‘Hollywood 1969 … You shoulda been there!’ reads the tagline to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the novelisation of his 2019 film of the same name. Indeed, the film had some of us wishing we had been there as we walked out of the cinema into the world as it now stood—a world without opulence and without that overwhelmingly glorious glamour, that vibe, exuded by Hollywood in 1969.
So effective was the film in covering every inch of screen in a fulgent sheen of nostalgia that you’d be right to ask why Tarantino even bothered novelising it. A novelist cannot deliver the unadulterated spectacle of Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth speeding home through the twilight glow of the Hollywood Hills; nor can they bring us into the luminous, Dionysian frenzy of an A-list party at the Playboy Mansion. Or rather, the novelist can try to do both of these things, but the toolkit at hand is too limited—there are certain effects which an image can achieve and language cannot. Tarantino must surely know this.
But if the new novel indicates anything, it’s that there is also a unique power yielded by language, which images cannot hope to match. Tarantino must also know this, because what he achieves with his novelisation goes beyond straightforward, scene-for-scene retelling. Backstory is one thing: all the film’s characters have their past fleshed out, their psychology excavated. Cliff is an interesting case. In the film, with Pitt playing the role of the razor-sharp, assured, humorous sidekick to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth wins you over in an instant. But in the novel, understanding Cliff’s past excursions as a decorated soldier, almost-pimp, dog fight organiser and, yes, murderer, the character communicates something a little darker, if not more intriguing.
Lovers of the film will especially enjoy reading Cliff’s informal yet articulate digressions on film history, which he recites while in a cinema watching the notorious Swedish erotic drama I Am Curious (Yellow), which he’s, um, taken a woman to see for their first date. The second chapter of the book takes the form of an essay of sorts, comprising Cliff’s musings on Jean Luc Godard, Otto Preminger, Tishiro Mifune, the films of Akira Kurosawa—which he loves—and of François Truffaut—which he isn’t so keen on. ‘And he thought the mopey dopes in Jules and Jim were a fucking drag,’ we read. ‘Cliff didn’t dig Jules and Jim, because he didn’t dig the chick. And it’s the kind of movie, if you don’t dig the chick, you ain’t gonna dig the flick.’
Digressions, so critical to the book’s style, constitute another important difference between the forms. If you thought Tarantino was a digressive, novelistic filmmaker, wait until you read this. But it’s all skilfully done, entertaining and conversational, in keeping with the tone of his filmography. Indeed, many of the other Tarantino hallmarks remain intact in the novel. Characters are sharply portrayed, vivid and alive and funny as hell, Sam Wanamaker shining especially. Point of view is shifted, the novel retaining the film’s multi-perspectival mode with great effect, particularly in the Spahn Ranch scene which is here entirely filtered through the eyes of Squeaky, the Manson acolyte looking after George Spahn. Tarantino has nothing left to prove to any of us, and yet, even knowing that most of his screenplays are written in prose-form, I was a little surprised by his intuition for the rules of a novel. So skilled is he, in fact, that in altering the form of the story the prosaic and poetic sides of his voice maintain their enduring shimmer. The book is, very often, a joy to read.
However, it did raise questions for me, the same questions the film raised too. Tarantino has once again dipped into the nostalgia well, a seemingly endless source of inspiration for his work. Yet I can’t help but wonder if there are limits to this method, or what we do when the proverbial well runs dry.
In a 1974 interview on Parkinson, Orson Welles argued that ‘any form of entertainment only exists because it corresponds with a moment in time.’ Once Upon a Time is no different. It seems that a great wistfulness for the past is encircling our culture, and beginning to penetrate deep into art and media of all kinds. It’s why the vinyl boom hasn’t peaked yet, why kids still dress like it’s the Haight-Ashbury in 1968, and why we do nothing but remake old film sagas. Once Upon a Time, both film and novel, are products of an age deeply unsatisfied with its own parameters, its own institutions, and its own aesthetics; the solution, evidently, is to cast our eye back on a better time.
Or rather, both film and novel are the products of an individual who lives within an unsatisfying age. Tarantino, better than most, understands how well the past plays on screen; cinema is the natural form for it, and the exquisite purity of period-vision which Once Upon a Time oozes on film is, admittedly, not quite captured by the words in Tarantino’s book. And yet, the author is in some way eschewing this fact by dipping the novel form into the nostalgia pool as well. It’s not only that the book presented in an old-school ‘drugstore paperback’ edition; nor is the very idea of the novelisation, a genre utterly passé, enough for QT. No, a sense of the lost past occupies the story on the thematic level too—more so in the book, as opposed to the film where the visuals do much of the heavy lifting. This is typified by the character of Rick Dalton, played wonderfully in the movie by DiCaprio, who, in the novel, becomes an even more forceful expression of what happens when generational schism and social revolution leave someone behind.
Perhaps we can be buoyed by the fact that Tarantino chose to filter what I consider his cinematic masterpiece through the novel form, whose death-knell seemingly never stops being sounded. (How tiresome!) Just as he believes in the cinema experience, so does he have a certain unwavering faith in the power of a good novel. It’s heartening to see what a book can do when it’s done right––something different from a film, no question, but something not necessarily worse. In fact, you could even call the book an important compliment to the film. In the book’s penultimate chapter, casting agent Marvin Schwarz forthrightly tells Rick Dalton that if he doesn’t change his outlook, his career would be left behind for good. ‘When you weren’t looking,’ he says, ‘the culture changed.’ Indeed, fashions and fads come and go, as do aesthetics, styles, the window dressing of an era. But a yearning for connection with real characters, for something true and humane to be communicated through an art form, will never go out of style.
Elroy Rosenberg is a writer and louche layabout living in Melbourne. elroyrosenberg.com