Pulp Fiction's iconic gimp cage was part of a larger plan to keep audiences off balance, and now you can buy it for your own home

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Pulp Fiction is full of intensely memorable scenes, like the whole “Royale with cheese” conversation or the mysterious glowing contents of the briefcase at the end. However, one scene that will never escape our collective consciousness, no matter how hard we try, is when Marsellus Wallace and Butch Coolidge have been captured by the owners of a pawnshop and their leather-clad gimp.

If you have spent the past 30 years wondering what happened to the gimp’s cage when they stopped filming Pulp Fiction, then we have good news as well as some deep concerns about you. The prop itself recently went up for sale, netting $12,500 at auction. It is a strange but unforgettable piece of cinema history, one that helps highlight the chaotic pacing of one of Quentin Tarantino’s best films.

Pulp Fiction was always meant to be an amalgamation of different films and genres slapped together to keep the audience guessing what was coming next. The bizarre twist of watching Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis go from a drag-out fight to being tied up in an S&M dungeon was meant to take you from a classic boxing film into the depths of Deliverance in the blink of an eye. It is a disorienting transition – which is what Tarantino always wanted.

Whether or not Pulp Fiction’s chaotic style works as a film is a long and tired debate, but the fact we’re still talking about it 30 years after it came out probably says something. All we can really know for sure is that somewhere out there, someone is going to be locking themselves into the Gimp’s cage and we just don’t know what to do with that information.

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