A couple of thoughts on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Years ago, back in 2003, I worked as an assistant for a filmmaker dear friend of mine whose partner was Leslie Van Houten’s attorney. Van Houten is in prison for her participation in the LaBiancas murder committed the day after Sharon Tate and a group her friends were killed by members of the Manson family. She was convicted to life in prison with eligibility for parole after death sentences were automatically commuted to life in prison in California in 1972. Her role in the murders has been vastly documented and considered as not an active one. Under the brainwashed influence of her cult leader she was ordered to stab one of the victims after she was already dead.

Since then she has expressed remorse and turned her life 180 degrees. But being a model prisoner and proved rehabilitation have not changed the fact that she’s marked by the stigma of those infamous events that turned utopia inside out and opened the doors to cynicism and despair. My friend shot one of her parole hearings and I went there to give her a hand. I would never forget the sight of a frail Van Houten in her fifties that looked more like a woman in her seventies, shackled almost like Hannibal Lecter while being dragged by a group of police officers down the corridor of that correction facility on her way to what will be one of many denials of parole.

(SPOILERS AHEAD) In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the woman that leaves the scene under the pretext of having forgotten her knife was, I assume, Linda Kasabian, who was there that night but didn’t participate in the murders. I’d like to think there’s a bit of Van Houten in her as well. That decision of fleeing the scene is the spark that starts the whole retelling of a story in which beautifully the victims find redemption and maybe one of the brainwashed perpetrators does as well. 

By changing the historical facts Tarantino seems to be on a quest for justice. He understands that in a movie things could happen against all odds and by retelling history, things could happen as they should have. The most disgusting human being that ever lived could go down in flames; a slave could lead a revolt and outsmart his captors; a black man and a hillbilly can work together for their common benefit. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a woman that represents change in the male-centered paradigm of the entertainment industry gets to live.

Those scenes at the Bruin with Tate watching herself on screen kicking ass in an exploitation Dean Martin movie, feel like the passing of the torch from the old to the new Hollywood that sort of happened in real life, and from men to women in position of power that didn’t. That giggling excitement of the old Hollywood embodied by Dalton when he finally gets to meet her way more famous and relevant next door neighbor at the end of the movie is the symbolic happy ending and archetypal shift that this history retelling points to.
  
I don’t think it’s possible to disassociate Tarantino from the shadow of Weinstein or even from his own role in objectifying women to a certain extent. Don’t be fooled by the movie’s poster and advertising, women are in the center of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and it’s that idealistic role of independent, decision-making, strong women which is at the core of this movie.

As in his previous approaches to historical facts, it’s the contrast with reality that turns the positive outcome into melancholia and make his films as effective and as moving as they are. There were many shifts in society in the late sixties, some of them haven’t even come into fruition until recently. At the beginning of that decade Dylan wrote that “As the present now will later be past / The order is rapidly fading / And the first one now will later be last / For the times they are a changing”. That spirit probably died on the same night that Tate was murdered but it’s kept alive by the end of the movie and -who knows?- the wheels might be in motion as we speak. One song in the movie, in its beautiful Jose Feliciano version, said it best: “All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey / California dreaming on such a winter’s day”.

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