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jackie brown II
OK, so here are some of my thoughts on Jackie Brown (contains mild spoilers):
I think Jackie Brown is a movie that's about cultural membership and its related bugaboo, authenticity. One potentially "authentic" culture that the film examines is the culture of the criminal underworld, a culture that Tarantino explicitly explores as artifice in his earlier films. That project is continued here. The arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) initially appears to be a criminal mastermind but we're almost immediately told by Bridget Fonda's character that this is a ruse, that really he's slow-witted, "just repeating things that he's heard from other people." Even more pointedly, we have Robbie's clients, who all want to be outfitted with .45s because they've seen them featured prominently in the Hong Kong crime film The Killer. (This example, with its shrewd suggestion that one's sense of authenticity is compromised by one's awareness of authentic-seeming artifice, is key to my understanding of Kill Bill.)
The other culture that the film explores is African-American culture. I don't need to tell anyone that participation in African-American culture is commonly thought of as a special marker of authenticity; Tarantino's earlier films, which use race in a way that is not particularly reflective, can perhaps serve as key illustrations of that mindset. However, Jackie Brown makes a fairly substantial efforts to complicate this conception. When Robbie first meets Max Cherry (Robert Forster), he looks at a photo of Cherry and his African-American assistant, Winston (Tom 'Tiny' Lister, Jr.) and remarks that the photo makes Cherry and Winston seem "tight." He then immediately critiques this bond as artifice, by reminding Cherry that Winston is his employee, and then by suggesting that the photo must have been Cherry's idea—a suggestion which Cherry, notably, does not refute.
(Robbie himself spends some of the film building a friendship with a Caucasian, Robert DeNiro's Louis Vara, going so far as to bestow upon him the authenticity-endowing title of "nigga." Vara fails, however, to live up to the standard that the title would imply: he's the film's biggest dunce, and by film's end the friendship has been dramatically retracted.)
But back to Cherry, who is the film's key character. The film invests some energy in exploring Cherry's relationship to African-American culture by way of his relationship to a piece of cultural product: he is introduced to the R&B group the Delfonics by Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), and later he goes out and buys a tape of their music. It is not hard to see Cherry here as a stand-in for Tarantino; someone enamored with the African-American culture he glimpses through the (distorting, artificial) world of popular culture. Significantly, the pleasure Cherry takes in this music stands as his most a "successful" moment of participating (however minutely) in African-American culture: during the film's climactic car ride, Robbie looks at Cherry with a kind of respect and says "I didn't know you liked the Delfonics."
This moment of participation, however, allows him no substantially deeper membership in African-American culture: at the end of the film he remains a Caucasian bail bondsman with an African-American employee, and the fledgling romance with Brown is left (mostly) unrealized. The film's recognition of the real social force of cultural difference distinguishes it happily from a film like Bulworth, where Warren Beatty lives out the fantasy of being a Caucasian deemed "authentic" by virtue of successful participation in African-American culture (symbolized most egregiously by his bedding of Nina (Halle Berry)).
Still more to say, but this is at least the base of it. |
Thursday, October 16, 2003
6:35 PM
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