once upon a time...Spoiler alert!

We saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood last night, me D an my brother, who is in town for the week.

First of all it was at least thirty minutes too long. There were all of these extended movie-within-the-movie scenes that were wholly unnecessary, but by the end of the film one can’t be mad at them anymore because it’s possible that not only is the film about being gratuitous but all the good bits are themselves the gratuitous ones.

D left the theater saying he felt that the whole thing was Tarantino giving the middle finger to his critics and exercising his unchecked will to do whatever he wants. That the Manson kids represented social justice warriors and Brad and Leo a composite of Tarantino’s position as a stronghold of a now older Hollywood generation. At the beginning Al Pacino tells Leo that he’s being brought on as a guest star on new tv shows as a punching bag to establish the show’s dominance over Leo’s now cancelled western series.

I like seeing movies with D because usually his reading will enter at a more social and political level whereas I walk out of the theater blinded by my own fixation on trying to situate movies and directors approach to the real and so I get all caught up in probably reading too much into formal elements. By the end of dinner or drinks afterward we have synthesized our perspectives or agreed to disagree. If D reads this I hope he thinks this is true.

I thought that the movie seemed like, yes, Tarantino pissing all over everyone who hates him, but also like him, after years of hearing it endlessly from critics, making a case for his own work. Though he's pissing on everyone, ultimately the movie tries to answer to the eternal criticism–that his films are excessively violent, misogynistic, etc. Tarantino's answer is kind of garbled, but so is the reality of the situation. The thesis of the film–if there has to be one–seems to be something like we live in an infinite regress of violent images and realities inflecting upon one another. At this stage, who is to say what's real or not?

I told D and Max that I thought it felt like a companion piece to Natural Born Killers, which he wrote and Oliver Stone directed. It is one of my favorite films, honestly. It's so fucked stylistically and for the obvious reasons. I thought Once Upon seemed like Tarantino at least returning to a bookmarked page somewhere toward the end of NBK in that 1. You see a strange collaged almost essayistic stylistic tic in OUTH that NBK models too. In NBK, it's more heavily mediatized; newsreel and faux archival footage. But NBK also does this thing where certain shots are in color and others on black and white and there's not a whole lot of apparent logic as to why or when this happens. Likewise in OUTH, we get these strangely lengthy faux archival film clips from Leo's character's career while another character narrates his past. Maybe instead of toggling between kinds of film like in NBK, we could say horizontally, Tarantino toggles up and down within reality-layers. The best instance of this is when Leo is shooting a scene as a guest star on a show and we watch probably 5 minutes of the scene, as though its completed and edited. But then Leo forgets a line and we're on set; someone feeds him his lines from offscreen, but we never see the crew; the lighting is still perfect. We're still in the camera's reality. Then the camera cycles back to one and Leo starts again. I can't remember if the entire 5-6 minute scene is actually one shot or not; I don't think it was. But it was an interesting mechanism, placing us so wholly in the viewer's position and then keeping us there visually even as the artifice falls away narratively? I dunno.

Anyway, the other reason I felt like this was a revisitation of NBK was because, to me, Once Upon seemed like Tarantino's most direct attempt at making a film about violence and about film/media, since writing NBK. His other films are violent and they are films made by someone who clearly loves movies and the entire apparatus and industry etc. But they aren't about these things. Are they?

An actor and his stuntman best buddy; guy who made a career out of acting out violence and a guy who made a career of shouldering the weight of the real violence required to simulate violence for the screen who has also possibly killed his own wife in real life. And then the Manson family running around in the background–living on a disused western film set in Chatsworth–as we count down to the date we (are presumed to) know marks the murder of Sharon Tate. In Tarantino's version of that night, the three kids who go to Cielo Dr. sit in their car and decide that they'll kill Jake Cahill (Leo) instead of whoever lives in Terry Melcher's old house. They decide this because, as one of the girls says, shouldn't they kill the very people who made them violent? She says a thing about how everything on tv is murder; if it's not (i can't remember what the other thing was), it's murder. The whole thing becomes a different kind of revenge fantasy, wrought by youth on an older generation for making them who they are. It's sort of kill your idols thing, I guess?

This scene was fantastic and I think the crux of the whole film–climax obviously but also the theoretical crux–the kids attack Brad Pitt's character, who is tripping on acid and at first can't figure out if they're real. Tex Watson says what he's been historically recorded as having said in the real Tate murders: "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business," as he points his gun at Pitt, visibly so freaked out. What ensues is a Scary Movie (the comedy franchise) level slapstick fight beyond anything Tarantino has put together in the past, I think. It's so gratuitous that you can't even be disgusted by it; it's hilarious. The fight ends with Leo taking a flamethrower from a WWII action film he'd starred in and burning the final, already mangled Manson kid to a crisp in his pool. The whole thing is perfect, I think; it digs into this idea that these kids are like pantomiming some image they've ambiently absorbed. It feels like western pastiche even spatially. and then: "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business," the actually uttered line, said so wannabe-desparado-style.

Anyway, then everyone is okay. Brad goes to the hospital. Leo stands outside of his house and then gets invited to hang out with Sharon Tate and her friends and he is SO thrilled.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this movie. I am messaging with Z about it now on Slack. I'm sure my thoughts will evolve. I don't think it was holistically Great, but it was a good film for Tarantino to make. It's funny because people are like oh it's personal and intimate but I think it's not really. It's reflective, primarily.

The great thing is that it was the kind of movie that makes me think about how much I love movies and the film industry and how much I miss Los Angeles. It also made me think about this idea I had for a Western about this woman Biddy Mason who was a freed slave, but her old master made her stay with him. She fled and made her way to Los Angeles, where she became, I think, the most propertied black woman in the city at the time. I would want this to be an ultraviolent, hyperclassical western road movie. Maybe I will start to outline it.