(In)Glorious Doubling

Rating: 8/10 (31 July 2019)

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a thoroughly self-reflexive piece of revisionist nostalgia of Hollywood and its motion pictures--theatrically screened, televised and drive-in. That the leads are an actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt) underscores this. Live-action film (and it's important that this one was actually shot on celluloid instead of digitally) is fundamentally a process of reproduction, or doubling; it's a photographic copy and imitation of reality, which in turn is reproduced manifold in its public distribution. Likewise, Pitt's character doubles DiCaprio's in the films-within-this-film; he pretends to be him while performing manful feats, while the actor pretends those acts for himself. Like film, they are of two characters in one. On top of this, the narrative involves both their past glories and present struggles in the movie industry. Although in many other films, such self-referential doubling tends to play out as haunting doppelgÃ¤ngers or whimsical twins, here we mostly get a buddy picture. Moreover, Pitt is not DiCaprio's exact clone and obviously neither is "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" faithful to the history it enters.
I'm so fond of this meta filmmaking--beyond the more limited simple borrowings, homages and recollections that occupy director Quentin Tarantino's entire oeuvre--that I'm tempted to overlook how hollow and self-indulgent much of Tarantino's cinematic insight has ultimately turned out to be. The indiscernibility in style between the outer film and the inner TV episode in a sequence where DiCaprio's aging star plays the baddie is especially well done in the former regard. But while entertaining and well constructed in its mirroring itself, Tarantino often wanders into mere pastiche and even into making a pastiche of his own prior movies. The nostalgia is likewise immoderate--contributing to an often cluttered and meandering trip down memory lane that would've benefited from further cuts. Even the full display of the title, with its ellipsis, is indicative of the roundabout nature of the picture. And after lulling the spectator with series upon series expressing his eclectic pop-culture tastes and sentimental reminiscences, Tarantino resorts to an all-too-familiar Grand Guignol finale to satiate said spectator's, or at least his, assumed lust for ultraviolence.
Contributing to the languid pace is the adjacent story of Sharon Tate and the Manson Family. Much of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is ripe for a film theory thesis in the Laura Mulvey tradition concerning the alleged objectification of women through the cinematic male gaze. And perhaps Tarantino and company cultivated the era placement of this film, sepia tones and all, so much so that they adopted the treatment of gender by the kind of films Mulvey criticized in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published only a few years after this film's 1969 setting. While most of the focus here is on the emotional performance of DiCaprio's actor and laid-back gallantry of Pitt's stuntman, central to the masculine/feminine dichotomy in the picture is the role of Tate (Margot Robbie), who's mostly a mute, idle and passive object to be looked at--by the active male characters within the film and by the spectator meant to identify with those men outside of the picture. There's also the casual inclusion of uxoricide, let alone the fact that this is Tarantino's first film after the public disgracing of his former producer, Harvey Weinstein, to raise the ire of anyone dissatisfied with the picture's gender imbalance. There's also the unmentioned (within the film) subsequent rape by Roman Polanski, although one may suppose that this is alluded to and rebuked in the scene where the stuntman refuses the advances of a girl absent identification proving her adulthood.
Regardless, one scene with Tate here is interesting by playing with assumptions about the power balance in the cinematic gaze. In it, she attends a theatrical screening of one of her films--joining in the gazing upon herself and, all the while, reveling in her doubled to-be-looked-at-ness as the audience enjoys her performance on screen. It's a terrific mise-en-abyme that separates the real Tate with her double in contrast to the obliteration of that separation in the sequence involving DiCaprio's actor filming the TV episode. Additionally, it gives an agency to the Tate character that is otherwise denied in the film, including her as an unbeknownst damsel-in-distress for the denouement akin to the victims of Henry Fonda's gang in the film for which Tarantino is presumably giving a nod to with the title of his own quasi-Western and with all of the spaghetti Western references--"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968)--and denied to her more horrifically in reality by her murder at the hands of the Manson cultists.
It's because the victims of injustice were the active agents in Tarantino's prior forays into historical revisionism that his ultraviolent climaxes were more satisfying--from righting the wrongs of Nazis in "Inglorious Basterds" (2009), to slavery in "Django Unchained" (2012) and, somewhat, even fixing racism of the Reconstruction era in "The Hateful Eight" (2015). Plus, at some point, if you keep employing the same gimmick, fatigue sets in. "Inglorious Basterds" even mixed that ultraviolence with cinematic self-reflexivity, and unlike here it did so by combining them in a theatrical showdown. There, it wasn't just a film where Nazis were scorched in flames (which also happens in this one), nor did it merely flame out in an orgy of brutality; in it, too, the film caught fire. Here, instead, we get smoke, or rather and literally, lots of smoking caught on film.