The New Yorker & Me: Cars and Songs: Quentin Tarantino's Pleasurable "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Cars and Songs: Quentin Tarantino's Pleasurable "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood"

Last night I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood for the first time. I have to say, notwithstanding my allergy to much of his previous work, I enjoyed it immensely. What I enjoyed was the sight of that gorgeous cream-yellow 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville cruising around Hollywood. Strange how such a simple thing as a car gliding across a screen can magnetize my eyes. Of course, it helps if the car is driven by Brad Pitt and Los Bravos’ “Bring a Little Lovin’ ” is playing in the background. (Margot Robbie is not too hard on the eyes, either.) This morning, checking out what Anthony Lane had to say about the movie, I see that’s what he liked, too. He says,

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it, than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” is a declaration of that love. There are many scenes in which the characters—folks like Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt)—motor around Los Angeles without a care. To call those scenes the best thing in the film is not a slight upon Tarantino. As he, of all people, is aware, they are the kinds of scene that play in our movie memories, years after the event, on a helpless and happy loop. [“Surface Tension,” The New Yorker, August 5 & 12, 2019]

That, for me, is a perfect summation of the film.