‘Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood’ Doesn’t Have A Plot, But It Does Have A Motive

SPOILER WARNING

To call Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood a movie in search of an idea wouldn’t really be accurate. Mostly because the nearly three-hour movie is perfectly content to have you ride along with semi-washed-up movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt-double/gopher Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they wander around Hollywood in all the neon-hued splendor of 1969.

Although the film doesn’t have (or want) a plot of any kind, it clearly has a motive. One that not only fits nicely into Tarantino’s revisionist timeline of American history, but reveals the filmmaker’s own intentions behind its construction, motivated by his own incessant need to force his personal legacy into the larger history of cinema.

Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood spends its time building slowly (oh, so slowly) to its climactic event: the night of the first Manson murders on August 8, 1969, which claimed the lives of actress Sharon Tate, who was eight-months pregnant, along with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. Manson assumed the act, which was followed by another gruesome killings of Leno and Beverly LaBianca the following night, would spark a revolutionary race war.

While that never came to pass, it nonetheless shocked the world, leaving a permanent stain on the idyllic notion of flower power, and largely seen as a ghastly end to the free-spirited ’60s.

This event also happened to coincide with the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. New Hollywood was just starting to take root, and a few years later would propel an all-new class of creative auteurs, including the likes of Francis Ford Copolla, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg into the stratosphere. They were young, visionary filmmakers who upended the stuffy traditions the industry had built upon, and parlayed their respective visions to critical and commercial acclaim.

But this isn’t how the events unfold in Tarantino’s carefully constructed world.

In the film, the quartet of Manson family cultists rolled their car onto Cielo Drive that fateful night, only to break into the house next door, where Rick proudly resided. Instead of a quaint gathering of Tate and her nouveau-cool friends, they find Cliff, tripping on LSD, hanging out with his pitbull, Brandy — a rare example of Tarantino successfully writing for a female character.

Anyway, Brandy springs into action, mauling two of the intruders while Cliff casually bashes the third’s skull in. One of the maulees makes her way out to the pool, where Rick has been idling away the evening hours with frozen margaritas and AM radio. As she flails aimlessly in the water, bleeding profusely from the face, Rick leaps into action and grabs a flamethrower he used in an old WWII flick, burning her to a crisp.

The cops come, bag the corpses, and take a slightly wounded Cliff to the hospital. It’s only then that Jay (Emile Hirsch) comes to the end of the drive, asking Rick what the hell happened from behind the safety of the home’s iron gate. Cliff recounts the story, and is invited up to hang with Tate (Margot Robbie) and the gang, fulfilling his goal of being noticed by the wife of the guy who directed Rosemary’s Baby, potentially saving his career from playing one-off TV villains before he fades into obscurity.

Prior to this final chapter, Rick spends much of the film desperate to save his space in the spotlight, constantly worrying that his career will implode at any moment. Cliff, on the other hand, is void of any introspection, but due to his relationship with Rick, and Rick’s shaky star status, he’s a stuntman without stuntwork, yet still seems reasonably content.

One thing that the two characters do have in common (besides a reliance on Rick’s career) is their scathing hatred of hippies. The hippies, in the context of the film, are indistinguishable from Manson’s reviled cult. And when Cliff gives a ride to an underage runaway to her “home” at the Spahn Ranch, where they all resided, it’s repeatedly overstated how much of a threat they don’t pose to him — long before the film giddily reveals that.

See, Cliff and Rick both come from the macho swagger of Westerns and war pics in the ’50s and ’60s, which came about in the wake of Hitler’s death by machine gun in a burning movie theater, as depicted by Tarantino at the end of 2009’s Inglorious Basterds. So, instead of taking his own life in a bunker somewhere, the modern incarnation of evil is killed by a group of elite American soldiers who (mostly) gave their lives in the process.

I mean, Jesus Christ, can you fucking imagine the kind of ball-cupping displays of patriotism that incident instilled into the American consciousness? Hell, the U.S. was likely so high on its own Nazi-killing testosterone it might’ve even skipped over bombing Japan. Or at least cut the number of bombs dropped by half.

We’ll never know about this for sure, (unless this is when Tarantino decides to set his 10th film), but it goes a long way in explaining his characters’ pop-culture proclivities, not to mention the sheer majesty in which movie theaters are presented in the film. But somewhere in there might be the real motivation behind Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

Throughout the film, there are extended sequences of Rick’s acting career, and his resulting stardom, that show up as expositional flashbacks. One, in particular, has him addressing the rumor that he was up for the part of ‘The Cooler King’ in The Great Escape, which was played by Steve McQueen. It’s the second time McQueen’s referenced in Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood. The first time he’s played by Damian Lewis, and shows up for one scene simply to explain Tate’s backstory to us… albeit indirectly.

As Rick denies the story, we see him acting out one of The Great Escape’s most memorable scenes, digitally replacing McQueen’s character. While it’s bafflingly distracting, in part because it has the notoriously low-tech Tarantino utilizing extensive CGI, its intention was clear: Rick Dalton is part of the legacy of cinema’s golden era. Given that Rick Dalton is solely Tarantino’s creation, Tarantino seems to have now granted himself that same kind of recognition.

It’s quite the declaration, especially considering that Tarantino has been a definitive force in modern cinema ever since Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’or back in ’94. Sure, Reservoir Dogs had made some waves, but Pulp Fiction is completely inseparable from the mid-90s. Since then, every movie Tarantino made, or didn’t make, or was thinking about making, has made headlines. And every film that he put out in theaters spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of articles analyzing them from top-to-bottom (see also: this article).

Tarantino has always been perceived as something of an outsider, indulging his extensive love of low-budget camp along with his grindhouse sensibilities to create unconventional narratives. But given the sheer scope of his influence, (say the words ‘Tarantino-esque’ and even casual movie-goers will know exactly what you’re talking about), it’s easy to label him a prominent, mainstream filmmaker.

It seems that this kind of reverence wasn’t enough for a director who’s spent the last 27 years as the go-to redefinition how a movie can be told. Though Tarantino’s own career runs parallel to much of the New Hollywood era, it seems he’s no longer content with countless homages and references to the films that inspired him. Now he feels the need to force his legacy directly into that bygone era of film — digitally or otherwise.

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