If Only it was Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and Not Now.
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood wasn’t trying to recreate 60's Hollywood itself; it was trying to represent it in the style of the 1960s films on purpose. So at least, in its defence, it was doing it knowingly and it never pretended to be anything else.
Nevertheless, watching it got me thinking about a wider issue when it comes to period pieces on screen; without realising it, we often just prefer to keep recreating the interpretations rather than a accurately depicting the era we are trying to represent.
In 1960’s Hollywood there were women that lived as fully fleshed human beings with lives and thoughts and feelings. With motives. But we don’t see any of that.
I watched the film and I just couldn’t help but go away thinking about how interesting it would be to do a film about 60s Hollywood that told the stories that really happened, the ones that we don’t know about. For example, what were the stories behind those blonde actresses that we only ever see in the background of the old movies? What are their life stories?
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is based to some extent on a real story, albeit a dark one. So to take the scope of this film as an example, I wanted to know more about Tate: What was her life like? How did she get famous? What was her relationship with her husband? I wanted to know what the story was behind those hippy girls? What life did they run from to join the cult? How do a group of girls get to a stage where they could murder?
In fairness, the film’s marketing appeal wasn’t that it was an accurate retelling a real story, but that it was a Tarantino film, and with that comes certain expectations of genre and style that people are buying into. But for whatever reason, Tarantino decided to allude to this particular real life event in history- the Manson Murders.
Usually the excuse for a period piece that is male heavy or skewed towards the male point of view is that it is ‘more historically accurate’ because women ‘didn’t have those kinds of roles back then’ or ‘we don’t have enough documentation to tell us what the women at that time did, so we’ll have to leave them out’ etc.
However, in the Manson murders the female characters and roles have actually been documented. Nevertheless, this retelling still gives female characters no agency at all or else just completely warps them and their roles they played. Tarantino could have left this story well alone, but he didn’t.
In the Manson murders, Tate, a real woman over 8 months pregnant, was brutally killed in her own home. In Tarantino’s retelling, her story wasn’t told. She is just a nod to the original story. She stays the pretty background actress and nothing more.
Moreover, in the Manson murders a group of young women were capable of a terrifying murder. When I read the real story it made my blood run cold. But in the film version we, as the audience, laughed as those silly hippy screamers got their faces smashed in by the male heroes. Those fictional hippy girls weren’t capable of murder. We never know how or why a group of women in history were so manipulated into a cult that they could kill like that.
Instead we have two already famous middle-aged, white men starring in a film that recreates everything that was so very wrong with 60’s Hollywood and its movies. Two dimensional female stereotypes come back with a vengeance (apart from the little girl, Trudi Fraser, who is the film’s saving grace).
We go along with it 3 hours and then walk away from the cinema realising that we’ve just put millions of pounds into a film that brings back everything we’ve been fighting against in the last decade in the film industry. And because it’s a modern satire, somehow we’re all laughing calling it a stroke of genius…