|
|
The third mainplot is about Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) and his goldwatch. He is a boxer, which is supposed to throw a fight, but doesn`t. He earns a bit of money on the bookies (news were out that the fight was fixed) and together with his girlfriend Bonnie (Maria de Mederios), they are heading out of town with a very angry Marsellus Wallace (He paid him to fix the match) after them. Bonnie forgets Butch`s legendary goldwatch back in their apartment and he must return to get it back. He finds it, but in the meanwhile he both manage to shoot Vincent (on the toilet, his gun on the kitchen table,) who is waiting for him, and hit Marsellus with his car, getting chased into a nearby gun shop, were they both become captives of weird leather freaks in the basement of the shop! (In this film things only seems to get worse.)
While Marsellus is being raped, Butch manages to escape, but changes his mind when facing the outside-door upstairs, and bravely takes a sword which he rescues Marsellus with. Only a few scenes back Butch had a gun pointed to Marsellus`s head and was about to kill him himself, but the weapon-shop freaks surprised him. And suddenly he completely changes and instead of killing him (or let him be killed) helps him out of his misery. Not even his worst enemy deserves a faith in a basement being raped by psychopaths, until death seems like a mercy. This shows how the our human hearts can ignore good logic sense, when it all comes down to it. Butch took his chances and won.
There are other themes to this short story also. Butch, when he`s not with Fabienne, he`s a jerk, he`s a cold-hearted bastard. Before he meets Fabienne, he lived in a shitty world and he was a shitty guy. Marsellus is not saying, «Take the money or I`m going to kill you.» he`s saying, «I`m going to offer you this money to throw the fight, you might as well, you`re never going to become champion, you`ve only got another couple of fights in you.» Butch is thinking, «I`m taking your money and I`m still going to win. I`m screwing you.» He kills the guy in the ring and doesn`t give a damn. He takes out Vincent, doesn`t think two things about it. If it wasn`t for the psychopaths in the shop he would have killed Marsellus right there. He found Fabienne and she`s such a breath of fresh air into his miserable world that he`s «Okay, I can get rid of all this, so I`m going to have to do one more dirty trick in order to get the money that`s going to allow me to be a good person.» When he walks into that hotel room and closes that door, he`s closing it on Butch forever, but she leaves that watch and it`s like, «I`ve got to be Butch one more time.»
«The depth of these characters and, once again, the opportunity to sink their teeth into some huge chunks of dialogue, was an obvious attraction for the actors.»
Jeff Dawson, a Film Critic for the Empire
Pulp Fiction delights some audience members and disturbs others, I think, for the same reason: because it toys with their expectations. It does not seem willing to play by the rules. It imposes its own order on the material. Just at a time when American action films have seemed bogged down in a morass of formulaic plots, here is one which throws out everything they teach in the Hollywood screenwriting workshops and reinvents a genre from scratch. "Pulp Fiction" is likely to be the most influential film of the next five years, and for that we can be thankful, because it may have freed us from uncounted predictable formula films.
Also, in usual films, the dialogue is constructed to bring the plot forward. But in Pulp Fiction and other Tarantino-films, the dialogue is based around every-day topics, though with a philosophical flavour to it, and have nothing to do with the actual plot.
Back ti Pulp Fiction Main Section (Hit Image)
