In Which Tarantino Saves the Movies
So ... I've been busy, putting together a collection of film essays, but let's take a look at Once Upon a Time....in Hollywood, since Tarantino is writing a sequel as we speak.
About midway through this remarkable film, we watch dreamily as a bright sun slowly fades over Los Angeles; Angelenos shutter their storefronts, head home from downtown or close a movie set for the night, all bathed in golden light. Jose Feliciano’s elegiac version of “California Dreaming” floats out from the screen. This is what they call golden hour in Hollywood, that moment between day and evening, the moment when cinematographers love to shoot in its warm, luscious light. This is a lyrical vision of the city that is not undeserved. Los Angeles in the late ‘60s looks beautiful, as it indeed once was, but I feel a stab of terrible knowledge, as I recognize the evil lurking behind the pacific city scape, of the all too real brutality that will soon come and smash all that beauty and fun into bits of broken glass. For Once Upon a Time is a fairy tale, as its title suggests, an alternate version of the Manson Family murders, if only a few things went a different way. When I hear that song, at first viewing, it sounds mournful because I know what’s coming and I dread it. Beauty and death in one shot.
I mark the beginning of The Restoration of classic American film with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Some people say Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is about the movie business itself, or the optimism and fun epitomized by cruising Sunset Boulevard, the ‘60s as paradise—but honestly, it’s about the death of all that. Or maybe I should say suicide. It’s about the counterculture and the blind acceptance of its extremes by traditional culture until it became just “the” ur-culture. It’s about how all that tolerance enabled, inevitably, something monstrous like the Manson Family murders, and enabled too the slo-mo societal collapse that followed. I call the movie remarkable because rarely has a Hollywood movie tagged so clearly the counterculture as the bad guys—and this in the year 2019, the peak of postmodernism and DEI and self-loathing in a long string of Hollywood films, from Easy Rider to American Beauty, and to so many others.
The movie opens with a ebullient montage, stewardesses in white patent leather go-go boots frugging at an in-flight disco. Yes, first class airplanes used to be two stories, and the upper level was a swanky club—people happily smoking and drinking and dancing, over the row of their comfy seats down below. Flying was fun. Tarantino shows us this world, all good vibes, innocence and energy. No corruption, no decadence, no addicts in the street or shootings or impossible traffic.
Yes, Haight Ashbury, Sunset Boulevard, the canyons: California was a different place in the ‘60s, full of young boomers from the Midwest, Manhattan or London pouring in for the sunshine, the beach, the music and the scene, free from the restrictions of a stultifying world back home. A young Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) could pick up a scruffy hitchhiker or invite in some guy (Manson) who rings her doorbell, and she thinks nothing of it. Peace and love, baby.
And Ms. Tate was the new woman in this new world, joyful and trusting, smart and accomplished, and understandably thrilled with her new success, so excited she can’t resist taking in a movie in a Westwood theater in which she had a bit part. Even a Playboy Mansion party she attends with her posse is all about dancing, upbeat music, the cool people and maybe just a little harmless weed. Fun, not decadence.
Tarantino also takes all the cynical, tarnished complaints against the movie business and stands them on their heads. We first meet fading actor Rick Dalton, (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), his pal and stunt man, a couple of old Hollywood hands who embody equally old values, especially the masculine values of strength and honor and loyalty to friends. Tarantino portrays them as likeable, even admirable, without a trace of the usual irony or anti-masculinity. Cliff and Rick earn our respect by standing up for each other even when it’s tough, for eschewing idle boasting, as in Cliff’s faceoff with Bruce Lee, or by taking advantage of someone who is weak, like the hippies who manipulate old, blind George Spahn into a free stay at his ranch.
Even beauteous starlet Sharon Tate defies feminist tropes. She is not being used, and she is intelligent too—she’s just read Tess of the d'Urbervilles and buys a first edition for her husband, Roman Polanski, with whom she has an apparently happy marriage—and is innocent enough to get a kick out of seeing herself on screen. (As a footnote, she had hoped to inspire him to make the Tess movie with her as the star.) She is kind to everyone, hitchhikers and old boyfriends alike, and works hard as an actress. She is the character that we hope is as wonderful in person as she is in this movie; we don’t want to know if she wasn’t.
The Manson family members we meet, on the other hand, whether on the streets of L.A. or at the ranch, are grifters and dopers, a cult with murder in their souls. They are not the enlightened nonconformists imagined by most filmmakers; they are instead the underbelly of all that peace, love and understanding, which they grift to their own advantage. Tarantino seems to warn us that the groovy L.A. wasn’t real, or that it couldn’t last, once the inevitable bad guys like Manson and his hangers-on were accepted into the scene. They had contempt for the normal people—“pigs” as the cultists called them—and all too easily hoodwinked them into thinking they were harmless. “Isn’t she cute?” one middle-aged woman trills when a couple cult members take them on a horse ride into the hills. All of us watching can see the feral hatred in the eyes of the guides that the riders missed; we wonder if those two customers ever came back.
One character we get to know better, teenage prostitute Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), cadges a ride from potential customer Cliff after several tries. She laughs at the tourists, who always give her a ride when she’s hitching, because it makes for a great story when they get home. Cliff sees right through her. He refuses the sex she offers because he knows there will be a price, in money or trouble with the law, and to his own sense of honor. But he does drive her back to the Spahn ranch and the “family.” He senses immediately the menace of this menagerie of misfits and suspects they’ve abused the owner, old movie buddy George Spahn. After Cliff checks on him and fights his way out of the camp, Pussycat in fury yells, “You’re the one who’s blind!” But we all know he’s the only one who gets it; he is not fooled by the weed and the sex like Spahn and all the other enablers. (Even after the murders, Spahn refused to cast out the rest of the cult, stating that it was just “couple of bad apples.”)
Today this blindness persists; and in every aspect of life we cannot miss the tragic results. California has the highest poverty rate in the nation and the second highest cost of living, ranks 10th from the bottom among the 50 states in school performance, and the highest in welfare spending. But these are just dry statistics. Our foundation is now built on the shifting sands of a radical individualism apparent to all, where everyone is free to choose his own “lifestyle.” Tragically, from San Diego to San Francisco we can see “families” of outcasts living on the street or in the brush, all the mini-Manson families. Now the drug-addled, criminal, rootless people live in Santa Monica, Newport Beach and San Francisco in squalor right next to upscale enclaves. Murder and madness from the camps spill over into communities that are horrified by drug zombies and the mentally ill living on their streets and underpasses. Yet our leaders see no emergency: The excuse-making, the moral relativism, is as familiar as the blindness of the people portrayed in the film. After all, they’re not all bad, just a few bad apples! Tarantino could have written their script.
Yes, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is called a modern fairy tale and redemption story, because decency, hard work and honor ultimately triumph after many trials. The good guys prove their mettle, save a lovely damsel in peril and prevail against the forces of darkness. And Rick Dalton, in his life’s third act, even rouses himself to acting greatness once more. And although by now everyone knows the incredible twist at the end, I would say a more remarkable twist is that finally a Hollywood film admits the awful truth, that the leftist social experiment sparked by those early California dreamers has been a deadly failure.
And incidentally, real Hollywood abounds in sincere people who actually love the art of film, like Rick and Cliff. Tarantino here portrays Rick’s aching need to live up to his native talent. His sense of failure, his doubts, almost sink him. Yet he rises once more to the occasion. Even the child actor, his scene partner, is in awe of Rick after he, after much emotional struggle, delivers a fantastic scene in the Western they star in. As in few other modern films, the artists are honored as artists, as in Argo, for instance, when the CIA puts on a table read of their fake movie, designed to keep the con going to get them into Iran. Here comes the cheap shot, I think, as the actors walk in clad in goofy sci-fi costumes. But the actors sit down and read and act; they infuse the script with all their skill and emotion, and by the end, their audience is silent and mesmerized, in thrall to their work. This was Ben Affleck’s love letter to film actors and artisans, as this movie is Tarantino’s.
Every conservative or classical liberal, or whoever despairs of this societal failure, should see this film. Tarantino’s optimism ultimately is bracing—perhaps a return to virtue will save us, or at least to outposts of decency like male friendship and loyalty. And bring a left-leaning friend. They will love it too—they can feel the truth of it even if they can’t or won’t name it.