Not the Good Guys
In Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, Tarantino breaks with Progressive moralism and has unreconstructed men, who are not only politically incorrect, but also immoral, save the day. They’re not the good guys, but they’re the guys America would have needed to prevent murder, because the hippie 1960s turn out to include both the angelic Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and the devilish Manson cult—and people couldn’t tell the difference between them until it was too late.
This novel freedom could mean having a good time—love, peace, and understanding—and it could also mean desecrating violence, like the real murder of a pregnant woman in an orgy of violence. The softest people to make it to fame in America, the hippies could also easily turn cruel. This wasn’t supposed to happen: The soft are supposedly opposite to the harsh and therefore are lambs, not wolves. But that is of course not true—it’s merely a judgment meant to deny political and moral responsibility for violence.
Tarantino shows the dubious relationship between glamour and irresponsibility in the casting. Bona fide stars Leonardo Di Caprio and Brad Pitt play over-the-hill tough guys. We want to love them because we’re used to them and they’re still very handsome, but the story shows that they’re in important ways damaged goods. What recommends them is not their beautiful faces, but the ugliness of their characters, a necessity for violence. They get to earn our admiration, therefore, by their deeds.
Tarantino shows the dubious relationship between glamour and irresponsibility in the casting.
Meanwhile, the evil Manson gang of barely legal aspiring actresses includes instead children of stars or at least wealth—also young aspiring actresses, but ones who have the privileges of their parents to recommend them: Margaret Qualley (daughter of actress Andie Macdowell), Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin Smith’s daughter), Maya Hawke (Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter), and Lena Dunham. The children of celebrities become Hollywood insiders looking for glamour. Noticing how suspicious this is should lead people to notice how suspicious the beautiful hippie girls themselves were. But this people will not do.
For that reason, only people who live by another code than that of the hippies could deal with the problem they pose. So Tarantino has Pitt and DiCaprio play stuntman Cliff Booth and has-been TV Western star Rick Dalton, the fictional next-door neighbors of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, in the very expensive Beverly Hills.
This is unusual storytelling, to say the least, but it’s remarkably true to Hollywood history. Booth and Dalton are inspired by Burt Reynolds and his stuntman friend Hal Needham, a daredevil who wrote and directed Reynolds in the very popular Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. These are hard-drinking men who enjoy each other’s company and seem completely alien to the suburban family home idea of American life. It’s friendship between men that provides the opposite model to the Manson cult, apparently.
Booth and Dalton are inspired by Burt Reynolds and his stuntman friend Hal Needham, a daredevil who wrote and directed Reynolds in the very popular Smokey and the Bandit in 1977.
Dalton’s a millionaire and Needham is his servant, not merely his friend—they are far more like an aristocratic bachelor and his valet than like equals, since Dalton pays for Booth’s living and Booth does everything from drive him around, to watch film of his old successes in a rehearsal of bygone glories reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard. Yet they’re all-American, and the movie is mostly about them learning to deal with the end of their heroic lives, both real and on film—they have to grow old and perhaps their friendship itself will fail them. But then a miracle happens: The horror of the 60s suddenly invades their lives. They unexpectedly save the day, one drunk, the other on drugs, which seems to correspond to the hallucinatory, inexplicable character of the attempted murders.
Compared to a very pleasant film which mostly avoids the showdown between good guys and bad guys and even leaves Manson out of the story almost completely—the ending is both hilarious and brutal, arriving only when it’s no longer expected. More, it only happens because Dalton goes looking for trouble—he’s drunk, it’s the middle of the night, and he goes out of his expensive house to scream at a car full of hippies to get off his private road. They oscillate between violent anger and fascination with celebrity once they recognize him: They’re on a mission to murder, but they used to love his TV show.
Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood doesn’t present Dalton and Booth as heroes. They’re by turns endearing, ridiculous, and contemptible.
So the showdown turns out to be a fight between celebrities and their admirers, who are also would-be replacements. Booth and Dalton both get a chance to prove they are as harsh as they seemed on screen—they weren’t just playing roles, it seems. They are at their rare best in the midst of chaos. They get lucky, too, but for once their violent virtues count for something. They are men, they are friends, and their nobility raises them above the hippies they had always held in contempt. It’s a last bow for an America as surely gone as the Western.
Tarantino suggests that we lost some important things when we modernized. Morality cannot really supplant violence and one part of what we admire in people is their self-reliance. Our understanding of what we want out of the movies has become complicated, we tend to prefer the soft to the harsh, the compassionate to the punitive, and the therapeutic to the judgmental. But this is neither a good account of what it takes to face up to horror, nor a reliable prediction of a future free of horror.
So Tarantino concocts an accident, rising new celebrities being neighbors with old departing celebrities, to point to a fundamental problem, our need to make room for violence in our pacifism. We need to learn to admire ugliness, not just beauty. Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood doesn’t present Dalton and Booth as heroes. They’re by turns endearing, ridiculous, and contemptible. But they do the only admirable things in the story. Perhaps that’s enough to justify selective nostalgia for the American past, and therefore to allow the movies to endure.
