Tarantino to Political Correctness: F—k Off!

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Movie review by Michael Isenberg.

You might have noticed that it’s been a while since I wrote a movie review—not since last December’s Aquaman, which I described as “not great…fails to sparkle.” In fact, I haven’t even been to a movie in that time. Frankly, I’ve been boycotting. Too much of what comes out of Hollywood just isn’t very good, and the tiresome political correctness sucks all the fun out of it.

But Quentin Tarantino is one of the most talented and politically incorrect directors in Hollywood. I’ve been a huge fan ever since 2003’s Kill Bill, Part I. Every time I watch the scene of the plane landing in Tokyo, I just shake my head and mumble, “This is f—king brilliant.” So this week’s release of his ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood seemed like a good time to head back to the theater.

I recognize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. A piece by Sara Stewart in The New York Post this week, “Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation has no place in Hollywood anymore,” captures the controversies swirling around the director:

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” is a love letter to the film industry days of yore — the late ’60s, to be exact. Men were men, female actors were “starlets” and the words “Me too” had yet to be hashtagged. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that a guy who partnered with producer Harvey Weinstein up until the latter’s shattering downfall would feel a bit nostalgic about the good ol’ retro days in the film biz. But just like Harvey, Tarantino and his oeuvre are things that should now move quietly into the “boy, bye” column. There was a time and place for Tarantino, who gave us his share of strong female characters — Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill,” Pam Grier’s fierce “Jackie Brown” — but never strayed far from his urge to exploit in his films, fetishizing the N-word and relishing the sadistic treatment of women. Look no further than Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue taking a truly stupendous number of punches in the face, and then much worse, over the three-hour span of “The Hateful Eight.”

And yet, even Stewart had to concede, “Tarantino worshippers and cinephiles will gush over his new movie’s gorgeous depiction of old Hollywood, its twisty conclusion and Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt’s dedicated, leathery performances.”

Love him or hate him, one thing is clear to anyone who has ever seen a Tarantino film: the man loves movies. So it was inevitable that he would eventually make a film about Hollywood.

The film covers the six months leading up to the real-life Tate Murders. For those unfamiliar with them, here’s some background; it's critical to appreciating the film: On the night of August 8-9, 1969, a little after midnight, members of Charles Manson's infamous Manson Family gang brutally murdered actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child (she was eight and a half months pregnant), and four of her friends. The atrocity occurred at the Beverly Hills house she shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski, who was away in Europe directing a film at the time.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, these months in 1969 are not seen from the viewpoint of Tate herself, at least not primarily. Rather the POV characters through most of the movie are her fictional next door neighbor, actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), and his stuntman, driver, sidekick, and best friend Cliff Booth (Pitt). Dalton had starred in a popular Western TV show in the ‘50s, as well as a number of action films. But he blew his chance at the lead in 1963’s The Great Escape, losing out to Steve McQueen, and now his career is on the downswing. He sees Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Tate (Margot Robbie) driving in and out of their home, but he doesn’t interact with them. He’s frankly intimidated living next door to the director of Rosemary’s Baby. And it doesn’t help that their careers are on the upswing.

IRL, Tate spent the early 60’s toiling in bit parts on television—including that of one of the girls in the typing pool on fifteen episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. But by the end of the decade, she was getting some fairly decent movie roles. “I did a lot of research on Sharon and became very enamored of her,” Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly:

She seemed like an incredibly sweet person. When you talk about all the different friends that she had, even acquaintances that she had, they all tell the same story about her, about this unaffected beauty, just this reservoir of goodness and kindness. Now, that almost sounds too good to be true, but for whatever reason, as I’m reading all this stuff, I’m really buying it. Every account about her that I found backs up that version of her. Unfortunately, she’s kind of been defined by her murder. I thought the best way to get her across was not sticking her in a bunch of scenes with Roman or with other people where she’s [furthering] a plot, but just hanging out with her, letting her drive around Los Angeles, do her errands, and just see where the day takes her. I wanted to show people a glimpse of Sharon before the murder, so they think of her as more than just a victim.

It was a gamble on Tarantino’s part, but thanks to Margot Robbie’s amazing performance, it pays off. Sharon Tate comes across as pretty, carefree, and happy, in that natural, long-haired, barefoot 60’s kind of way. We like Sharon Tate. We don’t want to see her get murdered.

Robbie captures her so well that Tate’s real life sister Debra said, “She made me cry because she sounded just like Sharon. The tone in her voice was completely Sharon, and it just touched me so much that big tears [started falling]. The front of my shirt was wet. I actually got to see my sister again… nearly 50 years later.”

The film has all the usual Tarantino trademarks. Cool people looking cool with cool cars and cool music. Red Apple cigarettes. Feet. Long conversations about nothing important, but with a subtext that has us on the edge of our seats.

And yet, I thought the movie started slow. We sympathize with Dalton as he struggles professionally. And he has a very sweet friendship with a precocious child actor (not actress!, she insists) on the set of his latest TV pilot, in a scene-stealing performance by nine-year-old Julia Butters. When I saw it, more than one “aww” went through the audience during their scenes together—without irony. It was all very nice, but where was the real conflict?

Things picked up about halfway, when Booth picks up a hitchhiker who asks him to take her to the Spahn Ranch—a deserted movie site where Booth used to film Westerns, now a commune for hippies. They seem like nice enough people, albeit the woman who is apparently in charge, Squeaky, is a little suspicious of strangers. Perfectly understandable since their leader, referred to only as Charlie, isn’t around. And this is why I say that knowing the back story is so crucial to appreciating this movie. We’re never told explicitly that they’re the Manson Family. We’re just supposed to know that, and because we do, because we know that Booth is alone among these seemingly nice flower children who are actually killers, the scene takes on chilling nail-biting tension and suspense.

After the scene at the ranch, there’s a brief interlude to wrap up Dalton’s career arc, and then, for the remainder of the movie, the notorious and brutal events of August 8-9 unfold.

I mentioned at the beginning that I was sick of politically correct movies, so I was eager to see how Tarantino would handle the pressure from the likes of Sara Stewart to get in line. Would he present women in keeping with feminist orthodoxy—independent, frigid, and ugly? Would he tone down the violence? Would he pussyfoot around minority characters, out of fear of offending somebody? In other words, would Quentin Tarantino stop being Quentin Tarantino?

To his credit, the answers were no, no, no, and no. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino told political correctness to F—k off. The women are hot. The violence is violent. And the people of color are human.

Clearly the decision to just hang out with Tate as she did her errands, and not really give her a story line, was problematic from the feminist point of view. “We don’t need that type of guy anymore,” harps the Post’s Stewart, “especially one who thinks silencing Sharon Tate for most of his film is somehow a fitting homage.” But as I said, that gamble paid off.

More generally, the women in the film are frankly sexual. (As are the men. IMDB reports, “At the film's world premiere screening at the Cannes film festival, the scene where Brad Pitt, 55, takes off his shirt to show off his still muscular stuntman physique, drew gasps and spontaneous applause from the audience.” Quentin Tarantino is an equal-opportunity objectifier.) Margaret Qualley as Pussycat, the hitchhiker (Pussy, for short) absolutely sizzles. Well, she does if you like pit hair. It was the 60’s. And if you expect some obscene double entendres concerning her name, à la 1964's Goldfinger, you won’t be disappointed.

As for violence in general, and violence against women in particular, if anything, Tarantino has doubled down. Compared to one of the women in Once Upon a Time, the Jennifer Jason Leigh character in The Hateful Eight got off easy. And you may not want to watch what Dalton does with a flamethrower. You heard me. There’s a goddamn flamethrower.

Tarantino even has the courage to trash the late, beloved martial artist Bruce Lee. IRL Lee was friends with Tate, had given her martial arts lesson to prepare for a film role, and was briefly a suspect in her murder, at least in Polanski’s mind. He was the subject of the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. It’s an excellent film which treats Lee with reverence. There are many touching scenes that take on the subject of racial intolerance. But there's no reverence for Lee in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Played by Mike Moh, whose physical resemblance to the original is uncanny, Tarantino's Lee is just a dick.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, sex and violence are fun, that’s all there is to it. By refusing to back away from that, despite pressure from the forces of political correctness, Tarantino has made an entertaining, gripping, and touching film which, in his own words, will be his “memory piece.” I’m glad I picked it for my return to the Megaplex.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. He is the author of Full Asylum, a comedy about politics, hospital gowns, and political correctness run amok in Hollywood. It is available on Amazon.com

Never Meet Your Heroes

The Boys by Garth Ennis and co-created, designed, and illustrated by Darick Robertson.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

So many superheroes these days. In comic books and theaters, on broadcast TV and now the streaming services. There are standalone heroes and hero team-ups and movies where heroes team up with other versions of themselves from parallel universes. Seemingly even some notable bombs can’t stop some superhero franchises from chugging along. You could wipe half of them from existence but they’d come roaring back the next year, in even greater numbers. Does every other movie or TV show have to be an adaptation of some sci-fi pulp fiction rag starring some model-perfect celebrity who packed on the muscle (or donned a padded suit) to get in on the craze some of you may ask? Who will save us from this legion of costumed clowns?

That’s where “The Boys” come in.

The Boys comic book series, running from 2006 to 2012, is a brutal deconstruction of comic book superheroes. With Amazon Prime’s new streaming adaptation coming this week I wanted to briefly revisit the original comics.

They are set in a world where Corporate America mass produces a glut of irresponsible and dangerous real life super-powered people in a profane combination of celebrity culture and defense spending. Very few of the “Superheroes” in the story (most of whom are clear parodies of DC and Marvel Characters) have any redeeming qualities. They are a result of the mega corporation, Vault American (think OCP from the RoboCop trilogy) either attempting to create human weapons, or covering up when they cause industrial accidents that result in some poor schmuck getting doused in chemicals and coming out the other end with superpowers. Whether grown in a vat or coming into contact with hazardous chemicals, Vaught slaps garish costumes on them, creates back stories, and makes them rich with a share of the merchandising and comic book rights. Comics are bowdlerized or outright fictionalized accounts of their “adventures.” Vaught American has the marketing down to a science, with a legion of super IP for all tastes: Teams of young “Social Justice Warrior” heroes checking off every demographic box for progressives. Jingoistic “God, Family, Country” heroes for Middle America. Vaught American doesn’t really care about either value set, just about casting the widest net possible in pursuit of profit. Many of the supers themselves are assigned their heroic identities and accompanying politics much in the way that pro wrestlers are—the costume and persona are assigned by management and it is the performers’ responsibility never to break character in public.

Meanwhile, as there is little need for actual day-to-day superheroics (battles in this world are rare but tend to be brutal, vicious, short and likely to result in collateral damage), many of the “heroes” partake in the usual vices of celebrity: sex, drugs, and all manner of irresponsibility with the assurance that their corporate masters will grease the palms to keep them out of the papers and jail. As if any jail could hold them…

Not happy about super-powered menaces with an excellent PR department running around, the US government activates “The Boys,” a small goon squad of individuals given superpowers to keep the garishly dressed supers and their corporate masters in check through blackmail, intimidation, and brutal application of lethal force:

Billy Butcher: Leader of the The Boys, this rough and tumble British bruiser has brains to match his considerable brawn. Always accompanied by his bulldog Terror, Butcher has a veneer of gallows and profane humor covering a very personal vendetta against the world’s most powerful super, The Homelander, a blond ubermensch in a star-spangled costume. Clearly a riff on Superman.

Mother’s Milk: Billy’s lancer. His mother worked in a Vaught industrial facility and exposure to chemicals passed along extra superpower imbuing nutrients when she nursed him.

The Frenchman: What’s his nationality? He’s French. Why do you think he has this outrageous accent?!

The Female (of the Species): a stoic (mostly silent) teenage waif who is ready for any excuse to fold men into pretzels and punt them into the stratosphere.

Wee Hughie: The newest member of the team and the primary audience POV character to learn about this world. Hailing from bonny Scotland, he is recruited to the team and granted superpowers after his girlfriend is brutally killed as collateral damage by a reckless super. Brought into the fold by Billy, he is our viewpoint to the ridiculous, profane, and deadly excesses of the supers and the many sins of Vaught America.

The Boys fits in with other works that violently deconstruct a superhero genre that has become inexorably entwined with the comics medium, such as 1980’s classics Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, or millennial fair like Kick-Ass and Super. This was a series that launched two years before the MCU takeover of the international box office and wrapped up the same year as Avengers delivered on the promise of a shared cinematic universe. What would it feel like to revisit this harsh take down of superheroes as they’ve started taking over the culture?

After a quick reread I’d say my feelings are still very mixed but curious about what Amazon is going to do with the material.

First, the book revels in over the top graphic depictions of sex and violence (as do many works by co-creator Garth Ennis). Beyond the gut-churning imagery itself, what I find most disconcerting is that the series veers wildly between extreme imagery in service of realism and pathos on one page, and then in the next page pulls a 180 with the violence and sex a punchline for dark humor. The only through line connecting the extremes is a consistent drum beat of cynicism: about politics, about the genre, and about the human (and superhuman) experience.

The anger and cynicism that drips off the page (with all the blood and gore) makes the most sense if you take into account that Garth Ennis is ambivalent or even outright hostile to the superhero genre that dominates comic books. In laying out a narrative in which honest blue-collar goons can take down celebrity ubermenschen, it seems like Ennis often isn’t writing to make a grand statement about the nature of corruption of power, but rather an exercise in catharsis to violently banish the costumed clones that take up so much of his work schedule when he’d rather be writing about spies, soldiers and gunmen.

I felt the series was strongest in its earliest installments in which the two most naive members of the cast, Wee Hughie the rookie member of The Boys, and Star Light, a heroine who has just graduated to “The Seven” (A dark parody of the Justice League, led by the Homelander) still have all their preconceptions about superheroes—and themselves. As the story unfolds, they see these preconceptions cruelly undermined at every turn as they come to realize just how dark and twisted the world really is.

A lot of what the pair discover isn’t so much the dark secrets of the fictional world, but indictments of the superhero genre and comic book industry itself. Rereading this years later (very much after the superhero takeover of the mainstream) many of the most important critiques still ring true (treatment of female creators and female characters in the industry, shallow virtue/value signaling by mega corporations, and how much corporate lobbying protects big business from actual market forces). Other parts of the story (9/11, The Avengers being relatively unknown by the public when compared to The Justice League, its Stan Lee Parody) feel very much like products of their time and have not aged well at all.

As I said I’m interested in what Amazon is going to do with this so in my next installment I will binge the new show and report back whether the transition to TV and some new creators in the mix have smoothed out the rough edges.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.