<P> "The above list, with the possible exception of The Avengers," writes Miklitsch, "suggests that Pulp Fiction has less of an elective affinity with the cinematic avant - gardism of Godard than with mainstream network programming ." Jonathan Rosenbaum had brought TV into his analysis of the Tarantino / Godard comparison, acknowledging that the directors were similar in wanting to cram everything they like onscreen: "But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical; it's like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video - rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide ." </P> <P> Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show (Clutch Cargo) marks the beginning of, and plays on through, the scene between young Butch and his father's comrade - in - arms . The Vietnam War veteran is played by Christopher Walken, whose presence in the role evokes his performance as a traumatized G.I. in the Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter (1978). Willis writes that "when Captain Koons enters the living room, we see Walken in his function as an image retrieved from a repertoire of 1970s television and movie versions of ruined masculinity in search of rehabilitation...(T) he gray light of the television presiding over the scene seems to inscribe the ghostly paternal gaze ." Miklitsch asserts that, for some critics, the film is a "prime example of the pernicious ooze - like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bête noire: TV ." Kolker might not disagree, arguing that "Pulp Fiction is a simulacrum of our daily exposure to television; its homophobes, thugs and perverts, sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through a series of long - take tableaux: we watch, laugh, and remain with nothing to comprehend ." </P> <P> The combination of the mysterious suitcase lock is 666, the "Number of the Beast". Tarantino has said there is no explanation for its contents--it is simply a MacGuffin, a pure plot device . Originally, the case was to contain diamonds, but this was seen as too mundane . For filming purposes, it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow . In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino purportedly "reveals" the secret contents of the briefcase, but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), with an intertitle that reads "Missing Reel". The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the "knowledge" of the briefcase's contents alters one's understanding of the movie . </P> <P> Despite Tarantino's statements, many solutions to what one scholar calls this "unexplained postmodern puzzle" have been proposed . A strong similarity has often been observed with the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly . That movie, whose protagonist Tarantino has cited as a source for Butch, features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive . In their review of Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man in the Daily Telegraph, Nick Cowen and Hari Patience suggest that Pulp Fiction may also owe "a debt of inspiration" to the glowing car trunk in that film . In scholar Paul Gormley's view, this connection with Kiss Me Deadly, and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself . The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus' soul gained popular currency in the mid-1990s . Analyzing the notion, Roger Ebert dismissed it as "nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net". </P>

What 3 digit code opens the mysterious briefcase in pulp fiction