The stifling conformity of the Great Awokening has now driven even Quentin Tarantino to the subversive right. His immensely enjoyable buddy comedy Once Upon in a Time…in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt at their considerable best, has The New Yorker fulminating that it’s “obscenely regressive.” Critic Richard Brody complains, “Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie” that “celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command).”
Tarantino enjoyed box office hits with Inglourious Basterds, in which Jewish-American commandos roast Hitler in a movie theater, and Django Unchained, which did something similar for slavery. Once Upon a Time carries on Tarantino’s tradition of changing history to a more crowd-pleasing ending.
Once is essentially a former little boy’s reworking of the Manson Family murders. Rather than the damn dirty hippies butchering lovely starlet Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie of I, Tonya as the quintessence of blond beauty), what if 6-year-old Quentin’s favorite TV cowboy (DiCaprio, playing a fictionalized composite of various 1960s stars) and his stunt double and sidekick (Pitt) happened to be next door and heroically saved the damsel in distress?
Once is, for a Tarantino movie, remarkably wholesome. It has a soft R rating for bad language and a few minutes of comic mayhem at the end. But it endorses the straight-shooting values of old black-and-white TV Westerns.
Tarantino could have disappeared down any one of the endless rabbit holes offered by the Manson case.
For example, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was much appreciated within the entertainment industry for portraying Manson as an LSD-crazed apocalyptic avenger. Bugliosi’s masterful job of making Manson seem like the ultimate outsider sidetracked the question of why a lowlife jailbird like Manson had become something of an insider at the best parties in the Hollywood Hills.
Why exactly did Manson know so many important people in showbiz? The answer was the same as for why Jeffrey Epstein knew so many important people in politics: He had access to jailbait girls.
Without all the Helter Skelter stuff, Manson would seem less like the Antichrist and more like an ambitious pimp, an ex-con who was adept at chatting up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound bus.
As Joan Didion pointed out in her clear-eyed report on San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the baby boom produced numerous broken families who generated many runaways. In turn, their favorite destination, California, attracted pimps and drug dealers from across America.
