Time

 

In the world of Pulp Fiction, timing is everything. Tarantino intentionally disorients the audience by showing the events of the film out of order—most obviously, beginning with the final scene in the diner—without any subtitles or title cards to explain when the film is flashing forward and backward in time (with the notable, comic exception of the Wolf's arrival at Jimmie's, which takes place exactly "nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later"). As a result, the audience must deduce the order in which the events of the film take place. Unfortunate timing dooms many of the film's characters, such as Vincent, who chooses to use the bathroom at three separate points at unlucky moments, and Butch, who stops at an intersection at the exact moment his arch-nemesis Marsellus is crossing the street. Through the theme of time and timing, especially bad timing, Tarantino forces his archetypal, "stock" characters to confront ludicrous and unpredictable situations.

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Fate

 

After they are miraculously unharmed by a hail of bullets, Jules and Vincent have an extended philosophical argument over the nature of the universe. Jules believes that they survived due to an act of "divine intervention," and tries to persuade Vincent that God has spared them for a reason. Vincent, on the other hand, believes that they were just lucky. Their disagreement suggests a larger debate about fate versus free will: whether mankind is subject to higher forces, or whether life's events unfold spontaneously and according to no particular plan. Significantly, Jules, who recognises the act as a "miracle" and pledges to give up criminal life, survives the film, whereas Vincent, who refuses to acknowledge the "miracle," dies under extremely unlucky circumstances that Jules would also likely consider an act of "divine intervention."

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Morality

 

Virtually every character in Pulp Fiction is implicated in some kind of criminal enterprise, whether as a perpetrator, an accomplice, or a witness. Tarantino represents crime and criminals in a morally neutral and highly aestheticised fashion, emphasising the combination of glamour, squalor, and banality that typifies their lives. In addition to coolly performing executions and injecting hard drugs, the film's career criminals also bicker, whine, and make amateurish mistakes, undermining the hardboiled archetypes from which Tarantino draws their characterisations. Despite being criminals, many characters still experience moments of moral clarity, such as when Butch decides to rescue Marsellus, or when Jules rethinks his life as a gangster. In all these ways, Tarantino lends surprising moral dimensions to the "flat" stock characters (e.g. the mob boss, the corrupt boxer, the femme fatale) from bygone film genres about crime.

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Style

 

Tarantino, himself a master of stylisation, imbues every character in Pulp Fiction with an inimitable and eclectic personal aesthetic. Seemingly minor visual details like Jules's Jheri curl, Jody's piercings, and Lance's mounted high heel shoes lend each character a distinct personality, many of which reference stylistic touchstones from bygone eras. Vincent and Mia's dance scene at Jackrabbit Slim's serves little purpose other than being a vehicle for each of their styles as dancers and highlighting the personal chemistry between the two. Later in the film, Vincent's oafish, everyman qualities contrast with Winston Wolfe's curt, businesslike demeanour, suggesting the broad range of personalities that career criminals can inhabit. Discussing the difference between pigs and dogs in the final scene, Jules tells Vincent, "Personality goes a long way," a statement that also reflects the film's consistent and unapologetic elevation of style over substance.

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Violence

 

In the highly aestheticised universe of Pulp Fiction, violence is an everyday yet unpredictable phenomenon, often reflecting the fundamentally unforeseeable and surprising nature of life itself. Tarantino conveys the casual, almost indifferent approach that the film's criminal characters take to violence in scenes like Pumpkin and Honey Bunny's first argument, Jules's first murder in Brett's apartment, and Vincent's accidental slaying of Marvin. Like almost everything else in the film, violent acts are also opportunities for style and creativity, such as Jules's decision to recite the Bible passage from Ezekiel 25:17 before every execution, which he confesses he only does because it "sounds like some cold-blooded shit." The threat of violence looms over all of the film's sub-plots, especially Vincent and Mia's date, given that Marsellus has allegedly had a man thrown off a balcony for touching her. The story of Butch and Marsellus's capture at the hands of Zed and Maynard also demonstrates that the characters who are most capable of brutality are still equally subject to it.

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Fiction / Cinema

 

Critics have labeled Pulp Fiction a "postmodern" film and an example of meta-fiction. Meta-fiction refers to any work that calls attention to its own artificiality, or which takes as one of its subjects the very notion of fictive storytelling. The word "fiction" in the film's title, as well as the provided definition of the word "pulp" meaning a particular kind of lurid content printed on cheap paper, are early clues that the film will examine and repurpose the established tropes and characters of various preexisting film genres. The scene at Jackrabbit Slim's, filled with celebrity impersonators, is effectively a microcosm of American culture and cinema, which the film aims to deconstruct in numerous ways. By paying homage to specific films like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and John Boorman's Deliverance, Tarantino weaves the history of cinema into the narrative itself, which celebrates unlikely and absurd occurrences, rather than conforming to any sort of realism.

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Language

 

Language, both written and spoken, is a key component of Pulp Fiction's style. The film of course draws its title from a particular kind of lurid prose printed for mass consumption on cheap material. Each character speaks in a highly stylised vernacular, such as Pumpkin and Honey Bunny's British slang, Mia's hip lingo, or Marsellus's calm, precise syntax. Tarantino's dialogue often centres around trivial and irrelevant matters, such as Butch and Fabienne talking about the difference between a tummy and a potbelly, or Jules and Vincent talking about a "quarter-pounder with cheese," versus a "Royale with cheese." The insignificance of the subject matter is often secondary to the sheer enjoyability of the crackling tension and rapid-fire rhythm of the actors' delivery. Tarantino also employs monologues to great rhetorical effect, such as Jules's Ezekiel 25:17 speech, or Captain Koons's speech to a young Butch. As with nearly everything else in the film, language becomes a kinetic vehicle for style and expressivity.

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The Briefcase (symbol)

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The contents of the briefcase that Jules and Vincent procure from Brett's apartment for Marsellus are never specified. All that is known about them is that they glow, and that Pumpkin calls them "beautiful." The briefcase is an example of what is called a MacGuffin: a cinematic plot device that advances the plot with little to no narrative explanation. Given its alluring mysteriousness, the briefcase symbolizes human desire itself, with its status as a highly coveted object mobilizing several characters to commit unspeakable acts of violence.

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Ezekiel 25:17 (allegory)

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Jules recites Ezekiel 25:17 to strike fear into the men he is about to execute, conceiving of himself as the Lord who "lays vengeance" on men who have practiced "evil tyranny." At the end of the film, after an act of divine intervention prompts him to enter a "transitional period," and reconsider the true meaning behind the words, Jules ponders various interpretations out loud to Pumpkin, while they are engaged in a Mexican standoff inside the diner. Eventually, Jules determines that he is not the "righteous man" he thought he was, but in fact one of the "evil men" of which the passage speaks. As Jules's decision to non-violently de-escalate the confrontation in the diner bears out, he no longer wants to be an evil man, and instead is, "tryin' real hard to be the shepherd."

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Bathrooms (motif)

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Bathrooms are bad luck in Pulp Fiction, especially for Vincent. Vincent uses the bathroom at three separate points in the film, and each time disaster strikes shortly thereafter. The first time he uses the bathroom, Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine and snorts it while he is gone, leaving him to find her unconscious body on the rug. The second time he uses the bathroom, he leaves his assault weapon behind for Butch to find, who promptly kills him with it. The third time we see him use the bathroom, he leaves Jules alone in the booth just as Pumpkin and Honey Bunny leap up to hold the diner hostage. The unnamed character in Brett's apartment who fires haplessly at Jules and Vincent before being himself killed also hides in the bathroom. Bathrooms augur death and misfortune, and are perhaps a reference to Stanley Kubrick, who was also known for filming pivotal scenes in bathrooms.

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The Gold Watch (symbol)

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Butch's gold watch is a family heirloom, the significance of which is explained in a long monologue that is, chronologically, the earliest event in the entire film. As a child, Butch received the watch from a man named Captain Koons who had served in the Vietnam War with his father. The watch is a symbol of patrilineal love, being passed down from Butch's great-grandfather, to his grandfather, to his father, and finally to him, surviving an incredibly unlikely series of events in the process. The fact that so many men put forth so much effort to save the watch, including stashing it for years in their anuses, is what makes Butch willing to risk his own life to retrieve it, after Fabienne mistakenly leaves it behind.

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Breakfast (motif)

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Much of the film takes place in the morning, undermining the borrowed conventions of film noir, a type of post-war crime drama that mostly takes place at night. As a result, many characters eat and discuss breakfast in distinct ways, revealing something about their character in the process. Fabienne, for example, enumerates to Butch all the breakfast foods she wants to order—ironic given her petite frame. Butch tells her he will return before she can say, "blueberry pie." Jules talks to Brett about eating cheeseburgers from Big Kahuna Burger for breakfast, and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are eating breakfast in the diner when the film opens. Breakfast as a motif often reveals the ordinary, everyday qualities of the film's characters, making them relatable to the audience, even though they are extreme and brazen in other ways.

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Jackrabbit Slim's (symbol)

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Jackrabbit Slim's is a retro 1950s diner staffed by a small army of celebrity impersonators, who are dressed up as such figures as Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly, Ed Sullivan, Mamie van Doren, and more. The restaurant is a living symbol of the history of American mass culture, especially during the 1950s; Vincent jokes that it resembles a "wax museum come to life." Pulp Fiction uses the visual iconography and cultural lexicon of this "family-friendly" era as a counterpoint to the more sensational, exploitative genres that began to emerge after 1970, and the graphic depictions of drugs, sex, and violence that they entailed. The image of Vincent and Mia's trophy-winning twist routine, for instance, contrasts jarringly with the subsequent image of Vincent plunging a needle into her heroin-addled heart that very same night.