The Cultural Criticism of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
There’s one thing that ultimately separates Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the rest of Quentin Tarantino’s work.
It’s not nostalgia. Thanks to the director’s liberal borrowing from what he considers great art, every Tarantino film offers nostalgia. The best example of his obsession with nostalgia shows up in Django Unchained’s finale, which features the theme song of the comedic Italian western They Call Me Trinity. Tarantino’s choice of music — an uplifting, carefree song from a movie I personally watched with my family no less than a dozen times — makes one less likely to consider the implications of Django Unchained’s bloody climax. The tone of the reference trumps any potential moral or cultural point of the film; it’s as if the events of Django Unchained become part of an already cool memory about movies.
It’s also not the fact that Tarantino depicts two fictional men, lead actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), killing the Charles Manson cult members before they can kill Sharon Tate and her friends, thus rejecting historical record. Tarantino already pulled this kind of stunt when he offed Adolf Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. This latest ahistorical tease from the director is not surprising or even that provocative in a post-Haneke world (when the story involves a home invasion, is there anything more gotcha than the rewind in Funny Games?), though the punchline — that DiCaprio’s has-been star can only be the hero at present if he faces an enemy who has already been blinded and bloodied up — is hilarious.
The key difference between Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and its predecessors is a noticeable intellectual focus on culture. All Tarantino films involve culture, but primarily through simple references. This picture marks the first time he has dived into the questionable morality of a culture beyond the surface.
The most shocking part of the film comes much earlier than the fantastic and violent outcome. In the first third of the movie, Roman Polanski and Tate arrive to Playboy Mansion. During this scene, Tarantino, in an unusual turn for him, emphasizes people having the times of their lives. But in the background, talk emerges, and one partygoer says that Tate is into men who look like 12-year-old boys. I was taken aback by this line of dialogue, especially considering that Tate’s husband, Polanski, would go on to rape a 13-year-old minor after Tate’s murder in real life. With his script, Tarantino takes aim at a pervasive culture in Hollywood that prizes and thrives on sexual exploitation.
Tarantino forces the viewer to grapple with both nostalgia and reality in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Later in the film, well after the partygoer alludes to the actress’ pedophilic interest, Tate expresses glee when she sees her name on a movie poster, despite the fact that she had already been featured on multiple such advertisements. She goes on to watch her own film with a random audience and continues to display a sort of excited humbleness as she enjoys hearing the other viewers clap in the theater.
To Tarantino’s credit, it would be impossible not to identify with the humanity of Tate in these moments, and difficult not to become nostalgic about what was and could have been, yet the issue of exploitation hangs over the proceedings of the film. In another scene, Booth picks up a young female hippie hitchhiker. When she makes an advance in the vehicle, Booth asks how old she is. Her response represents another swing by Tarantino at culture: “First time anyone’s asked that question in a long time.” Booth and the presumably underage person then arrive at a ranch where a harem of young girls await with a few male suitors. Such imagery doesn’t encourage a positive view of the times, nor does it allow us, as fans of movies, to admire the ranch’s connection to film history (it once functioned as a Hollywood set). As the first Tarantino film divorced from the Weinstein Company, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood acts as a mirror to disturbing moral behavior that even the fun-loving Tarantino can’t continue to slide under the rug. Those who are offended by Tarantino’s disregard of history can’t dismiss his acknowledgement of a nasty legacy that lives on in different forms today.
Rick Dalton’s comeback at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood suggests Tarantino will never let go of his love for cinema. He roots for its success, for its history to be recognized, and for the careers of forgotten actors to be revived. Yet even with his happy revision of history, the positivity is tempered, given that we know Tate was actually killed and that the film’s allusions to predatory sexuality linger long after one leaves the theater. Like the Sergio Leone movies referenced in Tarantino’s title, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a complicated epic.
