Summary
The film flashes back to a scene from Butch's childhood, as he watches cartoons in his living room. His mother introduces a "special visitor," named Captain Koons, who was imprisoned in a P.O.W. camp in Hanoi where Butch's father died. Koons shows Butch a gold wristwatch: a family heirloom, first purchased by Butch's great-grandfather, and given to his grandfather, a Marine who died in World War II. Koons explains that Butch's grandfather, knowing his chances of survival were slim, then gave the watch to an Air Force gunner, who delivered it to Butch's father, who was wearing it when shot down over Hanoi. Koons explains that Butch's father hid the watch in his rectum for five years until he died, and Koons hid it for another two years thereafter, saving it for Butch.
The film flashes forward, where an adult Butch is now sitting in a locker room, preparing to box. A handler calls him into the ring, and an announcer reveals the name of his opponent as Floyd Ray Wilson. A title card reads: "The Gold Watch." Outside, a woman driving a yellow cab listens to the car radio, where boxing announcers reveal that Butch pummeled Wilson to death in the ring. Clearly, he failed to throw the match as Marsellus wanted. Elsewhere in the city, Marsellus angrily orders his associates to find and kill Butch.
Butch makes a hasty getaway in the yellow cab. The driver, a Colombian woman named Esmeralda, recognizes him and informs him that he killed his opponent in the ring, something Butch had not realized. She asks him what it feels like to kill a man, but Butch merely asks for a cigarette and tells her he doesn't feel "the least bit bad about it." In a payphone booth, Butch talks to a man named Scotty, explaining to him that rumors about the fixed match created long odds that will now give Butch a huge payout, to be collected by bookies over the next 24 hours. He tells Scotty that he and his girlfriend Fabienne plan to leave the city and drive to Knoxville. He has Esmeralda drop him off at a nearby motel, bribing her not to tell anyone she saw him.
In the motel room, Fabienne is sleeping on the bed, and Butch crawls next to her. They discuss the difference between and a tummy and a pot-belly, and Fabienne explains that pot-bellies are only attractive on women. Butch tells Fabienne he won the match, but that he is still retiring. Fabienne senses they are in danger. The two have oral sex and shower, and Fabienne scolds Butch for his "retard" impression of her. He suggests that they move out of the country to Bora Bora or Mexico, then falls asleep while Fabienne brushes her teeth.
The next morning, a motorcycle noise on television wakes Butch from a nightmare, while Fabienne is again brushing her teeth. The two plan to check out, eat breakfast, and take a train out of town at eleven. As Fabienne lists all the food she wants to eat at breakfast, Butch realizes his watch is missing and becomes enraged. Fabienne confesses she's not entirely sure she remembered to bring it to the motel, prompting Butch to berate her and throw the television set across the room. After he calms down, he tells her he can't have breakfast, and decides to go back to his apartment to find the watch, despite knowing Marsellus's goons will be looking for him.
On the way, Butch once again screams in rage at Fabienne's forgetfulness. He cautiously approaches his apartment complex, and pauses uncertainly before putting his key in the lock of the front door. Finding no one inside, Butch retrieves the watch from a small kangaroo tchotchke where he left it, and feels immediately relieved. After putting a pop tart in the toaster, Butch notices an assault rifle sitting on the kitchen counter, then hears the toilet flush. Butch raises the weapon and aims at the bathroom door. The man inside is Vincent, and Butch kills him instantly, setting off the smoke alarm. Butch lays the rifle down near the front door, wipes his prints off with a tissue, and leaves.
Feeling elated, Butch sets off back toward the motel. Stopped at an intersection, he sees Marsellus walk by in front of him, holding coffee and donuts. Butch slams on the accelerator, hitting Marsellus, and then collides violently with an oncoming car. Marsellus wakes up on the pavement with concerned onlookers crouched over him and, when he sees Butch survived the crash, brandishes his gun, sending them fleeing in different directions. A dizzy, injured Marsellus staggers toward Butch and shoots, hitting a passerby instead. Butch runs through an alley and into a nearby pawn shop. When Marcellus runs in after him, Butch subdues him and is about to execute him when the pawn shop owner cocks a rifle and points it at both of them. As Marcellus loses consciousness once more, the pawn shop owner strikes Butch with the butt of the rifle, knocking him out as well, then calls someone named Zed on the phone, telling him, "Spider just caught a couple flies."
Analysis
Tarantino modeled Butch after the character Ralph Meeker in Robert Aldrich's 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. The story of Butch resembles the plot of Robert Siodmak's 1946 film noir The Killers, based on Ernest Hemingway's short story of the same name, where a boxer (played by Burt Lancaster) must avoid hitmen who have been instructed to kill him over unpaid debts. Tarantino's script comically emphasizes the juxtaposition between the sentimental value of Butch's gold watch as a family heirloom, and the grotesque process by which it has fallen into his hands (being stashed over several years in two men's anuses). In keeping with the film's elliptical structure, Tarantino skips over the precipitating event in Butch's story—namely, his decision not to throw a pivotal boxing match, which leads Marsellus to place a bounty on his head.
The character Esmeralda is one of the film's unlikeliest creations: a glamorous, mysterious Colombian woman who also happens to drive a yellow cab in Los Angeles. Esmarelda is a red herring, a suspicious "femme fatale" archetype borrowed from the genre of film noir, designed to lead the audience to believe that she will inform Marsellus about Butch's whereabouts, which never happens. Instead, Tarantino undermines genre-based expectations by making Butch's story hinge entirely around an incidental and unpredictable series of events that befall him after he reclaims his gold watch.
Butch's story is another prime example of the film's exploration of good and bad luck, and the way they tend to karmically cancel each other out: Butch successfully wins the match, but accidentally kills his opponent; he escapes to the motel safely, but then discovers his watch his missing; he finds the watch and kills Vincent, but then runs into Marsellus on the street; he rams Marsellus, but is hit by another car; he eventually subdues Marsellus, but is then taken captive. A rule of thumb in the universe of Pulp Fiction is that every stroke of good luck will eventually be met with a stroke of bad, if not worse, luck. Jules later calls such moments acts of "divine intervention."
Tarantino also comically upends the audience's expectations in the scene where Butch enters his apartment to retrieve his watch. Whereas a more traditional action film might have contained a scene where Butch has a dramatic, death-defying shoot-out with multiple men stationed inside, Butch instead enters while his would-be assassin, Vincent, is in the bathroom, having carelessly left his assault rifle behind. The scene where Butch puts a pop tart in the toaster and notices the weapon is another instance of the film humorously placing ordinary and violent details in close proximity. Vincent's death, and reappearance later in the film, also clues the audience into the fact that the film has deviated from standard chronology.
The scene where Butch spots Marsellus in the cross-walk in front of his car is an allusion to a similar moment in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), where protagonist Marion Crane sees her boss (whom she has just robbed) while stopped at a red light. Marion Crane and Butch share several similarities: like Marion, Butch is a criminal on the run, who is attempting to leave town before his misdeeds catch up with him. Also like Marion, who winds up at the Bates Motel, Butch unwittingly winds up in the hands of a sociopath. The egregiously evil nature of Zed and Maynard encourages the audience to empathize with garden-variety criminals like Butch and Marsellus, a moral calculus that Hitchcock also employed to great effect in Psycho.
