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The Patreon Letter - 27th July, 2019 (catchup)
🕑 Added 2019-08-20 01:42:32 +0000 UTCHi everyone, Em here with more of the parade of catchup letters. At this rate I should be caught up by the end of the month (I hope)! So thank you so much for bearing with me as everything keeps happening despite my need to sit down and find something to write about that I haven't already turned into a podcast.
**SPOILERS FOR ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD AHEAD**
As I mentioned on a recent VoIP Life, I wasn't particularly excited about the new Tarantino, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood but I figured I would go if Destiny wanted to. She did, so we went the other week. I think I fall pretty squarely in the normal consensus I've seen (I don't mean RT please that's an essay for another week) in that it's kinda ... bad. Not only is it kind of bad, it's full of some pretty shitty politics too. So instead of a formal review of what worked and what didn't (I think the acting is good, the scene with Pitt's character at the ranch surrounded by the Manson family is legitimately tense and chilling, the script sucks and the ending is a nightmare) I'd hit on some specific points that really keep tugging at me a week later.
For a movie about two down and out actors from the 50s/60s adrift in the New Hollywood of 1970, Once Upon A Time really revels in a generally unexamined nostalgia for that era that they came out of. I don't think it's particularly surprising that the nostalgia director has a fixation on the kind of television actor he would have grown up watching, but the movie is on the surface supposed to be an extended joke on how out of touch these guys are in a world that's passed them by while suggesting that perhaps this is exactly the kind of guys we need more of to right the literal wrongs of history.
The ending of the film has DiCaprio and Pitt's characters attacked by the Manson family murderers, who decided to detour to the television star's house down the hill from the Polanski residence where Sharon Tate and the others were killed that night. The two of them, tripping and drunk, use their rugged stunt man skills and weaponry kept from old action flicks to brutally murder the Manson killers, at which point DiCaprio's character is escorted up for drinks with Sharon Tate like the literal gates of heaven open up and bring him out of obscurity and into Hollywood royalty.
This is, of course, the exact same ending as Inglorious Basterds, a movie I remember many critiques of the time arguing spoke out of turn to 'give' Jewish culture an out as a bunch of American soldiers shot Hitler roughly 800 times until his body was meat. I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether Basterds was right to veer into this alternate history, or if the movie from a non-Jewish director climaxing in a character declaring Jewish Vengeance on a theatre full of Nazis, but I do think there's something more insidious about the Manson murders. And that's because while broadly Nazis have become a wide cultural target, and Hitler so fraught as a symbol Taika Waititi can potentially tank his entire career playing him in a comedy, the Tate murder is a true crime story in the living memory of much of the audience for this movie, and its alternate history is not the crux of global history for the last 75 years.
Now one could argue that the Manson murders are a reflexive point in the pop culture history of Hollywood or even the history of America of the last century, coming as they did as the cold water in the middle of a free love revolution, but Once Upon A Time doesn't bother to offer us any of that. It's vision of Hollywood is Professionals In Film and Dirty Hippies Digging Through Trash. That's it, those are the only two types of people who populate 1969 LA in this world. Everyone is a star, was a star, or wants to be a star. If you don't? You're just a greasy, filthy degenerate waiting to be brainwashed into murdering the only thing good in the film's world.
This is ludicrous, but in keeping with the film's general opinion about the new wave of Hollywood. A girl working on a TV show is portrayed as outrageous because she acts professional and wants respect from adults on set. Roman Polansky (more on him later) is a cartoon, capering around the background of the movie in bad Austin Powers cosplay. One of the most infamous scenes of the movie is about Brad Pitt's rough and tumble stuntman proving that he could absolutely beat the shit out of Bruce Lee, a preening blowhard who uses his race and reputation to put good hardworking Americans out of a job while he teaches karate moves to stars like Sharon Tate. Kurt Russell plays a henpecked stunt coordinator who tries to give Brad Pitt's character a job under the table because his wife is too sensitive about the fact that Pitt's character probably murdered his wife and got away with it.
That wife, by the way, is only obliquely referred to as Natalie, and in one scene we see that he maybe shot her with a harpoon gun on a boat because she was also a nag. Which would be regressive on its own, but evokes the real life mysterious death of Natalie Wood, who died under suspect circumstances while out on a boat with Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken, both of whom have been accused by rumor but never charged of murdering her. But in the movie is only a joke about how women do be like that.
In fact, the only woman who isn't portrayed as dangerously mouthy is Sharon Tate herself, who is played as the true goal of all people in film: in love with the potential of just seeing herself on screen. She's given a beatific presence throughout, aspiring only to be famous, a walking future victim signposted at every turn as the tragic result of fate: too blonde, too nice, too pregnant with potential and by the end a child to possibly be cut short by something so common as murder.
And yet, in maybe the movie's most disgusting aside, a very badly portrayed Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis, earth shatteringly miscast) tells us how Sharon Tate was in love with hair stylist Jay Seabring, but dumped him for Roman Polansky, and it's pointed out how weird it is that she seemingly has a predilection for men who look like twelve year old boys. This attack comes not only against a real person, but a real person who was killed at 26 a half century ago, and also someone who was married to actual statutory rapist Roman Polansky, who exists only as a sort of British invasion arm candy throughout the story.
This scene, tossed off early on in the film, is such an awful attempt at throwing moral relativism on a film where such points of view only cut one way. Maybe she had a thing for young boys, who can say, the film argues. Good people did awful things all the time. It's show business. We'll never know, because she's dead, and isn't that sad. Never mind she left behind a husband who actually slept with a teenager. Never mind these critiques always punch down, to women in Hollywood who bust the ass of men who just want to drink their way through another pilot season and shoot guns and get hot wives who won't talk too much. And god, wouldn't have the world been better if we remembered all the drunks and wife murderers we threw away for the long haired pretty boys with their Asian mysticism and concern for feminism or their burgeoning social awareness that can only be processed as the misguided rage of losers to lash out and try to kill their betters.
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a movie in love with the dream of a Hollywood that was dead at the time it was depicting, a time and a world that people actively struggle against the inertia of today, through #metoo and efforts to diversify Hollywood and the endless labor struggles across all careers. The movie whispers around the edges of its low key hangouts and sun drenched LA afternoons that maybe things were better before, with before being when the men Tarantino idolized could do no wrong. It's misguided and regressive and a disappointing dead end for a director that, at the best of times, has opened doors to show modern audiences the joy of old movies that have been forgotten.
Nobody has forgotten this era of Hollywood, they've spend entire generations trying to bury it.
