Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD   **

Quentin Tarantino

2019

IDEA:  In 1969 Hollywood, an actor of TV westerns struggles with his declining stardom, while his stuntman happens upon a dangerous cult.

BLURB:  Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is an extravaganza of fetishes that finds Tarantino applying his signature brand of historical revisionism to a 1960s Hollywood engorged with his pop-cultural obsessions. Everywhere in the lavish production design and soundtrack is a signifier of some beloved media, a billboard, poster, radio advertisement, or television clip elevated to nostalgic fetish object. Within this fastidiously reconstructed milieu wander DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth, avatars of a faded Hollywood glory. They, too, are fetish objects, ego ideals – especially Pitt’s macho golden boy – Tarantino uses to save his bygone era. The same goes for Robbie’s Tate, but with less dimension: the director is uncomfortably content with simply employing her as a symbol of mythic pureness and optimism, a beautiful doll to be swathed in the protective wrapping of an imaginary past. Although the nostalgia is gratuitous in a way one expects from this director and this idiom, it does yield a richly realized world; one that feels like the fairytale crucible of Tarantino’s birth, an anatomy of the components that have formed his pop-culture-constituted, Frankenstein’s monster identity. Yet too often, Once Upon a Time… turns its nostalgia into a reactionary project of narrative fetishism, an act of denial with troubling implications. Not only does Tarantino crassly conflate the Manson family with the hippie counterculture, he reductively uses them as a catch-all metaphor to signal undesirable social change. And by the time he gets to his inevitable violent fantasy, Tarantino shows how limited his creative abilities are in processing realities that call for more than a bloody intervention, and how ultimately incapable he is of leaving his juvenile worldview in the past.