[2019—it’s been
real, it’s been good, but it ain’t been real good. Actually, I’m not even sure
I’d say it’s been good, but it has definitely been eventful. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of major 2019 stories I haven’t been able to cover on
the blog, leading up to a few predictions for what’s likely to be an even more
eventful 2020.]
On what
nostalgia for a mythical golden age gets wrong, and what it gets even wronger.
There are
various reasons why Quentin Tarantino’s films have generally not worked for me
over the years, but the most relevant to this blog is that, as I wrote in this
post on Django Unchained, I find
his frequent and purposeful mis-representations of the past both frustrating
and counter-productive. To be clear, as a huge fan of historical fiction I do
not believe that creative works owe absolute fidelity to the past—and indeed I
think many of the best such works aim to, as Catharine
Maria Sedgwick describes her own artistic goals in the Preface to her
historical novel Hope
Leslie (1827), “illustrate not the history, but the character of the
times.” So my problem with Tarantino’s portrayals of American history is not
that they are factually inaccurate, but that (to my mind) they also get the
broader histories, periods, and themes quite wrong. And wrong in ways that can
have really destructive effects on our narratives of those histories—such as,
for example, the contrasts between the heroic Django and just about every other
enslaved person we encounter in the course of that film.
Tarantino’s
latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
(which will likely have a number of Oscar nominations by the time this post
airs), is once again purposefully inaccurate about the specific histories it
portrays, this time (SPOILER alert) altering
the course of history when it comes to the
Manson family and their infamous 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and others. But
my problems with the film’s depiction of history are once again on a broader
(and I would argue deeper) level, and have to do with its thoroughgoing
nostalgia for a pre-1960s golden age of Hollywood and culture. The films
protagonists and heroes, leading man Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his
stunt double and best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), are relics of that golden
age, struggling with all the 60s changes that have seemingly rendered them
dinosaurs. Those conflicts come to a head in the climactic showdown with the
Mansons, a battle in which not only do Dalton and Booth triumph over these
(in Tarantino’s portrayal) exemplars of 60s cultural degradation, but they do
so by re-asserting the style of heroic manhood that their 50s golden age
featured.
I have a lot of
problems with that depiction of the decade, but would boil it down to two significant
errors. For one thing, Charles Manson and his cohort were themselves reacting
against various 1960s trends, and could just as easily (and to my mind more
accurately) be aligned with conservatives like Dalton and Booth rather than
with those forces for change. At the very least Tarantino’s simplification of
60s counter-culture to this murderous cult is problematic at best. But there’s
an even bigger problem with how he portrays that central conflict, and it’s
this: the Daltons and Booths of mid-20th century American culture
were largely fraudulent. Exhibit A in that argument would be John
Wayne, the uber-masculine hero of so many
50s myths (and of 60s
conservative backlash to the counter-culture) who was quite literally play-acting
at an identity from which his life and career consistently diverged. Am I
saying that I can imagine Dalton or Booth stating in 1971, as Wayne did in an infamous
Playboy interview, “I believe in
white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility”? Yes
I am—but in any case, such moments should shatter our myths of these idealized
50s icons, myths that Tarantino’s film traffics in far too thoroughly.
Last 2019 review
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 2019 stories you’d highlight?
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