1 New Wave single from 1979, “My Sharona.” (Tarantino said that the song “has a really good sodomy beat to it. The track he actually planned to use? The Knack’s No. The script dictates that the music playing during the rape of Marsellus is “The Judds, singing in harmony.” But Tarantino never intended to use the country-music family: he had gotten wise to the notion that if he specified the song he really wanted on the soundtrack, whoever controlled the rights would charge him extra, so he would plant false musical cues. (The theory falls apart because Budd’s lying: the sword turns up in a golf bag in his trailer.) Some people like to think that the sword Butch finds is a crossover from Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies: specifically, the sword that Bill (David Carradine) gave to his brother Budd (Michael Madsen), since Budd tells Bill that he pawned the sword. There’s an entertaining but goofy theory about that sword, to be filed next to the fan-favorite notion that Marsellus Wallace’s soul has been removed through the back of his neck and stored in his briefcase.
Tarantino’s screenplay specifies that Butch holds the weapon “Takakura Ken-style,” referring to the Japanese star of movies such as 1968’s The Drifting Avenger. ) Then Butch spots the appropriate weapon of honor and vengeance: a samurai sword. (Check it out here, starting around 6:30. The sequence is like an old Looney Tunes cartoon - “The Rabbit of Seville,” for example - where Bugs Bunny and an opponent engage in a rapid-fire arms race. He wordlessly grabs a claw hammer, then upgrades to a baseball bat, followed by a chainsaw. He turns back to help Marsellus, the man who just tried to kill him, but first he needs to find a weapon. Standing at the door of the pawnshop in a blood-soaked T-shirt, on the threshold of escaping his predicament and his movie’s genre, Butch has a crisis of conscience (beautifully underplayed by Willis).
#Gimp mask movie#
And you’re like, ‘What? How did I get into Deliverance? I was in Body and Soul, what’s going on here?'” ( Body and Soul is a 1947 film noir about a boxer Deliverance is the 1972 Burt Reynolds movie about a river trip that takes a disturbing turn into hillbilly rape.) Although some dismissed Tarantino’s genre-shuffling as a cheap postmodern stunt, it was part of a deliberate strategy, along with the timeline jumps, to keep the audience off-balance. “Part of the fun of Pulp,” Tarantino said, “is that if you’re hip to movies, you’re watching the boxing movie Body and Soul and then suddenly the characters turn a corner and they’re in the middle of Deliverance.
The pawnshop was actually the Crown Pawn Shop, at 20933 Roscoe Blvd., in the Canoga Park district of Los Angeles - still in business today. And the creepy Zed was portrayed by Peter Greene, also seen as the villain in The Mask. Maynard was played by the Texan actor and playwright Duane Whitaker, who later wrote the sequel to Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn. Underneath the Gimp’s head-to-toe leather was Stephen Hibbert, a comedy writer ( Animaniacs) and actor ( Austin Powers) then married to Julia Sweeney (the SNL alum who also appeared in Pulp Fiction - Tarantino did some work on the screenplay for her movie It’s Pat). Once they take Marsellus into the adjoining room, Butch knocks out the Gimp with a single punch, and heads upstairs to freedom. Maynard is joined by his cousin, Zed, and their leather-clad servant, the Gimp Zed decides that they will rape Marsellus first. Marsellus and Butch awaken in the pawnshop’s basement, tied to chairs and equipped with red ball gags. A limping chase on foot leads them both into a pawnshop, where Butch punches out Marsellus and the proprietor, Maynard, concusses Butch. The next morning, Butch heads to his apartment to fetch a watch while there, he kills Vincent (John Travolta) and hits Marsellus with the car. The setup: the boxer Butch Coolidge (played by a 39-year-old Bruce Willis) double-crosses crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) instead of throwing a prizefight, he bets on himself and wins. No scene upended more expectations than the pawn shop sequence (SPOILER ALERT - if you haven’t ever seen the movie, this is the moment when you should stop reading and go do that. But when Quentin Tarantino’s film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994, it thrilled and shocked the audience in equal measures. Pulp Fiction has become so canonized as a modern classic, it’s easy to forget how transgressive it was on its release twenty years ago.
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