Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

Author:Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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.

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