Once Upon A Time In Hollywood - Layers & Mess

Thoughts On: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

An alternative historical account of the Manson murders.


The endless tiring layers that cushion and cause to swell the existence of Tarantino and his films has me questioning everything non-cinematic about cinema: the egos, its audience and the endless opinions. Why must it all exist? Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is a trite yet simple film in need of distance and silence to be looked upon with anything more than a stupefied gawp. It can only be processed properly as a projection of a particular bulging ego attempting to re-manifest the exploitation film in the present day. Thus, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood makes no sense; it has sensibility, however - sensibility of a debased and unattractively elementary character. With lowly spectacle mediated by a consciousness aware not of itself, but of its liberties, this film is inevitably - by design you could say - incohesive. It is in all its cracks and through all its spillages that it successfully operates as an irrational exploitation of concept. Most intriguingly, alas, the concept exploited by Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is equally the director's caricature and his alternative history. This impacts the characterisation. Characters should not exist in the exploitation film, yet they almost do in this film. Agonistic entities are imbued with the ego of their creator and thus tied to the concept of the film as subjects - a queer byproduct of a celebrity directing an exploitation film. The final fold of the messy situation comes with the fact that there is a failure to secure proper measures of intimacy in this film. Thus, it does not work in total as an exploitation film - it is an aberration, a manifest of a culturally significant ego; a confusion at best. Hopefully Tarantino will retire soon so his filmography can be made sense of.





Popular Posts