In
Citizen
Kane, Charles
Foster Kane famously mutters 'Rosebud' on his deathbed. Only the
audience is given the solution to the mystery: it refers to a sled
which Kane played with as a child, long before he would lose himself in
the Xanadu of personal wealth, power and ego. In later interviews,
Orson Welles often downplayed the significance of Kane's
central
riddle, labelling it a cheap gimmick and a bad joke. Gimmick or no,
Rosebud taps into something universal about life: the older you get,
the more the details of your childhood assume a lustrous, irretrievable magic.
In
his 9th
picture Once
Upon a Time...in Hollywood, Quentin
Tarantino returns to the era of his childhood, to the year of 1969
when the director would have been 6 years old. It is the end of a
decade, and in a wider sense, the end of the whole period of
bounteous energy, optimism and self-belief which characterised
America in the post-war period. The next decade would usher in
economic slow-down and the political scandals of the Church Committee
and Watergate, and America's image of itself would never be quite the
same again. The texture and appearance of 35mm film in Hollywood
movies changed notably between the two decades. Up until about the
mid-60s, it still had something of the lustre and artifice of the Technicolour era; the movie world looked brighter and prettier than
the everyday one. In the 70s, movies adopted a more muted palette,
with a softer, hazier visual texture, accentuated by natural light
and deepening shadows. Location filming became the norm; the studio
backlot became the street.
This
loss of innocence, eulogized in Once
Upon a Time, was
a necessary and perhaps inevitable coming to the terms with the dark
forces and contradictions that underpinned the American Dream at its
apogee. Nevertheless, even if the innocence itself was built on
illusionary foundations, there is no denying the considerable beauty
and energy of American culture in its golden age of Pop: the
curvaceous, untethered exuberance of Space Age architecture and
automobiles, dusk and night-time skies tattooed with a giddy,
psychedelic chorus of neon signs, crackling radios tuned to the
hormonal teen symphonies of Phil Spector, the Beach Boys and the Shangri-Las.
Once
Upon a Time seeks
to bask in the energy and ambience of this era of American pop
culture, right at the point where the clock had finally run out on
it. America had already lost its innocence by '69; after a series of
traumatic assassinations and demonstrations, the country found iself
more bitterly divided than it is even today. The Manson Family
murders, however, became a symbolical culmination of that loss; they
were the harbingers of a bleaker era to come, where optimism gave way
to the cold grip of paranoid uncertainty. Tarantino's movie alters
the facts of history to create an alternative timeline where that
death knell never occurs. Of course, in the real world, had the
Manson murders never happened, an appalling tragedy would have been
averted , but history in general would progress in largely the same
way. In the self-contained fairytale of the movie, however, the
magic LA of Tarantino's childhood persists forever. Rosebud again.
In
this sense, Once
Upon a Time goes
against the grain of historical revisionism as it tends to be
practised in movies today. Most contemporary revisionist movies seek
to undermine the mythic image of a by-gone era by illustrating its
dark undercurrents and contradictions. Once
Upon a Time does
the opposite: it revises the historical facts in order to restore the
mythic image of the period. In many period movies, the period is
merely the setting for the story. In Once
Upon a Time, creating
a meticulously detailed yet ultimately dreamlike simulacra of LA in
the late 60s is the central aesthetic purpose of the movie.
One
the things I loved about the first (better) half of Death
Proof was
its unabashed celebration of American popular culture: jukeboxes,
pretty girls, pop records and muscle cars. In Once
Upon a Time,
Tarantino becomes a fully fledged poet and rhapsodist of Americana in
the tradition of Chuck Berry and Brian Wilson. The movie is infused
with an obsessive, infectious love for the culture and ambience of
its period. Television and radio samples are integral components of
the mise en scène and soundtrack, and of the historical dream state
that the film induces. A remarkable collaboration between director,
cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Barbara
Ling, its dream LA feels as boundless as a Grand Theft Auto game.
Sequences where characters drive at night are transportingly
beautiful.
Once
Upon a Time feels
like a departure for Tarantino, and the emergence of a more mature
vision. With the exception perhaps of the first half of Kill
Bill, the
primary focus and energy of his movies has always been with the speech
of his characters. Cinematic technique has tended to be subservient
to the dialogue, and he has often been carried away by the enjoyment
of his own voice. In Once
Upon a Time,
he has pared back his verbal exuberance, making the dialogue less
showy and more specific to the characters. He has learned the value
of silence, of simply watching characters behaving and being, whether
it be Pitt's serene Cliff Booth climbing the roof to fix a television antennae, or Margot Robbie's Tate surreptitiously enjoying an audience's
enjoyment of her performance in The
Wrecking Crew. There
are long stretches of Once
Upon a Time which
are the closest the director has come to making an actual drama.
As
an artist, Tarantino seems in no danger of becoming a has-been; but
the melancholy of ageing has brought something of hum-drum reality
into his incorrigibly escapist cinematic world. To my taste, any
rate, it might be his best film.
In
the devastating conclusion of Lynch and Frost's Twin
Peaks: The Return, Dale
Cooper travels back in time to prevent the TP world's defining
tragedy from occurring. Lynch's vision is extremely dark and tragic:
you can't eradicate the trauma of the past; change one thing, and the
tragedy will simply re-emerge, perhaps in an even worse form,
elsewhere in the karmic ledger. Tarantino has always been a comic
rather than a tragic artist, and in Once
Upon a Time, history
is re-written and redeemed: Sharon Tate survives, and all of the
darkness is expunged from the Manson story. Yet Tarantino maintains
an awareness throughout of the impossibility of this scenario; it is
a fairytale and a magic trick, sustainable only by the illusionary
magic of cinema. Rick Dalton plays cowboy heroes and
(latterly)heavies, but in reality he is a comic, shambolic figure.
The irony is that it is his stuntman, who belongs in the anonymous
class of movie performer whose face or name will never be known by
the public, who embodies the reality which Rick merely plays on the
screen. He is the stoic, indomitable, self-contained archetype of
American cinema, embodied on screen by McQueen, Redford and countless
others. Carrying Rick's load once more, he is the one who saves
everybody from the Mansonoid intruders, leaving Rick to enjoy a
hero's welcome in a Cielo Dr residence unscathed by blood and sorrow.
Postscript: Hippies. Does Tarantino hate hippies? Maybe. Certainly there
are enough gratuitous hippie beatdowns in Once
Upon a Time to
make Joe Friday, Vincent Bugliosi and Bigfoot Bjornsen salivate with
joy. Or maybe he's just playing up Rick Dalton's peculiar antipathy
for the hippie for comic effect – either way, it is admittedly hilarious.
Iconic
Hippie Haters:
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