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Pulp Fiction, what was in the briefcase? (1 Viewer)

What was in the briefcase?

  • Marcellus Wallace's Soul

    Votes: 25 33.8%

  • something else

    Votes: 49 66.2%
  • Total voters
    74
fantasycurse42

fantasycurse42

Footballguy Jr.
Amazing movie (a personal top 10 for me), with a good part of the plot revolving around the briefcase...

Arguments for his soul, good write up here.

THE SOUL OF MARSELLUS WALLACE

The most persistent and ingenious theory is that what is inside the case is nothing short of the soul of gang kingpin Marsellus Wallace, who sold it to Satan and is trying to get it back. The imposing mob boss wears a Band-Aid on the back of his neck, reportedly because actor Ving Rhames has a scar there he wanted to hide for the iconic over-the-shoulder shot, but it's also been argued that when the devil takes your soul he takes it from the back of your neck. This neat esoteric factoid doesn't seem to be in the Bible, as messageboard amateur sleuths claim, or in some vague version of "Chinese mythology" (correct us if Google has served us poorly), but we like this theory's style. It would also explain why bullets miraculously miss Vincent and Jules in an apartment shooting – divine intervention is surely more likely to help your ### when you're on soul-saving business. And the briefcase combination? What else but 666.
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So, his soul had to be carried around in a briefcase? His soul somehow ended up in the hands of three 20-somethings in an apartment across town? Vincent was able to identify it at a glance? He knows what a soul looks like? Jules refers to Marcellus' soul as "the s--t"?

Let's get real here, people.

 
I just cast the vote that made it 16-15 in favor of something else. So, half of the rest of you are laughing jackalopes.

 
fantasycurse42 said:
Could be an homage to Robert Aldrich's Mike Hammer vehicle, Cold War, atomic noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly. It definitely wasn't a soul in THAT briefcase.

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Somebody unsuccessfully tried to murder him by stabbing him through the cervical spine, before being taken out Travolta and/or Jackson?Band-aids are pretty routine, mundane objects, without need of invoking souls in brief cases?

 
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I usually like to carry other men's souls in something more unassuming, like a brown paper bag. People see a locking briefcase, they figure something valuable's in there.

 
I forgot there was a similar briefcase in Repo Man (possibly/probably also an homage to Kiss Me Deadly?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction

Excerpts:

In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly [1955]. I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk".

The mysterious 666 briefcase

The combination of the mysterious suitcase lock is 666, the "number of the beast". Tarantino has said there is no explanation for its contents—it is simply a MacGuffin, a pure plot device. Originally, the case was to contain diamonds, but this was seen as too mundane. For filming purposes, it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow.[186] In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino purportedly "reveals" the secret contents of the briefcase, but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), with an intertitle that reads "Missing Reel". The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the "knowledge" of the briefcase's contents alters one's understanding of the movie.[187]

Despite Tarantino's statements, many solutions to what one scholar calls this "unexplained postmodern puzzle" have been proposed.[87] A strong similarity has often been observed with the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. That movie, whose protagonist Tarantino has cited as a source for Butch, features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive.[188] In their review of Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man in the Daily Telegraph, Nick Cowen and Hari Patience suggest that Pulp Fiction may also owe "a debt of inspiration" to the glowing car trunk in that film.[189] In scholar Paul Gormley's view, this connection with Kiss Me Deadly, and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself.[190] The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus' soul gained popular currency in the mid-1990s. Analyzing the notion, Roger Ebert dismissed it as "nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net".

 
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I voted No Soul '15.

Also, Repo Man wasn't quite a MacGuffin. The thing was toxic, wasn't it? That's why the driver of the car is sweating and completely nuts. We never find out what was in the case, but it's surely not simply a plot device. The car winds up flying into the ether at the end, presumably because of some sort of toxic alien intervention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_(film)

 
Evilgrin 72 said:
So, his soul had to be carried around in a briefcase? His soul somehow ended up in the hands of three 20-somethings in an apartment across town? Vincent was able to identify it at a glance? He knows what a soul looks like? Jules refers to Marcellus' soul as "the s--t"?

Let's get real here, people.
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but is was glowing tho

 
It mesmerized a random hothead thief, a career mob grunt and anyone else who dared to open it. I don't think anyone calls a gold bar beautiful.

It was the tesseract.

Or option B, unobtainium.

 
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Soul? Wtf? I've seen Pulp Fiction several times and never even cared what's in it. Who cares - it's valuable to Marsellus and they want it back.

 
AAABatteries said:
Soul? Wtf? I've seen Pulp Fiction several times and never even cared what's in it. Who cares - it's valuable to Marsellus and they want it back.
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Of course people care. That's the point. He never tells you what it is to MAKE people care. Otherwise who cares?

 
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