[Warning: spoilers ahead…]
When my father was a kid growing up in the 60s and early 70s in New York City, his friends would run around the block, pretending to be spies. The year, they imagined, was 1945, and they were on a mission to kill Adolf Hitler.
His friends weren’t the only ones playacting combat in mid-century America. Twenty or so years after the end of the war, Hollywood produced a varied set of WWII films, from drama to pulp, usually about a group of swaggering, spitting, male Allied renegades taking the war into their own hands and refusing to play by the rules—from The Guns of Navarone (1961) to The Great Escape (1963) to The Dirty Dozen (1967) and its 70s exploitation-style spinoffs. My dad’s friends imagining they were a kind of black-ops coterie of badasses was made possible by this spectrum of films which all sought to ascribe a sense of agency, and the fantasy of particularly-American effectiveness, to a senseless war begun by a madman. This was the culture, and these were its signifiers.
The 60s and early 70s as an era of WWII-retrospectives and revisionism is not necessarily the prevailing story of the era that gets told—especially now, during the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, Stonewall, the Moon Landing, and the Tate-LaBianca murders (the brutal and random killing of seven people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, by the Manson Family on August 9th-10th, 1969). Last year’s anniversaries included the global student protest movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Recent discourse has analyzed the social and political upheaval of the 1960s in discussing the decade as crucial in the fight for various civil rights, but has also sought to comprehend the decade’s arc—how sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll gave way to violence, pandemonium, and tragedy.
Tarantino’s film is about the stars whose streaks ended and the industry that changed amid this transforming culture—narratives which have been eclipsed in mainstream history by accounts of counterculture and uprising.Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is a story about Los Angeles in this fateful year. It’s a Los Angeles where celebrities, hippies, and cult members all crossed paths. But Tarantino’s film, though it features Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Tex Watson, and others who embodied the anarchy of the day, is not about them. It does not care about them other than as markers of a changing zeitgeist. Tarantino’s film is about the stars whose streaks ended and the industry that changed amid this transforming culture—narratives which have been eclipsed in mainstream history by accounts of counterculture and uprising.
His protagonists, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), are two washed-up Hollywood types. Rick, the former star of a cowboy show called Bounty Law, now guest-stars on shows as the villain-of-the-week. Cliff, Rick’s former stuntman, is now his driver and “gofer.” Rick lives next door to Hollywood’s new cool kids, the director Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). The story interweaves two days in the lives of Rick, Cliff, and Sharon—with Rick and Cliff each discovering that the Hollywood they once knew is gone. Sharon locates what’s left of this Hollywood, but we know that soon she’ll be gone, too, in a death that will symbolize the era’s quietus.
The movie is nostalgic for a very specific kind of 60s entertainment: action-adventure narratives about extraordinary heroes and vigilante crime fighting. The movie features archival recordings from Batman, references to spy shows like FBI and The Man from U.N.C.L.E, and lots of Spaghetti Westerns and American cowboy television—including “footage” from Bounty Law, itself. Sharon watches herself in the spy movie The Wrecking Crew. And there are many nods to 60s World War II films, including The Great Escape, which we watch Rick audition for in his mind. And we see a clip from Rick’s last cinematic success, a Dirty Dozen-style film called The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey in which Rick plays an American soldier who singlehandedly takes down a war room of plotting Nazis, using a flamethrower. “Anybody order fried sauerkraut?” he hollers, blasting them all with fire.
Tarantino’s oeuvre is famously suffused with midcentury pop-culture, but the cinematic bellwethers in Once Upon a Time clearly address another of his movies, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, which is (partly) a ludicrous, high-octane WWII pulp film about a pistol-packing trooper from the American south, leading a team of warriors on a mission to “kill Nazis.” To my father,it captured a sensation felt by his generation, a feeling born from butch 60s war films and crime-fighting TV—the same entertainment Once Upon a Time revels in, and which Inglourious Basterds was born to resurrect. My father was a child in the 60s, a generation below the hippies—his world felt removed from the larger, turbulent climate. For what it’s worth, Quentin Tarantino is just three years younger than my dad.
Once Upon a Time gives us a take on the decade that is not concerned with the era’s flower children, so much as the era’s actual childrenOnce Upon a Time offers dual narratives of the 60s, but it’s noteworthy that the two narratives are broken down along generational lines. Once Upon a Time gives us a take on the decade that is not concerned with the era’s flower children, so much as the era’s actual children—the film fashions itself out of a 1960s cultural imagination that was too young to go to Woodstock but old enough to go to the movies and definitely old enough to watch TV.
Both Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time present narratives that become anti-historical, with endings that veer away from reality and towards a happily ever after. The end of Inglourious Basterds sees Hitler, and many high-ranking Third Reich officials, die. In Once Upon a Time, the murderers do not succeed in killing Sharon Tate, or her houseguests. Independently, the happy, inaccurate ending of Inglourious Basterds seems to be a meta-argument about the power and function of cinema; film kills Hitler; he burns to a crisp in a movie theater whose celluloid is set ablaze. Once Upon a Time seems to pull the same stunt. Rick and Cliff kill the killers; both halves of a fictional cowboy hero divert the murder of Sharon Tate. But reading these revisionist endings together allows us to see both films as youthful wish-fulfilment—the way perhaps a little boy would have rewritten both of these histories, if he could have: the cool soldiers do kill Hitler, and a cowboy saves the life of the beautiful lady.
Reading ‘Tarantino the filmmaker’ as ‘Tarantino the little boy’ provides a fruitful lens to parse his enthusiastic vision across both films. But in Once Upon a Time, “childhood” is a deliberate theme. The film begins with an evocation of an audience of children, featuring an early-60s interview on the Bounty Law ranch set, with Rick and Cliff explaining how stunts work. It’s full of people famous for being children, in one way or another. There are children of celebrities like Maya Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, and Harley Quinn Smith. There are people who played famous children or teens, like Luke Perry, Nicholas Hammond, and Kurt Russell. And there are former child stars, including Dakota Fanning, Austin Butler, Emile Hirsch, Mikey Madison, Damon Herriman, and Leonardo DiCaprio, himself. Current child star Julia Butters plays a precocious child actor who impresses Rick during shooting. And Sharon Tate’s unborn baby is, notably, saved.
Inglourious Basterds is an attempt to relive fleeting childhood entertainment, while Once Upon a Time is an attempt to figure out why it left. The film’s two scariest, most ominous moments, ultimately reveal that this era’s entertainment, and corresponding childhood innocence, is effectively gone. The couterculture movement—which, for this film’s purpose, has turned teenagers into monsters and murderers—has fully overtaken the culture. Cliff goes to Spahn Movie Ranch (brought there by a hippie who insists that she is not a minor and can therefore have sex with him, though he won’t listen—this alternate Hollywood will not harm a child). Spahn Ranch is the defunct set where he and Rick used to film Bounty Law, but Cliff discovers it’s been taken over by the Manson family commune—a horde of squalid, unwashed adolescents, bedraggled and pretending to be self-sufficient in this sinister desert Neverland that was once a dream-factory.
When the Manson family members pull up in their rattling old car to Cielo Drive to commit murder at the behest of Charles Manson, they are stopped in their tracks by Rick Dalton, himself, who yells at them for noise pollution and demands that they turn back around. Having returned to the end of the street, the four teenage murderers realize who he is. They can’t believe that they’ve just encountered the character “Jake Cahill.” Remembering how much they used to love his show, Tex Watson says that he had a Bounty Law lunchbox as a little boy. Lingering in these childhood memories (back at the ranch, even Squeaky loves watching TV), it seems like they might climb out of their hypnotic detestation. The teens reminisce that the show is from the 1950s, but they’re wrong. The film’s narrator tells us that Cliff and Rick have known each other for 9 years in 1969, which means that the show was filmed in the 60s, as well. The kids backdate Bounty Law, not realizing how close they are to it—how much they are still children.
But one of the young women doesn’t remember Bounty Law, and she directs them back to the dark task at hand, with an anecdote about how they have been poisoned by this generation of television. “Let’s kill the people who taught us to kill,” she says. And so the murderers go to Rick Dalton’s house (not Sharon Tate’s). The conflict is a literalization of the culture war—with the counterculture actually turning against the mainstream. The girl who can’t remember Bounty Law gets killed by Rick Dalton himself, with the prop flamethrower left over from The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey.
This clear allusion to 60s cinema as a tool for vanquishing a Manson murderer, and the corresponding salvation of Sharon Tate, leads to a triumph of 60s Hollywood entertainment over the violent surges of concurrent counterculture. Rick finally gets an invite to Sharon’s house, so his film career will live on. Sharon lives on, to make more movies like The Wrecking Crew. And, the film seems to insinuate, Roman Polanski (who in real-life, after the murders of his wife and baby, raped a thirteen-year-old girl) will also not have grievously violated a child. This is all a fantasy, obviously—a fairy tale. But it’s also not totally a dream. After all, Tarantino argues, there is an entire, real-life film tradition from this era that has been forgotten, and that it is not too late to remember—and save.
