The opening shot of Jackie Brown (1997), lasting only ninety seconds, tells you everything you need to know about the next two hours and thirty-four minutes of your life. Set to Bobby Womack’s grit-funk ballad “Across 110th Street,” we see the iconic rainbow mosaic of the LAX arrivals tunnel and then Pam Grier’s profile slide into view. She’s on the “Astroway”, the moving sidewalk of Terminal 4, letting it take her places as Womack sings, “I'm not saying what I did was all right/ Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day-to-day fight.” On the left-hand side of the frame, the cast member’s names in goldenrod fade in and out. The camera, travelling at the same speed as the walkway, holds the frame steady, as vertical bands of turquoise, olive, and yellow shift behind Grier. Sporting a polyester blazer, neckerchief, and a composed AF attitude, she’s clearly a flight attendant headed into work. Womack continues, “You don't know what you'll do until you're put under pressure/ Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester,” and then, in supreme retro fashion, the title unfurls in Benguiat Caslon, filling the screen as the chorus kicks in. Instantaneously, the viewer connects these elements: Grier is Jackie Brown, a survivor of the variety Womack sings about, and the whole film is going to revolve around her. Grier’s cinematic history as a star of several Blaxploitation films adds a whole other swath of text over the one we are about to witness. The colours keep moving, the song keeps playing, and though literally nothing has happened, we know that Brown is a force to be reckoned with.
"The colours keep moving, the song keeps playing, and though literally nothing has happened, we know that Brown is a force to be reckoned with."
Jackie Brown is an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which follows a West Palm Beach crew of criminals and law enforcement agents all trying to double-cross each other out of a half million dollars. The linchpin for this chaos is Jackie Burke, a struggling 44-year-old flight attendant. Tarantino’s version shifts the plot to Los Angeles and uses it as a container to pay aesthetic homage to his cinematic passions, specifically Grier and her work in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Accordingly, Jackie Burke becomes Jackie Brown, adding a timely socio-political dimension to the story of a down-on-her-luck woman getting fucked in both directions. Jackie, having fallen down the career ladder, makes ends meet by smuggling money out of Mexico for two-bit arms dealer Ordell Robbie (played by Samuel L. Jackson). Caught with Ordell’s profits and a bag of cocaine by two pointedly white ATF agents, Jackie faces prison time unless she’s willing to flip to their side. The danger of doing this is, of course, murder by Ordell, but an even more frightening prospect is an uncertain life, “If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothin to start over with. I'll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that scares me more than Ordell.” With nothing but dead ends, Jackie, following Womack’s words, knows that if she’s going to survive, she’s going to have to outsmart all the forces at play. This brings us back to the opening shot of the film and the haunting ooh-ooh-ooh’s of the opening song.
“Across 110th Street” opened a 1972 film of the same name, itself an adaptation of a novel written in 1970 by Wally Ferris. During the '60s and '70s, 110th Street functioned as the demarcation line separating Black Harlem from white Manhattan. This location, invoked in Tarantino’s 1990s Los Angeles, emphasizes the psychic expansion of this racial divide across the U.S. As Womack states in his song, “In every city you'll find the same thing going down.” However, opening Jackie Brown with these words at LAX generates another aspect of meaning: the mosaic behind Jackie was installed in 1961 as part of an effort to modernize the airport into the quintessential image of the Jet Age. The mosaic was conceptualized by Janet Bennett to represent a prismatic journey across the continent, beginning with the silvers and grays of the east coast and terminating with the deep blues of the Pacific. In between greens, browns, teals, tans, and purples, symbolize various ecologies such as the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. Yet, even without this knowledge, what the viewer sees is a background out of step with the world, an evocative remnant of a glossier time, underscored by the urban decay vibrating beneath the film’s surface.
It is hard to think of another opening shot that encodes so much information with such minimal components, but something incredible happens when Tarantino leaves the camera alone and lets the music do the work: we start to exist, in real time, with Jackie, living in the same atmosphere. We breathe alongside her on screen, and our time and the narrative’s time begin to blur. The plot unfolds solely through sound and vision, which pointedly occurs at other points in the film. In a shockingly stylish scene, Ordell, in the front seat of his car, takes his sweet time slipping on a pair of leather gloves to Shuggie Oat’s “Strawberry Letter 23.” The length of the shot feels excessive by today’s standards, yet Jackson’s performance imbues the simple action with such elegance you can’t help but feel that you’re learning something critical about Ordell’s psychology. In a later sequence, which is perhaps one of the most perfect renditions of falling in love ever captured on celluloid, the camera fixates on the face of Max Cherry (played by Robert Forester), a bail bondsman, hired to pick up Jackie from LA County Jail. As Jackie walks through the prison courtyard, Tarantino cuts to Max’s face which, somehow without moving, fluctuates from interest, to awe, to lovestruck all to the dreamy lyrics of “Natural High” by Bloodstone, “Why do I keep my mind on you all the time/ And I don't even know you.” In short: we fall in love with him while watching him fall in love with her. Had we not been primed at the very start of the film to connect sound and image in this very specific way, the impact of this moment would be diluted. Instead, something completely magical occurs. While we don’t typically walk into a Tarantino film expecting to have real feelings, in Jackie Brown we actually get to experience them because of how the images and music meld to create Cinema.
At the conclusion of the opening shot, the mosaic turns shades of white, and Jackie, like a boss, heads off into her day. Yet the strains of “Across 110th Street” linger. Womack’s song returns at the film’s end, as Jackie plays it on a cassette in her car, driving away from LA and into a new life.
The opening shot of Jackie Brown (1997), lasting only ninety seconds, tells you everything you need to know about the next two hours and thirty-four minutes of your life. Set to Bobby Womack’s grit-funk ballad “Across 110th Street,” we see the iconic rainbow mosaic of the LAX arrivals tunnel and then Pam Grier’s profile slide into view. She’s on the “Astroway”, the moving sidewalk of Terminal 4, letting it take her places as Womack sings, “I'm not saying what I did was all right/ Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day-to-day fight.” On the left-hand side of the frame, the cast member’s names in goldenrod fade in and out. The camera, travelling at the same speed as the walkway, holds the frame steady, as vertical bands of turquoise, olive, and yellow shift behind Grier. Sporting a polyester blazer, neckerchief, and a composed AF attitude, she’s clearly a flight attendant headed into work. Womack continues, “You don't know what you'll do until you're put under pressure/ Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester,” and then, in supreme retro fashion, the title unfurls in Benguiat Caslon, filling the screen as the chorus kicks in. Instantaneously, the viewer connects these elements: Grier is Jackie Brown, a survivor of the variety Womack sings about, and the whole film is going to revolve around her. Grier’s cinematic history as a star of several Blaxploitation films adds a whole other swath of text over the one we are about to witness. The colours keep moving, the song keeps playing, and though literally nothing has happened, we know that Brown is a force to be reckoned with.
"The colours keep moving, the song keeps playing, and though literally nothing has happened, we know that Brown is a force to be reckoned with."
Jackie Brown is an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which follows a West Palm Beach crew of criminals and law enforcement agents all trying to double-cross each other out of a half million dollars. The linchpin for this chaos is Jackie Burke, a struggling 44-year-old flight attendant. Tarantino’s version shifts the plot to Los Angeles and uses it as a container to pay aesthetic homage to his cinematic passions, specifically Grier and her work in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Accordingly, Jackie Burke becomes Jackie Brown, adding a timely socio-political dimension to the story of a down-on-her-luck woman getting fucked in both directions. Jackie, having fallen down the career ladder, makes ends meet by smuggling money out of Mexico for two-bit arms dealer Ordell Robbie (played by Samuel L. Jackson). Caught with Ordell’s profits and a bag of cocaine by two pointedly white ATF agents, Jackie faces prison time unless she’s willing to flip to their side. The danger of doing this is, of course, murder by Ordell, but an even more frightening prospect is an uncertain life, “If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothin to start over with. I'll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that scares me more than Ordell.” With nothing but dead ends, Jackie, following Womack’s words, knows that if she’s going to survive, she’s going to have to outsmart all the forces at play. This brings us back to the opening shot of the film and the haunting ooh-ooh-ooh’s of the opening song.
“Across 110th Street” opened a 1972 film of the same name, itself an adaptation of a novel written in 1970 by Wally Ferris. During the '60s and '70s, 110th Street functioned as the demarcation line separating Black Harlem from white Manhattan. This location, invoked in Tarantino’s 1990s Los Angeles, emphasizes the psychic expansion of this racial divide across the U.S. As Womack states in his song, “In every city you'll find the same thing going down.” However, opening Jackie Brown with these words at LAX generates another aspect of meaning: the mosaic behind Jackie was installed in 1961 as part of an effort to modernize the airport into the quintessential image of the Jet Age. The mosaic was conceptualized by Janet Bennett to represent a prismatic journey across the continent, beginning with the silvers and grays of the east coast and terminating with the deep blues of the Pacific. In between greens, browns, teals, tans, and purples, symbolize various ecologies such as the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. Yet, even without this knowledge, what the viewer sees is a background out of step with the world, an evocative remnant of a glossier time, underscored by the urban decay vibrating beneath the film’s surface.
It is hard to think of another opening shot that encodes so much information with such minimal components, but something incredible happens when Tarantino leaves the camera alone and lets the music do the work: we start to exist, in real time, with Jackie, living in the same atmosphere. We breathe alongside her on screen, and our time and the narrative’s time begin to blur. The plot unfolds solely through sound and vision, which pointedly occurs at other points in the film. In a shockingly stylish scene, Ordell, in the front seat of his car, takes his sweet time slipping on a pair of leather gloves to Shuggie Oat’s “Strawberry Letter 23.” The length of the shot feels excessive by today’s standards, yet Jackson’s performance imbues the simple action with such elegance you can’t help but feel that you’re learning something critical about Ordell’s psychology. In a later sequence, which is perhaps one of the most perfect renditions of falling in love ever captured on celluloid, the camera fixates on the face of Max Cherry (played by Robert Forester), a bail bondsman, hired to pick up Jackie from LA County Jail. As Jackie walks through the prison courtyard, Tarantino cuts to Max’s face which, somehow without moving, fluctuates from interest, to awe, to lovestruck all to the dreamy lyrics of “Natural High” by Bloodstone, “Why do I keep my mind on you all the time/ And I don't even know you.” In short: we fall in love with him while watching him fall in love with her. Had we not been primed at the very start of the film to connect sound and image in this very specific way, the impact of this moment would be diluted. Instead, something completely magical occurs. While we don’t typically walk into a Tarantino film expecting to have real feelings, in Jackie Brown we actually get to experience them because of how the images and music meld to create Cinema.
At the conclusion of the opening shot, the mosaic turns shades of white, and Jackie, like a boss, heads off into her day. Yet the strains of “Across 110th Street” linger. Womack’s song returns at the film’s end, as Jackie plays it on a cassette in her car, driving away from LA and into a new life.