Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction explained

We are then shown Vince’s eventful evening in the company of Marsellus’ wife Mia, before the story moves on to its only chapter with another central character. Butch Coolidge, played by Bruce Willis, is a boxer whose days are, in Marsellus’ words, “all but over.” And yet we see him fleeing the scene at the end of a fight in which he has not only defeated but also killed his opponent.

Tarantino consciously avoids showing the fight itself, and over the course of its two-hour running time, his story, like so many other film genres, hews to boxing movie tropes. Instead, jump to a shot of Marsellus standing over Butch’s dead opponent in the locker room after the game and saying to his right hand, “I’m ready to search the earth for that motherfucker.” We assume Butch will soon be one too will be a dead man.

But what did he do with Marsellus?

It’s not that Wallace sees the death of Floyd, the boxer he supported in the fight, as a personal tragedy. In fact, he’s more worried about losing the game than he is about losing his life. Marsellus played a significant role in Floyd winning the fight and, more importantly, Butch losing it.

On the other hand, Butch doesn’t just earn his reward from the fight itself. He’s about to receive a payout from eight different bookmakers for bets his brother Scottie placed with extremely high odds of winning. “As soon as the word got out, the solution was in, man, the odds went through the roof,” we see Butch telling Scottie over a payphone after his post-game escape.

The “solution” he speaks of is the instruction Marsellus gave him before the battle. In the film’s first chapter, the crime boss calls Butch to his club, where, in return for a bribe, he tells him, “Your ass will go under in the fifth.”

While Butch initially agrees to take a dive and intentionally lose the fight, his ego is bruised when Vince calls him a “palooka” at the club’s bar – an insulting term for a prize-winning boxer who never made it to the top has. It is the only time in the film that the two exchange words before Butch kills Vince in the most famous scene of his non-linear narrative.

He decides to double-cross Marsellus and his gang by beating them at their own game, by leaking the “solution” to increase the chances of him winning the fight, and then going against his paymaster’s wishes sets yourself up to win. As it turns out, Vince and Floyd are the only people involved in the plan who end up dead.

Butch and Marsellus cross paths by chance the morning after the fight and are then kidnapped by a crazy pawn shop owner who takes him to his sex dungeon and introduces them to a corrupt, sexually depraved police officer. Butch manages to escape the situation, but after a brief crisis of conscience, he returns to save Marsellus. He browses props from various film genres before settling on a samurai sword as his weapon of choice.

With the pawn shop owner dead and the police officer who committed the rapist incapacitated, Marsellus tells Butch, “We’re cool.” Butch completes his hero’s journey as only a Tarantino character could. And it’s certainly the most unlikely circumstance for a unifying moment in the history of cinema. Still, it embodies Tarantino originality at his best.

Related topics