Pulp Fiction, by Quentin Tarantino

906 Words2 Pages

The movie Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino, contains violence, sex and drugs but is an underlying religious film. The five main characters either follow the lord and are rewarded or they follow the devil and are punished. John Travolta plays Vincent Vega, Ving Rhames plays Marcellus Wallace and Uma Thurman plays Mia Wallace, these three characters represent evil and sin. Samuel L. Jackson plays Jules Winnefield and Bruce Willis plays Butch Coolidge and these characters represent good and follow a righteous path. The movie is broken up into four separate sections that are not in chronological order but they coincide with each other at the end of the film. Pulp Fiction is violent, drugs abusive and sex filled the movie that promotes strong religious messages through choice of the righteous man or the Devil’s path.

At the beginning of the film, Vincent and Jules are cold-blooded, murdering gangsters. They enter an apartment to obtain an important symbol in the movie. It is a briefcase that opens with the numbers six, six, six, which is a sign of the devil. The case belongs to Marcellus and is the first sign that he is an evil character. In order to retrieve the briefcase, Vincent and Jules need to kill people in the apartment.

Before Jules murders anybody, he recites a verse from Ezekiel 25:17, "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you wi...

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... his valley of darkness. The act of being a righteous man and saving the weak provides Marcellus with forgiveness to Butch for throwing the fight and allows the hit on Butches head to be called off. Butch then rides off into the sunset on a motorcycle, or chopper.

Pulp Fiction was brilliantly made to hide religious morals though out an inappropriate film. Underneath the surface of drugs and violence the path of righteousness and the allure of sin are present throughout the film. Janet Maslin from the New York Times claims "Pulp Fiction" leaves its viewers with a stunning vision of destiny, choice and spiritual possibility. The film needn't turn explicitly religious to reverberate when one character escapes death on a motorcycle labeled "Grace." The film was very discrete about the apparentness of the religious morals that it projected to the audience.

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