The critics missed their Pan Am flights when it came to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. For example, none of them compared it to Singin’ in the Rain, the best-ever film to look back decades and comment on a brutal Hollywood transition. The first thing to say about OUATIH is that it had this particular transition all to itself; no one had even tried to make a retrospective film about the late-60s purge that ended as many (or more) A-list careers as the late-20s purge. In a way, the best thing about OUATIH is that it chose to tackle that theme at all, even if it couldn’t quite live up to Singin’ in the Rain (who could?).
Kids, this think piece is not like other OUATIH think pieces because I did most of the thinking, and research, years ago, when I was writing “Representing Rough Rebels” for Palgrave MacMillan, the only book about OUATIH’s central theme. You might think, then, that I would be trying to make OUATIH fit my pre-existing agenda/scholarship. The truth is closer to the opposite.
I’m seeing way too many think pieces righteously “canceling” Tarantino for his woke-ness failures; I find it more interesting to note how the film actually anticipates such critiques by drawing historical parallels between the ways in which the Rick Daltons were “canceled” then and the Leo DiCaprios are canceled now.
“The real Leos and Brads of the world are not what they were 15 years ago.”
As OUATIH well knows, the real Ricks and Cliffs of the world fell from grace because of, not to put too fine a point on it, the 1960s. And the real Leos and Brads of the world are not what they were 15 years ago because of, not to put too fine a point on it, the 2010s.
When the 1960s began, Hollywood’s A-list included Gregory Peck, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra… and many others who pretty much wouldn’t be able to get a job by 1969. When the 2010s began, people like Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio were still headlining adult (“midrange”) dramas based just on their name.
Both decades saw a lot of changes. In the 1960s, movies that tried and failed to imitate Ben-Hur and My Fair Lady made the studio system seem lumbering and obsolete. In the 2010s, YouTube, reality TV, and social media upended midrange films as well as the glamour of the star system. Suddenly YouTube produced “stars” who were doing little more than talking into webcams in their basement, getting more attention than Tom Hanks or Cruise. If you, like Pitt and DiCaprio, weren’t on social media revealing yourself at Kardashian levels, it sometimes seemed like you were barely a star anymore.
SPOILERS
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood comments on this in many ways. But let’s start with the scene where Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, enters the Chatsworth ranch and approaches George’s house. This ranch was once a Hollywood set where Booth rode horses in the manner of royalty; now it’s been given over to hippie radicals.
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More than in, say, a film like Benjamin Button, Pitt is very much playing Pitt, or at least the version that we think he’d be if we knew him: easy, self-deprecating, no-BS, and effortlessly gorgeous. More than a dozen of the ranch dwellers stand on the yellow dirt and stare at him in the manner zombies stare at the living; Pitt/Booth turns back to take in the incongruity of them.
As Booth, Pitt plays an anachronism, “too old to fuck” the woman he chaperoned there. But there’s a meta-meaning here too: Pitt could also be said to symbolize, well, Brad Pitt looking at America’s current idealistic students and giving them a very sincere, “uh, okay, whatever.” Because Booth has been placed conspicuously above the rabble, the slack-jawed youngsters seem to signify a jaded social-media generation that, despite all its love for countercultures, still gets bowled over by Brad goddamn Pitt.
When Booth asks George are you sure you want to give this ranch to these kids, the presence of an A-lister like Pitt gives it a double meaning: are you sure you want to give up Hollywood’s cultural capital to a bunch of YouTubers? It’s probably significant that old George never answers the question.
Rick has a similarly meta-scene with Trudi as they sit on a western-set porch between takes. Rick guesses her age to be 12, but when she corrects him that she’s 8, she comes to symbolize the eight years since “Bounty Law,” the eight years since Rick had a career, and perhaps also the 8 years of the 2010s since Instagram became ubiquitous.
Children don’t normally figure prominently in Tarantino films, but Trudi’s presence makes sense because the youth takeover in the 1960s and 2010s was extreme and jarring. The 2010s must have launched a hundred child stars on YouTube alone; stardom has became exponentially more democratic, thanks to YouTube and Instagram and reality TV. In our era, “normals” seem to become stars, and pre-existing stars seem more normal… except for the very few stars like DiCaprio and Pitt who don’t maintain a social-media presence.
“Tarantino well knows that student radicals have influenced the 2010s as they have no other decade since, well, the 1960s.”
Of course, Trudi’s commitment to the Method is exactly what the Rick Daltons (i.e. old cowboys) of the world were refusing to countenance in the 1960s. When Rick says that her career will be over in 15 years, the audience howls because of how pathetic Rick has revealed himself to be.
The truth is that most of today’s movie stars look at today’s YouTube stars and give them 15 years, tops. When DiCaprio weeps over a lost career and a lost era… Cliff’s tussle with Bruce Lee, the movie’s only major non-white character, symbolizes an industry that could no longer ignore American diversity… in the 1960s or today. Back then, Hollywood looked downright plastic in the wake of civil rights, forced school busing, and a multitude of other events, from the Second Vatican Council to the Loving v. Virginia decision. These days… well, you know the current conversation about representation, and it’s long, long overdue.
It’s easy to accuse Tarantino of racism in showing Bruce Lee fighting and almost losing to a nobody stuntman like Booth… so easy that many have done it. I would say Tarantino is consciously positioning Lee the same way that Five Easy Pieces positioned its working-class waitress that Jack Nicholson castigated in the famous “no substitutions” scene; the main purpose of these scenes is to flatten the distance between protagonist and ostensible antagonist, to remind us that our “hero” isn’t always right.
Tarantino well knows that student radicals have influenced the 2010s as they have no other decade since, well, the 1960s. Tastes changed suddenly and swiftly, and students were probably surprised how much influence they had over the wider culture.
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Todd Gitlin memorably described young adults in the 1960s: “those young radicals moving leftward were already prone to a deep and passionate alienation from the whole ensemble of American normality, its racism and suburbs, its sexual hypocrisy and cultural fatuousness alike.” In many ways, that summarizes the anti-establishment mood in YouTube/Instagram culture today, which doesn’t see anything relevant coming out of Hollywood.
In the 2010s and 1960s, students systematically demonstrated the system’s flaws. Among other things, both decades’ protestors inveighed against racism and sexism. In many ways, Tarantino represents a reactionary riposte, a fantasy of victimized white men proving their relevance in spite of everything.
The easiest reading is that Tarantino is saying that the Rick Daltons of the world were cut off too soon, just as the Leonardo DiCaprios of current Hollywood aren’t getting enough work. But in other ways…Tarantino questions the fantasy even as he unfurls it. Tarantino can’t help but be elegiac when fighting for the fading dinosaur that is cinema, but the elegiac attitude isn’t always a forgiving one. Rick and Cliff are hardly unambiguous heroes.
If anyone is wondering why Rick spends most of OUATIH wandering and feeling sorry for himself, it’s because he’s finally learning to “act” (in more than one way) like someone like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (the film’s use of “Mrs. Robinson” cues viewers to this). Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate spent 1968 earning record fortunes and demonstrating that young baby-boomer audiences didn’t want to see films like The Sound of Music anymore.
Put simply, the “don’t trust anyone over 30” generation no longer trusted the Ricks and Cliffs of Hollywood, which in turn looked elsewhere for icons and inspirations. For example, to men like Al Pacino, which is why Tarantino wryly cast Pacino as a man trying to stave off this transition.
“When Rick and Cliff return from Italy, they, like Hollywood, are ready for a somewhat deeper fatalism.”
In many ways, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate had directly drawn upon European style and themes, and the most prominent themes of 1960s’ European cinema were disillusionment, nihilism, and absurdism, symbolized by the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni. Just after Hoffman finished filming The Graduate, before knowing if it would be a hit, he flew to Italy to star in a comedy there.
When Rick and Cliff return from Italy, they, like Hollywood, are ready for a somewhat deeper fatalism. The narrator emphasizes that they have no idea what they’re going to do, and it’s almost as though they’ve learned to embrace that feeling. On the other hand, they’re still resisting the revolution. Rick insults one of the Manson family by calling him Dennis Hopper – he means Hopper’s character from Easy Rider, then dominating American movie screens.
Rick doesn’t seem to understand American baby boomer females (instead, he marries an Italian), and in this regard, he is not far removed from the Rough Rebel roles that he (also) can’t seem to get. While Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate treated women as equals (or more), the hit films of 1969 (Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, Midnight Cowboy) excluded or denigrated women, as the Rough Rebel-led films would then do throughout the 1970s. Male-male, at times homosocial, relationships were considered more interesting…from the 1970s until at least the time of Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction.
This situation wasn’t criticized as much as you might think. Two generations of feminist film scholars have rightly hailed Molly Haskell’s “From Reverence to Rape” as a crucial and early intervention in our understanding of how Hollywood (mis)treats women. Before writing that terrific book, Molly Haskell explained what happened in the late 60s:
We no longer demanded ‘role models’ and instead went to see real actors – or even ‘real people’ – saying inaudible things in unpleasant films that would make us think. This was the sixties. Pop went the American Dream as it had been floated by Hollywood, and out of its rubble emerged the American art film… No more stoical heroes with a tough-guy swagger, but slouching, sensitive boy-men.
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Haskell hailed the new generation of “sensitive boy-men” as we do today. Tarantino’s film seems painfully aware of how history repeats itself, and how it doesn’t.
The critics are damning Tarantino for misogyny, and their case against him includes: his one-time defense of Polanski, his endangerment of Uma Thurman’s life in a stunt car, his general violence against women before and during OUATIH, and his partial complicity with Harvey Weinstein. On the latter point, in October 2017, Tarantino apologized by saying, “I knew enough to do more than I did,” and in turn, OUATIH reacts to #metoo more than might have been expected.
Hugh Hefner and Roman Polanski are reduced to spectral presences; even Tarantino’s hero Steve McQueen gets just one long piece of dialogue, as though Tarantino could have cut it if McQueen had been “#metoo’d” before the film’s Cannes premiere. Lena Dunham, of all prominent feminists, has a relatively assured if small role in the film.
Some of the film can be plausibly read as snarky comment on these controversies. Uma Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, is cast as a Manson follower who gets in a car to avoid the coming violence. (That’s Hawke’s entire role; it’s short.) As apparent improvisation, Rick throws Trudi to the floor and the girl smiles, “it’s okay, I have arm pads!” Either of these scenes could be references to the Thurman crash incident (or perhaps the “crash” of its recent revelations).
“…it would be more accurate to say that Tarantino is specifically interested in how we distract ourselves from politics.”
If Tate had lived, if she had Polanski’s baby and the two lived happily ever after, would Polanski have later raped a 13-year-old? Probably not? Speaking of Tarantino’s failure to be woke, this feels like both Tarantino’s first film without the n-word…and his first film since Reservoir Dogs without a black person. It’s almost as though the director is saying, “you don’t want me to say the n-word? Fine! Then I won’t cast black people at all.” If so, this is less than laudable.
More defensibly, I believe that Tarantino is comparing, sometimes directly and sometimes incoherently, 2010s’ “social justice warriors” to the 1960s’ insurgent radicals. Rick Dalton’s career peak came at a time, the 1950s, when horse-riding square-jawed men were barely questioned, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s career peak came at time, the 2000s, when great star-actors were barely questioned.
No one seemed to mind DiCaprio dating models during the 2000s, but now it’s become an issue. After the 1950s and 2000s, the following decade brought many disruptions. Some of these were led by university students who knew so much better than their forebears.
Silent-majority reactions to student excesses also gave the nation Nixon and Trump. Critics often chastise Tarantino for being uninterested in politics; it would be more accurate to say that Tarantino is specifically interested in how we distract ourselves from politics.
For example, Time’s very first cover photo (not a drawing), dated February 7, 1969, featured not a world leader, astronaut, or international conflict, but instead Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow, lounging in a suggestive close-up, adorned by the headline “The Young Actors: Stars and Anti-Stars.”
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The article reads: “As comedy grew steadily blacker and as audiences grew steadily younger, hipper and more draftable, the old concepts began to erode. The invulnerables like Peck and Holden and Wayne seemed lost… and suddenly Hoffman became an archetype.”
The cover of Life magazine in early August 1969 – between the moon landing and Woodstock – said “Dusty and the Duke,” bringing America’s attention to an article that contrasts Dustin Hoffman and John Wayne. Wayne’s wisdom of a generation before, “I don’t act, I react,” which once launched a generation of TV-western stars like Rick, is now unfavorably compared with Hoffman’s Method acting.
Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, taking place on February 8 and February 9, 1969, and then on August 8, 1969, plays like an extended reaction to the Time story and then the Life story. Note the camera time allotted to Rick’s magazines. Tarantino is not uninterested in politics; like Time and Life, he’s interested in the lives we pretend to have outside of them.
If OUATIH sometimes borders on moral panic, well, that may be because Tarantino sees the students as having won the arguments, in both decades. He doesn’t need to tell the story of the Nicholsons and Hoffmans; those stories have already been implicitly told. He would rather remind us that the Pecks and Waynes had feelings too. His what-if ending seems to suggest a world in which the Pecks and Waynes broke bread and made nice with the new generation (as, arguably, William Holden did, e.g. The Wild Bunch and Network).
The meta-suggestion: what if the new Instagram/YouTube generation could hang out with (and not overly judge) stars like Leonardo DiCaprio? Those guys are waiting outside the new gate. In the end, Tarantino is saying: let’s let everyone party together. If this is really Tarantino’s last film, his final message isn’t a bad one.
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