Deconstructing Tarantino: Master of the Adolescent Revenge Fantasy

Warning: Spoilers ahead

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino’s tribute to the glory days of 50s TV replete with reconstructions of old TV westerns and their attendant commercials. Tarantino’s main “present day” story is set in the heady days of 1969 and strictly neo-noir in tone.

The protagonist here is Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), the former star of a successful 50s TV series, “Bounty Law,” whose career has taken a nose dive, now playing the villain on various contemporary television shows. His sidekick is Cliff Booth (an impressive Brad Pitt), an Army vet, who has been working for him in the capacity of stunt double as well as driver and handyman for about a decade.

The film begins with Dalton meeting with Schwarz (Al Pacino), Dalton’s agent who provides a dire analysis of his career prospects and suggests that he take on work in Italy, acting in spaghetti westerns, which could be quite profitable. Dalton balks at the prospect of working as part of such cheesy enterprises and initially declines to travel to Italy. The scene is long-winded despite providing a great cameo for Pacino.

Despite its slow pace, Hollywood has a palpable sense of dread to it as the principals Dalton and Booth have rented a house right next to the infamous residence where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered by the Manson gang. For a while, it actually feels like the fictional characters of Dalton and Booth could have been there, crossing paths with the real-life Manson and his crazy crew of murdering sycophants.

There’s also a flashback as Booth reminiscences about a physical confrontation he got into with Bruce Lee years earlier on the set of the film The Green Hornet. It’s another one of Tarantino’s self-indulgent scenes which is supposed to foreshadow Booth’s physical prowess. It’s unfair to Lee, who is depicted as a macho bully, who purportedly wasn’t as cocky and arrogant as that in real life.

Tarantino shines in his scene where Booth picks up a member of the Manson gang while hitchhiking and gives her a ride back to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Manson’s followers are holed up. Booth remembers George Spahn from his work as a stunt double at the ranch years before and wants to check on him. He’s menaced by the Manson miscreants, especially Squeaky Fromme, and soon beats up Grogan, an unsavory hippie who first slashes Booth’s tire. Tarantino’s dialogue is particularly good here, with the Manson crew appearing quite scary and believable.

Meanwhile, more real-life personages are introduced by Tarantino, including the doomed Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who’s seen taking in her own flick (The Wrecking Crew) at a local movie theater. How much this contributes to the overall story is debatable—I understand it’s supposed to add to the atmosphere of the times, but the Tate part again doesn’t seem well integrated into the plot.

Less successful is another long-winded sequence involving Dalton who is hired to play the heavy on a new western series, “Lancer.” DiCaprio is actually quite good depicting Dalton as having a nervous breakdown on the set after forgetting his lines and then returning to give a powerful performance, impressing the series director. It’s only less successful because it again just goes on for too long and needs more editing. But Tarantino can’t help himself, as he loves the old TV shows, and doesn’t understand that his audience might not appreciate his long-winded homages, as much as he does.

Prior to the climax, Dalton’s agent convinces him to finally take on some work in Italy, where he’s hired to do a few spaghetti westerns, ends up getting married and splits with Booth. All this is rather unconvincingly related by a narrator who sums up the action in a series of voice overs.

That bring us to the unfortunate denouement where once again Tarantino shows his inevitable true colors. Dalton and Booth decide to have one last drunken bender where they end up inebriated back at Dalton’s house. The crazed Manson killers end up at Dalton’s home where (in an alternate history), Booth and Dalton dispatch them in salacious ways (Booth ends up wounded, with a knife stuck in his leg) and Dalton uses a blowtorch (which he still happens to possess from one of his World War II pictures) to set Susan Atkins, one of the more notable of Manson’s crazed followers, on fire in the backyard swimming pool.

An appropriate reaction to all this should be, “Oy vey.” Once again, Tarantino invokes his unconscious cinematic mantra which is of course, let’s have another puerile, adolescent revenge fantasy. Whether it be Nazis (Inglorious Basterds), racist slaveholders (Django Unchained) or now hippies and the Manson Family, Tarantino takes the easy way out by shooting down a group of straw men that people just love to hate.

Why does Tarantino sabotage his movies with revenge fantasy? Deep down this is the way Tarantino can garner acceptance in the film critics' community. By dreaming up alternate historical scenarios (such as killing Hitler), it allows his audience to avoid the painful truth of reality: that the good guys don’t always win and there is actual tragedy in the world where innocent people are killed (like Sharon Tate).

Don’t count on Tarantino to ever dispense with his deceptive and morally bankrupt strategies. Despite his talents (and he has many!), Hollywood will remain part of Tarantino's standard oeuvre: entertaining exercises in nostalgia that appeal to an adolescent base thirsting for revenge, decidedly incapable of facing reality.