"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is Quentin Tarantino's Rebuttal to "Sunset Boulevard"

"There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five." 

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

Because most of you are hardcore nerds, you are no doubt aware that Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” (which I love) was made as a rebuke to Fred Zinnemann’s "High Noon" (which I also love).

Yes, you can love both, because they're movies.

Hawks believed that no "good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help” and his "Rio Bravo"  leading man, John Wayne, reportedly thought it was "the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life."

So, y'know, fuck John Wayne.

But that's the thing about movies. Like any other art form, the people who create movies come out of a peer group which is in constant conversation with itself, even when some of those peers are long dead. They borrow each other's structure and pacing.  They root through each other's tool kits looking for new ways to solve old problems.  Because "Notorious" is my wife's favorite movie, her favorite example of this is "Mission Impossible II" lifting much of its plot directly from that Hitchcock classic. 

After "Star Wars" hit big, every screenwriting class in America made it virtually obligatory to build your script as a variation of "the hero's journey".

Without American westerns, there might never have been an Akira Kurosawa.  And without Kurosawa reinventing the American western as samurai high art, there would be no Tarantino as we know him.

And what I am bringing to you today is not the case that Tarantino has used the outline of  "Sunset Boulevard" to tell his own Hollywood fairy tale, but rather he has masterfully deconstructed "Sunset Boulevard" and remixed its constituent elements to tell the opposite story.

From now on there will be spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is shot like a Western.  Within a Western.  Within a Western.  It is a story of New Hollywood -- young and beautiful and fashion-forward and aware of the counter culture humming all around -- emerging from the chrysalis of an older Hollywood.  And that older Hollywood is, in turn, layered on top of a dead Hollywood, bones drying in the desert, inhabited now by feral children and a blind old man living in a hovel. 

"The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis—out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion."

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

In the New Hollywood, everyone drives far too fast, casually zipping in and out of traffic and up and down dark, hairpin mountain roads.  The imminence of a fatal crash hovers over the story at all times, and yet the only actual vehicular damage is done when stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) tosses Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) into the side of a car.

Nice bit of misdirection and subliminal ominousness-building, Mr. Tarantino :-)

You'll find a million words about Tarantino's mastery of his craft elsewhere and I'd probably agree with most of it.  I'm a fan, and here his recreation of 1969 Hollywood is lush and thick with gorgeous detail.  Every button and belt is in place.  Every bus bench and license plate on every cross-street we breeze past is fully realized, with a depth of field that extends as far as the eye can see.  The illusion is complete.

And within that completely realized world, like a compounding chemist, Tarantino takes the elements of the real-life Hollywood nightmare of the Manson family murders and the celluloid Hollywood nightmare of "Sunset Boulevard" and recasts them as dream of Hollywood with a happy ending.

(I will pause now while you go re-watch Billy Wilder's 1950 classic so I don't have to begin every damn sentence with "And just like in 'Sunset Boulevard'...".)

We find fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) rattling around his nearly-empty, too-big, house that was probably perfect for entertaining back in the day, but that day has passed.

You know, this floor used to be wood but I had it changed.  Valentino said there is nothing like tiles for a tango.  

-- Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

All around him the memorabilia and film clips of his glory days are turning into the memento mori of his dying career.   He's not really "old" by any conventional standard, but almost before he realized it  his industry had passed him by.

Of course, unlike Norma Desmond, Rick is neither independently wealthy nor is he entirely cut off from reality;  he still talks to people out in the world and still finds work playing the heavy on other people's programs.  But they are both on the same trajectory of failure, Desmond is just further along.  Where Rick is "going, going...", she is "gone".  And they both dream of a return to their former glory.

Rick has a sort-of live-in sidekick, the aforementioned Cliff Booth, who is also in the business and is also watching his career guttering out.  He's charming and smart and poor (he lives behind a drive-in theater, next to an oil derrick, in what appears to be a smaller, shittier version Bud's trailer from Kill Bill 2.) They get along and he bucks up the star when he's feeling old and blue.  He enjoys the perks of being a celebrity gofer, but at the end of the day he is an employee who is (often literally) along for the ride.

There is also a fresh-faced young woman named Trudi (Julia Butters) who is not bitter or cynical about the movie business at all.  Instead she is an enthusiastic pragmatist who takes her profession seriously and loves doing what she does.

Above all,  "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is about the loving little details of the machinery of the Hollywood Dream Factory, and all the people who labor long hours behind the scenes to keep the factory running smoothly.  The movie is shot on-location, and on sets, and on Hollywood sets which are shown to be Hollywood sets, both active and abandoned.

It's a story where the point-of-view changes, but not promiscuously.  We see the world through the eyes of our leading men -- Rick and Cliff -- and when we need a little more information than their perspectives can provide, a more omniscient voice-over narrator pipes up to get us where we need to go.  In "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" it's stunt man Randy.  In "Sunset Boulevard", it's dead man Joe.

Finally, at the beginning we're prompted by our foreknowledge to believe we know that story will end violently.  And it does, with a dead body floating in the swimming pool of our fading Hollywood star.

This is the DNA which both movies definitely share.

But "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a dream and "Sunset Boulevard" is a nightmare because Tarantino and Wilder each choose a different villain around which to build their story.  And that choice makes all the difference.

For Wilder, the villain is Hollywood itself.  The relentless demands of the Dream Factory can only be satiated by first creating movie stars and then, inevitably, destroying them and casting them aside to fade away in a cage of their own narcissism and despair. 

"She was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career."

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

For Wilder, the threat comes from Inside.

But for Tarantino, the threat comes from Outside.

Despite his reduced-and-still-falling circumstances, Rick continues to hang onto his expensive house based on his faith in a scrap of Old Hollywood wisdom passed down to him by “Eddie O’Brien" that the only real citizens of their community are property owners, and as member in good standing of that community, opportunities will still come Rick's way.  And he's not wrong.  Those opportunities may come in the form of reluctantly flying to Italy to star in the new genre of "spaghetti westerns", or a happenstantial meeting with a Famous Director next door, but they do come.

Tarantino's Hollywood power-elite are not old men in suits.  They're young and attractive and effervescent and kind.  They meet each other with open arms.  They remember and respect each other's work.  The yeomen of their realm are hardworking artisans.  There's ample parking, restaurants enough to meet every appetite and budget, and everyone is getting laid.

The monsters are drifters from Outside, blown into town by the wind.  They squat in the desert, in the ruins of dead Hollywood.  They live as a swarm of parasites on the trash of citizens: indolent locusts full of dumb ideas they believe are profound.  They are set into homicidal motion by the word of a grimy lunatic.  They're so inept they raid the wrong house, and although they are armed and on a mission, are undone by an unarmed, stoned stunt man and his dog.

Wilder's Hollywood is Cronus: a cruel god that devours its own children.

Tarantino's Hollywood is a hazy version of Plato's Just Society: Governed by a class of philosopher kings, defended by capable soldiers, and provisioned with the goods and services the city needs by a caste of skilled artisans.  And in Tarantino's Just Society, the forces of chaos and madness do not carry the day.  The fading Hollywood star doesn't self-destruct, off the sidekick and feed the ravenous Hollywood press one more lurid scandal.

Instead, as in any good Saturday morning episode of Bounty Law, the townsfolk are saved from the outlaws who threatened them by heroic, quick-thinking men of action.

The sidekick and the fading Hollywood star team up Batman-and-Robin-style (see the end-credits) to take down the bad guys.

The damsel is saved.

Order is restored.

Community values are reaffirmed.

The stuntman takes the beating.  And the movie star (sort of) gets the girl.

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