In Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis plays the boxer Butch Coolidge.
Butch is a professional boxer who accepts money from crime boss Marsellus Wallace to lose an upcoming fight. Instead, he wins and escapes with the money, making him a target of Wallace’s retaliation. His storyline is one of the film’s three main narrative strands and is presented out of chronological order.
Butch’s escape becomes complicated when he realizes that he has left his father’s gold watch behind in his apartment. The watch, which was passed through generations of his family, becomes the reason he returns to the neighborhood. That decision leads to the encounter with Vincent Vega and later to the pawnshop sequence involving Zed and Maynard.
Butch should not be confused with Vincent Vega, Wallace’s hitman, or Marsellus Wallace himself. Pulp Fiction connects the characters through crime, chance, and overlapping locations rather than a single straightforward plot. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and became one of the best-known independent American films of the 1990s.