Thirty Years of Blindness
Tarantino teases viewers mercilessly about the briefcase. He even has Vincent, and then Pumpkin, gaping at its contents, and Pumpkin asking if it’s what he thinks it is. Would it not be an excellent twist to this teasing if somewhere in the world of the film, clearly displayed, was what Vincent and Pumpkin were awestruck by? And that does seem exactly what Tarantino has managed to do.
Consider the patch of wall behind Jimmie when he delivers the infamous lines about how he isn’t running a facility for the storage of deceased persons of colour. On this patch of wall there is a circular clock, and beneath it a mirror with a gold-coloured frame, a similar size and shape to the clock.
Jimmie is played by Tarantino. It’s a sketchy characterisation and has been much derided. But perhaps Tarantino deliberately played the part that way, not wanting Jimmie to emerge as a coherent figure. He wanted Jimmie there less as a character than as the character played by the director.
Under this view, the question isn’t what the clock, and the mirror, say about Jimmie, but what they say about Tarantino. And the first thing one might notice is that the mirror’s gold frame has a certain resemblance to a halo. When Jimmie utters his crass remarks (I’m not an expert in the nuances of United States vernacular and so won’t call them more than crass) that would therefore seem to be Tarantino debunking the notion of the artist as a sage who leads the people to wisdom. Given that the mirror is twinned with the clock, his position seems rather that he doesn’t editorialise, or sugarcoat – he simply holds a mirror up to the times.
But it’s what Tarantino also appears to be doing which is really interesting. Because once a viewer has joined the dots sufficiently to realise that it’s a time machine in the briefcase, it’s a small step to seeing that the mirror could be such a contraption in ‘off’ mode. Switched on the frame could well emit a golden glow. While looking into the glass one might behold a wormhole of flashing numbers and darts and dashes, to elicit awe and seem like the future of time measurement.
Moving on from this prank, Tarantino is maybe making the further assertion that as a film director he himself in effect possesses a time machine – not just because he can jumble chronology, but in his ability to reach out to the future. It’s a claim he also seems to be implying when he has Mia draw a rectangle on the screen. Because the rectangle, like a time machine, makes a breach in reality. And since the rectangle is drawn on the rectangle of a movie screen, the implication is that films can bust through space-time as well.
Consider also one of the key briefcase clues – the link Tarantino draws between Marvin’s inclusive-of-head corpse in the boot (a rectangle whose contents don’t make sense) and the briefcase (a rectangle whose contents are a mystery). The viewer is invited to see that a time machine in the briefcase makes sense of the corpse. And so when Jimmie holds forth about the storage of corpses, with mirror and clock prominently behind him, the viewer is again encouraged to think ‘time machine’, and that Tarantino is at the controls of one.
6 January, 2026
