UPON ANOTHER TIME

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly.

As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.

There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone.

August 20, 2019 by Nalina Moses

At an astonishing lecture at the Institute for Classical Architecture last week, historian Nancy Steinhardt traced the influence of the École des beaux-arts through Chinese architecture. To illustrate how marginally Chinese traditional architecture was positioned within the canon, she showed the frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s 1924 book The History of Architecture, a drawing called “The Tree of Architecture." Embedded in this diagram are some not-so-certain notions that still have purchase today: that ancient Greece is the primary origin, that Asia is a minor source, that contemporary American and European forms are the highest expression, and that the Middle East, South America, and Africa beyond Egypt don’t exist.

Though the interpretation is single-minded (progress is symmetrical and vertical) and the representation is kitschy (robed figures posed beneath the branches embody virtues of Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Society and History), it’s hard to resist the charms of this illustration. The tree and figures are rendered naturalistically but composed melodramatically, like scenes in Puvis de Chavannes. What tree in real life is shaped like this, with a dense, high crown and strangely criss-crossing lower branches? More deeply, there’s something touching about Fletcher's desire to fit a subject as expansive and as complex as the world history of architecture in a single diagram. In middle school I had an English teacher who taught us how to diagram a sentence graphically, to draw a horizontal, fallen-tree structure and set each word on its own limb. It gave immense satisfaction to tease language into its most basic components like this, but at the same time it was always understood that any sentence, once uttered, surpassed its spindly diagram. As he was imagining "The Tree of Architecture,” Fletcher might have felt something similar.

November 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses