Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

In the early morning of August 9, 1969, five people were murdered by members of the Manson Family on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. The victims included Steven Parent; hairstylist Jay Sebring; screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski; Folger coffee-heir Abigail Folger; and actor Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant. Their deaths were brutal — each was stabbed or shot multiple times. The killings made national headlines and instantly evolved into a grotesque cultural mythos: the collision of glamor and violence, movieland fantasy morphing into lurid nightmare. Life imitating pulp fiction.

Now, fifty years later, writer-director Quentin Tarantino has adopted the massacre as the subject of his latest (and allegedly final) film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. He has claimed for years that he would only direct nine movies, and if he keeps his promise, then this three-hour ditty shall stand as his last word in cinema. Or, more accurately, his last word of cinema, for Tarantino has until now only spoken in movie — all his reference points, all his codes of meaning are reducible to things he’s watched on TV or video cassette. Or 35mm prints, as agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) specifies during an early scene. (Now more than ever, it sounds like we’re getting a direct feed to Tarantino’s rambling off-camera conversations. You can just picture him: sitting in his L.A. mansion, playing a fourteen-reel Western and smoking a cigar. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got Pacino to do a walk-on for this next one?”)

As Schwarz, Pacino is talking to Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Rick Dalton, a middling Hollywood actor who aspires to starring roles in movies but who’s increasingly resorted to guest spots as villains on TV Westerns. Anxious that he may be over the hill, Rick finds solace in his one-man support system, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), his former stunt-double and current chauffeur. Together, the men cruise between studio sets, restaurants and Rick’s bungalow on Cielo Drive. That’s right, Cielo Drive — Rick Dalton lives right next door to Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha). (This is the Polanski who, of course, would go on to become an American expat after charges of raping a minor were brought up against him. At the time of this story, however, he is merely a hot young director, and Tarantino is too polite to make any unflattering allusions.)

The action begins in February of 1969 but then flashes forward six months to August — and the night of the killings. But this is a Tarantino movie, which means that the historical facts are subject not merely to outrageous manipulation, but complete renovation. I won’t give the twist away, but let’s just say the murderer-victim table is not only turned, it’s strung from the ceiling and assailed like a piñata. With a flamethrower.

The effect of such playful revisionism is questionable. For one thing, I wonder how many people who see this movie will know who Sharon Tate was; I saw it with my brother, who was shocked when I explained to him afterwords that this movie was based on real events. For another, I’m of the opinion that we should allow the dead their peace, and if we take it upon ourselves to tell their stories, we should dust them off and diligently tend to their balance — not flail them around like marionettes. But Tarantino is delighted to use Once Upon a Time… as an opportunity to indulge in unrestrained puppetry: he slips his fingers up the spine of mid-century American media and waggles all sorts of knickknacks into view — radio ads, billboards, neon lights and retro Hollywood locations. And Sharon Tate, whom he dangles in front of his audience like a slab of meat in front of a tiger cage.

The great failure of Tarantino’s cinema (aside from its very real and repeated faux pas toward people of color, white women, queer identities, etc.) is its readiness to exploit history without properly addressing the consequences of such exploitation. History is a record of incident and consequence; Tarantino takes glee in suspending consequence for the sake of indulging his wish to alter the incident. Thus Hitler is blown to smithereens in Inglorious Basterds (2009); a former slave burns a plantation to the ground in Django Unchained (‘12); and in Once Upon a Time…, the worst thing that happens to Sharon Tate is she isn’t recognized by the staff at a theater showing her latest movie.

But the fact is she did die. Horribly. Nothing that Tarantino does onscreen will alter that reality. But as the dog food flies and the flames die down, we can pretend that all is well — just as, thanks to Tarantino, we can laugh at the foiled Third Reich and cheer for the obliterated antebellum South. He affords us an escape from historical imperative; he allows us to be like him, thoughtless. In my eyes, Once Upon a Time… is deeply insulting to Ms. Tate and her friends. They deserve better than a developmentally-arrested film nerd’s goading erasure of their agony.

They also deserve a quality movie. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is so bloated with pop culture jump-scares as to become immobile: we hop from a mural of James Dean in Giant (1956) to a blast of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and then skip to footage of DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton standing in for Steve McQueen in a scene from The Great Escape (‘63). It’s Jack Rabbit Slim’s come to life; every square inch of frame is jam-packed with nostalgia and artifice. There are a few genuinely entertaining moments (i.e., Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell, who play a husband and wife producing team that begs for a movie of its own), and the rigorous attention to detail in production design is superb. As I’ve already suggested, this movie feels like the purest distillation of Tarantino’s interests: not people, not pain, but plastic and pastiche. That worked for him alright in Pulp Fiction (‘94) (a movie that, while formally genius, lacked any moral or intellectual coherency). Now, the tricks are familiar and ingenuity is out. It’s a milkshake without a straw.

Millions of people adore the past movies of Quentin Tarantino, and will likely enjoy this one. His audience is unquestioning — happy to be amused, flattered by the neat surprises they’ve come to expect in his work. But formal ingenuity should never excuse political irresponsibility. When D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation (1915) — a film that employed unprecedented sophistication in narrative storytelling — the liberties he took with historical truth led to a resurgence in violence against black Americans. He was on the wrong side of history; in due time, it will become clearer that Tarantino has been, too. Not for inciting terror, but for abetting the cult of ignorance that facilitates terror. After all, what did Charles Manson do but reorganize the world to win adulation from disaffected youths? Can we honestly say that Tarantino has done better?