Movie Explainer: What is Pulp Fiction about?
It's about henchmen, a fact both trivially and profoundly true
(The basic idea for this essay was spelled out to me decades ago by a guy I knew slightly named John Cho. Tip of the hat to him for that! If I have (as I hope I have) expanded on his basic idea, the additions are my responsibility alone. Hope you’re doing well, ungoogleable John, wherever you are!)
Indeed it’s said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes, it punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids.
•Vikram Seth, Golden Gate (1986).
In the middle—the exact middle—of Pulp Fiction, there is a conventional action movie. It even stars Bruce Willis! You know the plot: A down-on-his-luck boxer betrays the mob for one big score; now he has navigate the perilous labyrinth that is L.A., fighting gangsters (and worse!) as he tries to bring his girlfriend to a new and better life.
There’s a “big bad” he has to fight—that’s Marcellus Wallace, whose shifting relationship with our hero Butch marks the climax of this action movie. But along the way there’s another confrontation with another gangster: one of Marcellus Wallace’s henchmen, Vincent Vega, whom Butch dispatches silently, in an off-hand and almost accidental manner. When Butch fights the big bad, it’s personal: The two battle with fists as well as guns; Butch drops some action movie callback tough-guy dialog (more on that later); now this is a fight!
But in an action movie, before the big bad and the fight fight, there are the faceless goons. Usually they come in waves, mowed down by machine gun fire or just punched out one at a time. But the action movie under consideration is comparatively short, and we only have room for one faceless goon, so down he goes in one quick impersonal barrage of gunfire.
Already you are leaping from your seats, eager to point out that Butch cannot treat Vincent as a faceless goon, because they met before! The night Marcellus paid Butch off, Butch and Vincent shared a brief, inexplicably hostile encounter at English Bob’s bar! This is true, but you’ll notice that in the context of the action movie itself (“The Gold Watch” segment, I mean) Butch never references this earlier encounter. Now, when he fights Marcellus, he sure references the earlier part of the movie—this very scene! In true action-movie fashion, Butch quips a bunch of callbacks as he punches his foe in the face (“that sting is pride blah blah”). But that foe is the big bad. The faceless goon, contrarily, remains faceless. Butch doesn’t say “Take that, Palooka!” or “How do you like them apples, Punchy?” as he shoots Vincent. If Butch recognizes that goon at all, he never breathes a word.
But, yes, you’re right about the rest of the movie. In the rest of the movie, Vincent Vega is far from a faceless goon. The rest of the movie humanizes Vincent Vega, insofar as it’s, you know, a movie about Vincent Vega. He’s a dancing, dating, wise-cracking, Elvis-stanning hit man! What’s not to love?
In this way, Pulp Fiction invites us to think about every faceless goon in every action-movie goon squad. Maybe the guy James Bond just pushed into a volcano recently won a twist contest. Maybe the guy Chow Yun-fat shot twice, once with each gun, had had a really bad day, cleaning out a bloody car while some smarmy jackass called him a dork. Perhaps the 1990s were the peak time for asking us, the audience, to find a professional killer charming, but certainly John Travolta sells it well. It would be a rare viewer who watches Vincent Vega get blown away without feeling, in some sense, bad about it.
Contrast Vincent’s death with Marvin’s. Marvin is another Marcellus henchman. He’s the guy who lets Jules and Vincent into Brett’s apartment to recover the briefcase. He’s the guy who gets his head blown off (via Vincent) in the car.
We are certainly asked to compare the two deaths; I mean they run parallel. Each one is a sudden gunshot precipitated accidentally or almost accidentally by an abrupt jolt. Butch shoots Vincent with a start when the toaster pops; Vincent shoots Marvin with a start when the car hits a bump (or at least that’s his story). I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater back in the day, and I can assure you that the audience reacted to Marvin’s death quite differently from Vincent’s: With Marvin, the audience laughed. Marvin becomes a gag, his body a kind of reverse MacGuffin everyone is trying to get rid of. Marvin really is a faceless goon, a background presence with only a line or two. He gets no banter. He gets no twist contest. He gets no humanization. And so his death is as exhilarating as any faceless goon’s in a John Wick movie. Ha ha, “brain detail.”
Except we should have learned something. The death of Vincent should have taught us that we are wrong about the death of Marvin. Arnold Bennett once wrote1 that a reader should spend at least as much time thinking about a book as reading a book (those who do not are “simply insulting [the] author”); surely this applies to movies as well. But viewers have traditionally frittered away their Pulp Fiction thinking time on untangling the mildly twisty timeline of the film, and failed to consider the humanistic point. You cannot both mourn Vincent and mock Marvin. Once you mourn Vincent, your enjoyment of every subsequent action movie2 should be compromised!
Not really, because most of us are capable of compartmentalizing our emotions and suspending our empathy; but doesn’t something nag at the back of your skull anyway? Will you ever (while watching a movie) be truly happy again?
When a felon’s not engaged in his employment,
Or maturing his felonious little plans,
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man’s.
•W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance (1879).
Literary Taste: How to Form It (1914).
Except maybe Aliens or something where the goons are robots? How far can our humanistic sympathy reach?