There's a scene early on in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that perfectly captures a moment in time. Cliff Booth, the stuntman played by Brad Pitt, drives a convertible down an L.A. highway to his home in a trailer behind a drive in movie theater. The combination of the radio blaring 60s commercials and hits, the camera angles, the roaring engine, the peculiar acoustics of a parking lot full of drive-in movie speakers, creates an immersive experience. It's a wonderful moment, the best evocation of a summer night's drive since American Graffiti. Like that movie, it is transporting us to an idealized version of a lost world. In this case it is Hollywood in 1969.
Tarantino is my age. I have no doubt that, like me, the one time enfant terrible of Hollywood is beginning to notice the first signs of rust as he moves toward the far side of middle age. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is elgiac in tone; its hero is past his prime and facing the fact that he's being slowly put to pasture (Its funny that this movie and Bruce Springsteen's ode to aging cowboy actors and limping stuntmen came out the same year.). He represents not only all the celebrities who fall from grace, but also a culture that is waning.
As Rick Dalton Leonardo DiCaprio goes from humiliation to humiliation. Early on an agent played by Al Pacino breaks the news to him that the cameo roles he has been playing on TV series are a standard mechanism for euthanizing dying careers. Rick breaks into tears after being told the only career path left to him is doing spaghetti westerns (the thought that this is a bad thing is a tell tale sign that we are in another era). His loyal companion Cliff takes off his aviator sunglasses and puts them on Rick's face; he's trying to help him maintain his tough guy image. Cliff actually doesn't get to do a lot of stunt work anymore. It's not that age is slowing him down (he's still vital enough to take on Bruce Lee), but rather a scandal in his past that is costing him jobs. Rick keeps him on the payroll as a driver, repairman, bodyguard, and confidante. One shot of Cliff and his pet pitbull eating side by side makes the obvious point: both are loyal dogs. There's a bit more to Cliff than that, though. Stuntmen are also referred to as stunt doubles, and that is what Cliff is: Rick's doppelgänger. Cliff is the idealized Hollywood action hero: tough, loyal, principled. Like many tough guys onscreen he drinks and smokes continually yet remains in perfect health. Rick, on the other hand, has a nagging cough from smoking and looks hungover most of the time. Years of drink have stolen his ability to memorize lines, and he rages at himself in the mirror over his incompetence. Cliff, on the other hand, never loses his cool. He is the living embodiment of the sort of cowboy hero that sad sack Rick has made a career of playing.
The movie is set in 1969. Tarantino would have been in first grade at the time (probably sitting in the corner), so he has the kind of affection that you can only have for an era that you missed. He gets the details right. I couldn't help but notice that Rick has the Marx Johnny West and Geronimo action figures on his dresser; it's both a subtle jab at Hollywood's portrayal of Native Americans and the kind of detail that catches the eye of those of us old enough to remember the material culture of the era. In fact, there are so many bits of 60s flotsam and jetsam floating by as the movie cruises on that sometimes it feels like product placement for stuff you can't buy anymore.
Tarantino seems to be pining for the lost innocence of Hollywood. The golden age of cowboys at the movies and the FBI on TV is seen as fun, innocuous, and superior to the Age of Aquarius that will sweep it away. The counterculture is represented by a tribe of angry, feral hippie cultists that Cliff stares down in a filthy commune. A party at the Playboy Mansion, on the other hand, is about as decadent as a junior high sock hop; Hugh Hefner's pleasure palace has never looked so wholesome. The guest list cues us into the era: among the party goers are Steve McQueen, Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate. Margot Robbie plays Tate as a sweet wide eyed ingenue, and the movie has an unmistakable crush on her. Knowing what most of us know about Sharon Tate and 1969 creates almost unbearable tension. Tarantino has said that he was trying to show her as a real person, not the symbol that she has become.
"A day in the life, driving around, running errands, doing this, doing that, and just being with her. I thought that could be special and meaningful. I wanted you to see Sharon a lot, see her living life. Not following some story, just see her living, see her being.”
There is, of course, a wonderful soundtrack; the movie is almost wall to wall music. Most of it is organic. It pours from car speakers, home stereos, transistors; the cacophony that preceded the advent of the Walkman and the idea of an insulated media environment. The music provides a backdrop and often comments on the action. The Rolling Stones' Out of Time is particularly well chosen for its moment. So is Green Door, exactly the sort of song that a celebrity like Rick would embarrass himself with on one of the variety shows that so popular at the time. Music has always been one of Tarantino's strong points. He put Dick Dale on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction after the brilliant insight that surf music is sped up Ennio Morricone; in Inglorious Basterds he sets a sequence to David Bowie's title song from 1982's Cat People. Putting an 80s rock song about people who turn into panthers in the middle of a WW2 revenge melodrama makes absolutely no sense...except that it works beautifully.
Tarantino's movies don't pretend to take place in the real world. Alfred Hitchcock once praised Stephen Spielberg as "the first one of us who doesn’t see the proscenium arch,” meaning that the young director had grown up watching TV and movies, that he didn't think of movies as filmed plays. Tarantino goes a step beyond that. He famously worked as a video store clerk before getting his big break. He came of age in the era of entertainment on demand. Once upon a time you only got see a movie during its run at the theater; if you missed it you had to wait until it came out chopped up and reformatted for TV. With the advent of home video you could watch almost anything from any era anytime you wanted; even the quirky cult films and obscure foreign releases that once were limited to repertory theaters and midnight shows. Movies were now like books; you could collect whatever interested you, watch them whenever you wanted, watch the same scene over and over again.
Tarantino is the first major director of the home entertainment age, and because of this his movies are a hodgepodge of styles and references. Thoroughly postmodern, his movies don't try to convince you that they are "real"; they draw attention to their own technique. Even when dealing with historical events they are outfront about the fact that there are no "true stories" at the movies. The very act of telling a story requires shoehorning chaotic reality into some sort of coherent narrative. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York was about the impossibility of representing reality in any medium; the necessity of taking a point of view, of selecting what's important, of deciding who to believe, all turn even the best intentioned "based on a true story" films into fiction. Tarantino doesn't even try. He treats historic facts like scenes from old movies that can be revised for the latest remake. Pablo Picasso called art "the lie that points to the truth". The point of art is not to recreate an exact copy of reality, but rather to create an impression that allows us to feel the reality on another level. As Chief Bromden says in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the story he tells is "the truth even if it didn’t happen".
That basic unreality also makes the considerable violence in this and other Tarantino movies tolerable. This movie has a prolonged scene of brutality that is either an endorsement of violence as cathartic and redemptive or a satire of those ideas. I can't go into the details without entering the spoiler zone, but we are either supposed to enjoy being manipulated or enjoy watching the process of manipulation. Maybe both. I have a hard time deciding, especially in a movie that is so self conscious of its every move.
There is an ethical question here as old as ancient Greece. Plato taught that violence and other negative behaviors depicted in the theater were a negative influence, Aristotle believed that by watching and emotionally engaging with disturbing content we "purged" the negative emotions from our souls. The debate has gone on ever since. The question often arises in discussions of the gun violence that has become an epidemic in our country. Are violent movies and video games to blame? That is difficult to argue when you look at other societies, such as that of Japan, that tolerate a violent pop culture but that do not deal with the epidemic of mass murder that we do. It is a complex issue.
Depictions of violence are common in the Bible, yet we rarely hear of parents groups trying to ban it. The Bible is, of course, not a book but a library. Sixty six books by various authors collected from different eras. Despite the fact that we can see an overarching theme of Divine Love, individual books have conflicting attitudes about many things, including violence. The most extreme example would be the ban of Joshua, the command from heaven to the Israelites to kill every living thing in the nations surrounding them: men, women, children, babies, animals. Taken literally, these passages were used to justify exterminating the Native Americans; mass murder inspired by scripture rather than video games. On the other hand, in the Book of Matthew Jesus is quoted as saying:
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well!
But before we can all break out our love beads, in the Book of Revelation the author has a vision of Jesus as a warrior who tramples people like grapes:
Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and on the cloud sat One like the Son of Man, having on His head a golden crown, and in His hand a sharp sickle...the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.
So is Christianity a "religion of peace" or an excuse for genocide? Again, there is no simple answer, the complex relationship between violence and religion is too big of a topic to handle in a movie blog. However, perhaps movies can help us honestly face the violence that occurs in the scriptures of not just Christianity, but practically all religions. If we view these passages as stories to acknowledge and purge our baser instincts rather than models of behavior to emulate, we might be starting on the right track. There are many scholars who view the genocide narratives in Joshua as corrective narratives written by the priestly class to create a history where Israel was purified of the influences of her neighbors. That is to say, violent alternative histories that imagine a world where things were different...not unlike Inglourious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
In the Islamic faith the term jihad can mean a holy war against other beliefs or an interior struggle against one's inner demons. Characters in the story of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood who engage in brutal acts of violence are also representative of ideas: new Hollywood vs old Hollywood, traditional culture defending itself against a counterculture, idealized history raging against the unfairness of reality. Perhaps one way to look at the conquest of Jericho and other brutal stories that are woven into our faith is to see them as movies use violence to describe our own inner turmoil, rather than as historical precedents which justify our violence against others.
As Rick Dalton Leonardo DiCaprio goes from humiliation to humiliation. Early on an agent played by Al Pacino breaks the news to him that the cameo roles he has been playing on TV series are a standard mechanism for euthanizing dying careers. Rick breaks into tears after being told the only career path left to him is doing spaghetti westerns (the thought that this is a bad thing is a tell tale sign that we are in another era). His loyal companion Cliff takes off his aviator sunglasses and puts them on Rick's face; he's trying to help him maintain his tough guy image. Cliff actually doesn't get to do a lot of stunt work anymore. It's not that age is slowing him down (he's still vital enough to take on Bruce Lee), but rather a scandal in his past that is costing him jobs. Rick keeps him on the payroll as a driver, repairman, bodyguard, and confidante. One shot of Cliff and his pet pitbull eating side by side makes the obvious point: both are loyal dogs. There's a bit more to Cliff than that, though. Stuntmen are also referred to as stunt doubles, and that is what Cliff is: Rick's doppelgänger. Cliff is the idealized Hollywood action hero: tough, loyal, principled. Like many tough guys onscreen he drinks and smokes continually yet remains in perfect health. Rick, on the other hand, has a nagging cough from smoking and looks hungover most of the time. Years of drink have stolen his ability to memorize lines, and he rages at himself in the mirror over his incompetence. Cliff, on the other hand, never loses his cool. He is the living embodiment of the sort of cowboy hero that sad sack Rick has made a career of playing.
Tarantino seems to be pining for the lost innocence of Hollywood. The golden age of cowboys at the movies and the FBI on TV is seen as fun, innocuous, and superior to the Age of Aquarius that will sweep it away. The counterculture is represented by a tribe of angry, feral hippie cultists that Cliff stares down in a filthy commune. A party at the Playboy Mansion, on the other hand, is about as decadent as a junior high sock hop; Hugh Hefner's pleasure palace has never looked so wholesome. The guest list cues us into the era: among the party goers are Steve McQueen, Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate. Margot Robbie plays Tate as a sweet wide eyed ingenue, and the movie has an unmistakable crush on her. Knowing what most of us know about Sharon Tate and 1969 creates almost unbearable tension. Tarantino has said that he was trying to show her as a real person, not the symbol that she has become.
"A day in the life, driving around, running errands, doing this, doing that, and just being with her. I thought that could be special and meaningful. I wanted you to see Sharon a lot, see her living life. Not following some story, just see her living, see her being.”
There is, of course, a wonderful soundtrack; the movie is almost wall to wall music. Most of it is organic. It pours from car speakers, home stereos, transistors; the cacophony that preceded the advent of the Walkman and the idea of an insulated media environment. The music provides a backdrop and often comments on the action. The Rolling Stones' Out of Time is particularly well chosen for its moment. So is Green Door, exactly the sort of song that a celebrity like Rick would embarrass himself with on one of the variety shows that so popular at the time. Music has always been one of Tarantino's strong points. He put Dick Dale on the soundtrack of Pulp Fiction after the brilliant insight that surf music is sped up Ennio Morricone; in Inglorious Basterds he sets a sequence to David Bowie's title song from 1982's Cat People. Putting an 80s rock song about people who turn into panthers in the middle of a WW2 revenge melodrama makes absolutely no sense...except that it works beautifully.
Tarantino's movies don't pretend to take place in the real world. Alfred Hitchcock once praised Stephen Spielberg as "the first one of us who doesn’t see the proscenium arch,” meaning that the young director had grown up watching TV and movies, that he didn't think of movies as filmed plays. Tarantino goes a step beyond that. He famously worked as a video store clerk before getting his big break. He came of age in the era of entertainment on demand. Once upon a time you only got see a movie during its run at the theater; if you missed it you had to wait until it came out chopped up and reformatted for TV. With the advent of home video you could watch almost anything from any era anytime you wanted; even the quirky cult films and obscure foreign releases that once were limited to repertory theaters and midnight shows. Movies were now like books; you could collect whatever interested you, watch them whenever you wanted, watch the same scene over and over again.
Tarantino is the first major director of the home entertainment age, and because of this his movies are a hodgepodge of styles and references. Thoroughly postmodern, his movies don't try to convince you that they are "real"; they draw attention to their own technique. Even when dealing with historical events they are outfront about the fact that there are no "true stories" at the movies. The very act of telling a story requires shoehorning chaotic reality into some sort of coherent narrative. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York was about the impossibility of representing reality in any medium; the necessity of taking a point of view, of selecting what's important, of deciding who to believe, all turn even the best intentioned "based on a true story" films into fiction. Tarantino doesn't even try. He treats historic facts like scenes from old movies that can be revised for the latest remake. Pablo Picasso called art "the lie that points to the truth". The point of art is not to recreate an exact copy of reality, but rather to create an impression that allows us to feel the reality on another level. As Chief Bromden says in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the story he tells is "the truth even if it didn’t happen".
That basic unreality also makes the considerable violence in this and other Tarantino movies tolerable. This movie has a prolonged scene of brutality that is either an endorsement of violence as cathartic and redemptive or a satire of those ideas. I can't go into the details without entering the spoiler zone, but we are either supposed to enjoy being manipulated or enjoy watching the process of manipulation. Maybe both. I have a hard time deciding, especially in a movie that is so self conscious of its every move.
There is an ethical question here as old as ancient Greece. Plato taught that violence and other negative behaviors depicted in the theater were a negative influence, Aristotle believed that by watching and emotionally engaging with disturbing content we "purged" the negative emotions from our souls. The debate has gone on ever since. The question often arises in discussions of the gun violence that has become an epidemic in our country. Are violent movies and video games to blame? That is difficult to argue when you look at other societies, such as that of Japan, that tolerate a violent pop culture but that do not deal with the epidemic of mass murder that we do. It is a complex issue.
Depictions of violence are common in the Bible, yet we rarely hear of parents groups trying to ban it. The Bible is, of course, not a book but a library. Sixty six books by various authors collected from different eras. Despite the fact that we can see an overarching theme of Divine Love, individual books have conflicting attitudes about many things, including violence. The most extreme example would be the ban of Joshua, the command from heaven to the Israelites to kill every living thing in the nations surrounding them: men, women, children, babies, animals. Taken literally, these passages were used to justify exterminating the Native Americans; mass murder inspired by scripture rather than video games. On the other hand, in the Book of Matthew Jesus is quoted as saying:
You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well!
But before we can all break out our love beads, in the Book of Revelation the author has a vision of Jesus as a warrior who tramples people like grapes:
Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and on the cloud sat One like the Son of Man, having on His head a golden crown, and in His hand a sharp sickle...the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.
So is Christianity a "religion of peace" or an excuse for genocide? Again, there is no simple answer, the complex relationship between violence and religion is too big of a topic to handle in a movie blog. However, perhaps movies can help us honestly face the violence that occurs in the scriptures of not just Christianity, but practically all religions. If we view these passages as stories to acknowledge and purge our baser instincts rather than models of behavior to emulate, we might be starting on the right track. There are many scholars who view the genocide narratives in Joshua as corrective narratives written by the priestly class to create a history where Israel was purified of the influences of her neighbors. That is to say, violent alternative histories that imagine a world where things were different...not unlike Inglourious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
In the Islamic faith the term jihad can mean a holy war against other beliefs or an interior struggle against one's inner demons. Characters in the story of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood who engage in brutal acts of violence are also representative of ideas: new Hollywood vs old Hollywood, traditional culture defending itself against a counterculture, idealized history raging against the unfairness of reality. Perhaps one way to look at the conquest of Jericho and other brutal stories that are woven into our faith is to see them as movies use violence to describe our own inner turmoil, rather than as historical precedents which justify our violence against others.
Movies You Might Have Missed
 | Reservoir DogsThis is the movie that got Tarantino noticed. An intricate, finely honed film noir with an outstanding performance from Harvey Keitel. All the elements are there: the snappy dialogue, the inspired musical choices, the jarring violence and unexpected twists. |
 | Hail, Caesar!The Coen Brothers' spoof of the old studio system shares a lot with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; an affection for unsung heroes just doing their jobs, a distaste for the fashionably radical, clever parodies of old movies. Josh Brolin plays a "fixer" for the studios who has to cover up scandals and babysit wayward movie stars. George Clooney plays a vain movie star who discovers Communism. |
 | Twelve MonkeysDirector Terry Gilliam is every bit as distinctive, strange, and obsessive as Quentin Tarantino. Bruce Willis stars a time traveler from a bleak future trying to solve the mystery of a devastating plague. Brad Pitt's entertaining performance as a deranged activist is one of the many highlights of this clever film based on the classic La Jetée. |
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