The Ghost in the (Time) Machine
The spectre-infested battlements of Elsinore might seem an improbable spot for Pulp Fiction’s pop-culture savvy hoodlums to hail from. But Hamlet looms as a key influence on the film. This is hinted at in a number of details, such as Marsellus (possessor of the time machine) sharing a name (almost) with Marcellus, one of the guards to first encounter the murdered king’s shade. Or there’s that Vincent has recently returned from Amsterdam (not so far from Denmark). Add to which that if you leave Vincent alone in a bathroom he’s liable to start soliloquising. Then there’s Mia, who has also spent time in Amsterdam. While the shot of Mia, snotty and bloody after hoovering up Vincent’s heroin, looks like a sardonic reference to the iconic Pre-Raphaelite painting of the drowned Ophelia by Millais. There is in fact quite a lot in common between Mia and Ophelia, both hapless expendables. Perhaps the most shocking moment in the film occurs when Vincent informs Jules that he’s been told by Marsellus to take care of Mia. ‘Take care of her?’ asks Jules, making a gun sign. He seems a bit surprised, but only a bit.
Where Tarantino roars into highest gear though is in his reworking of the gravedigger scene. It’s here that it becomes clear the point of looking back to Shakespeare’s tragedy is partly simply because it is a tragedy. Hamlet muses immortally upon Yorick’s skull, holding it aloft, recalling the jester’s wit and high spirits. Yorick is gone, kaput, and that means something because it is set against the memory of his life. In Pulp Fiction on the other hand there is no ‘Alas, poor Marvin’. For one thing the gangsters can’t hold up his skull because they are wearing it. Now just a cleaning task to be bickered about, he is, in the Wolf’s phrase, ‘no one who will be missed’. Tarantino’s scene isn’t exactly bleaker than Shakespeare’s, but does seem suggestive of Nietzche’s dictum about how gazing into the abyss can turn into the abyss gazing into you.
Hamlet laments that ‘the time is out of joint’. He’s upset that the bonds between brothers, husband and wife, king and subject, are no longer trustworthy. While that ghosts are roaming the battlements suggests that the bonds of faith are also becoming a little frayed. Tarantino takes this world and seems intent on showing what four hundred years of further fraying of bonds has led to. He wants to show, for example, how honour has become (Vincent’s soliloquy) the loyalty a gangster feels he owes to a crime boss – on this point one might wonder whether, if instead of sending Vincent over to Butch’s apartment, Marsellus had told him his job for the day was to kill Mia, Vincent would have obeyed the order. And Tarantino finds the perfect emblem for this scrambled, post-faith world in the time machine which Marsellus sold his soul for.
26 January, 2026
