By Danielle Cole

For many people, music is an incredibly intimate thing.  What we like, what we are drawn to is often imbued with personal significance. Some music may resonate a time period, like college, or an event, like marriage.  Some music just intuitively rings true.  It seems to tell us something about the world, but maybe more importantly, about ourselves.

Music is just as much a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown as are Ordell and Jackie.  The use of music in this film is eloquent.  It rounds out the scenes and evokes emotion.  And it also feels personal.  One cannot help but wonder why Tarantino made these musical choices.  Maybe he simply chose music he liked and that he felt fit the scenes.  This is a likely reason supported by the interview with Tarantino on the collector’s edition DVD.  When he talks about choices he made for actors as well as adapting the book to the screenplay, we see a director who does what seems to feel right.  He picked music he felt best fit the scene, the mood, the characters and the flow of the entire piece.  But how does that intuitive process work?  It is likely we have all had the experience of feeling immediately connected to a piece of music we hear for the first time.  But why does that happen?  What is it about certain music that enhances both our personal moments, and this film?

In Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination, Robert Jourdain compares music to language.  This is a common comparison made among those who research the psychology of music.  He argues that music bears little resemblance to language and that, “language is devoted almost entirely to representing the contents of the world, something music hardly ever does.  Rather than portray events in the world beyond our skin, music seems to reenact experience within the body.”  He also states that much of the pleasure derived from music is “merely from perceiving patterns,” and that “Music mimics experience rather than symbolizes it, as language does.  It carefully replicates the temporal patterns of interior feelings, surging in pitch or volume as they surge, ebbing as they ebb.”  This is a great analysis of why music matters in a film.  And why well-chosen music enhances a film so greatly.  It provides pleasure and gut-level interpretation.

We start the film with Bobby Womack’s Across 110^th Street where we meet a calm, collected, cool-as-a-cucumber Jackie as she glides along the walkway.  She breaks into a stride, apparently running late to board a plane but is quickly back to calm and collected as she greets the passengers. She moves seamlessly from stoic to slightly panicked back to being cool and in control; what could even be a simplistic description of her character arc.  The song that accompanies this has a melancholy tone to it.  The lyrics speak of hardship and survival; words suited to her character. We experience Jackie together with the music for about three minutes.  Plenty of time to make a judgment about her based on the music and the scenery.  We learn little about her from the scenery; just that she is a flight attendant who is running late.  What we develop in our minds about her character begins with the music.  It is in a minor key, which music psychology would tell us, is often described by listeners with such terms as sad, doleful, dark, or gloomy.  Depending on our previous experience with this particular song, we may assign other more personal emotional descriptions as well.  Here the song is used as diegetic sound (coming from outside of the story space and therefore not heard by the character).  It is mood music for the audience.  But when this song is used again at the end, it is as diegetic sound (sound that is heard by the characters).  As she is driving and listening, Jackie’s expression tells a story.  Again it is up to interpretation but she appears reflective and solemn.  She is lip-syncing the words with little energy.  Perhaps because of the emotional toll all that has happened has taken on her, or perhaps because of the good-bye with Max.  Or the shock of realizing she is getting away with it.  We cannot be entirely certain and that makes it a brilliant cinematic maneuver.  Leaving a bit of mystery keeps the story with us because we may have different interpretations based on what we are internally feeling upon repeated viewings.

In the DVD interview mentioned above, Tarantino also says that he wants us to “hang out” with the characters.  That he wants us to be brought into their worlds so that on future viewings we are still gaining something.  It is arguable that apart from entertainment one of the best elements of film is the experience of it.  Being able to be in another world for a few hours, to experience another life different than our own.  That is why music is such an important piece.  It ties together these experiences with a form of communication that is both ambiguous and direct and hits us in our emotions.  Tarantino plays with diegetic and non-diegetic sound.  A song we think is just for the audience becomes the same song Ordell is listening to in the car, only we do not know it until Ordell switches the radio off.  This draws us into his world.  Suddenly what we are feeling in relation to the music becomes what Ordell is feeling.

It is also a brilliant maneuver that Across 110^th Street does not stand as Jackie’s theme song, but merely serves as the bookends to her story.  Her theme music actually becomes Roy Ayers’ Brawling Broads: an instrumental piece as suave and groovy as Jackie herself.  This piece occurs four times in the film and each time Jackie is in control, cool, and calm.  We also know that Tarantino is a big fan of the film Coffy, starring Pam Grier in 1973.  Even if all you ever saw of this film is the one sheet you can surmise that Pam Grier’s character kicks ass with no apologies.  If you have seen Coffy then the choice of Ayers’ music will highlight that memory in your brain and prepare you to see her play Jackie as a tough woman who becomes our hero.  If Across 110^th Street describes her character arc, then Brawling Broads describes her internal experience.  With these two pieces of music we are given a very full picture of her character without the use of words.

There are thirty-three musical cues throughout the film with only six pieces repeated.  Ordell and Max have music that is associated with them but not as repeatedly as Jackie.  Cissy Strut as played by The Meters occurs twice, both times during scenes with Ordell.  One could argue that this is his theme music but both of those cues occur within the first twenty minutes of the film: first when Ordell learns that Beaumont is in jail and procures his bail bond and second when he takes Beaumont to his car before shooting him.  Up to this point Ordel is in control.  The next time we see him he is back with Max Cherry buying a bond for Jackie.  During this second conversation with Max, Ordell is dancing around why he wants to bail Jackie out.  Max calls it when he says, “You want me to know what a slick guy you are.”  A very apt description of Ordell.  He talks a good game and seems to be a fairly successful criminal but one view we are given of him is that it is so much exterior.  Melanie outlines that to Louis when she tells him that Ordell does not actually know anything about guns but that he just repeats what he hears.  So it is appropriate that Ordell no longer has theme music after this.  His introduction to us as a badass gets quickly deflated and he becomes a pawn in Jackie’s game.  Likewise, The Delfonics’ song Didn’t I Blow Your Mind could arguably be Max’s theme, but this piece of music only becomes associated with Max because of Jackie.  We do not learn anything about Max’s character through music, except that he has a thing for Jackie or perhaps if we read into it, that something about meeting her shook him up.  It was that night he bonded her from jail that he decided to quit the bail bonds business.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, a prominent anthropologist and ethnologist, once wrote that music is “the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable.”  Music communicates directly and viscerally.  In an almost primitive way but yet in a complex, intelligent way.  It is a medium we all live with that affects our emotions whether we realize it or not.  After all, what would Jaws be without the creepy, anxiety-fueled orchestra sounds?  Music cues and readies our emotions.  Arguably nothing else does this so directly.  Scientists who study music psychology have found that experiencing chills is an incredibly common experience when listening to music (as well as viewing certain art or hearing an emotionally moving story) but is found nowhere else in our human existence.  And it is likely we would all have a similar definition of what getting the chills means.  Tarantino has a gift for choosing the right music.  In Jackie Brown as well as his other films, he draws us in and lets us be a part of the story on multiple levels.  The music is the personal touch, like the kiss shared by Jackie and Max.  It snaps us into the picture and keeps us interested, and maybe a touch forlorn as we drive away with Bobby Womack cooing in our ears.

Danielle Cole is a Philadelphia-based occasional philosopher who practices psychotherapy in the suburbs. She loves films of all kinds, especially those with protracted scenes of everyday life and any art that has a personal vision.