HOLLYWOOD DREAMIN'

Childhood dreams

When the young Butch (Chandler Lindauer) in 1994's 'Pulp Fiction' sits in front of the television watching 'Clutch Cargo', there's no doubt Tarantino was referencing a part of his own 1960s childhood with one of those idiosyncratically obscure references that only someone who lived at such a time could include in their own movie.

By the time we get to 2019's 'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood', we appear to be living in a nearly three hour remembrance of the director's childhood nostalgia where no detail is spared in evoking what clearly represented a golden era for the young Quentin - the pre-Manson Hollywood where the fairytales of movie stars and their films remained unbroken by monsters of the night.

But like all good things that come to an end, most of us know the cruel reality of what happened on that August night in 1969 when Sharon Tate and friends were brutally massacred on 10050, Cielo Drive, Los Angeles. Tarantino, concluding his historical revisionist film trilogy that began with 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009), decides to avert the actual events which took place in the Polanski/Tate residence that night and exact his own cinematic justice on Manson's mob of paranoid homicidal freaks instead.

In his Stoppardian approach to interrupting history and redirecting it away from the way things played out, Tarantino has his two valiant Knights, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), inadvertently protecting the princess (Tate) in her castle in the canyon.

Having just recently listened to the excellent 'Full Cast And Crew's' podcast episode 179 specifically dealing with the character of Rick Dalton in 'OATIH', host Jason Cilo (reading that as Cielo) makes a good point about whether or not Tarantino intended to have the heroes of the hour be from the old school Hollywood that he so clearly romanticises and who were going the way of the dodo by the time of the late 60s where the activist counterculture led by the acid head hippies quickly accelerated their demise. Cilo speculates that Tarantino may be implying that if more Rick Daltons and Cliff Booths had been around back then to keep an eye on things in the neighbourhood, the uprising of murderous cult members might have been kept in abeyance. The absence of a father figure in Tarantino's childhood may have also encouraged his romanticisation of these types of men/heroes where their celluloid representations of masculinity offer a gentleman's/warrior's code to live by. Tarantino seems to have learnt most things about human behaviour vicariously through the big screen and that may be both a good and bad thing, depending on which reports about the man you choose to believe. Certainly, the director's close association with producer Harvey Weinstein is nowhere near as noble and charming as that of Rick and Cliff and perhaps if Tarantino were to historically revise that significant figure in his own biography he might have him played by a more affable and less highly sexed mentor/patron/replacement father figure.

Redeeming Hollywood's dark past with a creative solution is possibly Tarantino's own way of atoning for being in such close association with monsters himself, most notably his producer and friend, Harvey Weinstein. And on a somewhat more pragmatic level, it occurs to me that Tarantino is almost saying his farewell to a Hollywood that only ever truly existed as an illusion of the imagination anyway. Anyone who has read Kenneth Anger's 'Hollywood Babylon' will know only too well of the depravity and carnal sin in tinsel town through the first half of the 20th century and beyond. At the time of the movie's US release in 2019, a Los Angeles street artist 'face swapped' DiCaprio and Pitt's images on giant billboards at Pica and La Cienga with that of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and controversial film director and husband to the deceased Tate, Roman Polanski.

The illusion of Hollywood as a place of honour is merely a child's dream and Tarantino with 'OATIH' appears to be closing the book on that fairytale in that same way the closing of ornate, well bound tomes in the end titles of old Walt Disney movies used to do. In the words of Corinthians 13:11 'When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.' With 'Once Upon A Time' then, has Tarantino finally become a man? At the age of 56 when he made his magnum opus, one would certainly hope so.

Orpheus in Hollywood

The director achieves several resolutions in 'OATIH'. Firstly, by having man-child Rick Dalton, being invited into the undisturbed residence of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski at the end of the film, Tarantino provides the neurotic struggling actor with the happy ending he has desired since the start of the movie; secondly, preserving the Texas-born movie actress, Tate (similar to Snow White) so that she can remain untouched and unslain by the murderous hands of the 'Manson family' puts the lid tightly back on the Pandora's box of Manson's violent Hollywood revolution.

This 'Orpheus In Hollywood' poetic trope that sits just outside the current metaverse zeitgeist (Marvel, Spider-Verse etc) has allowed Tarantino to rescue his Eurydice (Tate) and bring her back to life. David Lynch in Twin Peaks Season 3 attempts a similar approach with Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), having Agent Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) try and re-correct the timeline that resulted in her famous murder, leading her out of the dark pine woods back to safety. Lynch's ending, however has far more disturbing cosmic implications. Lynch provides us with a nightmare; Tarantino provides us with a fairytale.

And finally, as the ethereal 'Miss Lily Langtree' theme from Maurice Jarre’s score for 'The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean' accompanies Rick's moonlit walk up the steep driveway to Tate's house, we, the audience, feel a deep sense of catharsis as we're returned safely home to both the director's and our recent shared mythic past where both our heroes and heroines can remain as gods, living forever, up there on the silver screen.