Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time, the Image Saved Itself

There is a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in which Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, walks up to the box office of a movie theater in Westwood and asks, with a winning shyness, what it costs to get in if you happen to be in the picture. The manager is summoned. He recognizes her, has her pose beside her own poster for a photograph, and waves her inside without charge. She takes a seat, slips off her boots, props her bare feet on the seat in front of her, and watches her own image flicker on the screen above her, laughing along with the audience whenever they laugh at her. Tarantino films the moment as a love letter—a small, tender resurrection of a woman the culture remembers chiefly for the manner of her death. What he has actually filmed is closer to a confession. This is what the spectacle looks like when it pauses to admire itself: a beautiful woman happy because her image is making strangers happy, the self successfully liquidated into product, smiling at the spectacle of its own dissolution. She is not even required to pay; the image admits the image.

The whole film operates inside this loop. It is Hollywood's mythology of Hollywood, a movie whose central drama is whether a fading television cowboy played by Leonardo DiCaprio—one of our last functional megastars—can persuade himself he still matters in a culture that has begun, very faintly, to lose interest in him. Around this drama swirl the period-correct billboards, the lit marquees, the Pan Am stewardesses, the cigarettes, the radio ads, all rendered with the loving fidelity of a fetishist arranging his collection. The film does not simply depict the late-1960s Los Angeles entertainment industry; it refuses to depict anything else. Outside the frame, history is happening—Vietnam, urban uprisings, the long crack-up of the postwar consensus—but these enter the picture only as muffled noise on car radios, mood music for the leading man's existential slump. Hollywood, in Tarantino's hands, is not a part of the world. Hollywood is the world, and everything else is a distraction from the only story that matters.

This is, of course, the worldview the entertainment industry has always needed in order to keep functioning: the conviction that what happens on the soundstage and along the boulevard is not an industrial process for the manufacture of images but a kind of magic, a sacred labor whose disappearance would impoverish the species. Tarantino's innovation is to dramatize this conviction with such loving granularity that we cannot help believing it ourselves. By the time we reach the final act, we have spent two and a half hours marinating in the warm bath of period reverence; we have watched our protagonists rehearse, drink, drive, swim, ruminate. The cumulative effect is to install in the viewer a fierce protectiveness toward this disappearing world—even though most viewers never lived in it, and the world itself, even at the time, was largely an arrangement of facades arranged for the benefit of the camera.

And so we arrive at the rewrite. The Tate murders, in the actual record, occurred in the early hours of August 9, 1969, when members of the Manson Family entered Sharon Tate's home on Cielo Drive and butchered her and four others. (The film, with one of its many small chronological smoothings, dates its climax to the evening of August 8—the day the killers left Spahn Ranch—keeping the violence at a slight, deniable remove from the date everyone actually remembers.) This event has long served as a foundational trauma in the American mythology of the Sixties—the moment, we are told, when the dream curdled, when flower power revealed its skull. Tarantino changes the ending. In his version, the killers blunder next door, where they are intercepted by a stunt double, an attack dog, and an aging actor with a flamethrower, and are dispatched with such gleeful, prolonged, almost cartoonish violence that the audience is invited to cheer. The gate at 10050 Cielo Drive then opens; Rick Dalton, in his bathrobe, walks up the driveway and is greeted at the door by Sharon Tate herself. History is, briefly, undone.

This is the film's signature gesture, and it is more telling than its admirers tend to admit. It is one thing for cinema to imagine alternative histories; that is part of the job. It is another for cinema to imagine an alternative history in which cinema itself rescues the world from its real fate. The fantasy here is not merely that Sharon Tate survives but that Hollywood saves Sharon Tate—that the manufactured violence of the entertainment industry (the flamethrower borrowed from Rick Dalton's old war picture, the hardened body of the stuntman) is mobilized against the real violence that came for it, and wins. The spectacle, threatened, defends itself, and in defending itself rewrites the historical record so that it is no longer the wounded party but the victorious one. What presents itself as a fairy tale is closer to corporate self-soothing: an industry's dream of its own indispensability, projected at twenty-four frames per second.

Watch the climactic violence again with this in mind. The brutality visited on the Manson followers is not the cleansing rage of victims; it is the panicked overkill of an institution that has just glimpsed its own mortality. The hippies in the film are barely characters—they are mumbling, drugged, ridiculous, almost subhuman, voided of any of the political content that made them frightening to the actual Hollywood of 1969. Cliff Booth, by contrast, is the spectacle's hidden labor made flesh: a man who has probably murdered his wife (the film stages this ambiguity as roguish charm), who eats macaroni and cheese in a trailer behind a drive-in screen, who exists as the muscle and reflex that allows the leading man to look heroic. When the moment of crisis comes, it is this figure—the disposable body beneath the glamour—who does most of the actual fighting, takes a knife in the thigh for his trouble, and is then loaded into an ambulance and driven away. The hidden labor stays hidden. The man who walks up the driveway when the gate finally opens, the man welcomed at the door by Sharon Tate, the man rewarded with an evening among his social betters, is the star: Rick Dalton, who arrived late to his own rescue and brandished the prop. The division of credit between the body that fights and the face that is photographed remains intact even at the end of the world. The labor saves the image, and the image gets the invitation. There is no more reliable trick in the spectacle's repertoire.

What is missing from all of this, almost stunningly missing, is any sense that Hollywood itself might be implicated in the world it is so anxious to be rescued from. The film offers no curiosity about why a Charles Manson should arise in such proximity to a culture industry that had spent the preceding decade marketing youth, sex, transgression and the dissolution of the old order as commodities. It does not ask whether the dream factory and its discontents might be related phenomena. It prefers to treat the killers as a weather event, an unmotivated horror from outside the frame, against which the frame must be reinforced. The rewrite restores the wall between the spectacle and its consequences. It reassures everyone—filmmakers, stars, audiences—that the relationship between Hollywood's fantasies and the world's nightmares is a matter of pure coincidence, the kind of bad luck a sufficiently competent stuntman could have averted.

Audiences cheered. They cheered at Cannes in May, they cheered in theaters that summer, they cheered that February when the film collected its Oscars, and the cheering itself is the most clarifying thing about the picture. We had been offered a fantasy in which the entertainment industry undoes its most mythologized historical defeat through the application of more entertainment, and we found this satisfying. The pleasure was not in the rewriting of history—history is rewritten constantly, in every direction—but in the specific consolation the rewrite preserved: the assurance that the image is on our side, that it suffers and triumphs along with us, that there is no longer any outside to the screen, only better and worse stories about ourselves, told to ourselves, by the one institution still permitted to do the telling.

It is an extraordinarily seductive film. That is the problem. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not a critique of the spectacle's habit of rewriting the world in its own flattering image; it is the spectacle performing exactly that operation, with technique so refined that the operation passes for tenderness. The fairy tale of the title is not an irony. It is an instruction. Once upon a time, the film tells us, the image was almost lost. Then it saved itself. We are invited to be grateful, and most of us were.