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.