Summary
The film begins by showing the American Heritage dictionary definition of the word "pulp." A man and a woman named Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, sit in a booth at a Los Angeles diner. Honey Bunny calls Pumpkin a "duck" for not wanting to commit armed robberies anymore, and he tells her the story of a man who robbed a bank with a telephone by convincing the teller that someone was holding his daughter ransom. Pumpkin discourages the idea of robbing liquor stores and gas stations, where cashiers are often armed, and suggests they rob the diner, which is a soft target full of customers whose wallets they can steal. Honey Bunny agrees, and the two kiss before jumping to their feet with guns and holding the restaurant hostage. The frame freezes and the opening credits come on.
After the opening credits, the scene shifts to the interior of a car. Two men named Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, wearing suits, are discussing hash bars in Amsterdam, and the cultural differences between America and Europe. After parking, the men retrieve pistols from the trunk, and Jules mentions they should have shotguns. Walking into an apartment building, Vincent and Jules discuss an actress named Mia, who starred in a pilot that was never picked up, and her husband, a man named Marsellus Wallace.
Jules tells Vincent that Marsellus ordered his men to throw a Samoan man named Antoine Rockamora (nicknamed "Tony Rocky Horror") off a balcony for giving Mia a foot massage. Jules and Vincent heatedly debate whether foot massages are inherently sexual. Vincent annoys Jules, who thinks they are not, by asking whether he'd give a man a foot massage. Vincent also reveals to Jules that Marsellus recently asked him to look after Mia while he is on vacation in Florida.
Vincent and Jules enter an apartment building with three men inside, eating cheeseburgers for breakfast. Jules approaches one man named Brett, trying his cheeseburger and Sprite, then asks another where the "shit" is. The second man tells them it's in the cupboard, and Vincent retrieves a briefcase with a padlock that requires a three-digit code. When he opens it, its contents glow. When Brett tries to apologize to Jules, Jules casually shoots the second man, lying on a couch. Jules asks Brett what Marsellus looks like, and shoots him in the shoulder when a terrified Brett says "What?" too many times. Jules then recites Ezekiel 25:17 before he and Vincent fire multiple rounds at Brett, killing him.
A title card reads: "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife." In the back of a bar, Marsellus explains to a boxer named Butch that he is nearing the end of his career. Butch accepts an envelope full of cash in exchange for throwing his next boxing match in the fifth round. Jules and Vincent walk into the same bar, now wearing casual clothes. The bartender wryly asks Vincent about having to take care of Mia, amusing Jules. On his way out, Butch and Vincent exchange a few tense words, before Marsellus calls Vincent over.
The scene shifts to the home of a drug dealer named Lance, where Vincent overhears Lance's wife Jody explaining her piercings to an Irish woman named Trudy. Lance calls Vincent into the next room, where he shows Vincent bags of different kinds of heroin. Vincent buys three grams of a brand called "Madman." Vincent complains about someone scraping his brand new Chevy Malibu with a key, and asks Lance if he can shoot up in his home.
A montage sequence shows Vincent injecting heroin and driving to Mia's house. Vincent finds a note on the door left for him by Mia, inviting him inside while she is getting dressed. Once inside, Vincent hears Mia's voice via an intercom system, telling him where the bar is. While Vincent makes himself a drink in the living room, Mia snorts cocaine in her bedroom. She walks into the living room barefoot, and the two depart together to a retro diner named Jackrabbit Slim's, where Mia has made a reservation.
Analysis
The first frame of Pulp Fiction primes the audience for the kind of aggressively postmodern and self-aware sensibility that the film will embody. Crucially, Tarantino offers the audience not one definition of "pulp," but two. The first—"a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter"—can of course refer to any kind of inner core material, but also describes the unconventional structure of the film, which does not abide by the traditional three-act structure or linear chronology of a Hollywood production. By the standards of most unitary feature film narratives, Pulp Fiction is an intentionally open-ended and shapeless mass: beginning at the end, ending at the beginning, offering no clear protagonists, and following numerous tangents that Tarantino casually abandons.
Whereas the first definition refers to Tarantino's formal experimentation, the second definition refers more to the explicit content of the film, describing "lurid subject matter" that is typically printed in "a magazine or book... on rough, unfinished paper." Tarantino, an avid cinephile who worked in a Los Angeles video store before becoming an acclaimed director, sought to creatively combine a bevy of lowbrow and highbrow genres that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, which offered audiences visceral, sensational pleasures—Blaxploitation, rape-and-revenge, Kung Fu, hardboiled crime, spaghetti Western, Gothic horror, French New Wave, and more. Given how deliberately the script stitches together and pays homage to a number of wildly different genres and traditions, critics have labeled Pulp Fiction as a prime cinematic example of "meta-fiction" (fiction about fiction), and the postmodern phenomenon known as "pastiche."
The concepts of plurality and fragmentation are essential to understanding the spirit of the film, which unfolds in an episodic structure that floats freely through time, repeating scenes from various perspectives, skipping pivotal events, and lingering on seemingly inconsequential ones. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, for example, do not appear again until the final scene of the film. But their conversation about whether to rob banks or restaurants, which opens the film, models a dialogue structure that reappears numerous times over the course of the plot, where two characters have an argument that unfolds in a heavily stylized vernacular, such as Jules and Vincent, Vincent and Mia, Marsellus and Butch, Butch and Fabienne, and so forth. In Pulp Fiction, what the characters are saying is often secondary to how they are saying it. The first scene is an early clue that style, not substance, is the real subject of the film.
The casting of the film also reflects Tarantino's desire to incorporate the history of cinema, with 1970s matinee idol John Travolta playing the key role of Vincent Vega, and Samuel L. Jackson wearing a Jheri-curl wig reminiscent of a Blaxploitation protagonist. Even small details, like the nickname of a never-seen character Antoine Rockamora being "Tony Rocky Horror," reference midnight-screening classics from the 1970s like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Tarantino essentially imagines what the colorful, off-screen lives of these fictional characters might be like, by scripting scenes where they go about relatively ordinary tasks like discussing fast food, arguing about foot massages, dancing, and using the bathroom, in addition to participating in more dramatic events like murder, theft, and rape.
Drugs, sex, and violence are all integral to the plot of the film, given that virtually all of its characters are immoral criminals immersed in the seedy, criminal underbelly of Los Angeles. Jules's monologue, in which he recites Ezekiel 25:17, foreshadows a moral awakening that he will experience toward the end of the film. In Pulp Fiction, violence is casual, incidental, and brutal—likely a nod to seminal works like Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1972) and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). Tarantino delights in creating jarring contrasts between ordinariness and extreme violence, such as when Jules asks for a bite of Brett's Big Kahuna Burger before executing him. The briefcase, the contents of which are never revealed, is a reference to the cinematic plot device known as the "MacGuffin"—a desired goal or object that is pursued but never fully explained.
