Jackie Brown

It’s easy to get caught up in Tarantino’s postmodernist quotations but I think, in this case, we should focus on his feminist leanings. If feminism is a questioning of what the world does to women, then you can’t get a better exemplar than this. Jackie is a woman marginalized by society. She’s a poor-ish black woman who has been trodden on by society’s expectations. She works a boring, low-paying job as a stewardess (essentially a servant) who shuttles drugs for that asshole Ordell. When she gets caught, she embarks on a complicated double cross (or maybe triple I don’t know) in order to save herself and manages to play just about everyone. This film seems to make the point that marginalized people don’t deserve to be so, without ever actually focusing on that. Tarantino made Jackie tough, driven, rule-breaking, powerful, and intelligent to the point that I could barely follow what she was doing. (This was one of those movies where everything is explained at the end and you’re supposed to have an Ah ha! Moment but I never really did.) However, Tarantino does seem to focus just a bit too much on the fact that she is a woman. If we were really being equal, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The film could be read to mean that Jackie is just an exceptional woman (a woman like a man as Levy would say) and is in no way representative of her class. I also seemed to pick up overtones of sexual control in her relationship with Max, the bailbonds guy. I might have been imagining it but she does seem to use her body as a weapon of sorts. This obviously undermines the power of her intelligence, but at the same time shows her resourcefulness.