a bunch of pausing, an entire watch, and a couple scene analysis videos later, it's safe to say pulp fiction is one of more intense, weird, and interesting movies i've seen so far.
walking into this movie i knew nothing about the plot save for the apartment scene with brett's men, vincent and jules. even google couldn't answer that question for me.
the dialogues are all very natural. they sometimes directly pushes the plot forward, sometimes hint towards what's going to happen, and sometimes just there for the laughs. if i were to put my shoes back to the late 90s watching this movie and have never watched those bloated cgi stuff, this could've easily been the craziest movie i've ever seen. because this movie was a subversion of everything. the craziness from shocking scenes, the tension between characters and the countdowns/ups, the non-linearity (i liked that a lot, and someone pointed out in an analysis video that in the beginning scene you can actually see vincent in the background walking to the bathroom reading the same book that he read when he was shot at the last chronological scene of his appearance), the cinematography, and of course, the creation of a new sub-genre of crime films (we usually see the criminal underworld from the average joe perspective; here we see them from the insiders and they are just normal guys as well... in short, every character has a trajectory, has multiple angles, and the logos of their arc is very much foretold).
if we strip this film as naked as possible, i think this story is ultimately about "probability," or in jules' eyes, "divine intervention." you can only survive if you stop indulging yourself in bad behaviors and going deeper into the gangster underworld of LA. the two most important characters, jules and vincent, are literal foils, and i think the story is about their initially shared but ultimately opposite fates.
jules is calculated, skilled, religious, and humble. his character rise starts with the miraculous moment when one brett's men tried to shoot him and vincent but landed zero shots. he took that as a warning and in the restaurant scene, we see he rises atop and becomes an enlightened "monk-like" person. we don't see him for the majority of the movie, but he is the singular most important character in the story. he left. and none of the things that happened afterward is part of his business. be a "bum" or not, he didn't die.
vincent is sloppy, unserious, prideful, and careless. his character is a descent after descent and it's very obvious. he took the "missing shot" as "things just happen" instead of a warning that he should probably get out of this criminal underworld within LA to pursue something else. we see jules tried repeatedly to convince him and he didn't listen. instead, he stayed in marcellus' circle - almost broke marcellus' trust because he was attracted to mia, took many drugs, being rude and disrespectful to winston wolfe, and instead of being diligent, he shat in butch's apartment's bathroom without his gun and was toasting pop-tarts. this combination of sloppiness increases his probability of death and ultimately, although not being a "bum," he died.
we see butch being a mirror character of jules. he's prideful in the beginning and because of that, he didn't allow himself to lose the boxing match. the result is that he had to escape LA and be chased all around the world by Marcellus. his obsession with his watch almost cost his life if it weren't for vincent to be sloppy as well, but he survived the apartment, and then almost died from Marcellus himself shooting at him, and AGAIN almost died from Zed's graping gangs, but things took a turn when he decided to go back and save his biggest enemy. i dont think that was a logical decision but that was the best decision he could ever make. killing Zed's ppl and freeing his arch nemesis gave him the ultimate redemption, and as a result, he and his gf/wife (not sure the status) left LA and lived happily ever after.
butch and jules are the only winners of this story. from jules' angle, it's that God is giving him a warning, that he must stop being the "tyranny of the evil men" and become the "sheppard" and protect the "weak." in my perspective, it's a character realization that one can only have so much luck "luck is pure probability, and the sloppier, the more careless and less pragamatic you are in a literal crime world, you have higher chance of dying," he realizes himself and jumps out of the box by departing from LA altogether.
if i were to further dumb this story down, it's fafo, or fafrrluregfo (f*** around for rly rly long, ur eventually gonna find out).
i would argue against ppl who disliked that vincent died and died so suddenly as if he, as one of the protagonists, didn't have any plot armor. vincent and jules both had massive plot armor (evident in the brett's apartment scene). from then on, we see how jules and vincent diverge in decision making. one keeps gaining moral high ground while the other keeps sinking. and the sinking, throughout the entire film, is the most obvious foreshadowing of his "sudden" death.
anyways, pulp fiction is a pretty good movie, even without factoring in the "cultural impact" real-life context. I don't think it's as extraordinary as The Truman Show, Shawshank Redemption, 12 Angry Men, or Green Book and the like, only because the movie leans heavily towards comedy. and that's my personal preference. my favorite part is the subversion of narrative, where on the most basic and surface level, this movie is just about the interaction and the intertwined connections between a bunch of very compelling and interesting charactersi within the LA crime world melting pot and the result of everyone's decisions and actions.