There are Oscars coming up & this made me think of the way the Oscars have failed to reward the better American artists & thus failed to show Hollywood a better path. I’ll give you one example, Tarantino’s very successful Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, which made almost $400 million & got ten Oscar nominations (only Brad Pitt & the production designers won). For an artist with a stellar reputation like Tarantino, this was the epitome, getting the audience on his side while offering the best expression of his vision of America. This was the moment therefore when the Oscars should have honored him & thus encouraged other artists. It failed miserably & I think that’s partly because the Academy doesn’t understand Tarantino or its own need for talented directors—but partly because it grasps at least this much, that he’s not applauding Progress. He has reservations…
So watch the movie with these two essays in mind, on its art & intentions, first looking at Tarantino’s criticism of Progress:
Tarantino has spent the last decade rewriting American history. His business is now poetic justice: the oppressed return in time, through Hollywood, to punish their historical oppressors. Inglorious Basterds (2009) had Jews kill Hitler. Django Unchained (2012) had a liberated slave kill slave owners. In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019), the murderous Manson cult is punished.
With these stories, Tarantino is pointing out that the narrative of moral Progress is not the whole truth. Slavery is over and all the Nazis are dead, but evil persists, giving the lie to Progress.
More, the horrible violence in these movies is supposed to reveal something wrong with us. In the name of justice, horrifying passions are vented. Not only is evil still real, but it is part of our own hearts. Tarantino suggests we have a deep, dark desire to practice cruelties on the evil among us, safe in the knowledge we have all the power—safe, too, in the knowledge that we have clean, if bloody, consciences. “They” deserve the worst we can give them, & it turns out that worst is really inside of us.
Then turning to the oblivion brought about by the ‘60s, in taste & among celebrities both, & therefore in what we admire & how we think when moralistic pacifism dominates the public:
Tarantino suggests that we lost some important things when we modernized. Morality cannot really supplant violence & one part of what we admire in people is their self-reliance. Our understanding of what we want out of the movies has become complicated, we tend to prefer the soft to the harsh, the compassionate to the punitive, & the therapeutic to the judgmental. But this is neither a good account of what it takes to face up to horror, nor a reliable prediction of a future free of horror.
So Tarantino concocts an accident, rising new celebrities being neighbors with old departing celebrities, to point to a fundamental problem, our need to make room for violence in our pacifism. We need to learn to admire ugliness, not just beauty. Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood doesn’t present Dalton & Booth as heroes. They’re by turns endearing, ridiculous, & contemptible. But they do the only admirable things in the story. Perhaps that’s enough to justify selective nostalgia for the American past, & therefore to allow the movies to endure.
Great perspective.
Hollywood is a cult and the best creatives will rarely get the props that they deserve until they die. Then the Liberals will figure out a way to profit from their glory leveraging greedy family members.