Once Upon Some More Time in Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino has figured prominently in my adult cinephilia; his first film, Reservoir Dogs, was released the year I graduated from high school. It’s the only film of his I didn’t see in the theater on or around opening day. Tarantino has accrued multiple reputations, multiple controversies, multiple accolades and multiple backlashes ever since, as befits an extremely talkative auteur at the center of the American film zeitgeist for thirty years. Like De Palma and Scorsese before him, a lot of Tarantino’s work has been misunderstood in a variety of ways and he has been accused, somewhat incoherently, of a number of sensitivity crimes—he glorifies violence, he’s a misogynist, he’s racist. He’s also been celebrated like only a few other directors of his generation—Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh come to mind—but perhaps none have maintained such pop culture supremacy as Tarantino.
Tarantino’s work has always resonated in at least two ways. For largely cinema illiterate fan boys, his extraordinary pastiche of the exploitation genres he loves works as a hip, ultra-violent ratification of regressive masculine prerogatives. To the cinema literate fan, with a bonus for lovers of pulpy B-movies, he offers a heady, hilarious critique of masculinity that both celebrates the over-the-top joys of “trashy” movies and utterly transcends them, with rich characterization, irony, suspense, comedy and a virtuosic command of cinema language. We see these divergent camps in the response to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the film he released two years ago. Many saw the film, but many younger film fans found it boring—not violent enough, too talky—compared to other films of his they prefer; whereas, another audience more responsive to art film but also appreciative of film history and the myriad influences Tarantino riffed on, found it to be a masterpiece.
Firmly in that second group, I loved the film. I was excited to read Tarantino’s novelization of the film, which was released last month. I was also wary, wondering if the book would change my perception of the movie. I needn’t have worried. If anything, the book enriched the understanding I already had formed. The book has been marketed—by Tarantino, too—as a “complete rethinking of the entire story,” which seems almost comically wrong as a description. The impression that I’ve gotten from the marketing is that QT sat down to write this book after the movie came out, but that’s almost certainly not true in the larger sense of expanding the story he told. It seems clear to me that the book is a slight reshuffling of everything he already knew about the characters and the backstory when he wrote the movie. He had way too much material—and, indeed, seems to have shot a LOT more than we saw onscreen (according to multiple cast accounts)—and decided to release it in book form simply because he loves everything about it.
What I’m saying is, sure, he might have written the book after the movie came out, but the material was not new—this is my suspicion. I consider the movie to be a comic drama exploring cultural modes and experiences of masculinity in perhaps the most direct and rigorous way of any film in his career. Then I read the book, and saw, over page after page, that this was precisely his intention and, if anything, he realized he didn’t need it all for the movie version, in order to make his point. Or, at least, he felt he didn’t need it when he released the film—but I wonder if some of the reactions to the movie influenced his decisions in the book?
I am particularly curious about the Bruce Lee scene—some found Lee’s portrayal in the film to be racist, particularly that handsome white man, Cliff Booth, bests him in a fight, and that the Lee character is presented as something of a poseur. He’s shown showing off for a crowd of stunt men and other film workers and boasting of his fighting prowess. In reality, Lee was a transformational figure, a milestone in Asian representation in Hollywood—which nothing in the film or book undermines. According to detail we get in the book, though, Lee was also, apparently, not at all popular with stunt men. He was known to repeatedly “tag” stunt performers on set—actually hit and kick them, instead of faking it—a practice which would, indeed, have potentially led to his being beat up by a “ringer,” a freelancer like Cliff brought in to teach a tagger a lesson. Cliff was not brought in to act as a ringer in the story; instead, it gets him in big trouble and ends his stunt career for a while.
But Cliff’s motivations for fighting Bruce Lee are complicated. Some of his views—Cliff’s views—could be construed as racist; as a World War 2 hero in 1960s Los Angeles, they’re not surprising. Nor are they Tarantino’s views. But racism has little to do with the fight that takes place. Instead, in both the movie and the book, we are asked to think about the difference between the fake violence that onscreen men have dished out for decades, as opposed to real violence. This is one of many times we’re asked to contemplate the masculine image our culture creates and sells, versus the reality even of some of those who collaborate in that image-making.