“She’s a Whole Lotta Woman”: Jackie Brown and Pam Grier’s Star Image in Jackie Brown (1997)
Résumé
This chapter considers Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997) as a metafictional film that is about its lead actress’s (Pam Grier’s) star image and, more generally, about African American women in US-American cinema and culture. By changing the race of Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel’s heroine and explicitly referencing one of Grier’s most famous roles in the title and inviting us to reconsider Coffy (Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974) as hypotexts, the film points to the extent to which an African American actress’s career was determined by a cultural history of representations, in which racial stereotyping complicates the boundaries between femininity and masculinity. But above all, Jackie Brown is a celebration of the actress’s capacity to negotiate such roles as best she could though a narrative in which the heroine rejects subjection to patriarchy and asserts her agency.