It was never really explained why all those bullets missed. Jules just assumed it was a message to him from God. Vincent didn’t care.
So here’s a theory. It was due to God’s intervention but it wasn’t a message. And Jules had nothing to do with it. God made the bullets miss so Vincent would stay alive.
And you’re thinking, “That can’t be true. Vincent got killed by Butch a couple of days later. Obviously God didn’t care if Vincent died.”
No, God didn’t at that point. Vincent had fulfilled his role. It may have even been that God arranged for Butch to kill him just to tidy up the cosmic balance. (Jules may have died off camera.)
But between Vincent’s miraculous escape and his death, he did something important: he was the guy who saved Mia’s life when she OD’ed. God didn’t care about Jules or Vincent; it was Mia he wanted alive.
So while she wasn’t on screen very long, Mia was actually the central character of the story. That explains why Tarantino cast his favorite actress in the role and why she was on the posters.
The script seems to discount the idea that it was just bad shooting:
VINCENT: Why the fuck didn’t you tell us about that guy in the bathroom? Slip your mind? Forget he was in there with a goddamn hand cannon?
JULES: We should be fuckin’ dead right now…Did you see that gun he fired at us? It was bigger than him.
VINCENT: .357.
JULES: We should be fuckin’ dead!
VINCENT: Yeah, we were lucky.
JULES: That shit wasn’t luck. That shit was somethin’ else.
VINCENT: Yeah, maybe.
JULES: That was… divine intervention. You know what divine intervention is?
VINCENT: Yeah, I think so. That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
JULES: Yeah, man, that’s what is means. That’s exactly what it means! God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
VINCENT: I think we should be going now.
JULES: Don’t do that! Don’t you fuckin’ do that! Don’t blow this shit off! What just happened was a fuckin’ miracle!
VINCENT: Chill the fuck out, Jules, this shit happens.
JULES: Wrong, wrong, this shit doesn’t just happen.
VINCENT: Do you wanna continue this theological discussion in the car, or at the jailhouse with the cops?
JULES: We should be fuckin’ dead now, my friend! We just witnessed a miracle, and I want you to fuckin’ acknowledge it!
VINCENT: Okay man, it was a miracle, can we leave now?
And besides this in-movie conversation, there’s also the rules of narrative. If something is in a story, it’s in it for a reason.
Yeah, the whole scene with the needle and Mia’s “breastbone” was bogus crap. Tarantino could have made the injection some weird prohibited drug called nalaxone. Simple shot in a vein. That,s what really would have saved her life. And it might have, actually, been “edgy” and meant something.
I wouldn’t go so far as the OP, but for a movie that’s often derided for being so violent, there is a moral message in there. Jules, who accepts the miracle, gets out of the business and, one assumes, lives to a decent age. Vincent, who doubts, does not. In fact, it’s just after the diner conversation where Vincent has his first run-in with Butch, and in a sense plants the seeds of his own destruction.
I worked in a movie theatre at the time this movie came out. If he did the scene this way, people would not have come out to the lobby right after and FAINTED in the lobby they way the did.
The bullets missed Vincent so that he could have a short “talk” with Butch, and Butch would set up Marcelus Wallace to be butt fvcked by two crazy whites. That way Pulp Fiction got what it needed to be a sure hit: the sexiest movie scene of all time.
Yeah, that’s what I was going to post. “Vincent needed to live so that later, after his dope inadvertently triggered an almost certain death for Mia, Vincent could retrieve her from the brink.” Um, how about Vincent dies in a storm of bullets, as a result never placing the supposedly most important person the the Pulp Fiction universe in danger in the first place?
I’ve wondered about this in more recent years.
Being young and knowing little of the world when the movie first came out, I believed Mia mistook the heroin for cocaine because she snorted it- but I didn’t know that people do snort heroin as an alternative to needles. Later I learned that people do snort heroin, but had already had the idea in my mind that Mia mistook it for coke. Going with the “mistook it for coke” idea, I figured her problem was that she snorted a big ol’ coke sized line instead of an appropriately modest heroin sized line (having no personal idea if a heroin line should be any different than a coke line).
Recently my reasoning has been that Mia is an experienced drug user and, unlike me, she could probably tell the difference between heroin and cocaine. She OD’d simply because she’d been drugging all night, been abusing her body for far too long, and she OD’d simply because she’s a druggie and druggies just OD sometimes.
What’s the Doper consensus on whether Mia knew it was heroin or instead that she mistook it for cocaine?
As I understand it, Mia confused the heroin for cocaine because of the way it was packaged. If you recall the scene where Vincent gets his heroin, Lance asks if it’s ok to put the heroin into a baggie, because he’s all out of balloons. This is far enough from the norm that when Mia finds a baggie (not a balloon) of white powder in Vince’s pocket, she assumes it’s coke.
If it had been a balloon of white powder, she would have treated is heroin. And while heroin can be snorted like coke, the amount that you would use is large enough that snorting a coke-appropriate line of heroin puts Mia straight into OD-land.
Wow, thanks drillrod! An insightful breakdown.
I always liked the “out of balloons” line, but I had always thought of it as just Tarantino’s way of coloring the characters with specifics. I never thought of it as having further significance.
Ah, but Mia needed to have a near death experience to get her head in order, abandon the life of a gangster moll and get back into the acting world with the movie version of Fox Force Five… what we know in this universe as… Kill Bill.
You know what? I never caught on to that! Apparently they dropped the gimmick of having her tell a joke that her father, an old circus performer, taught her, but that totally makes sense!
What’s more, Jules exits the film by saying what he just experienced has now prompted him to think twice about those lines in Ezekiel, which he now relays when trying to shepherd that weak criminal through the valley of darkness. So instead of Vincent saving Mia, maybe redeeming the Brit was the point all along.
