Hollywood Tales
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Mild spoiler alert
Someone recently recommended me a book called “The Archive of Alternative Endings” after I shared the story about my name. The book “explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold.” The imagination of another world, of “what might have been”, is an intriguing yet daunting one. I still remember very vividly the last time when Quentin Tarantino decided to tweak history and expedite the end of WWII in “Inglourious Basterds”. This time the spotlight is turned back on Hollywood. We know the story — an ingénue comes to Hollywood with her dreams and god forbid it doesn’t end well. We know the story of Elizabeth Short, aka the “Black Dahlia”, on the morning of January 15, 1947 when her naked body was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles bisected at the waist. We know the story of Norma Desmond in the haunted Renaissance mansion on Sunset Boulevard and yes the story of Sharon Tate.
The story of Sharon Tate was one that was half told. You may know that she was a rising star. You may know she was eight and a half months pregnant when she was stabbed to death in her rented house on Cielo Drive. You may know it was ordered by cult leader Charles Manson. What you may not know is Manson was an unfulfilled musician rejected by the producer who happened to own Tate’s house. A white supremacist and a fanatic for the Beatles’ white album, Manson intended to start a race war by killing the white and ultra rich — Tate along with four of her elite friends — and framing the Black Panther.
I watched the documentary of Joan Didion again on Netflix, “The Center Will Not Hold”, as I was writing this. “Before the Manson case, everything seemed explicable. And suddenly the manson case happened and nothing was making sense,” she says and gesticulates. The Pitt-Dicaprio plot, despite its abundant presence, seems trivial. Because everything makes perfect sense — the unapologetic celebration of white male stardom in the late 60s, the frustration on Rick Dalton’s (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) face when his fellow actor Trudi, an eight-year-old girl, told him she didn’t like being called pumpkin puss, the mockery of Bruce Lee and the Martial Arts, and the irrevocable decline of the golden age.
Hollywood tells good stories about us and about them, to us and to themselves. Good stories are dangerous because they make sense. “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is essentially, as its title suggests, a fairy tale charged with irony. Had the 60s not ended abruptly with the Manson Family murder, what would’ve become today? Tarantino tried to make sense of connectedness and intention: Charles Manson played by Damon Herriman shows up at Tate’s house only to find out the music producer he is looking for, Terry Melcher, is not living there anymore. He never comes back. The hippies, coming off a bad trip, decide to take revenge on the people “who taught them to kill”.
In the most obscure of aftermaths we recognize change with a little reluctance and slowly we surrender to our previous obliviousness because everything starts to make sense in hindsight. But change doesn’t happen instantaneously — or maybe it does, through the accumulation of a million ostensibly trivial moments.
Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate got few lines. But what I saw was normalcy. Tate’s power was beauty and youth — her job, as portrayed on the silver screen at least, was to make people laugh, to dance at the playboy mansion, to be desired and to be talked about, to smile, to be warm, to be recognized by her newly acclaimed fame, to pose for fan pictures and to get pregnant. In any sense of the half told story, she did not deserve to die so prematurely. I thought of the many actresses in the Hollywood hills, who are already dead before they actually died. Do they deserve it?
I was at a fashion event in Williamsburg a few weeks ago. Towards the end, a drunken old man stumbled inside asking for the bathroom, his attire could easily suggest he was someone living on the streets. People would later inform me that he was Harvey Weistein. I was shocked until I was not. Because things don’t make sense until they do.
Further reads:
Joan Didion making sense of 60s California: Here
The argument why Didion should have been in the movie: Here
For the love of Brad Pitt: Here
