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dustedmagazine · 10 months

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Music for Films, Vol. IV: Once upon a Time…in Benedict Canyon or, Tarantino, Redux

(N.B., I wrote an earlier piece in this series about Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof [2007], which seemed to me to represent the apotheosis of that director’s postmodern sensibility, for cinema and for its use of pop music. That still seems accurate to me. But Tarantino’s Once upon a Time…in Hollywood [2019] turns out to be a much more interesting engagement with both of those aspects of his filmmaking, and with postmodernism, generally — and it’s also a film I admire a bit more. So we go around again. If, however, you are sick of Tarantino and of chatter about his films, I get it. For sure, he’s irritating as hell in interviews — and below, I start with some of my own irritation at his winking and ironical guffawing. But, as is the case with someone like Richard Hell, it’s useful to separate the man from the work, and if you can pull that off, the work can be pretty great.)

There are moments in Once upon a Time…in Hollywood at which Quentin Tarantino’s auto-referentiality tips over from risible cleverness into unsavory self-obsession. See the scene about 80 minutes into the film, during which Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, effortlessly cool) finally picks up the always hitching and emphatically sexually available Pussycat (Margaret Qualley, breathlessly feral). After they connect on their shared histories with Spahn Movie Ranch, Pussycat settles into the Coupe de Ville’s massive bench seat and, inevitably, puts her feet up on the dash. Her toes smush into the windshield; the bottoms of her feet are filthy. You can just about feel Tarantino hyperventilating — or maybe he’s laughing his ass off at us. Tarantino and feet, it’s an exhausted punchline by now. And the moment is almost a direct quotation, a visually inverted rendition of the opening shot of the narrative portion of Death Proof, in which Butterfly’s (Vanessa Ferlito) feet rest on the dash of Shanna’s (Jordan Ladd) Honda Civic. Tarantino seems to want you to make the connection, and, perhaps, to feel a little bit gross about the fact that you can.

The whole scene is shot through with problematic erotic energies, generated less so by Pussycat’s directness (“Obviously I’m not too young to fuck you, but obviously you are too old to fuck me”), more so by Cliff’s reasons for not pursuing her (“What I’m too old to do is go to jail for poontang”). And Tarantino has Dee Clark’s “Hey Little Girl” lasciviously jangling from the Coupe de Ville’s radio: “Hey little girl in the high school sweater / Gee, but I’d like to know you better / Just a-swinging your books and chewing gum / A-looking just like a juicy plum.” Gee. I get the crassness of the choice, which provides an intensification of the more playful song accompanying Cliff’s first look at Pussycat on a different LA street (and about 63 minutes earlier in the film), Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” With all the signaling, ogling and panting, it’s easy to forget the song that immediately proceeds “Hey Little Girl,” sonically framing the initial gestures of Cliff and Pussycat’s conversation.

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The song is typical of Neil Diamond’s peculiar talent for constructing gravid schmaltz that is neither too serious nor too cloyingly mawkish (mostly, anyways). That emotional tonality seems a less than intuitive choice for Cliff and Pussycat’s encounter — until we remember why she wants a lift to Spahn Ranch, and who might be there to meet them. Diamond’s Brother Love is a religious huckster, a metaphysical con man, and so, in part, was Charles Manson, a wannabe acid-soaked Svengali who managed to bewitch more folks than seems believable. Pussycat’s passionate desire for Cliff to meet him (“Charlie is reeeeally gonna dig you”) suggests Manson’s poisonous influence over her. She is thus the fictional avatar of numerous women and girls, like Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins and Squeaky Fromme, who fell under Manson’s influence, utterly convinced of his psychic and prophetic powers.

Manson, as is widely known, was erstwhile friends with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and with producer Terry Melcher. Manson first went to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, where Manson Family members would eventually murder Sharon Tate and several others, looking for Melcher. Manson was attempting a career as sort of demented folksinger manque, and he wanted to bug Melcher about it. By 1969 Melcher was coasting on the rep he had built producing the Byrds’ hit records from 1965 and most of Paul Revere & the Raiders’ sides from 1965 to 1968 (and that band’s singer Mark Lindsay also briefly lived at 10050 Cielo), including this tune:

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Watching Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) bounce around the room is a charming experience, and Robbie’s still-youthful beauty is an interesting counterpoint to the aesthetic pleasures of Pitt’s middle-aged body. In truth, Robbie isn’t given all that much to do in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood; mostly Tarantino seems to have told her, “Okay, be adorable” (though we should also note that it isn’t hugely easy to be adorable on demand). There may be an intent in that: to revise the dominant filmic profile on Tate, the sex kitten in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and half-naked beach bunny in Don’t Make Waves (1967), presentations underscored by a nude-photo-supplemented article on the actor in Playboy. Tarantino renders Tate beautiful — not much else one can do with Robbie — but never insists on her as a libidinally charged presence (save for a shot or two of her feet …).

Hence the smart choice of the Paul Revere & the Raiders tune. Their goofy costumes and bright vocal harmonies cast them very much in the mold of the British Invasion, with Beatles-ish overtones of mop-topped sweetness, and the explicitly anti-dope messaging of the band’s hit “Kicks” further associated them with a cleaned-up vibe, distinct from druggy counterculture. In the film, Tate teases Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), “Aw, what’s the matter? You afraid I’ll tell your friend Jim Morrison you were dancing to Paul Revere & the Raiders?” Morrison doesn’t appear in the movie, but in just another minute of screen time, Manson (Damon Herriman) does. Sebring stops him at the front door of 10050 Cielo, and when Tate approaches (walking past a massive reproduction of a poster for Don’t Make Waves, Tarantino just can’t help himself), Sebring tells her, “It’s okay, honey, it’s a friend of Terry’s.”

Of course, the arc of history tells us that it’s not okay. The sheen of good feeling and innocent kicks pop culture was attempting to sell in the late Sixties had been mussed up by all the “fucking hippies” that Cliff and Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio) continuously curse at as they drive the Strip. Even Spahn Ranch, in the film formerly the production site for Dalton’s hit cowboy show Bounty Law!, has been overrun by Manson’s accumulating freaks. That’s another historical fact that Tarantino lovingly recreates, reducing the Ranch to a relic, a dusty ghost town haunted by sweaty, fried, raggedy heads and a legion of young women, Pussycat among them (Dakota Fanning turns in a terrific performance as Squeaky: paranoid, overheated, drenched in weird, wanton ambiguities).

Their presence is disorienting, but it can’t entirely dislodge the visual logic of the cowboy film, the Western. In part, that’s due to the sheer amount of time the film devotes to painstaking reconstructions of Westerns, in cinema and TV, in LA and Italy; see especially all the minutes of Dalton on set, filming his guest appearance for the pilot of Lancer, a Western that ran on CBS through the late 1960s (and we should note that Bruce Dern, who portrays George Spahn in Tarantino’s film, did some work on Lancer early in his career). But the more interesting nods and allusions to the Western cluster around Cliff: buckling on a holster-style work belt when he fixes Rick’s TV antenna; staring down the line-up of Manson Family women who gather across the dirt lane in Spahn Ranch, like bandits inviting a gunfight; and most emphatically, his shoot-out-style stand-off with Tex Watson (Austin Butler, and more on that just below). Appropriately, when Cliff gets his first few minutes of solo camera time early on in the film, Tarantino scores it with a song that works through numerous tropes of the Western antihero.

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Some might assert that a Gram Parsons tune would better suit both the Western style and LA in 1969. But I’ll argue for the Seger song, even though it was recorded when he styled his band as the Bob Seger System, not yet the Silver Bullet Band (which would get us semiotically closer to the gun and the cowboy). “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” (1969) is certainly a rhythmic match for Cliff, as he careens through the city’s streets and freeways in his beat-to-shit Karmann Ghia. And check out the lyrics: a tale of a “ramblin’ man” who left home at thirteen; a past-master of roulette and dice; rugged and a little ugly, but full of macho sexual confidence. All he needs is the horse. Most significant, the song’s lyric speaker eventually notes, “Gotta keep moving, never gonna slow down / You can have your funky world, see you around.” That’s Cliff to a tee, but it’s also Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, who is always ready to ditch the scene when the civilized world becomes too much its petulant, cynical self. Better out in the bush, among the cacti and canyons. And while the usage of “funky” seems a poor fit for a cowboy’s mouth, it’s right on point for the film’s take on LA, as it lurches into counterculture’s violent dissolution.

It's unfair to counterculture to peg that dissolution to the Tate-Labianca murders. We can more meaningfully reference the 1970 explosion at 18 West 11th Street in NYC, or Eldridge Cleaver’s fugitive conversion to evangelical Christianity, or Altamont, or any number of other events, betrayals and tragedies. But the Manson Family’s perverted use of countercultural language (“revolution,” “the pigs,” “grokking”) is particularly galling in its confusions and lunatic bloody mindedness. Tarantino is tuned into it: see Sadie’s (Mikey Madison) deranged rant about “pigs” and “fascists.” Even a year earlier, other speakers were using the terms with much greater clarity, and many of those speakers were black.

So what do we do with this:

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Black confronts white. Bad guys threaten good guy. The stand-off morphs into a massacre, but not before Cliff brings up the Western again, reminding us of Spahn Ranch and of Tex on his “horsie,” belittling him and adding to Cliff’s inability to take Manson’s minions at all seriously (Cliff, to Tex: “Uh, you are?” Tex, intoning: “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” Cliff, dismissive: “No, it was dumber than that…”). Soon Brandy the pit bull is chewing Tex and Sadie to pieces, and Cliff is hammering Katie’s (Madisen Beaty) head into any number of hard, angled surfaces. (Let’s not linger on Dalton’s flamethrower.) The violence is gratuitous, meaty, precisely staged and shot. It’s a Tarantino film, after all. And in this brutally antic sequence, the film and the director shift into another generic form, very dear to Tarantino: the revenge drama.

A number of Tarantino’s films have employed revenge plots: all of Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Death Proof (2007), Django Unchained (2012). Inglourious Basterds (2009, featuring a cartoonish but still satisfying performance from Pitt) expanded its revenge to world-historical scale, using film as a weapon for culture to take its vengeance on Hitler, and on the Nazi Party’s development of cinema as a vector for political propaganda. Once upon a Time…in Hollywood is less expansive but still has complex dimensions: American pop takes its revenge on Manson, rolling back his invasion of LA’s industrial and cultural turf and reversing — if only symbolically — his extinguishment of Tate and her career, of all the images and roles she might have given us.

But it’s possible to discern other layers to the vengeance, if one listens. Running throughout the fight sequence is the Vanilla Fudge’s bombastic, psych-rock rendition of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (1967), which is both a suitable and a strange choice. Suitable, in that its acid intensities resonate with Manson and with Cliff, who is tripping throughout the scene. Strange, though, in its lack of a clear thematic relation to the scene’s action, which seems to have guided other songs’ selections — certainly “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” and “Hey Little Girl,” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and even, in its limited way, “Good Thing.” So why would Tarantino abandon that logic here, at the film’s big, bloody climax?

As ever, with Tarantino, the layers have histories.

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“You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” of course, was first recorded and released by the Supremes, for whom it was a #1 charting single in 1966. There’s a sort of pattern suggested by the film, of utterances and meanings developed in black American culture that are quickly adopted and refitted, frequently rendered vanilla (hello) and commodified, by white culture. To be sure, the Supremes also produced a successful commodity with their version of the tune. But the play among those songs and vinyl sides suggests a more problematic set of appropriations — among them, Weatherman’s use of the revolutionary language developed by the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael, which Billy Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and others spouted and spun out to fringe actors, like Manson, who degraded it, rendering it nearly meaningless.

“Helter Skelter” was another of the Manson Family’s watchwords, and another of Manson’s nutty notions, alleging that the Beatles song was endowed with the power to launch a race war in America. Manson’s racism mixed paranoia with his megalomania. He envisioned an America in which blacks would murder all the white people, save for him and his followers. In his view, blacks were too incompetent to govern themselves; they would need a white leader, and it would be Manson. So while Ayers and Dohrn called cops pigs in an attempt to make common cause with black revolutionaries (who were deeply skeptical of the white kids and their enthusiasms), Manson and his minions called cops pigs out of a chaotic psycho-social melange of persecution, ressentiment and bizarre apocalyptic divination.

So maybe we should linger on Dalton’s flamethrower a bit, after all. He uses it to torch Sadie to death, the Mansonite most earnest in her identification of him as another “piggie.” Close to the film’s beginning, there’s an ersatz movie clip drawn from The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey, in which Dalton, as the fictive hero McCluskey, uses the same flamethrower to burn a bunch of Nazi officers to death. It’s another Tarantino callback, to the climax of Inglourious Basterds and the incineration of many, many more fascists (and that scene had the benefit of the fever dream of Shoshanna Dreyfus’s [Melanie Laurent] face, projected onto the celluloid-fed inferno and madly laughing, surely one of the best images Tarantino has ever concocted). But the visual synonymy identifies Sadie with the Nazis. She seems to be the fascist. She has certainly been infected by Manson’s racist manias and linguistic depredations.

That may be too clever, by half — but with Tarantino, that sort of playful cascade of images and associations that ends up feeling meaningful is generally what we get, and in this case, there is a sort of critique to be made. If the postmodern in part emerged amid the collapse of counterculture’s revolutionary agendas, Once upon a Time…in Hollywood directs its wrath at a symbol of that collapse, and of the resulting nightmares borne on dope, irrationally enraged agony (especially over Vietnam, news of which occasionally issues from car radios in the film) and harebrained political analysis by kids reading texts that had currency amid a very, very different conjuncture. While Tarantino’s revenge narrative morphs generic forms again at the end, into alternate history, there’s a way in which that mutation can be read as a useful provocation. Not just a thought experiment, or a gesture lionizing fiction’s weirding power, in some ironized celebration of relativist spectacle. But a reminder that while history has to happen the way it happens, our histories are constructions, and they tell very partial and very particular stories. It’s an old saw, now, to recommend postmodernity’s meta- moves and pop cultural saturations as testing grounds for our reading strategies, but that doesn’t make the assertion any less cogent. Perhaps, to burn through the layers of images, to burn down the funhouse of contemporary revisionisms and to fight the fascists, who continue to manipulate media, what we need is a powerful instrument: our minds, tempered by their interactions with tempting narratives that wish to tell us pleasant stories.

Or mavbe we just want to watch Sharon dance, Manson be damned.