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

The year 2019 is one of commemoration: 50 years ago, in 1969, the love and peace hippie culture experienced it's apex at the Woodstock music festival - and the epic chronicle of that event, Michael Wadleigh's WOODSTOCK (USA, 1970) has been duly re-mastered and re-released to celebrate the festival's 50th anniversary - while twenty years ago, in 1999, cinema definitely entered its digital age with the release of the first episode of THE MATRIX (Wachowski Brothers, USA, 1999), which is also celebrated with a 'digitally remastered' re-release. However, 1969 also marked the end of the period that is now known as 'the sixties': the stabbing of a stoned young woman by one of the Hells Angels, hired for security by The Rolling Stones for their 'free concert' in Altamont (in front of the camera of the Maysles brothers who documented the event in GIMME SHELTER (USA, 1970)) brought the flower-power period to a tragic and violent end.
 This contradiction between the blossoming of an alternative culture based on love, drugs, free sex and the rejection of property and consumerism on the one hand and hatred of and violence against those who did not share these counter-cultural values was maybe even more tellingly - and shockingly - incarnated by the hippie commune around Charles Mansion who sent out the members this commune to murder the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski. And since Polanski, the young director of the succesful art movie ROSEMARY'S BABY (USA, 1968)  - ironically a film about the kind of satanism that inspired Manson - was himself  hailed by Hollywood as the harbinger of a new kind of filmmaking that would appeal to a younger generation that had lost interest in the Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn sort of movies that Hollywood still churned out in the fifties and sixties, one might argue that in the Manson murders, as in the stabbing at Altamont, the alternative cultures of the sixties turned against themselves and brought themselves to an end. The mainstream film industry had to wait for  the generation of the 'movie brats' - Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino - for a 'New Hollywood' to take off.
 It is this ambiguous sense of celebration and awe, but also of commemoration and effacing, of historiography and phantasy, of reconstruction and imagination, of, indeed, truth and fiction that is at the heart of this Tarantino movie. As the very title of the film, ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD already suggests, the movie is trip down memory lane, but, as the title also explicitly makes clear, the world to the movie returns to is not only a defintely foregone world, but also to a very great extent an imaginary, fairy tale world, or maybe even a mythological world in which, as the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss had argued, irreconcilable contradictions are overcome and resolved. One of these contradictions is in the very making of the film itself. Honoring cinema's ontological obligation to photographically and hence realistically reproduce reality as it appears in front of the camera, Tarantino refused to use computer-generated images (CGIs) and digital technologies to reconstitute the Los Angeles of the end of the sixties or to create the special effects that have become the stock of Hollywood movies since THE MATRIX. In this respect Tarantino is a Dogma-filmmaker après la lettre, but as Lars von Trier, he does not let this commitment to photographic realism get in the way of building a phantasmagoric resurrection of a Los Angeles not as it actually was or maybe not even as he actually remembers it, but the Los Angeles as he has always imagined and longed for - a fairy tale LA. 
 This movie's LA is, however, an LA on the cusp of vanishing. In this LA the youth culture of the sixties in general and the hippies in particular only play a marginal - but eventually a lethally threatening - role, quite literally so as one of the hippie girls is repeatedly encountered on the sidewalks by Cliff (Brad Pitt) as he drives his friend and 'boss Rick's (Leonardo di Caprio) car through the city and as it appears that they do not live in the city but on the Spahn Movie Ranch, fifty kilometers north of LA. However, though literally excentric and marginal, these hippies - members of the commune headed by Charles Manson - now occupy a derelict location where just a short while ago Western TV shows were shot: the place and its occupants stand for the gap between a Hollywood film culture of the fifties that already had to concede prominence to TV shows in the sixties and a youth culture that has no interest in Hollywood movies at all (when Cliff arrives at the farm, a group of hippies are watching a pop music show on TV). 
 The same contradiction between what has come to be called the old 'classical Hollywood' and the new Hollywood that should again attract a younger audience to the cinemas is mirrored by the arrival of Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as Rick's new neighbours in LA. Whereas Rick Dalton used to be the star hero of the TV series BOUNTY LAW but is now on his way down  and only gets asked for guest appearances in other stars' series in which he has to play the bad guy who always gets to be defeated at the end, Polanski - as already mentioned - was hailed to Hollywood to give the film industry a fresh boost that would allow it to reconnect with the new youth culture. And, up to a certain degree, this contradiction is also mirrored in the two main characters of the movie, the 'has-been' movie star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth who, as both confirm in a TV interview in the beginning of the film, 'carries Rick's load'. Whereas Rick is averse to hippies, as he makes abundantly clear several times in the movie, and especially in his brief confrontation with Charlie Manson (Damon Herriman) when comes to explore the surroundings of his and his neighbour's houses late at night in a rather noisy car, Cliff is willing to give the hippie girl Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) a ride to the Spahn Movie ranch, to buy an LSD cigarette from her, and to try and smoke it later on the fateful night when Charlie's hippies attack Rick's house where he then finds himself. Cliff, then, has a streak of hippie culture and, one surmises, if only Rick would have some of his athletic and casual cool, he might have made it in the new Hollywood instead of getting stuck in his fifties and sixties 'classical' manners. Partly because of his 'cool', and partly because most of the movie's story evolves around him, Cliff plays a more eye-catching role than Rick, which only fits the declining career of the latter who is pretty much aware that he has become a 'has-been' (and it testifies to Di Caprio's acting skills that he conveys this second-rate status of his character more than convincingly).
 Tarantino, however, definitely takes sides in this multi-layered texture of contradictions, and he is with Rick and his double rather than with the (then) new youth culture that, together with new media like the TV in the sixties and the digital technologies at the end of the twentieth century, would bring the classical Hollywood culture to an end. Cliff's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where he insists on seeing the old owner George Spahn (Bruce Dern) much against the will of the hippie commune, is filmed in a long-drawn way and in wide shots as if a shoot-out were imminent that would be worthy of a Sergio Leone Western (although, of course, the success of spaghetti Westerns also contributed to the demise of 'classical' Hollywood). Cliff turns out to live in a decripit trailer next to a classical, but also seemingly dilapitated drive-in movie theatre (on the screen of which one sees a commercial rather than a scene from a feature film), and it is the classical stunt man Cliff who takes on Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), the hero of the special-effects laden Kung Fu films of that area and wins this apparently 'friendly contest'. But Tarantino's most touching declaration of love for the classical cinema is the scene in which Sharon Tate enters a Westwood Theatre where she noticed a poster of the movie THE WRECKING CREW (Phil Karlson, USA, 1968), in which - the real - Sharon Tate was featured, along with Dean Martin and Elke Sommer. She mimicks the martial art movements that she has learned from Bruce Lee and the real Sharon Tate makes in that movie, but first and foremost she is delighted by the response of the audience to the jokes and acts on screen: it is a celebration of the classical, social and collective film experience that was already vanishing at the end of the sixties when classical genres became the food of TV series and these were watched in the privacy of the home (the Westwood theatre is far from sold out, and most films or series are watched on television in this movie). This Sharon Tate, later in the movie pregnant of a child she has with Polanski - a hopeful joinder of classical and art cinema as the new future for Hollywood? - is obviously the center of the film, as well because of this open declaration of love as because of the looming tragedy that her and Polanski's presence and that of the Manson gang evoke.
 However, in a typical Tarantinesk style, the story of the film hardly builds up to this expected climax. The film meanders along many digressions that  seem to be motivated mostly by the opportunities they offer to showcase a meticulously (re-)constructed LA with all its billboards, signposts, restaurants, bars, film sets, dwellings, cinemas, streets, cars, clothes, shoes, jeans, sunglasses, that together build up an admittedly very romanticized and idealized image of that city in that period as Tarantino wants his audience to experience it (as he has maybe himself always wanted to experience it). As exciting as the sometimes hilarious or violent scenes of the movie are the almost endless drives of Cliff (sometimes with Rick) through the city, which makes the movie akin to some of the road movies that inaugurated the end of the classical film (most spectacularly Dennis Hopper's EASY RIDER (USA, 1968) a film that is curiously absent in this film, although one long-haired cab driver is scolded as 'Dennis Hopper' by Rick). In this respect,  ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is what Frederic Jameson would call a 'nostalgia film' par excellence: a film that is true to imagination and longing rather than to historical factuality.
 That goes for the ending of the film as well. Rather than having his darling - Sharon Tate - killed, Tarantino has the Manson gang assault the house of Rick where they meet Cliff - who has just smoked one of Pussycat's LSD cigarettes and can't believe the hippies with their knives are real - and through Cliff their - cruel - end, and of course Rick who kills one of the female hippies with the flame thrower he used in one of his films to kill a couple of German Nazi officers - and maybe thus rekindles in 'real life' the faked heroism of his acting life. But his real redemption comes after this violent reckoning with the Manson gang, when through the intercom of her mansion Sharon Tate tells Rick - who in the beginning of the film had said that he  wanted to have a role in one of Polanski's films - that she has always admired him and invites him into her house. Here - as he had done before in his other films - Tarantino uses the fictional dimension of film making to rewrite history and to create a what the historian Nigel Ferguson once called a 'counterfactual' history in which Rick, as well as Sharon Tate are redeemed: history is moulded into the format of the classical Hollywood film that requires, as Rick experienced in his guest appearances as the bad guy in the TV shows, a happy end. 
 Of course, as many critics have remarked, this fictional redemption of the past comes with a price: this idealized and romanticized LA is not disturbed by the civil rights movement, or the protests again the war in Vietnam, that also heavily marked the sixties, historically as well as in the collective memory and imagination. In this respect ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD also voluntarily conforms to the norms of the classical Hollywood movie, where social conflicts and political struggle were always carefully avoided and elided from the screen. The famous left-wing critic Jonathan Rosenbaum therefore has compared Tarantino's films with the back-to-the-fifties mentality as it propagated by Trump and other populists. Whether he has a point remains to be seen, and maybe the answer is in the present in which the film culture that Tarantino celebrates and bemoans at the same time no longer exists: the greatest paradox of ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is, perhaps, that is a very powerful and a very powerless movie at the same time. But isn't that the case with all mythologies?