![]() The person holding the gun at the crotch is, of course, Jackie Brown, played with incandescent cool by blaxploitation veteran Pam Grier. Later, when he tries it again, he ends up dead. When he goes after someone smart enough not to trust him, he ends up, in the first case, with a gun pointed at his crotch. In both instances, he uses his personal relationship with his employees to maneuver them into situations where he can simply shoot them mid-conversation at point blank range. On the contrary, his two kills are predicated on the most tawdry kind of betrayal. Ordell's murders, too, are hardly in the glorious blaze-of-phallic-firearms mode. One of his three women steals from him as soon as she gets a chance his white surfer-girl chick Melanie (Bridget Fonda) despises him ("His lips move when he reads," she sneers), and his third girl, Sheronda (Lisa Gay Hamilton), appears to be loyal mainly because she is borderline mentally dysfunctional. Ordell's pretensions to masculinity are, then, actually and specifically portrayed as pretensions-and ones to which the man himself steadfastly fails to live up. Who says the media isn't implicated in violence? He needed Johnny Cash to get him in the mood for murder. The mythologizing, in other words, wasn't (or wasn't just) Tarantino's extra-diegesis-it was Ordell in-narrative psyching himself up. The moment is broken, though, when Ordell exits the car and turns off the radio, shutting Cash down abruptly. Tarantino certainly enjoys flirting with the cold-blooded tropes of iconic masculinity-as in one cool-as-shit sequence in which Ordell, about to strangle someone, slowly pulls on a pair of red gloves while Johnny Cash's knowing "Tennessee Stud" plays on the soundtrack. The name of the film is not, however, Ordell Robbie. The End of Violent, Simplistic, Macho Masculinity As Jackie Brown unfolds, in fact, it becomes clear that Ordell sees himself in no small part as a blaxploitation protagonist, whose hyperbolic cool, toughness, and masculinity is demonstrated by the $500,000 he's got stored in Mexico, by his three kept women (one of them white, as he notes with pride), and by his guns. Not coincidentally, it's also a good summary of blaxploitation (and not just blaxploitation) markers of maleness. That's a good summation of Ordell's interests-women, guns, and money. When we first encounter Ordell, he's watching a video called "Chicks Who Love Guns," a kind of infomercial in which hot women in bikinis fire and laud the virtues of different weapons. ![]() ![]() The main antagonist in Jackie Brown is Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson), a thug and gun runner. It's called Jackie Brown, and it was released way back in 1997. But it is worth noting that Tarantino actually has a film about the limits of blaxploitation masculinity, and about women making their own way. That is where I want to go.Īs Coates acknowledges, it's hard to know how all of this plays out till the film is released. That is where I believe the nectar of narrative awaits. In so many cases, they had to make their own way. The fact is that is that very few enslaved black women had the luxury of waiting on freedom via black men. I worry about rendering enslaved black men as eunuchs restored, and enslaved black women as merely the field upon which that restoration is demonstrated. I'm not really interested in replaying the problems of blaxploitation. ![]()
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