The Film Ends Where Someone Changes
A Case Study of Pulp Fiction (1994)
“The story does not end where the timeline stops. It ends where one character finally chooses not to repeat himself.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work.
This article discusses the film’s plot in detail, including its ending. It also references homicide, drug use, overdose, sexual assault, and organized violence.
Vincent Vega dies in the middle of Pulp Fiction. Butch Coolidge returns to his apartment for the gold watch his father carried through a prisoner-of-war camp, notices a gun sitting unattended on the kitchen counter, and shoots Vincent before he can recover control of the room.
The film keeps going. Eventually Vincent walks back onscreen — not resurrected, simply returned to an earlier day, before the evening with Mia, before Butch’s fight, before the pawnshop, before the apartment in which he’ll die. By the final scene he’s alive again, standing beside Jules Winnfield in a diner while two would-be robbers point guns across the room. The audience already knows which of the two hitmen has a future.
That’s the reason Pulp Fiction is nonlinear. The chronology isn’t rearranged to turn the film into a puzzle. It’s rearranged so that consequence can precede choice — so we see what Vincent’s refusal to change will cost before the film returns to the moment when he and Jules were offered the same reason to reconsider who they’d become. Both men survive a gunman firing at them from a few feet away. Jules decides the event must mean something. Vincent decides it doesn’t. The timeline carries Vincent forward to his death, then doubles back to place him beside the man who read the same miracle differently.
Chronologically, the film’s final major event is Butch escaping Los Angeles with Fabienne after rescuing Marsellus Wallace. Emotionally, that isn’t where the film ends. It ends in the diner, because that’s where one person finally chooses not to complete the role he entered the movie with.
Chronology Is Not the Organizing Principle
Pulp Fiction contains several interlocking crime stories: Jules and Vincent retrieve a briefcase, survive an apparent miracle, accidentally kill Marvin in their car, and need Winston Wolfe to clean up the result; Vincent takes Marsellus’s wife Mia out for an evening that nearly ends with her overdose; Butch throws a fight badly, wins it instead, kills his opponent, returns for an heirloom watch, kills Vincent, and gets trapped in a pawnshop with the man he betrayed; Pumpkin and Honey Bunny decide to rob a diner, unaware that two hitmen are eating breakfast a few tables away. The plotlines overlap through shared characters, accidents, objects, and locations — but the film doesn’t arrange them by when they happened. It arranges them by what one event will make another mean.
Tarantino has described the film’s construction directly: the pieces that survived into the final script weren’t the ones that were merely clever or intellectually satisfying to connect, but the ones that worked emotionally once assembled. He’s also described the movie’s underlying shape as a series of paired encounters rather than one continuous ensemble — Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, then Jules and Vincent, then Vincent and Mia, then Butch moving through a sequence of partners, and finally Jules and Pumpkin. The screenplay already contained this nonlinear design before a single frame was shot. Sally Menke’s achievement in the editing room wasn’t inventing that structure — it was making the chosen order feel emotionally inevitable rather than mechanically clever, following what she’s described as the emotional tension inside a scene rather than cutting simply because another line of dialogue had arrived.
That distinction matters because Pulp Fiction rarely announces its own temporal disruption through unstable scene grammar. Most individual scenes are locally straightforward: characters enter a room, speak, negotiate status, and something interrupts the version of the encounter they expected. The camera stays comparatively composed while this happens. The American Society of Cinematographers has specifically contrasted Pulp Fiction’s largely proscenium-style framing with the more kinetic handheld language of Reservoir Dogs, noting that Andrzej Sekula reserves handheld movement for genuine crises — the diner robbery chief among them. The chronology is radical. The individual scenes are almost always classical. That stability lets the audience live inside each present-tense encounter without being constantly reminded the larger timeline has been rearranged above their heads; the film doesn’t ask us to solve dates while Vincent and Mia are deciding what their silence means across a dinner table. It lets that scene stay temporarily complete, and only gradually gives the audience the privilege — and the burden — of knowing where some of these moments will lead.
The Movie Lives Between the Crimes
Jules and Vincent are driving toward an execution when they start discussing European fast food. They reach the building too early, so they wait in the hallway and keep talking about foot massages before they go in to kill several people. That conversation isn’t unrelated to what follows — it’s establishing how the two men understand rules. Vincent treats the rumored massage of Mia Wallace’s feet as a question of technical boundaries: what happened, what it meant, whether Marsellus’s reaction was proportionate. Jules insists meaning is determined by context and relationship, that the same physical act signifies differently depending on who’s involved. Minutes later Jules will perform a biblical speech whose meaning he’s never seriously examined. The foot-massage debate is already rehearsing the film’s real question, long before the film needs it: does an action mean only what the person doing it intended, or does meaning come from the situation surrounding it? The apparently disposable dialogue isn’t disposable. It’s showing us how people think before consequence forces that thinking into action.
The Vincent-and-Mia sequence runs on the same principle at greater length — a drive, a wait, an intercom, a restaurant, an ordered silence, a dance, a bathroom conversation Vincent has entirely with himself. The assignment is simple: keep the boss’s wife entertained and bring her home safely. The drama lives in the space between that assignment and everything the evening could be mistaken for. Vincent isn’t really fighting another gangster in this stretch of the film. He’s managing implication — how close he can sit, what Mia actually knows about the foot-massage rumor, whether she’s flirting or testing him or both, what he owes Marsellus, what he wants, what he has to refuse. Then Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine, and an evening built on social discomfort becomes a medical emergency in seconds. The shift lands hard specifically because the film let the scene stay small for so long.
The Bonnie Situation runs the inversion from the opposite direction. A man has been shot in the face inside a moving car, and the immediate dramatic deadline still isn’t police, retaliation, or another gunfight — it’s Bonnie coming home from work. She never appears onscreen. Her anticipated arrival reorganizes everything anyway. Jimmie is more frightened of his wife finding blood-covered killers in the house than of the killers themselves, and the production leaned into that fear physically: set decorator Sandy Reynolds-Wasco has said Jimmie’s home was the only set in the entire film given wallpaper, a deliberate choice meant to keep his domestic terror — of his wife, not of the men standing in his kitchen — visibly present in the room. Winston Wolfe’s competence is satisfying not because he commits any violence, but because he imposes sequence on other people’s panic: clean this, remove that, change clothes, move the car, finish before the situation acquires another witness. Disposal becomes choreography.
Menke has described her general method for Tarantino as chasing a scene’s emotional and dramatic tension rather than its literal event content — creating, in her words, the sensation that time is ticking away even when a character is doing something as small as eating breakfast. That’s the entire logic behind these long, apparently casual stretches. Every extended conversation in Pulp Fiction is secretly sitting on top of a countdown. The conversation stays casual. The consequence doesn’t. That’s the film’s most transferable lesson: a dialogue scene doesn’t need more plot if the characters are already sitting inside one.
Every Story Happens Between Two People
Tarantino’s own description of the film as a chain of paired encounters, rather than one ensemble, explains part of why the fragmented structure stays emotionally coherent. Each chapter gives a character someone whose presence exposes the role he’s trying to perform. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny reinforce each other’s belief that robbery is manageable if you choose soft targets. Jules and Vincent share a profession, a uniform, and a routine, but the apartment shooting reveals two incompatible relationships to what just happened to them. Vincent and Mia each know their evening carries a danger neither can name directly without changing it. Butch and Fabienne share an intimate world built around a planned escape, and the forgotten watch exposes exactly how differently they understand what can be left behind. Butch and Marsellus begin as betrayer and betrayed and become, briefly, two captives whose private conflict shrinks next to the violation happening around them. Jules and Pumpkin end the film as killer and robber — and Jules refuses to let those roles dictate the only available outcome.
Change in this film almost always happens through collision rather than private reflection. Butch might have kept believing he was purely self-interested if leaving the pawnshop hadn’t meant abandoning Marsellus to it. Jules might have kept believing he was simply an instrument of Marsellus’s authority if Pumpkin hadn’t handed him, unintentionally, the chance to decide whether power has to end in an execution. Vincent is the exception that proves the pattern: he keeps encountering people without letting the encounters revise him. Mia nearly dies. Jules announces he’s leaving the life. Butch openly defies Marsellus and lives. The apartment bullets miss him entirely. Vincent processes each event locally, adapts to the immediate problem, and never touches the pattern producing it. Even his recurring habit of stepping into a bathroom mid-scene tracks the same blind spot — he leaves the diner and a robbery starts behind him; he withdraws at Mia’s to talk himself out of a decision and returns to find her overdosing; he uses Butch’s bathroom and walks out into his own death. Vincent keeps leaving scenes believing the world will hold still while he’s gone. It never does. The film’s nonlinear structure gives the audience a vantage Vincent never earns: we can see the recurrence. He experiences only the next inconvenient event.
Death Keeps Missing
Nearly every major storyline in Pulp Fiction contains a death that either happens unexpectedly or fails to happen when it should. A hidden gunman empties his weapon at Jules and Vincent from a few feet away, and neither is hit. Mia overdoses and comes within a syringe of dying. Butch is supposed to lose a fight and instead wins it, killing his opponent by accident. Marsellus means to punish Butch and ends up trapped beside him. Butch escapes the pawnshop with a clean opportunity to leave Marsellus to his captors. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny start a robbery that should end badly the moment they pick a diner with two armed hitmen inside it.
These aren’t identical situations, but the film treats them as variations on one question: what does a person do once the expected ending fails to arrive? Mia and Vincent respond with preservation — agreeing to tell Marsellus nothing, so the life they had before the crisis can simply continue as if it hadn’t happened. Marsellus responds with containment — restoring order through a new arrangement rather than undoing the violation, directing future consequence rather than repairing the past one. Butch responds with interruption: he refuses to let the role of fleeing enemy dictate his next move, and turns around. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny get to leave the diner alive not because of anything they planned for, but because Jules refuses the result his own professional identity would ordinarily produce. Vincent, who receives the most opportunities of anyone in the film, makes the fewest changes of anyone in it.
The Same Event Produces Two Men
Jules and Vincent are given identical evidence in Brett’s apartment: a man emerges from hiding, fires repeatedly, and somehow hits nothing but the wall behind them. The film never resolves what actually happened — no revealed dud weapon, no supernatural shield, nothing that settles the question either way. The event stays available for interpretation. Vincent calls it a freak occurrence. Jules calls it divine intervention. The difference between them isn’t access to better information. It’s which man is willing to let the event demand something of him. Jules decides survival can’t just be interesting — it has to change what he does next. Vincent treats meaning as optional, because no physical fact forces him to accept Jules’s reading of it.
That makes their divergence more demanding than a simple believer-versus-skeptic split. Jules may be wrong about where the missed bullets actually came from. He’s right that his interpretation can still change his future. Vincent may be correct that an unlikely event isn’t proof of anything divine. He uses that uncertainty as permission to stay exactly who he already was. And the film’s structure lets the audience judge the practical outcome before it even finishes staging the debate: by the time Jules announces he’s leaving the life, we’ve already watched Vincent continue inside it and die for it. The edit doesn’t prove Jules’s theology. It proves that Vincent’s dismissal failed to protect him.
Costume marks the same divide before either man’s beliefs fully separate. Costume designer Betsy Heimann has said she built Jules’s collar short and tight to the neck — close to a preacher’s, since he’s always preaching — in an indestructible poly-cotton suit that wouldn’t wrinkle no matter what happened to him, while she made Vincent’s suit out of linen specifically so it would go rumpled and schlumpy within minutes of putting it on, matching what she’s called his looser, more laissez-faire character. They share the same hitman silhouette without wearing it the same way. Then the Bonnie Situation strips both men of that silhouette entirely — the suits are discarded, and they arrive at the diner in borrowed T-shirts and shorts that make them look, in Jules’s own word, ridiculous. That demotion isn’t incidental. The film’s final moral confrontation doesn’t happen while Jules still looks like the commanding executioner from Brett’s apartment; the costume through which he ordinarily performs authority has already been taken away from him. He still has the gun, the voice, the professional instincts. The mythology has been punctured. Vincent experiences the identical humiliation and treats it as a temporary inconvenience — he’ll be back in the suit and the job by tomorrow. Jules starts imagining a life in which the suit doesn’t have to come back at all.
The Music Is Already in the Room
Pulp Fiction has no traditional composed score. Its musical identity was built with music supervisor Karyn Rachtman from songs Tarantino had, in many cases, already written directly into the screenplay — surf rock, soul, pop, country, funk, chosen well before a needle ever dropped in an edit bay. The less-discussed fact is where most of that music actually comes from inside the story. It’s almost always diegetic — a car radio, a jukebox, a restaurant’s own sound system, a record someone in the scene has physically put on. “Jungle Boogie” plays low out of the car stereo while Jules and Vincent are debating European fast food on their way to Brett’s apartment. “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” is the song Mia herself puts on and dances to, alone in her living room, in the minutes before she overdoses. “Flowers on the Wall” is what Butch is singing along to on his own car radio in the moments before he runs into Marsellus in the street. Even the twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s was shot to actual playback of the Chuck Berry track, which is part of why the cutting there has the momentum it does — camera, actors, and edit are all locked to one shared piece of music from the start, rather than assembled around a cue added afterward.
Almost every cue in this film belongs to the space the characters are standing in rather than commenting on that space from outside it — which matters more than it might first appear, in a movie this dependent on nonlinear structure. The edit already knows the future. The music, sourced from inside each scene, almost never does. Vincent doesn’t walk into Jack Rabbit Slim’s under a tragic motif warning the audience he’ll be dead before the film ends; he hears the same music Mia hears. Mia’s overdose isn’t announced by an outside score cueing the audience that her night is about to turn fatal; the song she chose simply keeps playing until her body interrupts it. That refusal to score from outside the story is part of what keeps each chapter feeling newly inhabited rather than narrated in hindsight — the chronology may have been rearranged from above, edited by people who already know how every thread ends, but inside each individual scene the music never lets on that anyone does.
Every Room Becomes Another Movie
The film’s chapters are separated by more than title cards. Each one takes place inside an environment built to establish a different set of cinematic rules entirely. Brett’s apartment is a confined ritual space where Jules and Vincent control the door, the food, the questions, and eventually the bodies. Jack Rabbit Slim’s is a manufactured museum of American entertainment history, staffed by performers dressed as other performers, and Vincent — played by an actor whose public identity is inseparable from dancing — enters it as one more living artifact. Lance’s cluttered drug den becomes an emergency room without changing rooms. Jimmie’s kitchen converts gangland catastrophe into suburban domestic farce. The pawnshop opens as an accidental hiding place and descends into captivity horror; Butch’s weapon selection there — hammer, bat, chainsaw, katana, laid out almost like a genre catalogue — plays like a man briefly auditioning which movie he’s about to be in before choosing the one where he gets to be the rescuer. The diner itself begins as an easy target picked by amateur robbers and ends as the room where Jules tries to reinterpret his entire life.
Reynolds-Wasco’s strategy of giving each of these worlds sharply contrasting color identities keeps them from collapsing into one generic Los Angeles underworld — her own example is the gap between the drug-overdose apartment and the world of Butch’s boxing plot, built to register as a jolt the instant the story crosses between them. Sekula’s camera gives each space the time to establish its own rules before anything interrupts it: because the film favors composed, proscenium-style views most of the time, a room functions almost like a stage whose meaning shifts with who currently controls it, and a scene going suddenly handheld reads as a signal in itself — a room whose order has just broken down, not the film’s default energy. The combination matters. The chronology is fragmented. The spaces never are. Once the audience is inside a chapter, design, camera, and costume all supply enough local stability that the question stops being where a scene falls on the calendar and becomes who currently controls the room — which lets the film change genre constantly without ever losing the characters inside it. Vincent stays Vincent whether he’s in a hitman ritual, an awkward romantic comedy, or a medical panic. Butch stays Butch whether he’s in boxing noir, motel intimacy, or exploitation horror. The rooms change the rules. The people carry the continuity across them.
Butch Turns Around
Butch’s story supplies the film’s other major act of refusal. He starts with a plan: take Marsellus’s money, pretend to throw the fight, win it anyway, collect the outside bets, get Fabienne, leave Los Angeles. The watch complicates the escape because it isn’t property — it’s an inheritance carried through generations of male suffering and obligation, and Butch is willing to risk his life recovering it because leaving without it would mean abandoning the story he understands himself through. That return puts him in Vincent’s apartment with an opportunity to kill him, which he takes. Later, Butch runs into Marsellus in the street, and their private conflict drives them both into the pawnshop.
He eventually escapes the basement. Nothing physically stops him from walking out the door. Turning around is the first thing in his entire storyline that his existing plan can’t explain. Marsellus wants him dead. Saving him offers no guaranteed benefit. The safest option is simply leaving. Butch goes back anyway — not because he’s become a different kind of person, but because for once he’s using violence to interrupt a violation rather than just advance his own exit. Marsellus restores their relationship afterward through a new agreement: the betrayal is forgiven, Butch leaves town, neither of them speaks of it again. That isn’t the same transformation Jules undergoes. Butch breaks one expected role and then continues directly toward the life he’d already planned to live. Jules starts questioning the role itself. Butch earns the story’s chronological escape. Jules earns its final scene.
The Speech Changes Meaning
Jules’s Ezekiel 25:17 passage appears first as performance — recited before Brett’s execution because ritual makes an ordinary killing feel larger than it is. The words create hierarchy: Jules becomes the voice of judgment, and the man about to die is placed inside a story of wickedness and punishment. Jules later admits, flatly, that he’s never actually thought about what the words mean. He’s used them for years the way you’d use a cool line right before pulling a trigger.
At the diner, he says much of the same passage again, and this time the words aren’t doing the same job. He’s no longer using them to close someone else’s life — he’s using them to examine his own, actually considering, out loud, which figure inside the text he might be: the righteous man, the shepherd, the weak, or the tyranny of evil men the passage warns against. For the first time, he doesn’t automatically cast himself as the one authorized to judge. Samuel L. Jackson plays the shift as active reasoning rather than serenity — Jules hasn’t reached spiritual certainty, he’s working his way toward a different action while guns are still pointed across the table, which is exactly what keeps the scene dramatically alive. A completed saint would be less interesting than a killer trying, in real time, not to kill the next person in front of him.
He still controls the room through force — Pumpkin survives because Jules is better armed, more experienced, and more composed than anyone else at that table, including Vincent, who returns from the bathroom ready to reassert the old logic of threat and retaliation the moment he sees a gun pointed at Honey Bunny. But Jules uses that control to prevent the familiar ending this time instead of imposing it. He lets Pumpkin keep the money from his own wallet, calling it the price of the man’s life — a transaction that looks like the film’s ordinary criminal economy, money changing hands under threat, with its entire purpose reversed. The first use of the speech turned language into permission to kill. The last use turns it into the thing stopping the killer from finishing what he started.
Why the Diner Has to Be Last
The diner appears twice because its opening can’t tell us what the scene is actually about. The first time through, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny control its meaning entirely — a room where people eat, servers work, money changes hands, and no one is prepared to become an opponent, exactly the kind of soft target they’ve talked themselves into believing exists. Then they stand up, and the film cuts away before showing us what happens next.
When it finally returns to finish the scene, the audience understands the diner already contained another story the whole time. Jules and Vincent arrived after the apartment shooting, after Marvin’s death, after the cleanup, after their own professional clothing was taken away from them. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny didn’t walk into an empty narrative space. They interrupted someone else’s moral crisis mid-collapse. That’s why the repeated sequence gains tension on its second pass instead of losing it — we already know the robbery starts. We still don’t know what Jules will do once it reaches him.
Told in strict chronological order, this scene would land early, and Jules would announce his plan to retire before the audience had watched Vincent die for failing to make the same choice. The distinction between the two men would stay theoretical. Built the way the film actually builds it, Vincent’s decision gets a demonstrated cost before Jules ever has to act — so that by the final scene, Vincent is alive in the frame and already dead in the audience’s understanding, while Jules is still, technically, a murderer, and beginning a future anyway. They walk out of the diner together. The film has separated them more completely than any physical distance could. Vincent will keep treating extraordinary events as temporary disturbances until one of them finally isn’t. Jules has decided that what happened to him has to change what happens next. The film doesn’t bring Vincent back to undo his death. It brings him back so the dead man can stand beside the choice he refused to make.
The Cost of Giving Time Back
This method creates real ethical and dramatic costs, and they’re worth stating plainly rather than gestured at.
Time becomes reversible only for some people. Vincent dies and reappears; the audience gets to enjoy him again, arguing and eating and complaining, even though his life has already technically ended. Brett doesn’t return in any comparable sense. Neither do the men killed alongside him. Butch’s opponent stays an offscreen death discussed only through its consequences. The structure grants its charismatic central criminals a kind of narrative afterlife that it never extends to the people they’ve actually harmed — a bias that’s partly just a function of whose point of view the film follows, but one that still shapes the moral experience of watching it. Some deaths in this film become endings. Others become setups for somebody else’s next entertaining problem.
Marvin’s death becomes an inconvenience. He’s killed by accident, with no speech, vendetta, or strategy attached to it — a banality that’s genuinely part of the point the scene is making. But the film immediately redirects its own attention toward the practical catastrophe that follows: the blood, Jimmie’s house, Bonnie’s imminent return, the need for new clothes, Wolfe’s competence restoring order. Marvin’s body becomes the object other, more charismatic men get to display panic and professionalism around. The tonal pivot is extraordinarily well executed. Its effectiveness depends entirely on one person’s death becoming another person’s farce.
Second chances don’t produce restitution. Jules’s decision matters — refusing to kill Pumpkin and planning to leave the life is a real distinction from continuing to cause harm, and the film is right to draw it. But that recognition can’t repair the lives Jules has already taken, and the final scene centers his emerging conscience rather than any claim his past victims might have on the outcome. The film never pretends Jules’s insight absolves him. It does let that insight become the story’s emotional endpoint anyway, which is the actual cost of building an ending around change rather than repair.
Other people’s crises become someone else’s character test. Mia’s overdose is horrifying and immediate, but a large part of its dramatic function is to test Vincent’s ability to save her and keep the secret. The pawnshop assault becomes the condition that lets Butch perform an unexpected rescue and renegotiate his standing with Marsellus. The people actually enduring the danger remain present and active in these scenes, but the narrative keeps converting their suffering into someone else’s opportunity to reveal character. The film is fairly open about using extremity this way — that openness doesn’t neutralize the ethical weight of what’s supplying the opportunity.
The city can start to feel like a closed machine. Tarantino built the film as overlapping Los Angeles crime stories in which a central figure from one chapter can wander through another in a smaller role — Marsellus crossing the street exactly as Butch drives past, Vincent happening to be inside Butch’s apartment, Pumpkin choosing the one diner with Jules in it. The collisions are satisfying because they keep revising what the audience already thinks it knows. They can also make the city feel less like an open social world than a mechanism built specifically to keep forcing these particular people into each other’s paths — a compression that belongs naturally to pulp storytelling, but one that can make moral revelation look less like the product of a lived history than the reward for landing inside the right extraordinary coincidence.
Closing
Pulp Fiction begins with two people deciding how their next robbery should end. It closes in the same room, after someone else decides that ending doesn’t have to happen. Between those two points, nearly every department is working toward the same argument: chronology yields to transformation.
Editing places Vincent’s consequence before Jules’s decision, so the audience can measure the difference between the two men while both are still alive in the final frame. Cinematography keeps individual chapters composed and locally classical, holding real instability in reserve for the handful of moments a room’s order actually breaks. Production design separates the stories through color and space, letting an apartment, a theme restaurant, a drug house, a suburban kitchen, a motel, a pawnshop, and a diner each carry a different cinematic language without breaking the world they all share. Costume starts Jules and Vincent inside one shared silhouette, quietly encodes the difference between them in fabric and collar, and then strips both men of that image entirely before their paths divide for good. Performance lets ordinary conversation reveal the roles characters believe they’re playing long before any crisis makes those beliefs cost something. Music stays inside the room — a car radio, a restaurant’s own system, a record someone in the scene actually chose — keeping each rearranged chapter grounded in its own present tense instead of narrated from the vantage of what comes later. And the film’s structure turns waiting, driving, eating, cleaning, and talking into real dramatic action, because none of it is ever happening outside a deadline the characters can’t indefinitely ignore.
Chronologically, the film ends with Butch and Fabienne riding out of Los Angeles, free and clear. That ending resolves a plan. The diner resolves a person. Vincent and Jules walk out through the same door side by side — the audience already knowing Vincent will keep repeating himself until repetition finally kills him, and Jules walking out because he has, for the first time in the film, decided not to.
Pulp Fiction doesn’t end at the last point on the timeline. It ends at the first genuine exit.