No doubt about it, Quentin Tarantino is a nostalgic motherfucker. It’s a common disease. NMFD. Nostalgic Motherfucker Disease. I have it, too.
He’s also media mad. Movies, television, music, books, stories. For him, it’s more than entertainment. It’s also more than “art”, a word that I don’t use much when I write about media–and not just because I’m the kind of jerk who raves about Sleepaway Camp II.
“Art” is something behind a velvet rope or a glass case. Look, but don’t touch. People who talk about “art” tend to bring their baggage to it. Even worse is when they use the word as a compliment. They also often use a lot of distancing adjectives in their writing… and I’m a verb guy.
Because for some of us, movies are not a thing that just happens to you. Watching movies is not passive; it’s active. Media is an endless conversation. Every film ever made, no matter how bad it is, is one half of a conversation. You supply the other half. That’s the guiding principle behind everything that I write. It’s the thing that I’m hooked on. It’s my big project. It’s the reason why I’m here. It’s one of my other diseases.
To crazy people like Tarantino (and myself), movies and songs and books are living things, never dead references.
In this film, every vintage movie poster, theater marquee, television show that plays in the background, record that someone puts on a turntable, theater screen and radio ad (and there’s a blizzard of all of that stuff here)–and even the iconic neon signs of old restaurants and bars–is a character in the scene. It’s a media obsession overload, even by Tarantino standards.
What I’m trying to say is that I loved this movie. I was not alive in 1969 and I’ve been to Los Angeles once in my life, but this film spoke to me. When it was over, I felt like I’d just eaten every last bite of a five-course meal. I laughed, I got fired up, I got creeped out (the Spahn Ranch scene is so carefully horrific).
The pace is perfect. It slows WAY the fuck down at times. It hangs out. It breathes. It goes on lengthy diversions. Everything that happens in it matters, but it’s far from tightly plotted.
There are thick chunks of this that are a pseudo-Western as Tarantino gives us LOOOOONG stretches of entire scenes of a cowboy television show being filmed. There are a few breaks in the illusion, when we’re reminded that this is a studio set, but for the most part it plays out as if this movie suddenly became an episode of the TV series that they’re shooting.
Why does Tarantino do this?
I think he likes the texture of these old Western TV shows and he wants to constrast their quick, meat-and-potatoes style with the wandering gait of the film he’s making. The quick Hollywood pace? The slow “European”, “art film” pace? Tarantino likes it all. He’s an omnivore.
Also, these scenes show us that Leonardo DiCaprio’s washed-up Western TV star Rick Dalton IS a good actor. Yes, he’s a drunk. Yes, his career has hit the skids. Yes, he forgets his lines sometimes, but when he’s on he’s FUCKING ON. He could be Steve McQueen if the stars were aligned in his favor. He’s not some talentless douche. The guy’s got the goods. (This is a good time to mention that Leonardo DiCaprio is on fire through this entire movie. This will be one of the films that he’s remembered for.)
This film is a character study–and its main characters studied are:
1) Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton. He used to play TV heroes. Now he takes money gigs as guest star villains. Meanwhile, he resists offers to make Italian films because, to him, leaving Hollywood is what you do when you give up. (Even if Tarantino, like me, LOVES Italian films.)
2) Brad Pitt as DiCaprio’s stunt-double, right-hand-man, gopher and best friend. While DiCaprio lives in a mansion with a pool, Pitt is broke and lives in a trailer. He’s far from a big shot, but he’s got serious swagger even when young hippie girls think that he’s “old”. He’s been around the block and that includes prison because he kinda sorta murdered his wife (and got a really short sentence for it, I guess).
3) Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. It’s all sunlight and busy streets and industry people and Tarantino’s memories of a world long gone.
Yes, Margot Robbie is in there as Sharon Tate, but the movie keeps an almost dreamy distance from her. Lots of shots of her legs in go-go boots walking. Her biggest character moment is when she goes to a midday screening of The Wrecking Crew, a Dean Martin flick in which she co-stars and beams at the effect of herself on the screen, bare feet propped up on the seat in front of her.
Of course.
Tarantino didn’t get ANY foot fetish moments in The Hateful Eight, so he makes up for it here with a ton of ’em, right in your face. He’s brazen as shit about it. This film is also full of hippie girls for whom it’s perfectly normal for shoes to be optional.
I wonder what the communication is like on the set when Tarantino clearly indulges in his foot thing. Everybody knows what he’s doing. Do the actors and crew laugh and joke about it when he has a cute young actress press her tender bare soles against a car windshield? Or is it an elephant in the room not to be acknowledged? I WANT TO KNOW.
Anyway, Sharon Tate is here because we know that she’s marked for death. She’s not famous for her movies (though she might have been if she had the chance); she’s famous for being gruesomely murdered by members of the Manson family cult one hot August night in 1969. It’s one of those symbolic “end of the 60s” moments.
In real life, at least. Tarantino, meanwhile, has a whole other idea in his fantasy where the late 60s never ends. Hey, what else are cameras, lights, actors and scripts for if not to conjure up a dream world?
Why did Tarantino make this?
I think he wanted to achieve the ultimate film freak fantasy.
I think he wanted to talk to the dead.