As the excitement mounts even now–in an era of extreme contempt for machismo–for Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film (when considering Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 as a single entity), Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, a question that naturally managed to get highlighted in today’s political climate during the Cannes Film Festival came from a, quelle surprise, New York Times reporter. Doing her best to make Tarantino come across as a chauvinist (which is almost parodic at this point considering his movies), she positioned her query regarding Margot Robbie’s role as Sharon Tate as follows: “Quentin, you have put Margot Robbie, a very talented actress–um, actor–in your film. She was with Leonardo in Wolf of Wall Street, I, Tonya, you know, this is a person with a great deal of acting talent and yet you haven’t really given her many lines in the movie. I guess that was a deliberate choice on your part and I just wanted to know why that was that we don’t actually hear her speaking very much.”
Irritated from the start of the question and its identity politics leanings, Tarantino shut it down quickly with, “Well I just reject your hypotheses” (yes, he pronounced it plurally). In many regards, his vexation stems from a collective white male quandary addressed in great depth in Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book called, what else, White. It is, incidentally, also in this book that Easton Ellis speaks of his controversial interview with Tarantino for The New York Times (again, a publication that clearly has a vendetta for Q) in 2015, when his promotional blitzkrieg for The Hateful Eight was beginning. That the article starts off by noting Tarantino had been drinking likely set him up for failure, to be discredited with the old adage, “In vino veritas.” And soon, Easton Ellis is driving the conversation toward one of his favorite topics: how Kathryn Bigelow is overrated as a director purely as a result of being a woman (this again comes up in White).
Writing in the article, “To my mind, [Inglourious Basterds was] much more sweeping, outrageous and formally inventive than Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, the other war movie that came out in the summer of 2009, which is a serious, straightforward, humanist-realist character study that makes earnest liberal audiences feel both guilty and self-congratulatory. It was because of this that Inglourious Basterds lost to The Hurt Locker at the 2010 Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay.” This opens the door for Easton Ellis to quote Tarantino as saying, “It bugged me that Mark Boal won Best Screenplay for that movie. The Kathryn Bigelow thing–I got it. Look, it was exciting that a woman had made such a good war film, and it was the first movie about the Iraq War that said something. And it wasn’t like I lost to something dreadful. It’s not like E.T. losing to Gandhi.”
Ah, but that was just the first landmine; it wouldn’t have been a completely offensive article without being an affront to both women and black people. Thus Easton Ellis continuing to quote Tarantino–after the auteur turned his nose up at Selma, the Moonlight of that particular year–saying, “If you’ve made money being a critic in black culture in the last twenty years you have to deal with me. You must have an opinion of me. You must deal with what I’m saying and deal with the consequences. If you sift through the criticism, you’ll see it’s pretty evenly divided between pros and cons. But when the black critics came out with savage think pieces about Django, I couldn’t have cared less. If people don’t like my movies, they don’t like my movies, and if they don’t get it, it doesn’t matter. The bad taste that was left in my mouth had to do with this: It’s been a long time since the subject of a writer’s skin was mentioned as often as mine. You wouldn’t think the color of a writer’s skin should have any effect on the words themselves. In a lot of the more ugly pieces my motives were really brought to bear in the most negative way. It’s like I’m some supervillain coming up with this stuff.”
And he’s a supervillain more than ever, releasing what could arguably be called “the last big dick picture” in Hollywood, one that showers praise on Roman Polanski and perhaps, from a moral standpoint, nebulously depicts Charles Manson. Noticeably missing as topics of conversation during the thirty-minute press conference were Harvey Weinstein (who Tarantino admitted to having the opportunity to do more to take down the sex monster/mogul) and Uma Thurman (who famously detailed her not so positive experience working with Tarantino during Kill Bill Vol. 2). But then, shouldn’t a press conference about the movie be about the movie? Not in today’s environment, where accusations of being a sexist screenwriter as opposed to making an artistic choice appear to be the more important talking point than the film itself.
Easton Ellis interjects in the same New York Times article, “But Tarantino is an optimist: ‘This is the best time to push buttons'”–the unspoken finish to that sentence being “as a white man.” And that’s exactly what he’s always done (for just as BEE with American Psycho in the 90s, Tarantino was ripped to shreds many times by feminist groups for the violence in his work), only now, the climate is more volatile than ever. And what’s worse, Tarantino has the same pinched rectum look of Donald Trump’s own mouth. So no, that doesn’t help his cause. What might, however, is if people actually see the movie for themselves and make up their own mind about Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Sharon, of which she gracefully stated, “I always look to the character and what the character is supposed to serve to the story. I think the moments that I got onscreen gave the opportunity to honor Sharon… I did feel like I got a lot of time to explore the character, even without dialogue specifically.” Ah, at last someone with a Hitchcockian sensibility in an Aaron Sorkin world. Or maybe she’s just Australian and naturally accustomed to male subjugation.
