Thursday, September 19, 2019

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

Twice I’ve watched Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood and been underwhelmed as it unspooled, and each time I had a warmer feeling afterwards. Of course the ending is transformative...but I don’t think it’s only that. Tarantino always gives the viewer a lot of direct pleasure, and I’m in the awkward position of not taking a good many of the same pleasures as he does, or at least not permitting these pleasures to myself. But Tarantino also has a powerful sense of narrative form, and I find myself appreciating the large structures that he builds around the giving of pleasure and the qualification of it, even when the actual pleasures that are his currency don’t hit home for me.


(I tried not to spoil the film, but I still don’t recommend reading this if you want to remain unspoiled.)


The most obvious play with narrative that we associate with Tarantino is the insertion of the inscribed audience - which is Tarantino and anyone who likes the same things he likes - into the diegesis of his movies, in violation of genre naturalism. Few have been so pedantic as to observe that the conversations between Travolta and Jackson in Pulp Fiction are the musings of young urban educated pop-culture-immersed men and fit oddly in the mouths of professional killers; it’s plain to all that Tarantino is acknowledging and expanding the fantasy of the inscribed audience to play at being killers in a genre film. This now-familiar ploy can be found in Hollywood as well, most memorably in the giddy scene where the Manson killers babble excitedly about their encounter with TV star Rick Dalton, but also in Rick and Cliff’s tipsy conversation about the films of William Witney, and in the geeky details about spaghetti westerns that Kurt Russell’s narrator inserts into the account of Dalton’s time in Italy.


But the most important structural idea in Hollywood is of another kind of reflexive genre play. Nearly every dramatic setup in the film fails to materialize, and in most cases we don’t realize that no chicken has come home to roost until the movie ends. The central friendship between Rick and Cliff is clearly marked for conflict by movie shorthand: by the power imbalance between the two, about which Rick is not especially considerate; and later, by the marriage that busts up the pals’ bond. But absolutely nothing materializes to disrupt the friendship. Another setup without the expected payoff: Dalton’s anguish over his declining career, which has a post position to move to the center of the narrative, is reversed by his bravura “Lancer” performance; likewise, his dreaded transition to cheap westerns in Europe goes pretty well. (What we get instead of all this personal drama that never quite happens are simple demonstrations of Tarantino’s desire for his characters to do well and be happy.) The 20-minute Spahn Ranch sequence is a fabric of ominous cross-cutting and portentous music cues, and there’s no clear moment where we realize that every single thing the Manson family tells Cliff is the truth. And the long-germinating flirtation of Cliff and Pussycat that sets up the ranch scene is another movie convention that never delivers its expected romantic payload. Finally, of course, there’s the big deception of the Dragnet-like buildup to the Tate killings, for which all the other little lies can be construed as preparation.


As we look back on it, Hollywood is basically a movie about a friendship that starts good and stays good, and about a pretty girl walking around a sunny, tranquil Los Angeles of memory. In the old sense of the word, the film is a comedy - and the unspeakably gruesome violence of the climax, like it or not, is certainly intended as a pure dose of entertainment pleasure, the greatest gift that Tarantino can imagine to reward his audience. It’s comedy all the way down until the gentle and moody postscript, where, alongside the sweetness of the gesture, the viewer must confront real death for the first time in the film.


It’s possible to think that the energy Tarantino puts into period recreation is misspent, to find the beer-and-pizza friendship between Rick and Cliff unremarkable in its particulars, to feel that Rick’s redemption as an actor is a bit up the sentimental middle, to be unsatisfied by Cliff’s unadulterated invincibility and cool, to close one’s eyes through most of the climax, and still to be moved by the filmmaker’s surreptitious creation of a world of fulfilled wishes, and by his sad, final acknowledgment of the limitations of fantasy.








10 comments:

Jake said...

Do you think Cliff killed his wife?

Dan Sallitt said...

I didn't see any clear evidence one way or another. Raising that issue and then leaving it hanging seems a somewhat different sort of misdirection from the other things I mentioned. Maybe this is Tarantino's protest against social media justice, and the lack of resolution is the veil that usually covers such protests.

Jake said...

I don't see clear evidence either—I think Tarantino wants the ambiguity. But our feelings about Cliff are necessarily affected by how seriously we take the idea of him as a potential wife-killer. I suppose the question was prompted by a sense that the straightforward pleasure you describe is something the film gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

Dan Sallitt said...

It's an odd card to play, but I feel pretty sure that Tarantino's pleasure in the character, and the pleasure he wants us to take, is not reduced by the allegation of wife-killing. Maybe it's a capital-M movie pleasure in the hero's dark past, maybe it's a rebellion against morality, maybe it's a test of our trust in the character - that's all pretty hard to pick apart. But I see no cloud in the skies of pleasure, such as we get at the ending.

Jake said...

Everything you say hangs together, and yet it wasn't my experience of the film. I felt like the game-plan from the outset was to place the narrative in quotation marks, as an example of the kind of thing Hollywood is always selling us, but with the fantasy pushed to an indulgent extreme that shows us something alarming at its core. With Tarantino the question of intentionality is even more moot than usual, but I came out with much the same heavy, queasy feeling I had at the end of the outwardly grimmer Hateful Eight.

Dan Sallitt said...

Do you think that a number of the things I listed in my article as non-pay-offs are intended to unsettle?

Jake said...

“Intended” is a tricky word, but basically yes: a friend says that Tarantino likes to mess with us, which is about the best way I can find to describe what he’s doing throughout. For instance, that the Manson followers turn out to be telling the truth about everything gives a certain weight to Sadie Atkins’ speech about TV's glorification of murder—which fits the Bounty Law trailer at the start too precisely to be coincidence, even if this also represents Tarantino sticking it to his critics by putting the case against his own work in the mouth of a villain.

Dan Sallitt said...

Contemplating our two reactions, I see that mine is dependent on intentionality, at least as inferred from the work. (I haven't read a single interview about it.) If one wants to distinguish between one's one reaction to a thing and the way the film seems to want it reacted to, one is constructing a system of intention. But, without this acceptance of the principle of intentionality, it seems to me that one is helpless to react to a film in any other way than one's gut permits. I think there's a lot of evidence that Tarantino is getting pleasure from things that I'm not - if I go with my reaction first and build the film's structure around it, I personally am really out of luck with Tarantino, who troubles me in various elemental ways. But I think I see him working at a structural level as well, and that level is where I find him remarkable.

Jake said...

Interesting to have that teased out. I don’t think we can avoid speculating about intention, but intentions exist on all sorts of levels, conscious and unconscious, which allows the speculation a lot of leeway. Ultimately my gut reaction to a film is what I trust—though I might have a different gut reaction on a later viewing, potentially influenced by ideas and information I've encountered in the meantime. Or I might start to reconsider how far the same basic gut reaction could qualify as a pleasure, even if an uneasy one.

To return to the film, the cigarette ad scene in the closing credits struck me as an ironic comment on everything that has gone before: Hollywood is in the business of profitable lies, which are often hazardous to our health. Did Tarantino consciously intend this meaning or anything like it? I have no idea. But I don’t think the validity of the interpretation depends on that.

Dan Sallitt said...

I agree that it doesn't speak well for our connection to the art if we allow Tarantino's testimony to confirm or deny intentionality. But I'm unwilling to dispense altogether with the concept. Using the cigarette ad as an example: I choose to focus on the humor of Dalton's uneasy status in the industry, and you on the amorality of Hollywood's pursuit of profit. (I wouldn't have advised Tarantino to put that ad there after the game-changing last scene, but that's a different issue.) Obviously both emphases can find support in the material. Maybe we just give up and accept subjectivity on this point? I don't, because I believe that the personal is essential to art, and so I need or want to hear a voice. Given that there is no actual voice, I give weight to systems I find in the movie that suggest the expression of a person - which, among other things, entails intentionality. If something in a movie works well for me but feels accidental, I usually find myself less attached to it over time - that may not seem fair, but the value to me lies elsewhere.