Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (20 page)

It is easy to miss, but Vinnie’s “incontinence”—and I mean this in the ordinary sense of the word—is the master key to the movie, and the monkey wrench. That’s the password to Taratino’s tree house. Everything bad that happens to Vinnie is signaled by what’s happening in the bathroom. The “fourth man” with the hand cannon is hiding in the bathroom when Vinnie and Jules make the “hit” in the apartment, but Jules takes the hint and Vinnie doesn’t get it. Vinnie is in the bathroom when Honey Bunny and Pumpkin pull their guns at the coffee shop to create the Mexican stand-off. Vinnie is in the bathroom when Mia Wallace mistakes his heroin for cocaine (saving them both from an impending and very disloyal tryst). And Vinnie is in the bathroom when Butch returns for his beloved watch, which is the end of Vinnie.

We do see Jules in the bathroom once, and we do see Butch there once: each is washing off the stain of a former life he intends to leave behind. And Tarantino makes it very, very clear that Vinnie does not wash his hands, showing him emerging
from the bathroom at Butch’s apartment immediately after he flushes the toilet, still fastening his belt. You think I’m making too much of it. If so, then why do Jules and Vinnie have an argument about washing their hands in Jimmie’s bathroom? And I quote:

Nothing happens by accident in a Tarantino movie. As Aristotle puts it, “that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.”
¹⁰⁰
Tarantino doesn’t waste your time with “that which makes no perceptible difference.” If Vinnie had the sense to wash his hands, thoroughly, he might still be with us—Butch would have had time to escape, and some noise to cover his exit. But no. Vinnie is lazy and careless and incontinent. Tarantino tells us what we need to know. It comes when Vinnie has taken Mia Wallace home after their “date” at Jack Rabbit Slim’s. Mia has her own issues with incontinence (as Marsellus well knows, from the infamous “foot massage” episode—he is testing Vinnie’s loyalty). Having excused himself to go to the bathroom after an “uncomfortable silence” with Mia, Vinnie has the following conversation with himself in the mirror:

That’s the password to Tarantino’s tree house: “loyalty.” It’s very meaningful. I noted that the McGuffin for Butch is the watch and for Jules it’s the briefcase. What is the McGuffin in Vinnie’s story? Let me ask it another way. What does he truly want that he cannot get? I mean he has the drugs and the cars and the money and women if he wants them (he turns down a free tryst with Trudi, so we know this isn’t his weakness). He tells us what he doesn’t have that he wants: self-control and true loyalty. The McGuffin evades him.

We may not be able to understand a world filled with people none of whom is morally similar to us, except that Tarantino shows us that they
do
have loyalties. Jules will deliver that briefcase to Marsellus even after he has decided to leave the “business,” and will risk his life to do so. Loyalty. Butch is loyal to the memory of his father, yes, but why, pray tell, does he turn around and save Marsellus Wallace when he could just as easily leave him to die at the hands of Zed and Maynard and The Gimp? If they kill Marsellus, all of Butch’s problems are over. But Butch is a man of honor, a man’s man, and he knows Marsellus is another man of honor, and to put it in his own words Marsellus at that moment is “very far from okay.” A loyal man just can’t let another loyal man meet such an end. Marsellus recognizes the deed for what it is when Butch saves him and also leaves him the privilege of taking care of Zed in “medieval” fashion.

The scene in the back of the pawn shop is a rerun of the rape of Ned Beatty from
Deliverance
. Butch’s search for the right weapon is the key to the scene. He picks up a hammer, then a chainsaw, then a baseball bat, discarding each after a moment’s thought, trying to decide what movie he’s in. Is it
Friday the 13th
? No. Is it
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
? No. Is he in
Walking Tall
? Is this about justice? No. This is about honor. It’s the katana. Uma Thurman and Tarantino are already writing
Kill Bill
on the set of
Pulp Fiction
.

We never quite learn whether Vinnie is capable of genuine loyalty or not. We know he
wants
to be loyal. We know he is
trying
to be loyal. We know he
values
loyalty. We also know that he is weak-willed, careless, and incontinent; he knows that
too, and doesn’t like it. But in the end, there is something different about Vinnie that curbs our sympathy. He doesn’t wash his hands when he goes to the bathroom. So the moral of the story? It’s three morals, but they all amount to one: Be loyal. It’s important. Don’t be weak-willed. It will lead you to a bad end. And wash your hands when you go to the bathroom . . . thoroughly; it says more about your character than you may realize.

KEITH ALLEN KORCZ

JULES:
Don’t do that! Don’t you fuckin’ do that! Don’t blow this shit off! What just happened was a fuckin’ miracle!
¹⁰¹

—
Pulp Fiction

 

So says Jules Winnfield shortly after a man fires six shots point blank from his hand cannon at Jules and his partner Vincent Vega, missing with every shot. But is this experience enough to conclude that, as Vincent puts it, “God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets”? True, it results in a sharp change in Jules’s outlook, as he decides to give up his life as an enforcer for crime boss Marsellus Wallace and just walk the earth, “like Caine in
Kung Fu
,” “tryin’ real hard to be a shepherd.” But there have been too many failed predictions from self-proclaimed prophets, too many pious frauds and too many cult suicides to accept just any report of a miracle at face value.
¹⁰²
Those who
want
to believe find it all too easy. But what about those of us with a more philosophical bent who instead want to
know
? What sort of evidence should we demand before accepting a supposed miracle as a good enough reason, all on its own, to believe in the existence of a particular god?

By far the most famous philosophical attempt to answer this question was written by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776).
¹⁰³
The main point of his reasoning is pretty straightforward. Suppose a generally reliable and trustworthy friend were to tell you that they left their DVD of
Pulp Fiction
in your living room. Would you believe them? Presumably, yes. This sort of thing happens all the time. Now suppose that your friend were to tell you that an aging boxer was in the process of punching out a leather-clad man named “The Gimp” in your living room. Would you believe him? Now, I don’t know what goes on in
your
living room, but I am presuming that this sort of event would be pretty unusual, and that you would assume that your friend was just kidding (at best) or had been conversing a bit too much with Choco the madman (at worst). Finally, imagine what would happen if Mia were to tell her husband, crime boss Marsellus, that she was pregnant, but the baby is definitely not his or that of any other human, contrary to the laws of nature. Rather, she claims that the baby came from God. What would Marsellus do? I suspect that Marsellus would not believe her. In fact, I suspect that Mia and whoever he suspected of being Mia’s partner would quickly become grease spots. “No marriage counselor, no trial separation—fuckin’ divorced” as Jules’s friend Jimmie says in another context. Tony Rocky Horror would have gotten off easy by comparison. If you were Marsellus, would you believe her?

It would be easier to believe that an aging boxer was punching out The Gimp in your living room. However unlikely this is, at least it wouldn’t involve the suspension of a law of nature. And this is Hume’s point: events contrary to what we take to be well-established laws of nature are about as unlikely as things get.

You are more likely to win two lotteries and then get struck by lightning and survive, all within the space of a few minutes, than you are to witness a suspension of a law of nature. Why is this? It’s because of all the evidence we have that laws of nature
do not get suspended. Even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will not patent a purported perpetual motion machine.
¹⁰⁴
They won’t do this because they know that a perpetual motion machine would violate a law of nature, hence that such a device can’t possibly work. A lot of people have tried, and all of them have failed.

We generally take something to be a law of nature because (a) it has been very carefully and repeatedly tested in controlled conditions and found never to be violated and (b) claims that it has been violated have been found to rest on mistakes or outright fraud. On the basis of these repeated observations, we conclude that this is how nature operates. These are not legal laws which, when violated, may lead to a cold shower in a county jail. Rather, they are observed regularities with regard to how things work in nature. Unlike legal laws, one cannot choose to create or to violate them. The kind of scientific testing involved is far more than any one person could do in a lifetime. The evidence, both testimony and physical evidence,
¹⁰⁵
supporting the claim that something is a law of nature is so overwhelming that we know that reports of its suspension are almost certainly mistaken.

Now, being shot at six times without being hit, as happened to Jules and Vincent, need not involve a suspension of a law of nature. Vincent realizes this when he says,

It’s merely a lucky coincidence. Should lucky coincidences be good enough evidence to believe that a god exists? I don’t think so. Suppose the odds are one in a billion that some lucky coincidence will happen to someone today. So, it’s pretty unlikely
that it will happen to you. But given six billion people in the world, it should happen six times today. Is this good evidence that the gods of these six people exist? If a cat (or a Samoan) falls four stories, through a greenhouse, and survives, the news reports it as a miracle. If a cat falls four stories, through a greenhouse, and dies, the news doesn’t report it at all. But if you drop enough cats out of enough windows, some are going to survive. A fortunate coincidence is not necessarily a miracle.

Hume recognizes, with Vincent, that you need more than a lucky coincidence to show that a god exists. Instead, you need something only a god could do, such as suspend a law of nature. If a law of nature gets suspended, you know you are more than just lucky. Thus, we can think of a miracle as a suspension of a law of nature brought about by some supernatural being.

Vincent seems to have a sense of this point when, in response to a question from Jules in the coffee shop, he says that an act of God is “when God makes the impossible possible. And I’m sorry, Jules, but I don’t think what happened this morning qualifies.” Jules replies:

Hume agrees with Jules on one point: the event does not need to be dramatic for it to be a miracle. As Hume puts it:

But notice that Jules’s argument now has shifted. The argument is not now that a miracle occurred, and that this is good evidence that God exists. Rather, the argument is that the apparent miracle has occasioned a feeling in Jules that God has touched him. But we won’t pursue this issue here.
¹⁰⁷
I mention it because it’s not uncommon for a person to present one argument and, in response to objections to it, shift to another without realizing that they have done so.

Jules’s experience doesn’t seem to count as a miracle because it’s apparently merely a coincidence that he was not shot. But what about Hume’s argument? Hume claims that it’s probably never going to be reasonable to believe that a genuine miracle has occurred because a genuine miracle involves a suspension of the laws of nature, and claims that laws of nature have been suspended have almost invariably been shown to be mistaken. As Hume says, when faced with a person claiming to have seen a miracle, “I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.”
¹⁰⁸
Hume thinks it’s clear that it’s always going to be more likely, based on our past experience with such claims, that the person was mistaken than that a law of nature was actually suspended.