Summary
At Jackrabbit Slim's, Vincent and Mia sit in a booth shaped like a Chrysler, and a waiter dressed like Buddy Holly takes their orders. Vincent registers skepticism at the cost of Mia's milkshake. Vincent rolls Mia a cigarette, and the two discuss Amsterdam, which both of them have visited, and the television pilot that Mia once starred in. Mia explains that the show was called "Fox Force Five"—an action-adventure series starring five women as super spies. Mia explains that her character was the granddaughter of a vaudevillian performer who would have told a different joke in each subsequent episode. Vincent asks to hear the joke from the pilot, but Mia refuses.
After Vincent tries Mia's milkshake, the two are quiet for a time, and Mia talks about hating "uncomfortable silences." As she goes to the bathroom to snort more cocaine, Vincent watches a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. When Mia sits back down, Vincent tells her he wants to ask her something if she promises not to get offended. Although Mia refuses, she encourages him to ask anyway. Vincent asks her if Marsellus did in fact order Antoine to be thrown out of a window for giving Mia a foot massage. Mia scoffs at Vincent for thinking the story is credible, and flatly denies it.
Across the restaurant, an Ed Sullivan impersonator takes the microphone and announces that the Jackrabbit Slim's "twist contest" is about to begin. Mia immediately volunteers, and when Vincent protests, Mia asserts her authority as his boss's wife and sternly insists that they compete for the trophy. Vincent and Mia remove their shoes and take the stage. As the song "You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry plays, Vincent and Mia lock eyes and dance together.
Vincent and Mia return to Mia's house, having won the trophy. After an awkward pause, Mia suggests that they share a drink, and dances around the living room to "Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon" by Urge Overkill in Vincent's jacket while he goes to the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, Vincent urges himself to finish his drink quickly and go home. In the living room, Mia finds Vincent's bag of heroin and snorts it, thinking it is cocaine. The mistake causes her to overdose instantly, and Vincent finds her passed out on the floor with a bloody nose and a foamy mouth.
A panicked Vincent carries her to his car and speeds across Los Angeles. He calls Lance on a cell phone and tells him that he's bringing Mia over. Lance tells him to bring her to a hospital, and forbids Vincent from showing up at his house, but Vincent arrives seconds later, crashing his car into the house's front wall. Vincent tells Lance that Mia is Marsellus Wallace's wife, and threatens to tell Marsellus that Lance let her die if he refuses to help. The two men carry Mia inside.
Lance tells Jody to get an adrenaline shot from the refrigerator, and she screams at the two of them for taking her in. Lance rummages through items looking for a black medical book with instructions about how to administer the shot, bickering with Jody while Mia edges ever nearer to death. They remove Mia's shirt so they can give her the shot, which needs to strike through her breastplate and pierce her heart. Vincent orders Jody to get a pen so they can mark exactly where the needle needs to land, and Vincent and Lance debate over which of them is going to administer the shot. At the count of three, Vincent plunges the needle into Mia's heart, and she violently jolts up, coughing and gasping.
Vincent and Mia ride back to Mia's house in complete silence. Vincent suggests to Mia that they both keep the incident a secret, and Mia agrees, telling him it would also get her into trouble with Marsellus. The two agree to a pact of secrecy and shake hands. Mia asks Vincent if he still wants to hear her Fox Force Five joke, and Vincent says yes. After she tells the joke, Vincent blows her a kiss and drives home.
Analysis
Pulp Fiction deconstructs the history of American cinema, television, and popular culture by repurposing decades of music, visual iconography, and cultural trends within the context of present-day Los Angeles. Jackrabbit Slim's, which Vincent calls a "living wax museum," is essentially a manifestation of the postmodern "pastiche": a work that imitates the styles of other works. Much like Pulp Fiction imitates and absorbs a legion of cultural influences, Jackrabbit Slim's is staffed by impersonators of bygone icons like Marilyn Monroe, Ed Sullivan, Mamie van Doren, Buddy Holly, and more. Vincent jokingly remarks, "Jayne Mansfield must have the night off."
Tarantino also exposes the industry practices by which American cultural products like films and television shows get made. Jules explains to Vincent early in the film what a "pilot" is—a one-off episode of a potential television series that may or may not get picked up by a network and make it to air. Unlike marquee idols like Marilyn Monroe, Mia is an actress who has never even appeared onscreen. "Fox Force Five"—an idea for a television show that resembles the plot of Tarantino's later film Kill Bill—is a pure example of the entertainment marketing machine, which combines elements of violence, sexuality, and humor in campy and implausible ways. A fictional show within a fictional film (which is itself about fiction), Mia's speech to Vincent about the show is yet another example of the film's playful attitude toward the aesthetic pleasures of stylized fiction.
Tarantino invests the relationship between Vincent and Mia with crackling, dangerous tension, given the fact that her protective husband Marsellus allegedly threw a man off a balcony for touching her feet. Although the two share chemistry, they cannot physically consummate it, which lends the scene in which they dance together an added frisson. Pulp Fiction's dance scene is a reference to another famous dance scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Bande à part, where a character named Odile (played by Anna Karina) starts spontaneously dancing in a cafe. The dance scene is a pure distillation of the way in which the film chooses time and again to elevate spontaneous, aesthetic pleasure over a logical, realistic narrative.
One major theme of Pulp Fiction is the unpredictability of fortune—often in the form of extremely good luck and extremely bad luck befalling various characters in close proximity to one another. The song that Mia and Vincent dance to ("You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry) foreshadows the fact that the characters are blithely unaware of the chaos and trauma that is about to unfold. Whereas Vincent and Mia winning the "twist contest" trophy is a turn of good fortune, especially considering that Mia expressed a sincere desire to win it, she then snorts heroin that she thinks is cocaine and immediately overdoses.
Tarantino uses the conceit of the cellular phone (a relatively new technology in 1994) to set-up the comic image of Vincent talking to Lance on the phone and then crashing his car into his house mere seconds later, filmed in one uninterrupted shot. Vincent plunging the adrenaline shot into Mia's heart is a metaphor for the way in which Tarantino aspires to plumb the "pulp" of American fiction and entertainment, injecting it with the unpredictable, live-wire energy of postmodernism and pastiche. Tarantino uses parallel shots—one of Vincent and Mia looking at ease driving to Jackrabbit Slim's, and one of Vincent and Mia looking traumatized driving back from Lance's—to visually bookend the date sequence. Mia's decision to tell Vincent her "Fox Force Five" joke, which she previously refused to do, symbolizes the fact that she now trusts him.
