The filmography of Quentin Tarantino has always had one foot- at a conservative estimate- rooted in the past. Even prior to his reawakening as a period dramatist, his neo-noir crime fables were drenched in obsessive cinematic nostalgia. Pulp Fiction’s much ballyhooed narrative musical chairs were really a contemporary riff on those pesky French New Wavers. Tarantino’s wonderfully restrained adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Jackie Brown became, in part, a loving tribute to Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation heroine: Foxy Brown. As his career evolved the allusions to his cinematic forbears became even more intrinsic to his work. His films became living monuments to eras past, cheekily goading you into challenging his mastery of niche. His sheer cinematic verve has remained undimmed: Inglorious Basterds was a triumph of historical sabotage. But both Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight started to collapse under the weight of his ‘Quintessence’. While audiences could appreciate his rancour in blunderbuss fragments, his films had started to become increasingly erratic. His new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood looked doomed to be yet another in his series of self-indulgent meta-heists. But amazingly, his paean to the death-rattle of cinema’s golden age is his most mature work since Jackie Brown, using the sun-drenched L.A of his youth as a filter for deeply personal and contemporary concerns.
Once Upon a Time is ostensibly a love letter to the last days of cinema’s Golden Age. The post-war economic boom that inspired the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ idealism of the 50’s was no more. The American dream had fractured, resulting in massive sociological tremors ranging from Civil Rights activism to the Vietnam War. Countercultures emerged to challenge the status quo, with the Hippie Revolution offering ideological respite to the disillusioned. Hollywood- much like America- was in a state of flux, with the entire industry poised for a major paradigm shift. According to the seminal work of Joan Didion, the Manson Family murders could be read as a confluence of these extremely complex forces, an experiential tipping point in American culture. The victims were socio-cultural martyrs, sacrificed to usher in a new era of cynicism and turbulence. Tarantino understands this perfectly, using the changing landscape of the Hollywood dream-machine as a vehicle to explore these tensions. But what’s truly extraordinary about this film is how it uses this pivotal moment in American pop-culture to reflect Tarantino’s own anxieties about his place in contemporary cinema.
Just like 1969, 2019 teeters on the cusp of another lost decade. The world of film-making bows to the hegemony of super-heroes and charmless Disney cash-grabs. Cinemas, once the claustrophobic cathedrals of film, are being threatened by the ruthless efficiency of streaming services. Tarantino is not simply paying homage in this film. He is articulating his growing sense of anxiety about his place in the industry. Rick Dalton, played with joyous frenzy by Leonardo DiCaprio, is in part a manifestation of Tarantino’s creative neurosis. Like Dalton, Tarantino is at an age where much of his creative vitality is behind him. Dalton relentlessly worries about his place in posterity, haunted by industry whispers of a lost audition for The Great Escape. His life is a constant quest for validation, culminating in a magical scene with a composed child actor (Julia Butters), who espouses the values of the Stanislavski technique- which of course is a subtle harbinger of 70’s New Hollywood. There’s something confessional about this scene’s intimacy, as if Tarantino is confiding in his inner-child, questioning his place in the rapidly changing cinematic landscape.
Enter Cliff Booth, played with laconic pizzazz by Brad Pitt. Booth is the embodiment of the carefree cowboy that Dalton so often portrays. In fact, while Dalton is navigating the emotional rollercoaster of shooting his latest Western guest-spot, Booth is immersed in an authentic Spaghetti Western tableaux, with the Manson hoard recast as the invading posse. If Dalton is Tarantino’s reservoir of doubts, Booth is his pragmatic counterpoint, reacting with nonchalance to seismic shifts in the industry. He is the aspect of Tarantino’s persona that doesn’t internalize stinging critical responses: even if you bring up the likely homicide of his wife. Booth is a mythic figure, personifying all of the L.A cool that Tarantino fetishizes so openly. In that sense he works as a stand-in for the mythologised version of Tarantino himself, the iconoclastic filmmaker who has no reservations about his place in the cinematic pantheon. Once Upon a Time is a rumination on both cultural and physical death. The dichotomy between Rick and Cliff may also offer a window into Tarantino’s conflicted feelings on death itself. Rick’s increasing paranoia about legacy preservation reflects a deep fear of the next step, while Cliff’s blasé, post-Rambo ambulance ride hints at detached resignation with the contents of the final reel.
The Spahn Ranch section of the film is a Disneyland trip for Tarantino, had Walt Disney delegated construction duties to Sergio Corbucci. Prior to the Manson Family’s insidious takeover, Spahn Ranch had essentially been an off-Broadway Western studio. Booth’s daytime sojourn with Pussycat leads him to the seat of his glory days as Rick’s stunt double. But what should have been a trip down memory lane turns into Alice in Wonderland L.A, as the Manson clan have slowly insinuated themselves into the misc en scene of the Old West. George Spahn is no longer the man that Booth knew. He’s blind, living a hermetic existence under the collective gaze of the Manson menagerie, with virtually no recollection of Cliff. I couldn’t help but think of Tarantino’s relationship with alleged sexual predator: Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein’s company Miramax was propelled into the stratosphere by Tarantino, evidenced by its popular sobriquet: the house that Quentin built. But both the Spahn Movie Ranch and Weinstein Company were felled by dark, festering undercurrents. Like Spahn, Weinstein has been disenfranchised by an alliance of women (though in Weinstein’s case the persecution was justified). Booth’s realisation that this is a much changed man may work as a poignant meditation on Tarantino’s ambivalent feelings towards his former champion.
Sharon Tate, portrayed by the luminous Margot Robbie, is really the beating heart of the movie. Knowing her historical fate imbues her character with an elegiac yearning wholly unique to Tarantino’s cinema. I want to focus on perhaps the most unashamedly joyous scene in the film: Sharon’s trip to watch The Wrecking Crew. Her incognito trip to the cinema, greedily devouring the adulation of the crowd, is a poignant curtain call for Tate. But I think it operates on a deeper level, revealing a painfully sentimental aspect of Tarantino’s persona. She was 26 years old at the time of her brutal murder, making her just five years younger than Tarantino when he made Pulp Fiction. That film established Tarantino as the de facto gatekeeper of American cinema, the wunderkind that could do no wrong. It’s as if Tarantino uses Sharon Tate as a conduit to revisit that period of bliss in his own creative life, when the future was boundless and applause unconditional. Watching Tate shuffle through Tarantino’s own killer record collection only strengthens that sense of kinship between the director and his angelic muse. There’s also a sense that Tarantino is exorcising some of his own misogynistic demons here, allowing Tate to exist as someone other than Roman Polanski’s murdered wife.
The final half hour of the film is where Tarantino’s patented historical revisionism runs amok. The Manson crew- in full Three Stooge’s mode- are provoked by Dalton into seeking retribution on him rather than the Tate residence. This leads to a bloodbath that can be best described as Sam Peckinpah’s take on Home Alone. Tarantino offers celluloid immortality to the Tate residence, reconnecting the cord between the Golden Age and New Hollywood: Dalton gets invited into Tate’s house as a consequence of their intervention. Filtering the events through a contemporary prism, Manson’s denizens are disciples of the franchise movie cult, similarly brainwashed into movie myopia. They are meta-critic aficionados, sacrificing individual critique for consensus. Just look at the vitriolic reception dished out to Darren Aronofsky’s visionary Mother! Wasn’t there something cultish in the hysterical reception of that film? Booth, in those moments of violent revelry, can be seen as Tarantino gleefully rejecting modern cinematic trends. Much YouTube criticism of this film reveals how adverse contemporary audiences are to contemplative cinema. So-called experts, generally surrounded by a throng of slightly malevolent Marvel figurines, come to the conclusion that this film doesn’t have enough plot, lacking the machinegun dialogue of his previous work. In the words of Mia Wallace: “Uncomfortable silences. Why do people feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to feel comfortable?”
The film then shifts down, retreating from the euphoric afterglow of fictional revenge to a far more bittersweet ebb. It’s not just cool shtick. In previous work, Tarantino would have let the audience bathe illicitly in the thrill of that violence. But this is not that sort of fairy-tale. You don’t actually see the heavily pregnant Tate in the conclusion, you only hear her disembodied voice. Through that distancing technique she effectively haunts the film, an affecting reminder of the awful truth of that night. In the same sense, Tarantino’s style of personal filmmaking may seem to endure, but look closer. The film has done quite well financially- though his work is essentially an IP in and of itself. But it does seem unsettlingly meta that a film lamenting the diminishing power of movie stars would open 2nd in America, languishing nearly 60 million dollars behind a virtual shot-for-shot remake of The Lion King, itself in its 2nd week of release. One can almost envisage Tarantino in his L.A lair, vibing out to The Mama’s and the Papa’s, only for a pack of ravenous CGI lions to storm into his house and slaughter him, heralding the next cultural zeitgeist.
