Once Upon a Time in

Hollywood (2019), a profoundly weird movie that I am finally watching on French Netflix via VPN, about which there is quite a lot to say but I am of course feeling lazy. My favorite bit so far, because naturally I have been dragging it out, jumping between distractions, kicking my heels in attentional mud, is the gossipy Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) part at the Playboy Mansion early on, which serves as exposition for the Jay Sebring-Sharon Tate-Roman Polanski romantic trifecta, of which it is suggested that McQueen was jealous. The puppeteering irreality of how that jealousy is conveyed, and of how every historically extant character—other than the composite duo of Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stuntman in Brad Pitt—is designed to be inhabited like a boardwalk peep cut-out, constitutes peak 2020s uncanny. Tarantino's film is arguably a first deepfake-era movie: a chronologically pre but spiritually post-TikTok farewell movie to a pre-TikTok period, echoed in the dream sequence of The Souvenir Part II and Honor Levy's videos projecting her face on actresses’ bodies…or how just now, when I saw some photographs of Paglia joining Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, also from 2019, I reflexively presumed they were fabricated.

McQueen’s actual life story, his experiences as a sailor and being on a chain-gang and also working in a South American brothel all before age 25, reminds me of Sabbath’s sojourns in Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and of Lucy Santé saying in a recent interview: I am passionate about certain types of space-time conjunctions…Valparaíso, 1952; Dar es Salaam, 1966; Brooklyn, 1933; Tokyo, 1905. If I have the right research tools, and I can incorporate randomly found references, such as photographs, newspapers, theater programs, train schedules, telephone directories, then I can insert myself into that world and write about it. Or, like Tarantino, you can do all that research, to a high-gloss, sun-kissed tee, and then insert in "Rick Dalton", a mash-up protagonist through whose watering eyes you drill out space for your own point of view. Such is the difference in Santé's and Tarantino’s styles, or between critic and artist. Adventuring McQueen ended up on the ground in ‘69 Hollywood’s conjunction void, suffering for it with his special fable-esque swagger, a suffering that…in Santé's framework, can then go ignored, if the textural details of a moment alone stir the archivist’s enthusiasm. Instead, Tarantino homes in on McQueen's desperation.

Santé's methodology is, in an ambient sense, Tarantino’s, but their vectors of contrast are important. The director finds himself in his work not only by getting place right—through granularity as a mechanism of memory’s mediation—but by getting place supra-right, getting place under his thumb, his terms...he wrangles the confusion that bygone conjunctions leave in their trail (think Dimes Square) by channeling more perennial shades of human experience…we are meant to oo-ah how Brad Pitt’s brand of dog food has campy 70s specificity, but equally, to enjoy how his seasoned approach to dog training is atemporal. The developmental swing from what were then major to now minor convergences or pockets in the continuum, as Santé refers to them, is compelling fodder, the stuff of, yes, cinema history—in the case of Valparaíso, being one of the cities where Jean-Louis Trintignant’s reformed lothario in My Night at Maud’s (1969 again) sowed his oats, like McQueen or Roth's Sabbath. The same might very well be true of Tarantino’s Mansonite Los Angeles, which was imaged already as it was "happening"—by, say, Robert Altman. It’s just a matter of who was connecting the dots, who was holding down the fort…that might be the crux of the deepfake exercise, as a fundamental attenuation or valve-braking of perceptive control, as rewrite upon rewrites, where exaggeration (like those blur-fragments where the AI fries itself—where we see virtual materiality come through) is ultimately what gives away the truth. Theory of the glitch, Pierre Huyghe, etc.