How Tarantino Made Race a Central Theme of ‘Jackie Brown’
In his only adaptation Tarantino made some monumental changes…
Jackie Brown is quite possibly Quentin Tarantino’s most thoughtful, nuanced, and socially substantive film. So of course, it’s one of his least successful. Both his shoestring budget gatecrasher Reservoir Dogs (1992) and his breakthrough smash hit Pulp Fiction (1994) were boisterous, frenetic joyrides, appealing to a strangely broad audience by way of their quirky, Godard/Fellini influenced arthouse cool, joyously juxtaposed with a knowing, exploitative sense of manic fun and no-rules, lose-your-lunch violence. By comparison, the slow-as-fuck-burn of 1997’s Jackie Brown (along with its dramatically lower squib count) probably made it seem sort of “meh” to a lot of people. But all of those people are dumb.
Because the thing is, not only is Jackie Brown an awesomely taut con movie and kickass crime drama, it’s also basically Tarantino’s only film to date to grapple with race, gender, and class in a modern sense — and to do it beautifully. Sure, he’s made purposefully over-the-top revenge fantasies where the hero, placed within the apex of their own institutionalized persecution, gets to personally annihilate their oppressor, whether it’s a band of hardass, Jewish U.S. soldiers assassinating Hitler in Inglorious Basterds, a freed slave saving his wife by blowing up the entire plantation of the antebellum asshole who owned her in Django Unchained, or a woman repaying the lover who beat her, shot her, and left her to be assaulted by orderlies during a four year coma in Kill Bill. But just the everyday, bummer reality that being a black woman in modern American society in many ways just sucks on a very dark, tedious, and depressing level? Integrating that into your film is a whole different ballpark. And what’s particularly cool is that Tarantino absolutely chose to tackle this nuanced reality with intent.
Jackie Brown is an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. Except in Rum Punch, the heroine’s name is Jackie Burke and she’s white. Whiter than white, she’s full on naturally blonde. It’s a cool book and the fact that her character has been shafted due to her gender is still there, along with some of the backed-into-a-corner toughness she uses to get one up over all the different people breathing down her neck. But truly — and I’m saying this as an Elmore Leonard fan — the film is just better, rare as that is. There’s more to it. The intertwined issues of both race and class that come with Jackie being black add an entire additional dimension to what was already a glorious character arc. And that’s not just implicit by way of casting. Which is to say, maybe all this added dimension would be there in Jackie Brown whether Tarantino meant it to or not simply because he cast African American Pam Grier in the lead. But there’s so much more. Casting is just where it begins.
When Grier walked into Tarantino’s office to talk about the role and found the place adorned with posters for her ’70s blaxploitation hits like Foxy Brown and Coffy, she asked suspiciously if he’d placed them all there just because he knew she was coming. On the contrary, he said, he had bashfully considered taking them all down just because he knew she was coming. Tarantino was a seriously devoted fan of the blaxploitation genre. (I know, I know, the controversial role of black culture and language in his films — we’ll get there). Yes, he wanted to work with Grier in part because she was one of his heroes. But he also had a vision for Jackie Brown that he knew she could help him crystalize by not just paying tribute to the genre Grier helped define, but utterly transcending it.
As we alluded to above, there are certain elements to the story that automatically take on a slightly new tone with Grier in the lead. In the book, when Jackie outsmarts the ATF agents on her back, she’s just a hard-luck lady with the balls to take her one shot. In the movie, Jackie’s race undeniably adds new aspects to this dynamic, even vaguely calling to mind the blaxploitation movies of Grier’s resume with a black heroine overcoming the power-tripping bullshit of her white bullies. However, rather than leave this aspect to be debated over by fans, Tarantino actually adds an important line of dialogue to the script (which otherwise, it should be noted, remains largely verbatim from the book throughout the film) between Jackie and the agents to make it explicit that race is indeed a vital element of Jackie’s journey. It happens immediately following her arrest and threatened incarceration, when detective Dargus (Michael Bowen) says to her, “If I was a 44 year old black woman desperately clinging on to this one shitty little job that I was fortunate enough to get, I don’t think that I’d think I had a year to throw away.”
Tarantino does ink in the film with a few other choices that more directly genuflect to the blaxploitation genre—though Jackie Brown itself isn’t a blaxploitation film. There’s the name and title of course, and some aesthetic flourishes like a soul and funk driven soundtrack and the occasional power zoom, in addition to the director’s famously frantic take on pacing and chronology (even here, where he seems calmer than ever). These things all pay the expected homage. The film’s real strength, however, is in its depiction of Jackie as a black woman transcending multiple levels of racist, sexist society by playing each one off against the other. But before we get to that, we should probably address something that will otherwise stalk the entire conversation. The 800 lb. New Yorker article in the room: the n-word.
It pulls us slightly off track, but nothing would be more distracting than to skip over it entirely, so fuck it, let’s just jump right in. Tarantino’s use of the epithet in Jackie Brown’s dialogue caught a Lot. Of. Flack. It had been a source of controversy in his previous films, but the issue flared up particularly intensely around Jackie Brown, prompting at least a minor mention in most reviews, and inciting a notable denouncement from Spike Lee, who criticized what he counted as 38 instances of the word in the movie, and said that even though he wasn’t blanketly against using the word in film, Tarantino had still used it in Jackie Brown “excessively.”
For better or worse, Tarantino has stood by the n-word’s place in his screenplays. As far back as a 1994 interview with Manohla Dargis, Tarantino has claimed that he attended a nearly all black high school, grew up surrounded by people of color, and has always heard the term thrown around by folks from certain backgrounds, like his blustering Jackie Brown character Ordell Robbie, thus making it inherently dishonest for him to skip over the word when writing dialogue for such a character. (For the record, Ordell, who is played by Samuel L. Jackson, is indeed responsible for most of those 38 instances in Jackie Brown, with almost half of them blowing by in his first 15 minutes of screentime). Of course, Tarantino also made some very naive and thoroughly boneheaded statements early on (particularly in that Dargis interview), such as that the word had too much power and he was actively seeking to dilute its social potency (jury’s in on the failure of that last mission, but at least he’s no longer claiming it’s his job to take it on in the first place). He also went so far (cringe) as to say that the word wasn’t racially exclusive — that in certain social circles, it was tossed back and forth by pals of all races, and he was as likely to be considered an n-word as anybody else.
As you try to unclench your teeth, at least take some comfort in the fact that he said this shit 20 years ago and in the meantime, somebody clearly passed him a note about the immense and oblivious privilege he was abusing by acting as if the n-word’s dark and tormented origins were ancient history. Because at least to his credit, he stopped. Stopped defending the use of the n-word on any terms other than whether it would realistically be uttered by the character in question, and perhaps more importantly, stopped writing scripts in which any white person utters the term who isn’t, by way of saying it, a racist villain. He clarified this refreshingly well (given his less than refreshing history with the subject) in an interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in which he explained that the use of the n-word in Django Unchained was indeed meant to be as ugly and dehumanizing as it was in 1858 Mississippi, so as not to (forgive the term) whitewash the repugnance of slavery in the American South.
It kind of gives you the feeling that he’s trying to make up for his earlier missteps. But hey, that’s easy for me to say. I am, you know, white, so take my words with as many grains of salt as they require. Along these lines, it also seems to help Tarantino’s narrative as an artist with good intentions who’s been learning not to be a clueless dick that in 2015, he didn’t mind inciting a threatened police boycott of Hateful Eight when he marched in New York to protest police brutality against black people. Even director Antoine Fuqua, who doesn’t even know Tarantino, defended the use of the n-word in Django Unchained because, as he put it, “…we’re supposed to find some truth in films and if you set a film in the 1850s, you’re going to hear the word ‘ni***r,’ because that’s the way they spoke then, and you’re going to discuss slavery because that was part of the reality. I want my kids to hear those kinds of words in the right context, so that they’ll know that language is not OK.”
Oh, Fuqua was prompted to say that because — bringing the conversation back to Jackie Brown — Spike Lee is still beefing with Tarantino over this stuff. He stated that he would not be seeing Django Unchained, tweeting, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.” It’s worth noting that Tarantino sort of gave the actual Holocaust the exact same treatment in Inglorious Basterds, but as Jules from Pulp Fiction has said, you don’t judge shit like this based on merit. Speaking of Jules, longtime collaborator Sam Jackson has consistently defended Tarantino against accusations of racism, to which Spike Lee called him, “A house slave defending the massa.” Something about that response feels….not cool. But again, salt my statements here as needed.
I frame all of this for you in order to point out that personally, I think most of Tarantino’s foot-to-mouth moments stem from cluelessness and social weirdness, definitely not feelings of white superiority, or really even an inappropriate fetishization of black culture (at least not insofar as you can clearly separate fetishization from a genuine interest in the black experience, stupid as his descriptions of this interest have been in the past). I don’t think he’s good at articulating or contextualizing his thoughts out loud (ironic given his vocation, but trust me, it’s a lot different with a laptop and a backspace key and infinite time), and I really don’t think he’s naturally great at extrapolating the nuance of when a word is or isn’t offensive out of the abstract social abyss most of us do.
If you have a friend or family member who just cannot hear how they come off to people, who think calling an Asian person “yellow” is the same as calling an African American person “black” because THEY’RE BOTH COLORS, leaving you with the infuriating task of explaining how it’s not the literal origin of a slang term that imbues it with offensiveness, it’s the social history with which it’s been used, just watch an early Tarantino interview on the topic of race. You’ll catch a subtle whiff of that familiar Eau de Social Deficit scent. But as alluded to above, I think he’s learned a lot since that 1994 Dargis interview. And despite being so naively stupid early on as to think, “Black people all know I get it, so I can say whatever I want,” I think he’s always come at issues of race from a genuinely good place. By which I mean, a place that truly does see and understand the existence of systemic racism. Because I don’t know how else you end up with a movie like Jackie Brown.
Jackie’s whole predicament stems from having done what women for centuries have been conditioned to do: stand by your man. She helped her pilot husband smuggle some drugs when she was a flight attendant for Delta 13 years ago and now she’s stuck making pocket change for the only shitty, low-paying Mexican airline that’ll hire a black stewardess with a criminal record. Secreting customs-free chunks of cash over the border now and then for gunrunner Ordell is the only way Jackie can make ends meet, but when she gets busted for that by two hotshot pricks from the ATF (Michael Bowen and Michael Keaton), her choices are either work with those guys to pull a sting on Ordell (which will almost certainly result in Ordell murdering her), or stay loyal to the gangster who’d be all too happy to shoot her in the head, and serve at least a year in jail for her recent bust.
Black or white, the only other person in the story who isn’t a total shit is bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster), who implicitly seems to get that Jackie’s been given a pretty raw deal for a 13 year old mistake made out of matrimonial loyalty. Additionally, the affectionate chemistry between the two gives us a chance to see the beauty of Jackie’s African Americanness through his eyes. Upon his first visit to her small apartment, Max tentatively takes in the raffia baskets, African masks, and Frank Frazier posters that dot the place, all of them unfamiliar but exquisite, both intrinsically and because they inform this radiantly elegant but ruthlessly tough woman. There’s just one flirtatious line alluding to Grier’s still rockin’ body, when despite looking empirically great at 44, she insists “My ass ain’t the same,” and Max succinctly responds “Bigger? Nothing wrong with that.” Most notably, Jackie introduces him to the gorgeous music of the Delfonics, which he of course becomes completely taken with, leading to a few amusing moments where we get to giggle watching a square, 55 year old white guy in khakis discovering his new love of ’70s soul music.
Max is obviously falling for her, but just as importantly, he sees how capable she is, how many chances she’s been denied, and is about to help her pull off a high risk con job that’ll offer her the closest thing to a just outcome she’s ever had. Because also wrapped up in the portrayal of Jackie’s race as a legitimate element of the story is the notion that she’s had to claw her way to get only this far up the ladder — which is why she’s willing to risk it all rather than be kicked back down to the bottom. That feeling is there from the first moments of the film — probably because of the carefully chosen theme music.
The song playing over the movie’s opening is Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” a song with a pretty unequivocal narrative:
“I was the third brother of five
Doing whatever I had to do to survive
I’m not saying what I did was alright
Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day to day fight
Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind
I knew there was a better way of life that I was just trying to find
You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester”
This song plays in its complete, three minute and forty-five second entirety while Pam Grier does little more than ride the moving walkways of an airport terminal as the credits roll, making it more than evident that the song is meant to be heard. Tarantino is telling us that the story told to us in this song — the story of black Americans struggling against the quicksand of endemic poverty and institutionalized racism — is an important theme in the film we’re about to see. If you have any doubt about his intention, just watch the movie to its conclusion. Even after Jackie accepts Max’s assistance in her expertly designed, nerves-of-steel operation to walk away with the cops and criminals both off her back and all of Ordell’s money in her pocket, even after she tries to share the money with Max but upon his refusal, leaves him with nothing but a kiss and a thank you (because “maybe someday” is enough for this movie — Jackie can ride off into the sunset on her own), even after she drives away, considering an open ended trip to Spain, the theme song returns as an ending theme, bookending the film.
As Jackie is seen driving with her eyes fixed reflectively on the middle distance of the road, the now familiar first verse of “Across 110th Street” swells to fill what we usually think of as the moment we step backward, away from the narrative and toward reality in preparation for the credits to roll and the house lights to come up. But just then, something bonkers happens: Jackie starts singing along. Remember, this isn’t just a random song that was picked to accompany the closing credits, it’s the movie’s theme song, the music that was playing for us as we glided into the film’s first moments and alighted inside its reality. It’s the song that bridges the suspension of disbelief between our world and its own. And by choosing to have Jackie join in and sing along with it, Tarantino is damn near breaking the fourth wall. That’s how important it was to him that we understand what Jackie has accomplished. She hasn’t just pulled off a kickass con job, she’s crossed 110th Street. A black woman just beat a system rigged twofold against her. And for all of his faults, Tarantino knew that was a moment worth savoring.
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