Once upon a time… in Hollywood - You’re a good friend, Cliff
**SPOILER ALERT (Most of the film is spoiled in the following essay).**
An oft heard criticism I hear of Quentin Tarantino movies is that they aren’t really about anything. Isn’t reservoir Dogs just a vulgar gangster picture? Isn’t Kill Bill just an excuse for the director to show off his perverse taste for senseless violence? Certainly, the long-working auteur director has a panache for flashy and frenetic genre homage that often, on the surface, lacks any kind of thematic resonance. But I see something deeper at times. I see a man who struggles with his obsession with death and nostalgia. I see a filmmaker who has a love-hate relationship with history and Hollywood - a long-time coming reckoning with his addiction to entertainment seems to always be breaking at the seams even in his earliest films. Pulp Fiction ends with a blunt refusal to provoke violence and even The Hateful Eight (a film that I actually loathe) comes apart as an object of near self-parody. It’s a movie that has the inevitable fate of a thing so vile that it can only mock its audience and jeer at its own empty pathos. It’s a stark self-aware portrait of a man who may have recognized he has seen too many westerns and might need to rethink why style vs. substance matters, or if that kind of thing really matters at all. Tarantino (through Hateful Eight) seems to say to us, “Screw it, I’ll just pull out all the stops and let’s move on to the next thing. This is the kind of thing you want to see from me, don’t you?”
His most recent work, the glossy 2019 time capsule of a bygone era of Tinseltown, is not so much a movie about filmmaking or so much about Hollywood itself for that matter as it is a movie about how we perceive ourselves and about how others perceive us. And it’s about what we think others expect from us and how that can damage us forever or help us live the rest of our lives in peace.
The film centers on 3 main people (2 of them fictional) - Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo Dicaprio), Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and the film starlet Sharon Tate (played with genuine care by Margot Robbie). Dalton is an ostensibly washed-up TV actor mostly known for a 1950’s cowboy show who is now an embittered and insecure shell of a man. He is slowly coming to terms to a frightening reality. His career might be in its twilight era or, even worse, in the toilet. A character played by Al Pacino suggests that Dalton’s days as a leading man are numbered and that his only escape route from total obsolescence is a mostly thankless campaign in Italian westerns. Dalton sees this not as a solution but as a death knell.
Booth is Dalton’s stuntman and has been for years. In fact, they’ve been pals and drinking buddies since working together for so long. Recently though, he’s become somewhat of a personal assistant for Dalton as well. As Booth’s work becomes less and less frequent, he becomes settled with menial tasks such as fixing Dalton’s TV antenna and driving him around Los Angeles. He doesn’t mind, at least as far as we can tell. But he harbors a dark secret - well, it’s not really a secret and in fact it’s never told to us whether or not it’s even necessarily true. Booth allegedly murdered his wife while on a boating trip and got away with it. This dark cloud seems to color many people’s views on him but it never once seems to rock his world. He is steady, loyal and confident. Is Booth an innocent destined to live out his life as a second banana to a has-been or is he a cold-blooded killer hiding in sheep’s clothing? Either way, what people think of Booth doesn’t phase him.
Tate is an actor who is obsessed with her own movies. She goes to see them during the day in somewhat crowded theaters. She has no problem notifying the cinema staff that in fact she is an actor in the movie and can’t she get a ticket for free? She not only loves to see herself on screen and see herself do the work (even the seemingly degrading work of playing a klutzy comic relief), but also to experience the audience members’ reactions and their affection for the character she portrays. She loves her films but she also loves the fact that people love her and appreciate her in those films, and that somehow and in some way, she will make some people’s days a little brighter.
Dalton hates what he has become. He is insecure and self-loathing. He hates when he screws up a line or cannot do a take. He is only satisfied with the process of making movies if he can give the perfect performance. Not only does he need to think he did well but he needs others to heap gracious words on him - the director and the little girl he befriends on set praise one of his takes one day and he beams with pride for a job well done. This is a stark contrast to earlier that day where he curses himself alone in his trailer and throws things and cries until he pulls himself together. Compared with Tate, Dalton is a man broken by the weight of his own self-aggrandizement and his own personal measuring stick for success and talent. He needs people in the same way as Tate does, but Tate already knows that she’s great, the audience enjoying her performance is just icing on the cake. She’s completely secure and so confident in her abilities that she, as mentioned before, wants to make it known to the people in the front that she’s “in the movie.” Dalton thinks he stinks and he needs others to approve of him.
Going back to Booth, he’s a man who has lived in Dalton’s shadow. A grunt doing the dirty work for a movie star. But he never cares - in fact he relishes it. He’s confident in who he is and confident in his own abilities. But he’s not arrogant and in fact, within the film, he scoffs at arrogance and literally laughs in the face of danger.
In a controversial scene early in the movie, Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh) explains why his martial arts are “the real thing” and trumps any hokey Hollywood hunks masquerading as genuine tough guys. It makes sense why the scene caused a stir. Lee is portrayed as pompous and vain and Booth challenges his claims of superiority as bloated. The two men scuffle for a moment and Booth gets the upper hand when those in charge break in to cease the commotion. Lee’s daughter decried the scene and stated that her father was not an arrogant man, and thus Tarantino’s portrayal was nothing more than slander. The reaction is understandable. I myself was uncomfortable with the scene. But if we are following the throughline of perception and identity, the scene makes sense, and it makes sense mostly as a fantasy and not as a true portrayal of a beloved pop culture icon (as I would argue Tarantino intended it to be). The scene plays out as a recollection of Booth - something he reminisces whilst reinstalling Dalton’s aforementioned fallen television antenna. It would then follow that he would remember the event as it is plays out - Lee, an arrogant and foolhardy blowhard; Booth, a humble hero who kicks the ass of the greatest martial artist on the planet. Yeah, I would remember it the same way. That’s a pretty nice self-perception.
Another side tale devoted to Booth is a drive he makes out to a place known as Spahn’s movie ranch, a site that he used to haunt while making pictures eight years previously. He heads out there when he decides to give a ride to a pretty young hippie who seems interested in him although he declines her advances.
Booth quickly becomes concerned for the welfare of a man he used to know who ran the place. One may assume while watching that the man is dead or is no longer on the premises. He soon discovers that the man is indeed still there, even after all these years. He is blind - physically so, but also metaphorically. He has refused to accept his position - a man taken advantage of by young rebels who have sought refuge from polite society. He tells Booth that one of the girls “loves him”. He has found people who, he thinks at least, have affection and love for him and that’s enough. Perception. Other people’s opinions. We relish what other people think - and that elevates us or destroys us.
Another notable element of Once upon a time… is the climax. Like several of his films before it, it is a revisionist revenge history; an alternate reality built to upset the more ugly truth. It is supposed to be a recreation of the Manson Murders - portrayed as the hasty decision of a group of scared twenty-somethings who desire vengeance on the man who broke into their peaceful hippie commune. One of the members of the killing party realizes something in her stoned-out, galaxy brain stasis - they are children of television. They spent much of their childhoods witnessing endless bloodshed on the tube (since, as she says, almost all TV shows are about murder) and thus their entire lives up to this point have led them to this. She is convinced that this is their fate - TV taught them how to be killers and so it is only poetically just to hash out violence against the people who were their tutors - actors. It’s their fault we’re like this, so let’s bring the death we’ve witnessed to their literal doorstep.
The young people break into the home of Dalton and attempt to kill Booth, Dalton and Dalton’s wife in the middle of the night. The tables are turned and the two men kill the 3 crazed hippies in self-defense. It seems to be Tarantino’s indictment of a kind of perennial moralizing against violent entertainment. He seems to say, “movies don’t make people violent. That’s just an easy excuse to justify people who are already bloodthirsty. It’s just too easy of an explanation.”
So, yes - as several Tarantino movies before it, it ends with a bloodbath but not just a bloodbath.
Dalton finally says good-bye to his buddy Booth as he is wheeled away in an ambulance due to a knife wound.
“You’re a good friend, Cliff,” he says.
Pitt’s gregarious stuntman smirks and simply says, “I try”.
Dalton finally appreciates the most important relationship in his life. The one man who encouraged him and always genuinely liked him for who he was, not for what he could accomplish as a professional actor.
After the ambulance screeches away, Dalton is greeted by his neighbor who he has never spoken to before. The neighbor is Jay Sebring (played by Emile Hirsch), the lover of Sharon Tate who is curious about all the commotion. After Dalton explains what’s happened, Sebring eventually realizes who the guy he is talking to is - it’s one of his heroes of the screen! He invites him to his house so he can meet others including Tate. Dalton is welcomed into a new world - a world where people recognize him, yes. A place where people appreciate him as an artist but also a place where people love him for who he is, as a person. Real human relationships.
Is this Quentin reckoning with himself? Is this the filmmaker who lives on a steady diet of 70’s genre films realizing his own insecurities and his own limitations. Are movies everything? Is there something more? Does he realize that he has put too much stock into creating things that people care about and things that will endure?
Maybe he has come to a solution to his own perceived obsolescence or at least the ghost of one. All that matters are the people in your life. It’s the relationships along the way that help you grow and encourage you. Is Roger Avary the Cliff Booth to Tarantino’s Rick Dalton(Avary is his long-time partner and a co-writer on Pulp Fiction)? Maybe. And maybe the great “homage master” is realizing his time is almost up and that’s okay. Maybe he knows the power of movies but also realizes their fading and finite glamour. Maybe he knows that while it’s good to be remembered, it’s even better to be loved. Maybe when all is said and done, someone close to Quentin will look him in the say and something really genuine, something so simple and so cliche that it can only come from a sincere heart and a true aficionado. Maybe something like, “Your movies are incredible.” And maybe, in reply, Tarantino will say,
And that’s all any of us can really do.
