Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (17 page)

Since the replaying of the switch-off doesn’t serve any expository narrative function, one might object, it could be seen as a case of sloppy filmmaking, or of pure aesthetic surface for the sake of pretentious flashiness. However, one motivated function of the sequence has to do precisely with its “failure” to resolve into an information-bearing structure. All the gestures of exposition are there, all the conventions by which we have been trained as moviegoers to recognize the clever unfolding of pertinent details are in place. But the filmic device adds up to nothing. The multiple vantage points of perception ultimately do neither us nor the characters much good. Jackie pulls it off, of course, but the scene in which she rushes out into the openness of the mall to let Ray and Mark know that the bag has been “stolen” is so convincingly staged from her position of subjective experience (the camera pans around her in continual motion, signaling what seems like her genuine panic) that once we realize she is play-acting, we feel as though our perception has changed. What has changed, of course, is only the
aspect
in which our perception is experienced.

The film plays on our aspectual perceptions in various ways from start to finish. During the opening titles, we see a profile of Jackie in a medium shot, in her flight attendant’s suit, apparently walking very smoothly and steadily from right to left in front of some colorful wall tiles. It’s only after a moment that we realize why the motion is so fluid: she is actually on a moving sidewalk at LAX. For a brief moment, that is, we see her
as
walking, before we correct ourselves and see
that
she is standing still on a mobile platform. Again at the end of the film, we hear a refrain of the same music that plays during the title sequence: “Across 110th Street.” As Jackie drives off in her car, we slowly start to see that her lips are moving, that she appears to be singing along to her car radio. What we had assumed was extra-diegetic music (that is, music that is not part of the world of the film as the characters experience it) is actually diegetic.
⁷⁹
What we see and hear remains consistent, but our aspect perception changes. This change, moreover, can only be registered via an aporia: a temporary space or gap of understanding within which we try to re-conceptualize and re-describe our experience so that we can make sense of it.

Although nearly everyone in
Jackie Brown
is subject to the disorienting effects of aspect change and related mental aporias, some characters are more aware than others of the ways in which these effects can be harnessed for their own benefit. One of those characters is Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). From the time we are first introduced to Ordell, we can tell that he’s all about control achieved through the manipulation of appearances, a trait signaled by his wielding of the remote while showing Louis the “Chicks Who Love Guns” promotional video. Ordell chuckles gleefully as he adjusts the volume to enhance the sound of automatic weapon fire at just the right moments, as though he were directing reality according to his whims.
(Later in the film, Melanie reveals to Louis that the Hermosa Beach apartment where this happens is not actually Ordell’s, as it at first appears not only to Louis, but to us as well. “I live here,” she says; “he just drops in and out.” Tarantino waits till halfway through the film to let us know this: it’s yet another example of the way our perceptions are subjected to a change of aspect, causing us to reevaluate assessments we may have made earlier.)

Ordell prides himself on his own ability to take advantage of others by manipulating their perceptions. He brags to Louis Gara about the way he has fooled his little “country” girl Sheronda: “I took her to my place in Compton and told her it was Hollywood.” When the hapless Beaumont Livingston (Chris Tucker) runs afoul of the law in the process of assisting Ordell in his gun-running business, Ordell tries to reassure him with soothing arguments about why he is not really in danger of receiving a severe sentence. The brunt of his argument rests on the claim that the police are “just fucking with” Beaumont. This is Ordell’s trademark strategy: to convince the people he means to manipulate that any fear they may have of getting caught and jailed is the result of authority figures fucking with their minds. The irony here, of course, is that no one fucks with people’s minds more habitually than Ordell, and that his reassurances that people’s minds are being fucked with by others are his main means of fucking with their minds himself. Ordell’s greatest fear is of being sold out by his accomplices, so it is in his self-interest to convince them at every turn that it is in
their
best self-interest not to co-operate with the authorities: that the benefits of their continued partnership with him outweigh the benefits of ratting him out. As Ordell says,

Ordell frames everything in terms of logical chains: if you know one thing, you know another, corresponding thing, and another. Theoretically, if you know enough things, and how the knowledge of each hooks up with the knowledge of all the others,
you have all the power. You are able to stay ahead of the game and work everything to your advantage. Whether it actually works out this way is another thing, as we’ll see.

The moment we first realize the extent of Ordell’s capacity for ruthless mind-fucking is when he goes to see Beaumont shortly after bailing him out of jail (through Max Cherry Bail Bonds). Beaumont thanks Ordell energetically for his help, and Ordell plays the benevolent protector, telling Beaumont about the high-powered lawyer he has lined up to defend him, and so on. Then Ordell tells Beaumont he needs his immediate help on a job. He tells Beaumont that he needs to sell some guns to some Koreans, and he would like to have a back-up man with him in case anything goes wrong. Beaumont is immediately apprehensive, and asks what the “problem” is. Ordell responds with the helpful distinction: “It ain’t no problem, man, it’s more like a situation.” He downplays the danger of the job, just as he downplays the risk Beaumont faces when he goes up for sentencing on the charge he has just been arrested on. He applies the same explanation to both situtations: just as the police are just “fucking with” Beaumont, he and Beaumont will just be “fucking with the Koreans.” Beaumont is still resistant, even when Ordell accuses him of ingratitude. Finally, Ordell pulls out his winning argument: the promise of “chicken and waffles” when the job is done! Beaumont accompanies him down to his car, where he is told to get in the trunk and hide. He gets in, still reluctant, and Ordell slams the trunk down on him, gets in the car, drives around the block (to the accompaniment of “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson), stops, gets out, goes back, opens the trunk, and shoots Beaumont.

It’s worth noting here that Ordell’s strategy is not entirely successful in this instance. Beaumont isn’t ultimately swayed by Ordell’s reassurances, but by a crude appeal to his appetite. For all Ordell’s subtle machinations, his arguments based on what given parties know or don’t know aren’t all that persuasive. He wastes a long time trying to engage Beaumont rationally, when he could just have played the chicken and waffles card at the beginning. He ought to know better. As he himself explains to Louis earlier in the film, he manages to sell guns to his clients based not on the truly relevant information about the specific models, but based on the clients’ superficial associations of the guns with characters from movies. “The Killer [John Woo in the
movie of the same name] had a .45, they want a .45,” he explains, even though the truth is that the .45 Magnum “has a serious fucking jamming problem.” Louis is impressed by Ordell’s savvy, though much of what he says goes over his head: “He knows a lot,” he observes to Melanie, who replies disdainfully, “He’s just repeating stuff he’s overheard.”

If Melanie is right—and she seems pretty perceptive, even though she’s apparently perpetually stoned—Ordell himself has no special claim to significantly greater analytical skills than many of the persons he scams. (At one point she remarks: “He moves his lips when he reads. What does that tell you?”) Nevertheless, he prides himself on such skills, and he seems disappointed when other people are not matches for him. He
wants
to lure Beaumont into the trunk through persuasive reasons alone. Ordell’s self-image centers around being perceived as smart, but he’s blind to his own limitations. When he says late in the film, “My ass may be dumb, but I ain’t no dumbass,” he is trying to play an aspectual mind game akin to the duck-rabbit example, but it doesn’t seem to occur him that someone whose ass is dumb is a dumbass no matter how you rearrange the terms.

The other main character in
Jackie Brown
who trades on a special ability to manipulate people’s perceptions is Jackie herself. At first, Jackie looks like she’s in danger of suffering the same fate as Beaumont, as Ordell goes through the same steps to bail her out and then do her in so she won’t squeal. Once again, we see Ordell’s preoccupation with mental games, as he says to Max at the Bail Bonds shop regarding the police’s potential case against Jackie after she is caught with drugs (and a lot of money) in her flight bag upon getting off work as a flight attendant at LAX: “They fuckin’ with her: they call that shit “possession with intent.” (To Ordell, certain words have a special, almost magical significance: he is fascinated with the rhetorical and poetic power they represent. After telling Max that someone “blew Beaumont’s brains out,” he stops and reflects on his own phraseology, “Hey, that shit rhymes:
Blew Beaumont’s / Brains out
!” (That shit is actually alliterative, but whatever.) Once again, Ordell wants to think of himself as in
control due in considerable part to his command of the chief instrument of reason: language.)

Ordell shows up at Jackie’s house directly after Max drives her there from jail, and begins his cat-and-mouse game. He tries to intimidate her by walking through each room, forcing her backwards as he goes, and flicking the light switches off one by one. We realize that the game is not one-sided, however, when Jackie, who has stolen a gun from Max’s glove compartment, turns it on Ordell and reverses his strategy: the switches start getting flicked back up as she assumes the upper hand. Ordell tries to keep his cool, protesting, “I was just playing with you,” and resorting to his old routine by expressing his concern that she might be overly concerned with the power the law has over her: “Police start fucking with your mind.”

Max too is concerned—for less selfish reasons—that the police might be able to counter-manipulate Jackie, and Jackie tries to persuade him that his concern is misplaced:

Much of
Jackie Brown
comes down to a competition between Jackie, Ordell, and the law to see who “rationalizes” most successfully, which seems here to have less to do with its everyday sense of “making up weak justifications” than with its stricter technical sense of “employing reason in an effective way to make calculations.” When Jackie tells Max that she has Ray and Mark believing that Ordell is afraid they are on to him, he cautions her: “You know, a good cop will never let you know that he knows you’re full of shit.” Although his warning turns out to be unnecessary, the principle behind it is one that Jackie fully appreciates and anticipates. “All [they] needed was a reasonable explanation,” she responds. Notice the role that “reason” plays in this passage. Ray and Mark value reason not because of its value as a mode of determining actual truth value, but as an indication that they have not neglected their duties in the course of pursuing their main objective. The reason in the reasonable
explanation need not be sound; it need only be identifiable as something one might legitimately call reason. What matters is that the rules of their particular police language game are adhered to, not whether the pieces moved in that game retain their use in other contexts.

Jackie’s awareness of this, and her ability to make accurate predictions about Ray and Mark’s behavior based on this awareness, are central to the attitude that I believe accurately characterizes her handling of the situation: one of sharply analytical pragmatism. Pragmatism is a philosophical approach first developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by thinkers like Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. One of the central tenets of pragmatism is that concepts like truth, knowledge, reality, and so forth are to be gauged by their utility with respect to a specific context, rather than by some absolute measure of validity. It is more complicated than this, of course, and the idea of pragmatism is often banally misrepresented as a simplistic credo along the lines of “whatever it takes to get the job done.” I maintain, however, that one can draw meaningful connections between specific concepts expressed in
Jackie Brown
and the ideas explored by philosophers like the pragmatists and Wittgenstein in his duck-rabbit example (Wittgenstein was not, properly speaking, a pragmatist, but there is some overlap between pragmatist theory and his own, especially in his account of language-games).

Notice the similarities between Jackie’s treatment of rationality and reason and Ordell’s, shortly after Ordell discovers that Louis has botched his role in the switch-off: