Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (16 page)

Further developing Hart’s theory, Sterba applies to it Rawls’s concept of “justice as fairness.” Rawls put forward the idea that what is just is what is fair, and what is fair is something that can
be captured by imagining that we get to choose some social arrangement without knowing in advance what position we will occupy within that arrangement. For instance, we would choose the best arrangement for allocating income to people, without knowing whether we would personally have the highest or the lowest income. We would give special weight to the worst off position (since we might be in that position). What we would choose would then be fair.
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Sterba adapts Rawls’s notion of fairness to come up with a form of retributivism as fairness.
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Fair principles for the legal system would be those that anyone would find acceptable without knowing what position within the legal system they would be placed in. Sterba’s approach saves pure retributivism from its biggest problem: that actions are more likely to be done out of revenge. I think that Sterba’s argument can be used to show that Blonde’s actions are a reflection of retributivism as fairness.

According to Sterba, representatives in the original position will not choose principles that maximize utility because

If any representative believed that the principle didn’t improve the conditions of the least desirable positions, then on Rawls’s account they would not choose those principles.

Sterba’s legal enforcement system includes some safeguards against problems that may arise. First, his system will not punish excusable behavior because Hart’s account only punishes people if they commit an offense with the cognitive and volitional conditions of
mens rea
. Second, his system would not punish innocent people, since it doesn’t justify punishment via utility maximization. Finally, Sterba argues that since the criminal would have been able to avoid his fate if he had chosen to
abide by the reasonably just laws of society, we decide the basic principles of legal enforcement with the interests of the victims in mind (p. 77).

The last safeguard is controversial, and it is one with which Blonde may not agree. The victims of the crime and the criminals who perpetrate them both have some claim to be in the least desirable position in a legal enforcement system. Sterba acknowledges this, but he believes that the criminals aren’t the least advantaged.

However, if the criminal were the product of a violent environment and if our environment shapes our character, then there is no way that she could have chosen to do otherwise. To choose to do something other than she did may be perceived as sacrificing her well-being. Since well-being is everyone’s concern, the criminal could not have chosen a different path.

Support of this interpretation comes directly from Blonde. After Eddie arrives at the warehouse, Pink and White confront Blonde about his psychotic behavior. White doesn’t want to leave Blonde with the captured cop “because this guy’s a fucking psycho.” Blonde went crazy in the store blowing away everyone in sight. Blonde says: “I told ’em not to touch the alarm. They touched it. I blew ’em full of holes. If they hadn’t done what I told ’em not to do, they’d still be alive.” When a person is in a hostage situation, an implicit principle is to do as the hostage taker tells you to do. If a hostage doesn’t listen to the hostage taker, then she should expect the hostage taker to punish her. We might think of the hostages and the hostage takers as parties in a contract where the parameters of the contract are created and instituted by the persons setting it up. Since the people violated the rules, they were the wrongdoers. Because Blonde is a retributivist, they deserve to be punished.

Blonde couldn’t have chosen to do anything else than blow the people full of holes. He says, “Fuck’em, they set off the alarm, they deserve what they got.” Blonde understands that he and the others are in a precarious position. They’re robbing the jewelry store. If they’re caught, they’ll go to jail. Going to jail is not in the interest of Blonde or the others. For Blonde not to shoot the people would be to sacrifice his own well-being and the well-being of his collaborators. The people in the jewelry store made it more likely that Blonde and the others would go to jail by sounding the alarm. Blonde takes it upon himself to
make the people understand that they’ve done something wrong. So, to his mind, he’s justified in blowing a few away, and he couldn’t have done otherwise because that would be endorsing their actions and sacrificing his own well-being.
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K. SILEM MOHAMMAD

. . . as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

—Donald Rumsfeld

 

The characters in Quentin Tarantino’s films frequently draw attention to what they and others don’t know, know they don’t know, and don’t know they don’t know. In
Reservoir Dogs
(1992), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) answers the question of what happened to Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker) by rehearsing a set of possibilities that tells us no more than that he hasn’t got a clue: “Either he’s alive or he’s dead or the cops got him or they don’t.” In another scene, Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) rattles off this piece of impeccable reasoning: “I can say
I
definitely didn’t do it, ’cause I know what I did or didn’t do. But I cannot definitely say that about anybody, ’cause I don’t definitely know.” In
Pulp Fiction
(1994), Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) asks Vincent Vega (John Travolta) whether the gossip he has just repeated to her is a “fact,” and he replies, “No it’s not, it’s just what I heard.”

“They” talk a lot, but They as well know only what They have heard: the circle of unknowledge disguised as information perpetuates itself. All the same, this imperfect, received version of knowledge is what They have to go on, what will have to do.

Tarantino’s fictional universe, one might say, is one that is characterized by a heavy incidence of
aporia
. Aporia, a Greek word meaning roughly “doubt,” is the classical philosophical method by which Socrates continually leads the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues to examine what they believe, or think they believe, until they are forced to admit that they cannot sustain those beliefs. They end up bereft of their false convictions, in a state of aporia. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) applies the concept broadly to a general epistemological condition of unknowing, gapping-out, unreadability, impasse. Statements of knowledge and attempts at reasoning in Tarantino’s films frequently start from and/or end up at a position of aporia.

An amusing and significant moment in
Jackie Brown
(1997) occurs when ATF agent Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) and LA police officer Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) are getting Jackie (Pam Grier) ready for a money pick-up at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance, California. Ray is speaking into his recorder, itemizing materials to be used in the operation, and he comes to the shopping bag in which Jackie will carry the money. He describes it as purple, and Mark interrupts him to observe that it is white. Ray is thrown off. The color of the bag is not that important; nevertheless, Ray’s momentary intellectual paralysis is telling. He looks at the bag, begins to clarify that the bag is in fact white with a purple pattern, then catches himself when he realizes the absurdity of the interlude. He comes up against the aporia of the situation, the space of doubt that threatens his need for organizational precision and categorical certainty. Wisely realizing that to linger in that space will be counter to the efficiency of their operation, he elects to move on.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) would describe Ray’s aporia in this scene in terms of
aspect perception
. In Part II section
ix of his
Philosophical Investigations
, Wittgenstein invokes the now famous figure of the duck-rabbit:
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Wittgenstein uses the duck-rabbit as an example of the phenomenon of aspect-change. A person looking at the picture might first see it as a duck, and then a rabbit, or vice versa, but nothing in the picture has actually changed. In fact, it is difficult to say that anything has changed, although it seems so to the observer. As Wittgenstein puts it:

The philosophical import of Wittgenstein’s thought-experiment (or
Gedankenexperiment
) concerns the way in which words like “know” tend to lose their coherence outside the context of the particular rules of the “language games” in which they are used. The duck-rabbit example illustrates the way in which we can become convinced that actions we perform are not just actions, but things or states of being. So for example when we stop seeing the duck-rabbit as a duck and start seeing it as a rabbit, we are tempted to say either that something in the picture or something in our perception (or both) has changed, that a physical phenomenon of some kind has occurred. What actually happens, Wittgenstein says, is just that we
describe
our experience differently from one moment
to the next in the specific “language-game” (
Sprachspiel
) we use to account for the way we register aspect-change—a game I myself play in referring to “aspect-change” as a noun, as though it were a substantive thing. It is this difference in description that makes it seem as though we have had two qualitatively different perceptions.

A couple of examples from
Jackie Brown
may help to flesh out the concept. At one point, illegal gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) glances at the movie his girlfriend Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda) is watching on TV, and thinks he recognizes the actor:

Similarly, earlier in the film, Melanie looks at a dark-haired actress in the “Chicks Who Love Guns” video and giggles: “Demi Moore.” Philosophical questions one might ask about these scenes are: does Ordell see the actor differently before and after he knows it is not Rutger Hauer but Helmut Berger? Does Melanie see the actress differently from the way she would see her if she did not make the mental connection to Demi Moore? According to Wittgenstein’s position as outlined above, the answer would be yes—but only within the particular language-game in which the phrase “to see differently” is used in this way. It would be a misunderstanding, Wittgenstein would say, to look for a “mental state” or other tangible epistemological condition corresponding to the expression. The meaning of the phrase is its meaning in
use
.

Tarantino is fascinated with the idea of differing perspectives on a single action or series of actions. In
Reservoir Dogs
,
Pulp Fiction
, and
Kill Bill
, he structures entire narratives as staggered temporal sequences in order to force our awareness of how our consciousness of the present is conditioned by past details that may have seemed insignificant or irrelevant at the time they occurred. By changing the order of events within the sequence of the filmstrip, the significance and relevance of such details is made more conspicuous, if not necessarily more clear.

Jackie Brown
stands out in comparison to these other films because its narrative is chronologically pretty straightforward: events are portrayed mostly in the order in which they are supposed
to occur. The one major exception is the long sequence depicting the money switch-off at the Del Amo Mall, in which the exchange is viewed first from Jackie’s perspective, then from the perspective of criminals Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) and Melanie, and finally from that of bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster). Even here, however, the order of events is not actually changed, only repeated from different angles. Unlike the other films, where the point of the skewed narrative is to affect
our
perception of the action, and thus to influence the interpretation we place upon the entire series of events that make up the story, the repetition of the switch-off in
Jackie Brown
serves primarily to emphasize the differing experiences of the
characters
in their relation to a single event. And the viewer may well ask: why? The events depicted could just as easily have been edited into a conventionally cross-cut sequence in which we see the bag hand-off from Jackie’s perspective, Louis and Melanie waiting in the dress shop from Max’s perspective, the parking lot escape from Louis and Melanie’s perspective, and so on, without any retreading of the same details. The revelation that Jackie has given Melanie a dummy bag with only a top layer of actual money, for instance, occurs after the sequence has already played out.