no such thing as a stupid question, right? is “gimp” a specific description or was it just a contrived character in the story? it was obviously an ensalved person but for what purpose? was it enslaved for sex or for some other purpose? is it mentally incapacitated by nature or rendered so? are there real-life cases?
Well he would have liked being ensalved based on what they were probably doing with him.
There’s probably additional info out there about this character, but I take him for what I see in the movie. A chained up and gagged guy. I assumed he was being kept for sexual purposes, although not necessarily involuntarily since he wasn’t exactly helping when Bruce Willis was freeing himself. Mentally incapacitated? Kind of hard to tell with the way he was physically incapacitated.
Sage Rat’s link implies that the word’s use in connection with sexual bondage and S&M originates with Pulp Fiction. Previously, gimp seems to have meant a physically handicapped person (at least, that seems to be the old meaning that is the most likely to be relevant). I suppose being in bondage bears some analogy to being physically handicapped, or perhaps it is a reference to actual physically handicapped people being sexually exploited by able-bodied sadists. I don’t know whether Tarantino just made up the newer meaning, or if he was just popularizing a usage that was already extant in the S&M ‘community’.
The article also mentions a movie from 1992 (predating Pulp Fiction) where that type of suit appeared. So the question is whether it was called the same thing before.
Clearly the term “gimp” has long been in use prior to Pulp Fiction to mean a “crippled person”. As has the leather S&M bondage outfit he was wearing.
The impression I got was that The Gimp was basically a simpleminded, animialistic, possibly metally retarded man who was probably going to rape the shit out of Butch and Marsellus. Possibly he was once normal and driven insane from the abuses of Zed & Co. Maybe he was always like that. Doesn’t matter since we aren’t really supposed to regard The Gimp as “human”.
As to the “point”, I think it was just another one of those bizarre non-sequitors one typically finds in a Tarantino film.
Yeah, I think the point is that these guys in the pawn shop were in to some strange shit and that Wallace’s and Butch’s day just took a turn for the worst.