Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood - a history of violence

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, Mike Moh as Bruce Lee.

Like several of Quentin Tarantino's films, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is a revenge saga.

Tarantino's films are not revenge tragedies because the avengers themselves do not perish, nor is there an epiphany about the futility of violence. In the cinema, revenge tragedy was a major approach in the Westerns typical for the 1950s. For instance in the golden year 1939 there were no revenge tragedies among its many great Westerns unless we count Jesse James as one.

Once Upon a Time belongs to a special Tarantino category: revenge fantasy. Three times he has taken an authentic historical situation and reversed the ending. Before Once Upon a Time this had happened with antebellum slavery (Django Unchained) and occupied France (Inglourious Basterds).

Without roots in history is Kill Bill, a saga of a symbolic castration of toxic patriarchy. Blacks, Jews and women each in turn get to wreak sadistic revenge. Which to me signals that to Tarantino they are no better than their tormentors.

Once Upon a Time with its cynical and brutal approach is both a part of America's history of violence and a meditation on it. Some of the most memorable reactions in the film come from unexpected sources. The Manson Family women comment that they have been influenced by the obsession of violence on American tv.

The Manson Family are the heavies, but there is an even more fearsome killer in the saga: Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. He is a war veteran, a former Green Beret (an elite soldier of the US Army Special Forces). The wars in question are not identified. They might include the Korean War (a cinephile can imagine Brad Pitt in Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets!) and perhaps clandestine operations in Vietnam before the official U.S. involvement (as dramatized by Fuller in China Gate).

Cliff is calm and collected in his Green Beret character entering the Spahn Ranch and facing the assault of the Manson Family.

But he also seems to relish violence. In a vicious scene with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) Cliff seems to be processing anti-Asiatic venom. Cliff's gratuitous cruelty in contrast to Bruce Lee's self-discipline distances us from Cliff, adding a piece to his puzzle which also includes accounts of his having served time in jail for violent crime, and most gravely, murdering his wife.