Major Spoilers:
After a summer filled with Disney remakes and pointless sequels that left me asking what the hell happened to movies, one of our best filmmakers currently working has released his new film. Of course the filmmaker I am talking about is Quentin Tarantino and his new film is Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. Once Upon A Time is a throwback to the kind of movies made before blockbusters and comic books took over. It is a film with star power in front and behind the camera that tells a story about real people. Not literally real(well in this case, sort of), but everyday folks who could exist. In other words, they don’t have lightsabers or wear capes. Nowadays, most big productions are stories with capes and superpowers, while stories about real people are told by obscure directors with obscure actors. This makes it quite fitting that a movie like Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood comes out now.
In many ways, the current state of movies is as much a part of Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood as the 1960s. It tells the story of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, a washed up actor and his stuntman, trying to keep their place in the quickly changing movie industry. The Old Hollywood Studio System was dying while newer, younger, hipper artists inspired by foreign cinema were slowly taking over Tinseltown. By 1967, The Graduate had brought sex to American movies like never before and Bonnie and Clyde had done the same for violence, but Classic Hollywood wouldn’t completely die and give way to the American New Wave until 1969, with the release of films like Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch and, most importantly, Easy Rider. Easy Rider gave La La Land to the counterculture and the Dennis Hoppers and Jack Nicholsons had no interest in giving it back to the John Waynes and Jimmy Stewarts.
This is where our hero, Rick Dalton, comes in to play. After the popularity of films like Easy Rider, leading men became long-haired, androgynous counterculture icons, the opposite of Rick, a John Wayne Man’s Man. So naturally, Rick’s popularity declines and guys like Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin get the few man’s man leading roles left.
Time is passing Rick by. He’s still trying to be a cowboy while audiences have moved on to hippies. The melancholy that comes from Rick’s depression over the changing of eras and his dwindling career seems to reflect Tarantino’s own feelings on how movies have changed in today’s world. Tarantino is one of the few directors who still shoots on film. He makes original films over the current trend of IP based blockbusters. He doesn’t allow cell phones on his sets. For all intent and purposes, Quentin Tarantino could have been the exact same Director if he was born in 1943 instead of 1963. However, with everything going digital and moving to streaming, even he must wonder if modern audiences will soon grow tired of his old school ways. Keeping these things in mind, along with the fact that The Hateful Eight(his previous film) was one of his weakest financial successes, it starts to make sense why he’s talking retirement. Perhaps he, like Rick, feels like a man out of time. More on this later.
Films weren’t the only thing changing in 1969. Something else happened in 1969. On August 8th, 1969, four hippies belonging to the cult later known as “the Manson Family” broke into the house of acclaimed director Roman Polanski and current “It Girl” Sharon Tate and murdered everyone in the house, including Tate and her unborn child. This has now been deemed “the night the ‘60s died”. The ‘innocence’ of the 1960’s were dead. In all reality, we know the 1960’s weren’t necessarily any more or less “innocent” than any other time period, but the change in culture and how we perceived the culture changed in the 1970s. They would bring things like the Kent State Massacre, the Summer Olympics in Munich, a slew of infamous serial killers and of course Watergate.
Why was the culture perceived differently in the 1970’s than the 1960’s? Vietnam, Civil Rights riots, and The Kennedy Assassination certainly weren’t innocent. However, television and cinema weren’t really commenting on the state of the country in the 1960’s. The 1970’s would be very different. TV was gritty and American Movies were no longer fairytales. They had sad endings. They had realistic endings. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle loses in The French Connection. So does Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes in Chinatown. Cinema had gone gritty and realistic. It was time for a new era. A less “innocent” one. And it needed new leading men. Can you imagine Jimmy Stewart playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather? We come back to Rick Dalton’s failing career. It is connected with the loss of “innocence” in Hollywood. Therefore, his career is connected to Sharon Tate.
Tarantino treats Tate as an almost Angelic figure throughout the film. She’s portrayed as caring, sweet and fun. All of her scenes are an absolute delight and Margot Robbie deserves a lot of credit. The decision to intertwine a day in the life of Sharon Tate with Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth’s story is genius. No matter how innocent her scenes are, there’s a certain sense of dread and impending doom you feel when she’s on screen. It’s a reminder of what’s going to happen. And when that happens, Hollywood will have fully lost its innocence and Rick Dalton will officially lose his career. It will die when Classic Hollywood dies and the final nail in the old system’s coffin, symbolically at least, is the brutal murder of Sharon Tate.
But what if the night of August 8th, 1969 went differently? What if Sharon Tate didn’t die? The symbol for both lost innocence and an end of an era wouldn’t happen. Therefore, the era wouldn’t end. Maybe Hollywood could still use Rick Dalton. Maybe he stars in a Roman Polanski film.
If the Manson Murders don’t happen, there’s also never a moment of lost innocence. Specifically talking about Tarantino, who was a six year old boy living in LA when the Manson murders took place, he has said that those events scarred him and made him look at the world differently, even at 6 years old. Along with everyone else, his innocence was taken that night. What if he could go back to that innocent six year old boy? Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood is about the end of an era and about two middle-aged artists struggling to accept that their time is over. Perhaps Tarantino, a middle-aged artist, made this movie now because he sees cinema at another end of an era. Streaming and digital have changed things. The world may not want Tarantino the same way the new era of the 1970s doesn’t want Rick Dalton. If only Tarantino could go back in time and stop whatever caused the world to move on from him, but he can’t. Real life doesn’t work like that. But fairytales do. Movies do. In Rick’s case, he does get to stop the event that causes time to pass him by. Rick and Cliff stop the Manson Murders from ever happening, which in turn allows the moment deemed “the death of innocence” to never happen, allowing a six year old Tarantino to keep his innocence and allowing Rick to continue his career…and live happily ever after.
And yet the whole point of Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood is that none of that possible, except in movies. In reality, we all get old, times change and we lose our youth and innocence.
Tarantino can’t regain his youth or innocence nor can he singlehandedly bring Hollywood back to where it once was. Perhaps this is why he’s contemplating retirement. In a way, he made a whole movie about his childhood and his impending retirement all in one. I, for one, hope he doesn’t retire. I hope he steps back and takes Cliff’s advice: He’s Quentin ****in’ Tarantino.
Especially The Long Kiss Goodnight. He's a step below the great action directors but the man always had a vision. His Alien 3 sounded a lot better than what we got. I know that's not saying much, but again, he had a specific vision for it.
