Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

I have to say, I'm pleased to have missed out on The Discourse on this one. It was partly accidental, because I simply didn't have time to see it. But it was a choice as well. Folks scramble to opine about Tarantino's films, and yet I can't think of a filmmaker working today who gives less of a shit what critical discourse makes of his work. He continually displays a contempt for all but the most superficial analyses, playing this proprietary grumpiness off as a boyish nonchalance, as if he's just too far above the fray to be bothered. For my part, I would rather devote my energy elsewhere.

But the films themselves are always worth engaging with, even as they become more and more conservative, Tarantino's ideas of America, masculinity, and labor becoming more and more Reaganite. Of course, he wraps them all up in a rather conventional, unproblematized notion of "fun," so taking a poke at these things inevitably sets the critic up as a killjoy in the Adorno mold, someone who can't take a joke, a "snowflake." OUATIH is almost an AM-radio version of Terrence Malick in that it lays out Two Ways of Life. Given that the choices are "psychotic murderous hippies" and "the old fashioned manliness the aforementioned killjoys deride as 'toxic,'" suffice to say that this is not a film that has a place for me in it, nor does it care. So I watched it with the sort of detachment one customarily employs for Olympic gymnastics or observing clothes tumbling in the dryer. "There's some stuff really happening there."

I noticed that OUATIH was very loosely held together, which I admired. It kind of reminded me of Arnaud Desplechin's joints, with their tonal shifts and "bursts of fruit flavor," films essentially comprised of semi-detachable set pieces connected by a broad conceptual framework. In this case, of course, there is the narrative of middle-of-the-pack TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo diCaprio) and his stunt double / man Friday Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). But amidst the clips of Bounty Law and scenes from Sam Wanamaker's set, Cliff driving through L.A. listening to forgotten radio hits and the marquees trumpeting forgotten B-pictures, is a more central thesis. The entertainment industry, for a good long while, was like any other business, a working man's game where rather ordinary people punched the clock and made products that were not made to last but had a certain integrity.

And the hippies, the counterculture, Method acting, self-importance of all kinds -- let's call it Manson Family Values -- came in to wipe all that away. Blink and you'll miss it, but Cliff's harpie of a dead wife (Rebecca Gayheart) was apparently a part of all that too. Women getting the upper hand in life, it seems, was intolerable, and even those who had a problem with Cliff having (allegedly) killed his wife, like Green Hornet director Janet Miller (Zoë Bell), are perceived as uptight, unwilling to hang with the dudes. Even Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) has to be retrofitted into a braggart in order to fit into this world of ring-a-ding machismo.

But it's okay, because Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her unborn baby are spared in this timeline. It's a lovely sentiment, I suppose. Who wouldn't prefer that the Manson murders never happened? One could follow the logic from there: Polanski might never have become a pedophile; Squeaky Fromme would never have taken a shot at Gerald Ford; an entire strain of right-wing paranoia could have been averted, at least temporarily. But in Tarantino's mind, this comes at a certain cost. The cowboys get to remain in the saddle. The crisis of confidence that the 1960s brought about is replaced with chivalry, white masculinity reaffirmed, and an implicitly Nixonian Hollywood.

We can win a war in Vietnam.