I recently watched Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown for the first time. Overall, I really enjoyed it. I seem to remember folks being very underwhelmed by it, but as someone who’s always been what we could call “appreciative” of the guy’s work (re: I’m not in love), I think I was pretty receptive to it.
I remember this movie was coolly received in the wake of the cultural maelstrom that was Pulp Fiction. I wonder if the “meh” feelings some folks seemed to have toward the movie may have to do with how jarring the decided lack of on-screen violence and spattered blood may be compared to the rest of Tarantino’s filmography, especially his first two films, which established his enfant terrible persona and preceded Jackie Brown.
My enjoyment of Jackie Brown is met with some reservations. My biggest problem is that — source material notwithstanding, as I haven’t read Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch and thus don’t know how he wrote Jackie Burke — I would have liked Pam Grier to kick more ass. At the beginning of the movie, flight attendant Brown is arrested for smuggling drugs for crooked gun runner Ordell Robbie (played by Samuel L. Jackson). After he bails her out, she catches wise to him setting her up and threatens him with a gun. But that’s really the extent of any physical displays of whup-assery.
It just seems weird to cast Grier as a means of hailing her stardom via 70s blaxploitation films and then not have her fuck some shit up. If John Travolta dances in Pulp Fiction, Grier can shoot a cop, rather than work with them to set up Robbie. She may use them and run off with Robbie’s money, but she got zoomed before she zooms the system.
That said, I love Grier as Jackie Brown. She’s tough yet vulnerable, a woman who has lived her life on the margins as an African American women and is trying hard to make it out of an unfair situation with her dignity.
Yet, at the same time, she’s proud and has a clear sense of who she is. One of those things, as Robert Miklitsch notes in his Screen article, is a record collector, whose predilection for the funk, soul, and R&B of her youth (i.e., primarily from the 1970s). I think her love of this music and devotion to vinyl potentially orients her as an author or source for the movie’s sound.
In a key scene I wish I could find for you readers, she defines herself for her bail bondsman and potential paramour, Max Cherry (played by Robert Forster) through song. The track is The Delfonics’ “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time.” Miklitsch reads this as Brown’s stubbornness to break from the past. I, on the other hand, read it as a firm declaration of who she is.
While a radio is in the background, Jackie Brown uses her hi-fi to tell Max Cherry who she really is; image courtesy of thisdistractedglobe.com
Thinking about Brown’s love and fluency with records is important. For one, it breaks up the tacit assumption that record collectors (real or mediated) are male. Scholars like Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Robyn Stillwell have contended the traditional gendering of male record collectors by analyzing mediated representations of female record collectors, but their examples tend to be white women and girls. Thus, Brown complicates the idea of who a record collector is while also promoting artists of color through generic preferences. You’ll note that she only listens to vinyl and, by implication, primarily listens to work by African American artists.
Of course, Jackie Brown may be the music selector within the movie but director Quentin Tarantino probably had more of a hand in picking which songs he would work with (though, interestingly, he doesn’t do as much virtuosis framing and editing of sound with image here as with, say, Reservoir Dogs, where he indelibly altered how many viewers would remember Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You”). In Jackie Brown, a lot of the songs simply exist in a scene, creating a mood or an atmosphere, or providing an orientation point, usually for the heroine.
At the same time, having a white dude center an entire soundtrack around vintage funk, soul, and R&B (and hail the blaxploitation) is not without its problems. The same can be said for Tarantino’s put-on “black” voice when announcing that “Pam Grier is Jac-kie Browwwn” in the trailer. Clearly Tarantino wishes he could be black, for however limited a time and in whatever essentialized capacity.
One may aver that Robert Forster’s character listening to The Delfonics is, like Tarantino, aligning himself with black culture, but I read his engagement — buying the tape and playing it repeatedly in the car — as a way to get closer to Brown, who seems to love her for who she is.
So, the music here really evokes a feeling, a sensibility and, in Jackie Brown’s case, character. And if the soundtrack celebrates a golden age in black music, it’s largely because Ms. Brown pledged allegiance to it. Brown is shaped by this era, specifically by plaintive yet funky classics like Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” which bookends the movie, yet takes on different meanings wholly dependent on how Brown is feeling. Here it is at the beginning, as she starts her work day.
And here it is again, at the end of her story, as she embarks on a journey to Spain. It will be a solo flight, as Cherry refuses her invitation (note that he’s a little scared of her). As she leaves him behind, she may be rueful, lip-syncing the words to the plaintive song. But I have no doubt that her records will affirm her resilience.
