The Violence and Politics of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’
I can’t deny the excitement of seeing a new Tarantino film in the cinema. He is one of the few, big name Holywood auteurs who still generates anticipation and controversy before every release. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood combines his recent trend of tackling alternative historical timelines with the more grounded realism of his early work Jackie Brown. It also follows some other recent films which deal with mid-century Hollywood in dense, pyschedelic terms: the Cohen brothers’ Hail, Ceaser! and Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. On the surface, the plot follows washed up actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-come-companion Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Of course, as in Tarantino’s film, one of its major themes is violence.
Tarantino is well known for exploring the relationship between cinema, entertainment and violence. Perhaps more than anything else, this film was about the anticipation of violence. Before even entering the cinema, the audience knows the backdrop is the brutal Manson family murders. Even 70 years later, it’s a crime that stands out for its infamy. Tarantino uses this foreknowledge to create an underlying sense of dread throughout. Not only during, but long before you start watching, the film has already tapped into your cultural awareness, drawing out the expectation of impending violence. And just like in Inglorious Basterds, the director turns these expectations on their head, while still serving a barbaric and cathartic climax.
But let’s not get into that final scene yet. Throughout the film, violence is constantly teased. Chekov’s gun is a well known device used to telegraph an outcome in the final act from the beginning of the narrative. This film provides Chekov’s flamethrower and Chekov’s ‘stuntman-who-is-capable-of-beating-Bruce-Lee-in-a-fistfight’. The latter is only partially congruent thanks to a throw away line from Dalton about Cliff being a ‘war hero’. The flamethrower is a direct reference to the alternative-history ending of Inglorious Basterds, in which Hitler and the upper echelons of the Third Reich meet a similarly fiery fate. Later, when Cliff is investigating the Spahn Ranch, the owner George is revealed to be alive and well (but blind) in an anti-climatic scene that feels like it is pulled from a horror film. And then there’s the open question as to whether Cliff intentionally killed his wife with a harpoon.
Tarantino teases the audience with the possibility of violence — and the question: what kind of violence is it okay to enjoy? Tarantino’s answer seems to be violence that serves as wish fulfilment and righteous fury against the ‘evil men’. As the thought experiment goes: if you could go back in time and kill anyone to alter history, who would your target be? Nazis, slave owners and the Manson family — all dealt with in Tarantino’s successive works — are candidates who would probably top many people’s lists.
Tarantino gives the audience the fantasy, but he makes sure they’ve waited for it first. Revenge is a dish best served cold, if you have the stomach for it. The trio of would-be Manson family attackers are deserving figures for divine retribution. They go out with the intention to brutally kill innocent people and the audience knows how far the real-life counterparts were willing to go. Still, Tarantino doesn’t hold back in his gruesome, almost comedic depiction of the violence at hand. Like in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List or the films of Gasper Noé, this violence is unremitting in its brutality and realism. Tarantino seems to be taunting the audience — this is what you wanted; are you happy with it? In my screening, the reaction seemed to be divided between abject horror and a dazed glee.
Another dish that is served cold is dog food. Twice in the film, the motif of Cliff Booth feeding his pit bull Brandy is shown. This serves as a metaphor for the director and his audience: the audience is hotly anticipating their next serving, salivating at the chops. (A self-referential moment like this shouldn’t be surprising in a Tarantino film: see Pitt’s final line of Inglorious Basterds delivered direct to camera). The tinned food that Cliff prepares carries the slogan ‘Good food for bad dogs’. This is is a far cry from the ancestral hunt of the wolf killing its prey. Deep down we know we are domesticated and prefer being pampered, but every once in a while we like to get a taste of the old days of red in tooth and claw. Tarantino makes his audience wait patiently both between and during films. The first two thirds of Once… move at a leisurely pace with several tangents that don’t seem vital to the plot. Even the dog feeding scenes themselves are drawn out, mirroring the Brandy’s servile anticipation. Whether the food that Cliff is serving to Brandy is doing her any good is anyone’s guess. Although, given the way it is depicted on screen — dropping unceremoniously into the bowl — , a parallel is drawn with what will eventually depart from Brandy’s other end.
Despite the intensely violence climax, this film feels more mature than Tarantino’s recent work. The main relationship is a largely uncomplicated and sincere one between two flawed, but interesting characters. Di Caprio’s arc as an alcoholic has-been actor recovering his sense of worth is delivered with humour and pathos. The architect of the real-life murders, Charles Manson, is treated with derision and the briefest of screen times, denying him a posthumous platform to have his say. The real-life victims are treated with respect, especially Sharon Tate, who is lovingly portrayed and indulged with delighting in her own performance and its affect on her audience. The film also serves as a lush paean to 1950s and 60s America and its cinema. But at a deeper level, this film seems to be searching for the soul of America and perhaps questioning its recent direction of travel.
As a chid of the nineties, I grew up as a Tarantino fan. More recently, that fandom has been tempered with critiques of how violence, race, gender, sex etc. are depicted and made sense of in mass media. As any fan of Tarantino would admit, his films are not known for nuance when it comes to these issues. They are exaggerated and provocative, drawing criticism from many quarters. With this in mind, next I’ll look at some of the deeper themes that came out of the film for me.
Once upon a time in Hollywood is a film the clearly pits different conceptions of what it means to be American against each other. In one camp is Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth. These are old Holywood tough guys, looking back to the 1950s and beyond that to the Wild West: frontiersmen and bounty hunters. This is a conservative America that harkens back to traditional values and manifest destiny. The two main characters themselves are able-bodied, straight, white males, played by two of the most popular leading men of recent times. Cliff Booth’s scene with Bruce Lee echos Indiana Jones facing off with the Arab swordsman. Despite the empty posturing and bravado of the Eastern other, all it takes is some no-nonsense, macho violence to dispell the threat.
On the topic of race, black America is conspicuosly absent from this film. In a film that is already tilting towards overblown, the inclusion of any extra plotlines and characters would probably be a mistake, especially if their inclusion would be tokenistic. The stories of black America in Hollywood in the 1960s are most likely better off handled by people other than Tarantino, but the absence is conspicuous. The treatment of women in this film is also open to criticism. The male gaze is leeringly obvious in several scenes. The camera languidly drifts over Margot Robbie’s body under a sheet as she dozes, unwittingly observed. Later, one of Manson’s followers called Pussycat flirts with Cliff Booth while hitchhiking. In one shot her backside in crop-shorts fills half the screen. Since this is a Tarantino film, her feet are the next body part to receive the same treatment. When she offers Cliff sex, he demurs since he suspects she is underage. Although this seems to speak to his upstanding character, the directorial perspective has no qualms about depicting her as an underage object of sexual gratification.
The other side of America which is depicted is new Hollywood and the hippy movement. This takes the form of Roman Polanksi and Sharon Tate buying property next door to Rick Dalton, and in the sinister commune of the Manson family. The hippy movement can be summarised as a rejection of traditional values, an inwards turn to self-reflection, personal liberation, casualisation of norms, Eastern spiritualism, sexual freedom and drug experimentation. This counterculture can be seen as the progenitor for recurring movements throughout the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The hippies in Once… could be a stand in for the counterculture of today; that is: identity politics, millennial hipsterdom and the polarisation of politics. When Cliff is beating one of the Manson family for bursting his tyre, onlookers stand ineffectually at the sidelines, virtue signalling their condemnation by clutching their hearts and pulling faces. A meme among far-right supporters of Donald Trump is how they have managed to change the established timeline to create a new reality in which ‘their guy’ is in the Whitehouse. In Tarantino’s alternative timeline, white, male violence is posited as a solution to straighten out ‘fucking hippies’ and ultimately saves the day, sparing Sharon Tate and her friends from their grisly fates.
The precocious, young actor, Trudy Fraser, who verbally spares with Rick Dalton, also seems like a proxy for these ideas. She is young- along with the Manson family hippies, one of the few youthful characters in the film- but this does not prevent her from challenging her elders. She is intelligent, which Dalton takes as a threat. She is tough and unafraid to speak her mind. She makes a point of being referred to as the gender-neutral ‘actor’ and takes Dalton to task over the pet-name he calls her. It doesn't feel like much of a reach for her to be a stand in for a ‘woke’ millennial on Twitter, criticising directors and actors like Tarantino and DiCaprio for their choices. Interestingly, later in the film Dalton vindicates himself in the eyes of Trudi and it is she who gives him his validation by praising his acting. Trudy feels like a Mary Sue that Tarantino may be using to symbolically make peace with these critics.
The above is merely one reading of the film that made sense to me. I don’t particularly care if these are Tarantino’s beliefs or not; it’s just interesting to interpret and speculate about what the subtext could mean. Clearly, the Manson family do not represent, fictiously or otherwise, the entirety of the hippy movement. Whether you agree or disagree with the hippy movement and counterculture, the frenzied murder of innocent people is abhorrent whatever your politics. The darkside of hippiedom — drugs used to sexually exploit young people and incite nihilistic violence — is a theme that has pierced the zeitgeist recently. The fatally flawed second season of True Detective explored this, and the centrepiece of Mindhunter season 2 was an interview with an older Charles Manson, played by the same actor in Once… So, it would be an overstatement to claim that any attack on the hippie movement is an attack on modern, progressive politics or young people. Charles Manson and his coterie are unarguably a deserving target on Tarantino’s stylised revenge. The question is: is there a reactionary subtext to Tarantino’s latest film, or is he trying to make peace with a new generation of fans and critics?
