Editor’s Note: There are spoilers throughout this article. Besides, the film under discussion is classified as?R? Through language and violence. Viewers should choose whether to watch or not.
The title of Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, immediately positions the film as a fairy tale. Shouldn’t he be in the film expecting a historically accurate description of Los Angeles in 1969, the Manson family and Tate?infamous murders — though there are aspects of these things tarantino does her best to describe accurately.
- No.
- Is it a fairy tale.
- Set in a land of mystical dreams?Hollywood.
- 1969.
- Es a film that idealizes both the glamorous (Hollywood Hill parties) and the ordinary (making macaroni and cheese in a Van Nuys mobile home).
- Saturating everything in bright colors and big screen features.
- It is a film that pays homage to cinema itself: its history.
- Its genres.
- Its personalities and.
- Above all.
- Its ability to do divine things.
- Such as transcending place and time.
- Intervening in acts of injustice.
- And glimpse a world of a day in which all the sad will become false (see Ap 21 1?8).
- To be fair.
- It’s also a movie with a Hollywood ending.
In fact, his much-talked ending to “But what if??(More on this later) reminds us that films are an inherently eschatological medium. In your ability to move in time?” sculpting time,” as Andrei Tarkovosky would say, “defeating death in control of his situation, the films present the viewer with visceral features of eternity. Maybe that’s why we love them, are the dark caves of cinemas paradise where time is suspended?”sweet places that evoke joy because they miss us.
And Tarantino’s movie is pretty. But by celebrating the power of cinema “to see eternity,” “once upon a time,” it only fuels the fire of our desire for a better ending. The satisfaction of its end is powerful, but temporary. We leave the cinema satisfied with the catharsis we have just witnessed?, but then remember that it is fiction, but to the extent that it ignites our desire to treat injustice and reverse death, it is a significant and refreshing film.
A beautiful scene in? Once Upon a Time: Watch Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) in a Los Angeles movie theater, looking at herself on screen one morning in 1968 for The Wrecking Crew (Brazil? Secret Weapon Against Matt Helm?). But Tarantino does something important in this scene, because the Tate we see on the screen is the real Tate. When Tarantino cuts between the real Tate and Margot Robbie, do we remember the “things”? Something that the filmmaker always reminds us in his extreme resources.
But we are also reminded of the dreadful power of cinema to “brake” death. Because even if you know that Tate is gone, that her death tragically occurred right after the release of The Wrecking Crew, she’s still there on screen. Bright pixels of flesh and blood. Preserved forever as a twenty-five-year-old, handsome, full of life and enthusiasm. When you watch an old movie and see a star dead a long time ago at the height of your life, right?A momentary defeat of death? A reminder that although “our bodies are buried in weakness,” Christians believe they will “be resurrected with power” (1C 15:43).
This scene is a beautiful omen of even more power to gain from death at the end of the film. So here it is. Stop reading here if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
? It was once announced as Tarantino’s film about the terrible murder of pregnant Sharon Tate and her unborn baby by the Manson family and three other people on August 9, 1969. It was an invasion nightmare that shocked the world and abruptly interrupted idealism. of the hippie of the sixties.
Knowing that this is what the film is all about and knowing Tarantino’s propensity for macabre and exaggerated violence, viewers watch the film in a state of constant tension (as we do with all Tarantino movies). We know what’s going to happen. We expect the worst. There’ll be blood.
But from start to finish, the film surprises us, at various times we feel especially tense. When Brad Pitt’s stunt character visits the Spahn Movie Ranch and meets a spooky company of Manson family hippies, we expect terrible things. When Manson himself (Damon Herriman) appeared, to make matters worse, in 10050 Cielo Drive (the house shared by Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski), we were afraid of violence, but there is no blood.
Instead, the film is cheerful and carefree for much of her life, taking advantage of the playful and glamorous exploits of her Hollywood core partner (Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio), who spend a lot of time in cool cars crossing a city. listen to cool music (Mamas e Papas, Neil Diamond, Deep Purple and so on) on AM KHJ radio station. But the fear of inevitable orgasm, where does all this go?It gives intensity to every innocent scene, so that Pitt’s routine act of opening a box of dog food?Wolftootoo?
When the film’s inevitable violence arrives, in the last twenty minutes of two hours and forty-five minutes, it is as bloody and extreme as expected. But maybe in the biggest turn of its kind?But what if? From Tarantino’s career (or any filmmaker’s career), violence doesn’t happen to those we expect to happen. Much of the way Tarantino describes the actions of the Manson family killers (?Tex? Is Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel more or less accurate?until they enter the house. They do not enter 10050 Cielo Drive, where Tate lives; enter the house next door, where DiCaprio’s character lives and where Pitt leaves; and instead of brutally killing innocent people, the Mansons are brutally murdered.
Seeing Manson’s killers face their cruel and imaginary punishment in this way is certainly satisfying. As the theologian David Bentley Hart observes, when writing about the film in the New York Times (!), The Scene?[Give] a glorious expression to a righteous Fury?
This kind of cinematic revisionist story, the bold indulgence in the power of the hypothesis, but what if . . . ?Django Unchained (2012) (Brazil? Django Book?) It presents the fantasy of the justice of a slave (Jamie Foxx) destroying a plantation and its evil slave owners. ) (In Brazil? bastards?) You end up with a group of Jews killing Hitler, Goebbels and dozens of Nazis?Where really, in a movie theater.
Don’t miss the importance of the film scene for the end of “Inglorious?”That does justice. Tarantino makes a serious statement about how films can exceptionally touch our aspiration for justice and present images, even if they are ephemeral, correct results and good ends, in a world where these things are painfully illusory?He does the same in “Once Upon a Time”. , “where the celebration of cinematic fantasy and moral desire for justice are deliberate and moving.
So, was it ever in Hollywood? It’s one of the most fascinating films of the year. As Hart observes, “Is this moral aspiration counterphaceous?For total cosmic justice, which history rarely embodies?That informs and encourages the most truly redeeming forms of religious, philosophical and social moral desire ?.
“Tarantino makes a thoughtful statement about how films can exclusively explore our desire for justice and present images, even if they are ephemeral?
The final scenes of? Once upon a time? Are they beautiful and scary, calls to the scene of Sharon Tate’s ‘ghost’ on screen?The beginning of the film. We don’t see Tate alive, but do we hear her cheerful voice through a phone booth?An other-world voice, a substitute dimension of film production. As before, a preserved Tate is placed in front of us with some distance. like Hart?the scene:
It is a tremendously moving reminder that she speaks of this alternate reality, of this earthly paradise in which evil could not enter, of this other world where the evils of time are undone. And then the door opens, and the protagonist of the film can enter this sky (in the absence of a better word). However, Tate’s last look is back and top, with her face turned because, after all, she’s there, not here.
I find it obvious that moral reason demands this other world. If it’s real, somewhere and somehow (and I’m one of those fools who want to believe it), then it’s also the only version of this world worth loving unconditionally. And the only form of existence worth trying to make a reality here and now?
Hart eloquently captures how films, at best, can give concrete images of this “other world,” presenting unreality in a way that seems strangely more real than reality. Like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Lewis’ Narnia or all sorts of other fairy tales and fictionals, the dreamlike scenarios of movies seem more real than real life. Why? Because they poignantly express the reversal to which we aspire: the overthrow of the curse, reconciliation and renewal that fallen creation (including us) needs.
“What if films like this are not an indulgent escape from the real world, but important invitations to think, discuss and direct people into a more real world?
Far from mocking and rejecting the fantasies of?But what if ??narrative arts (such as Tarantino’s masterful film), why don’t we value it because we remember that the desire to reverse the curse, like the “But, what if,” is exactly what we should do?What if we saw these expressions of common grace as fertilizer for the evangelical land?the special grace of knowing the true Aslan, the man Jesus for whom the curse of death is replaced by the gift of eternal life (Rom. 5:12?21) What if films like this were not an indulgent escape from the real world, but important invitations to think, discuss and direct people to a more real world?