Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) directed by Quentin Tarantino (with spoilers)

I’m almost always at odds with myself about Quentin Tarantino’s movies. With the exception of Inglourious Basterds and Jackie Brown (both unmitigated delights in my book) I’m almost always queasy about them at the same time that I am undeniably into them. Hateful Eight and Death Proof are the ones that I’m most down on, though a rewatch of either could shift that position. Josh Larsen said, in a discussion of Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs on a recent episode of Filmspotting, "I think that [Mr Blonde cutting of a policeman’s ear while dancing to Stealer’s Wheel] was probably our first indication that being a Tarantino fan was going to be a very morally murky proposition." I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a fan, but I don’t always feel great about that fact. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is no different in that regard, while being very different from his previous work in some ways.

As much as the title is an homage to Sergio Leone, it’s also a statement that the film is essentially a fairy tale. It’s going to give you QT’s take on the proverbial Hollywood ending. The bulk of the time is spent with DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth, a fading TV cowboy and his stunt double/gofer sidekick. Dalton is neighbors with Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, at the time the hottest director in Hollywood. The Manson Family drifts around the perimeter of the movie, as does Sharon Tate. The movie is mostly a hangout film with Dalton and Booth.

DiCaprio turns my favorite performance of his. An actor playing a bad actor is a tough thing, and he pulls it off. There’s a scene in the middle opposite a child actor he’s playing against in the pilot of a western that is one of the best things I’ve seen in a while.  Robbie is fantastic as Tate. If one were to complain that she has few spoken lines, I could see that as a valid complaint. My read on it is that it is an homage to a person who had a great career ahead of her and a genuine wish that she hadn’t been killed. Given Tarantino’s reputation for dialogue, it could also be an attempt to write a character without that strength. Pitt is fantastic as well, though his character is really a terrible guy.

Like the best fairy tales, it’s got a dark subtext. Pitt is no longer an active stunt man because he reputedly killed his wife and is a jackass on set. On the set of Green Hornet he gets knocked down by Bruce Lee and then throws him into a car. This has been seen as disrespectful to Lee, and I can see that from one angle. Given QT’s love for Lee, though, I think a likelier intent is to show how the old hollywood is on the way out, and Bruce Lee represents the future. As the older more conservative Hollywood is fading, the new Hollywood is taking over. Dalton and Booth aren’t the only one’s on the way out. They represent the old guard.

The ending, in which the Manson family attacks Dalton and Booth instead of Tate, et al, and are brutally murdered themselves is both thrilling and way too much. Imagine a world in which Tate and her friends survive. Maybe Polanski doesn’t commit the sex crime he’s in exile over. Dalton and Booth seem to get a second lease on work life. The knowledge that Tate died in real life, and the old guard Pitt and DiCaprio represent are definitively on the way out undercuts the happiness. As does the violence done to the Manson girls. The Manson family is hardly a sympathetic group. Them dying instead of Tate and her friends is preferable. Still the absolute brutality of their deaths is overwhelming. If QT didn’t have a reputation for portraying joyful violence against women it might play a little differently. Cliff Booth is not supposed to be a good person. But Pitt and DiCaprio are charisma machines and their (especially Pitt’s) effortless cool makes them seem better.


But that’s the point, the dark subtext. Hollywood endings are bullshit. The rest of the Manson family is still out there. Another attack could happen. Dalton and Booth’s Hollywood is going away. The loss of that old Hollywood is sad in some ways. It’s rare that saying a director is having it both ways is a good thing, but in this case I think it is. The film is an elegy to old hollywood and a sincere wish that things turned out differently. But it is well aware that that is not the case. I personally found the climactic violence stomach churning, but it does underline the point that this is a Hollywood ending, and that Hollywood endings are pure fantasy. Despite having to avert my eyes during the climatic violence the second time I saw it, I absolutely loved the movie. It’s only behind Inglourious Basterds and Jackie Brown for me. Those are his two masterpieces. With more thought and viewings I could come to see this as the third.

Highly Recommended.

The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson

The Man Who Bridged the Mist, a novella that is available as a standalone or the excellent collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees, was my favorite fiction that I read for the first time in 2016. I’ve thought about it at least every other month in the interim despite not rereading it until now. As I’m continuing my read/reread of Lovecraftian fiction, I wanted to return to this now that I've read more actual Lovecraft. This has Lovecraftian elements, but is its own entity; it’s also better than anything I’ve read by the old guy yet.

It’s a fantasy in an alternate world that does have some overlap with Lovecraft. But in that world Johnson weaves a story that is partly David McCullough feat of engineering story and partly a love story. Lovecraft was fond of vast onyx castles and the like, but he never dwelled on the experience of building one. It certainly doesn’t appear to have occurred to him to write a love story. These genres mix surprisingly well.

The nation in this world is divided by a mist river that corrodes most materials except for metals, certain woods and ropes made from the skins of the fish that swim in it. The mist is denser than water and caustic. Deep under the river of mist live the Big Ones, largely unseen but deadly creatures. The mist can only be crossed on light skiffs, and the passage is dangerous. An engineer is brought there to build a bridge across the river.

In excellent prose, Johnson tells a story that is wise about the ways that all technological advances shape society and its effects on individuals. What happens to the skiff pilots when the bridge is finished? Is connecting the two halves of the kingdom a good thing? It seems likely, but is it worth the cost? There is a real understanding of the satisfaction of a job well done, that is counterbalanced by a real understanding that every advance is a leaving of something else, for good and ill. There is a real understanding of economics. The love story pays off in a believable way; emotional but not naive about the future. It evokes that sense of divine discontent that Kenneth Graham talked about in The Wind and the Willows*; a childlike awe without being childish. It is a perfect story all round.

Canon.

*In addition to this and the River of Bees collection, if you grew up on Wind in the Willows, Johnson's sequel to that The River Bank is also excellent!

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke

This is my fifth James Lee Burke novel, and the second featuring Hackberry Holland. After reading the first two of each series, I think I like Hackberry Holland more than Burke’s signature character Dave Robicheaux. In Lay Down My Sword and Shield, the first Holland book, Hackberry is a dissolute lawyer and would-be politician, running for senator in Texas. He is an alcoholic, a frequenter of bordellos and has a fraught relationship with his wife, who is the one who really wants him in politics. As he begins to see the pressures that corporate forces place on him even as he is running and his alcoholism begins to come to a head he has a crisis of conscience and throws it all away to help a union group.

Rain Gods happens 30 years later, more or less. Holland is now an aging local sheriff and a widower (from his second wife). In his county Pete Flores, a young veteran, gets involved with some criminals and finds himself complicit in human trafficking and murder. Holland and others get drawn into the investigation. The main antagonist is Preacher Jack Collins. He is a singular villain. Early on I pictured him as a twist Anton Chigurh type; implacable, inscrutable and seemingly inevitable. But rather than seeing himself as an avatar of blind chance, Collins sees himself as God’s instrument. He also has an odd crisis of conscience which Chigurh never has.

Burke frames his books as moral quandaries. He has profound insights into aspects of human behavior. The need to be a good person, or the inability to see oneself as good is a constant theme in the books I’ve read so far. One thing I love about his work is that the moral microscope is trained as much or more on the protagonists of the stories than the antagonists. This is an impulse that I don’t often see. Morality in the twitter age seems to be something for other people; pointing out others moral failings puts the speaker in the clear. The prosecutor rather than the defendant. Not that people don’t need calling out much of the time; that is an important task. It would just be nice to see some self reflection as well. That is to say, I appreciate Burke’s willingness to wrestle with the question of what makes me good, not just what would make you good, even as I don't 100% agree with his answers to those questions. Not that he doesn’t rail against injustice; he very much does. He’s just refreshingly willing to implicate himself, and by extension the reader, as well. The frustrating thing is that he is nuanced at times, and absolute in others. I found myself nodding at most of it and raising my eyebrow at others.

The writing style, as always with Burke, is unimpeachable. He has a great descriptive voice and a good ear for dialog. Since I compared Preacher Jack Collins to Anton Chigurh (product of having recently reread No Country For Old Men), I might as well say that I like Burke on a sentence to sentence level much more than Cormac McCarthy (an author who I really love). On the book to book level, I probably still prefer McCarthy, but the margin isn’t wide.

Highly Recommended.

Sad addendum: While I was reading this book, I learned of the death of my friend Keith Morgan who introduced me to the work of James Lee Burke, among other writers. He was one of my favorite people to talk books with. We hadn’t spoken in a while, and now we’ll never argue Hackberry Holland vs. Dave Robicheaux. The world is poorer without him.

Dagon by Fred Chappell

When I first read this in 2013, I was fairly familiar with the Southern Gothic genre. Flannery O’Connor was and still is one of my favorite writers. I had also tried and failed to like Faulkner (I’m still willing to give him another go at some point). I had read all of Cormac McCarthy’s early non-Western novels which I liked, though not so well as his later work. I’d read the odd book here and there by others who worked in a similar vein. So the Southern Gothic parts of this were recognizable, despite the exaggeration and grotesquery that attends the genre. Even though I’d already started reading authors who to some extent or another are influenced by Lovecraft, I was insufficiently familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos to make much sense of that side of things. I knew I had read something disturbing and good, but couldn’t say too much past that. It was particularly strange given the Chappell novels I read previously were in a picturesque folklore Appalachian vein. Very funny, very moving and very good, but they in no way prepared me for this. The only similarity I could see was the high quality of the prose. Returning to the book now, having recently read a lot of Lovecraftian fiction and even more recently more fiction by Lovecraft himself, I had a better sense of that genre and as a result enjoyed the novel much more this time around. The two genres blend disturbingly well.

Peter Leland, a scholarly Methodist minister, inherits an old family home and moves in with his wife for an extended sabbatical. He is working on a book about the relation between the ancient worship of the Philistine god Dagon and modern obsession with sexuality that pervaded culture (for context the book was published in 1968). Walking around in it he begins to become obsessed with the place and with the papers of his grandfather (or great-grandfather) who seemed to be involved in a pagan religion of some kind; the reader of Lovecraft will recognize it as some splinter of the Cthulhu cult. It becomes likely that the Biblical Dagon and the lovecraftian Dagon are the same entity. He and his wife encounter a family that live on his land. They claim to have done so for generations. There is something off about them; the reader of Lovecraft will recognize that they seem to come from a similar lineage to the fish people in Shadow over Innsmouth. Peter begins to become obsessed with the daughter of that family. From there the Southern Gothic and Lovecraftian tropes mix in fascinating ways as Peter loses his grip on reality, does horrible things and has horrible things done to him.

This is a brilliantly conceived, well executed, and extremely disturbing story that I suspect will stick with me much longer this time.

Highly Recommended.

Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand had been on my radar for years as an author whose books I saw in bookstores and had a vague idea that she was considered good. I finally got around to her this year and now I’m kicking myself for not having started sooner. This is the third of her novels I’ve read tand is as good in its way as the other two. All signs point to Hand being able to write just about anything. Wylding Hall is a folk horror fairy tale structured as an oral history. Generation Loss is a gothic punk rock take on the horror thriller. This is a straightforward fantasy.  She’s three for three in my book.

It begins as Sweeney Cassidy begins her first semester at the prestigious University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, a sort of Ivy League school with ties to the Benandanti, a patriarchal society of wizards which has existed for centuries and is to the Illuminati what the Illuminati is to everyone else. It emerges that they are in an eons long struggle to keep an older matriarchal goddess worshiping religion suppressed. In an early class she meets Oliver and Angelica, scions of old families that are legacies at the school, and unwittingly the product of centuries of angling for a final confrontation between the two religious forces. They are supposed to fall in love. Sweeney falls for both of them and they for her and that throws a wrench in the works. I don’t want to spoil too much of the rest of it other than to say it doesn’t play out exactly as I expected, but plays out perfectly. Such a narrative begs for political readings, and they are there. But it never gets preachy.

The prose is excellent as I’ve come to expect from Hand. There is a little necessary place setting near the beginning, but it is not heavy handed. Once the ball is rolling the book moves quickly, despite its length. I love the structure of the book. Where a lot of novelists might have placed the final showdown and gone for a more obvious climax/hammering of the books themes it basically finishes the setup of the novel, and what could have been just a better version of The Magicians becomes something of a completely different order.

At this point, I think Generation Loss is still my favorite of the three Hand novels I’ve read so far, but all are of the type that rewards rereading, so that could change. This is an amazing book that I look forward to revisiting in a year or two after reading more of Hand’s work.

Canon-Worthy

The Mist by Stephen King

This is my eighth Stephen King book. I’ve at least enjoyed all of them (except for The Green Mile) and really loved Misery, The Shining and a few of the stories in Everything’s Eventual. I’d add this novella to that list.

Having finally read more than a couple of Lovecraft’s works, I’m planning on rereading Lovecraft influenced stuff I’ve read in the past and try out some new to me works. This is the latter, and it really  works. As great as something epic like IT can be in moments, I like King at this length (150 pages). This felt like the crisp hour long thriller like the Hitch Hiker next to something that is really good but bloated, like Infinity War.

The novella opens with a terrible storm that damages several houses. An illustrator, his son and his neighbor with whom he quarrels go into town for supplies. Before they leave they see a mysterious mist crawling across the lake. The mist catches up to them in town, and they are trapped in a crowded grocery store. People who walk into the mist get snatched away. The tension ratchets up nicely, and it ends with a little more hope that Lovecraft would have done, I think. But there are the gigantic lovecraftian things dimly seen in addition to the smaller monsters that add that awe-filled creeping terror that is my favorite kind of horror.

Highly Recommended

The Call of Cthuhlu and Other Dark Tales by HP Lovecraft (Barnes and Noble Edition)

So many of the books and authors I’ve read over the years have been influenced by HP Lovecraft, and yet I’ve read very little of his work before. Tim Powers, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Fred Chappell (yes that Fred Chappell). The novella The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson a mix of Lovecraftian horror with David McCullough style feats of engineering storytelling was my favorite fiction of the year in 2016. This was my entree into the recent surge of Lovecraft reimaginings as his books went into the public domain and people began to push back against his racism and attitude toward women. Johnson’s The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and the excellent Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle all fall into this category. Then I discovered a writer who quickly jumped to my top 10 or 15 list, Caitlin R Kiernan.

I started with her Agents of Dreamland last year, which is very much a part of that resurgence of Lovecraftian fiction. I’ve since read seven more of her books and nearly all of it relates back to Lovecraft in some way. I still prefer her to him, but as I read this collection I understood her work much better. Reading this collection was worth it for that alone.

I know that I read At the Mouth of Madness a few years ago, and last year I read The Horror at Red Hook so that I could better understand Ballad of Black Tom, which is a retelling of Red Hook from the perspective of a black man. I think that I probably read another story or so of his back before I started keeping a record of my reading in 2002, but I can’t be sure. Lovecraft’s influence is so pervasive that I could recognize it when I saw it. Reading these stories, though, I realized where my understanding was off regarding him. First I didn’t realize how much of a materialist he was. There are rites and ancient gods, yes, but they are all from outer space or other dimensions. I also realized how right people are when they point out that he was racist and xenophobic even by the standards of his time. That’s impossible to hand wave away, but it doesn’t mean his work is not worth reading. It is very much worth reading, even if I much prefer those he influenced.

The standout stories in this were the title story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Dreams in the Witch House. I will likely read all of those again.* The gradual build of tension, dread and madness as people search out knowledge that they should never have is one of my favorite approaches to storytelling. Cults try to raise ancient alien gods. There is something out there watching us, but it is not benevolent. Mankind is so small in the cosmos, and the existential horror of a materialist worldview is used to great effect. More than anything else, the mood of a Lovecraft story is what I enjoy most about it.

I finally get why he is so beloved and so reviled at the same time. I plan to read another collection of his work sometime soon, but also to read and reread some things he influenced. I picked up a copy of Stephen King’s The Mist. I also look forward to rereading The Man Who Bridged the Mist and The Ballad of Black Tom now that I have more context. I’m glad I read this.

Recommended (some stories highly so).
*There are others like Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family to which I will likely never return.