie’s garage we glimpse the corpse and it has a head attached, a little the worse for wear but far from fragmentary. What makes it hard to see this as a mistake is that the film repeatedly refers to the head being blown off. Even shortly before the head is seen, the Wolf remarks to Jules and Vincent that they look as if they have blown somebody’s head off. While in his phone conversation with Marsellus, the Wolf is shown writing into his notebook ‘One body, no head’. And in case it might be thought language is being used loosely, there’s quite a lengthy scene in which the hitmen clear the car of bits of skull and brain. Add to which that we’re inside Marvin’s head when it’s blown off. And I feel I must also mention the scene at Jimmie’s where Jules finds fault with Vincent for bloodying up a towel, telling him it’s the sort of thing which could ‘bring the situation to a head’.

And then there is the clue of clues, the scene where Jules and Vincent arm themselves to reclaim the briefcase. The weaponry is in the boot and the scene is shot from within the boot, the viewer placed in the same spot which Marvin’s head later occupies. It’s a big stretch to see this as a coincidence, or other than Tarantino priming the viewer to notice the renegade noggin. He even shows the gun used to blow it to bits.

Two rectangles: the boot, its contents which don’t make sense; the briefcase, its contents which are a mystery. Tarantino doesn’t insist that there is a connection, or that the connection is time travel. He never shows Marsellus twiddling the dials on his laptop Tardis. If viewers want to infer that the briefcase contains the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs, the film leaves them the freedom to do so. But by the end of the film, after such a weight of clues, when Honey Bunny asks – ‘Goddammit, what is it?’ – surely it’s reasonable to think that the answer Tarantino had in mind to his riddle is that it’s a time machine.

April 3, 2026