At Spahn Ranch: The Tragic Heart of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood

Who are these people? Watching Cliff try to figure it out is painful, because we know the future, but such knowledge is not power. Within its imagined boundaries, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood will concoct a happy ending, by eluding the catastrophe we expect and substituting a gorily-comic fantasia, but in real life, no one escapes history. And that is the sermon of Spahn Ranch – the stygian secret in the center of the film, the key to its tragic sense, and the keystone of its structure.

* * *

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood may be a comedy but it is hiding a tragic secret, buried in its center like a bomb in the desert. The bomb will not go off in the course of the film, thanks to the magical-thinking of Tarantino’s surprise ending – which leaves Sharon Tate alive and obliterates her would-be Manson Family murderers – but in history, the shock waves of its detonation are still felt. The tragic secret of the film – its heart of darkness – is an unbroken 30-minute sequence shot in a single location known as Spahn Ranch.

In its day, the ranch was 55-acre spread of rolling hills, strewn with boulders, bristling with brush and trees, threaded with winding trails and paths – a landscape that would look familiar to any film-lover who has seen a lot of westerns. Nestled among the hills was a strip of desert sand where the main street of a Wild West town had been created: wooden sidewalks, arcades, saloon, brothel, bank, sheriff, newspaper office, whatever a production company needed for the movies and TV shows – like The Lone Ranger and Bonanza – once filmed on the site. (The buildings are long gone, and today the land is part of the Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park, northwest of Los Angeles.)

By the time of the film’s action – 1969 – Spahn Ranch had fallen into disuse and disrepair. George Spahn, its owner, still lived in a small house at one end of the street, and kept horses in a corral, renting them out for rides, but the storefronts were dilapidated and the grounds littered. It had become the kind of neglected, out-of-the-way spot that could attract a tribe of drifters or squatters or a cult. And so it was that Spahn Ranch attracted the Manson Family (when they were still unknown, their crimes having not yet gone beyond petty grifting and auto theft). What draws us to Spahn Ranch – what pulls the film’s action into its gravitational field – is a chance encounter, although in hindsight we see it as less random than fated.

Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is an out-of-work stunt double who serves as gofer and chauffeur for Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a TV actor in career decline. One day – we are halfway through the film at this point – after Cliff has dropped Rick off at a studio lot, and while he is cruising aimlessly around LA in Cliff’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, he stops for a hitchhiker who has caught his eye: a wide-eyed, long-legged “hippie girl.” Cliff has noticed her on other drives, has noticed her twice in fact, flirting with her through the windshield, but without stopping. This time he picks her up. She wants a ride to Spahn Ranch – she lives there with a group of girls like herself; Cliff knows the ranch, from his work as a stuntman. But why would she be living there?

At the ranch they are greeted by a den-motherish woman who thanks Cliff for bringing back Pussy (such is her name). Cliff can’t make out what they are doing there, and, as he starts asking questions, we watch him move from curiosity to puzzlement to resolve, determining to get to the bottom of whatever it is (like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, as he makes his way into a hostile desert town with an evil past).

Although Manson is away, his acolytes are at home, and one of the scene’s unnerving strategies is to let them emerge gradually – lazily but warily – out of the shadows and into the thin desert light: several young men, some 15 or 20 women and girls, mostly quite young, some underage, one or two pregnant. All with an air of listless resentment.

The eerie ambiance, inherent in the mise-en-scène, is heightened by a shift in technique. Gone are the virtuoso displays of this film’s first hour and a half, the splashes of delectable color, the roller-coaster camerawork, the flashbacks and flash-forwards, the montages, the nimble shifts between quick looks and long takes. Here, the hues grow pale, the soundtrack falls silent except for background wind, and we are stuck in place: the pace slows to a literal standstill. The staging is straightforward, the aesthetic as plain as a John Ford western (“just point and shoot”).

Who are these people? Watching Cliff try to figure it out is painful, because we know the future, but such knowledge is not power. Within its imagined boundaries, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood will concoct a happy ending, by eluding the catastrophe we expect and substituting a gorily-comic fantasia, but in real life, no one escapes history. And that is the sermon of Spahn Ranch – the stygian secret in the center of the film, the key to its tragic sense, and the keystone of its structure.

* * *

Some critics regard Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood as similar in structure to Pulp Fiction, but the formal strategies of the two films are quite different. Pulp Fiction relies on a simple device: assembling some loosely related stories, slicing them up, and pasting them back together in a moebius strip that ends where it started. The governing formal principle of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is subtler, and riskier, because it is harder to bring off. The principle is to embed scenes within scenes; if we could see them all at once, we would realize they are running concurrently. The strategy needs to work partly at the conceptual level, since we are not always fully aware (or don’t remember) what’s happening behind the scene we are watching at the moment. The effect is a kind of half-hidden simultaneity.

To be specific: When the Spahn Ranch scene concludes, Tarantino will remind us that two other sequences are also drawing to a close: the studio-lot shoot of a TV program (Lancer), starring Rick Dalton, and a necklace of scenes that follow Sharon Tate through a day of outings. We realize then that the three sequences have transpired simultaneously. But how they connect in terms of plot, and how they relate thematically, will not be clear until the film is complete.

Pulp Fiction’s time manipulation is at once a simpler and a showier technique. The strategy of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is less obvious, even to the point of being elusive – as one scene vanishes behind another, and then reappears – and more inwardly complex, seeking to shape our understanding without signaling its intentions. If this strategy succeeds – as I think it does, brilliantly – the credit goes to the film’s editing.

The final edit of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood shortened the film drastically. The first cut Tarantino and his editor Fred Raskin made was four hours and 20 minutes; their finished film comes in at two hours and 45 minutes. Even if the full extent of their cuts was driven by the need for a commercially viable length, the paring-down proved the happiest of artful accidents. It could be ranked among the major feats of editing in any medium (comparable to a Raymond Carver story after Gordon Lish had reduced it to its essence and disclosed its laconic eloquence, or Eliot’s The Wasteland after Ezra Pound had pared it down to a modernist masterpiece).

The reduction reveals an architecture organized around Spahn Ranch, and it positions that sequence precisely where it needs to be: at the midway point, where it haunts and challenges the meanings of what will follow it, and what has gone before.

* * *

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood begins with a prelude, composed of black-and-white clips from Bounty Law (a fictional TV western series starring Rick Dalton), and then introduces us properly to Rick and Cliff, seen in the Cadillac, returning to Rick’s house on Cielo Drive, and Sharon, seen on a Pan Am flight, coming home from Europe with new husband Roman Polanski.

Introductions over, we join Rick (Cliff at his side) at the bar of Musso & Frank’s for the first of the film’s major set pieces. Rick awaits agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), who will come to pitch Rick on a plan to revive his career with spaghetti westerns (a nod to Clint Eastwood). Pacino’s florid monologue is intercut with clips of Rick – from an older film everyone seems to know – incinerating Nazis with a flamethrower.

Driving home, Rick and Cliff pass a file of girls who have been foraging in dumpsters and bear their trophies of found food; one of them, the hitcher Cliff will later pick up, flashes a peace sign as they go by. For Cliff, the girls are just girls – natural, accidental, anonymous parts of the passing scene, there for his gazing pleasure. For us, who know them as Manson groupies, they are pawns in the game of history, and their appearance is not random but part of a larger plan, part of a web being woven that leads to Spahn Ranch. Cliff drops Rick at his house and drives off in his own car, a battered gray Karmann Ghia.

The camera follows him as he swerves rakishly and dangerously down the hill, before panning up into the night sky and then swooping back down, without a hint of a break, over the top of the screen at the Van Nuys Drive-In – blinding us as we stare into the projector bulb – and continuing down, to rejoin Cliff as he reaches the trailer, behind the drive-in, where he lives.

The trailer scene is a portrait of life in the lair of a down-at-heel, down-on-his-luck stuntman. While the camera prowls through the cramped interior, picking out sordid details from the litter, Cliff fixes dinner (macaroni and cheese from a pouch), smokes, drinks beer, watches TV, and makes an elaborate ritual out of feeding his pit pull. The TV flickers and murmurs. Nothing happens. But the scene is rich in foreshadowing – of the Spahn Ranch sequence, and of the film’s final mayhem – and in characterization: it establishes Cliff as the sum of his contradictions and the soul of ambiguity, pensive, comfortable in his skin, but rough-hewn and roiled by volatile moods, charming (he is Brad Pitt) but as scruffily disreputable as an Elmore Leonard hitman, potentially violent, probably dangerous.

Amidst the detritus the eye lights on a hefty handgun. A souvenir prop from a movie or a weapon ready for use? Who is this man, with his trailer-trash life, his elan, his menace?

Cut to Rick, back at his house, learning lines for the next day’s shoot, first to the accompaniment of a rattling blender (margaritas), and then on a float in his kidney-shaped pool, seen from an overhead camera that will sky up and glide back down, through the leafy neighborhood, to find Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski in an MG convertible, on their way to the Playboy Mansion. They are heading for a garish pool party for gyrating celebrities: the kind of party Rick is no longer invited to, the kind of party the Manson girls will see only in the trash-fire smoke of their dreams.

The next morning: Cliff drops Rick at the studio lot where he has a guest spot in a TV western called Lancer (an actual 1960s series starring James Stacy). Having agreed to repair Rick’s TV antenna (these are pre-cable days), Cliff is on his way back to Cielo Drive when he sights the familiar hitcher, on a bench with her friends, sticking out her thumb – but he’s still not going her way, not yet. Not quite. But soon. And inevitably.

Although she appears in the guise of a twitchy teenager, Pussy is an agent of fate with other roles to play. At Spahn Ranch she will become a frightening harridan, and like her girlfriends, if stoked with mind-wrecking drugs and Manson’s messianic rants, could become a killer.

Up on the roof, before setting to work on the antenna, Rick drifts into a reverie; he’s remembering a fight he had with Bruce Lee on the set of The Green Hornet. (This protracted scene is one of the film’s most amusing and most controversial, due to what many see as its racial stereotyping of Lee.) The rumor that Cliff might have “killed his wife and gotten away with it” is first heard on this set, and a teasingly quick insert suggests how it could have happened: a glimpse of Cliff on a boat, speargun propped on his lap, staring blank-eyed into space while his bikini-clad wife harangues him.

We shift to Rick on the Lancer set (getting costumed, being made up), intercut with scenes of Sharon on a day’s outing that leads to a theater playing a movie she appears in, and dropping in to watch herself. This sequence has been indicted for reducing a talented actress to a brainless butterfly, furnishing her with minimal and vacuous lines. A different reading – which won’t resolve the dispute – is that Robbie’s airy rendition of Tate is mean to suggest a blithe spirit and a resurrected angel. Another interpretation (which also may fall short of justification, although it is closer to the mark) is that as a blonde, tanned, mini-skirted babe, Robbie’s Tate represents the marketable pipe dream of the ’60s, a charade exposed, in its cruel allure, by the grungy, disposable lives of the girls at Spahn Ranch. For if Sharon Tate is the bright avatar of the peace-and-love hype, the Manson girls are its shadow side – the grim residue of its seduction and betrayal. Girls who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone noticing. Or who could turn up on our doorstep as the home intruders of nightmare.

Back to the Lancer set where we meet its star, James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant), and where a sequence begins that could be considered too long: it is languorous, surely, refusing to hurry, declining opportunities to compress, indulging in lengthy and slow-spoken dialogues, and retakes of those dialogues, and dallying with diverting but possibly gratuitous minor characters (a flamboyant director, a child actress). But Lancer is, as it must be, a film-within-the-film.

It begins with the camera-eye following Stacy as he rides through the lot and onto the set, where our view merges into the TV camera filming the episode; Stacy, in character as Johnny Madrid, dismounts, crosses the street, kills a man in a pointless gunfight, and enters the dark, cavernous saloon; there we find, waiting for him at the top of a staircase, DiCaprio playing Rick Dalton, as Rick plays a snarling villain.

Lancer, a satiric homage to westerns, plays variations on the major motifs of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood: grievances and vengeance; gratuitous violence and senseless murder; the peril of innocence; the ambiguous face of evil. The sequence runs concurrently, in real time, with Spahn Ranch – but a film has to present its images in a certain order (even if it experiments with time, like Villeneuve’s Arrival or Iñárritu’s 21 Grams). Hiding one scene within another can produce a dialectic, conceptually, accruing meaning through parallel and contrast, but experientially, scenes have to take their turn, as in a figure-and-ground exercise (sometimes you see a contour of the vase, sometimes a profile of the face).

Lancer shifts into the background so we can join Cliff, on the road again, passing Pussy, and this time stopping. “The third time’s the charm,” she smiles – to her an idle pleasantry but to us a sign that Cliff is about to enter the realm of fable, where heroes undergo serial ordeals, princes turn into toads, victims can be frozen to stone.

At the ranch, when Cliff starts to look around, the camera moves to the end of the dusty High Noon-like street and creeps up the stairs into George Spahn’s house. Squeaky Fromme and followers are inside. When they peer out at Cliff (an inside-out, dark-to-light shot that recalls The Searchers), we see what they see. Girls on the wooden sidewalks, multiplying (like movie zombies). Junked cars and trucks. A bearded hippie in a tall top hat. A school bus painted black.

And Cliff. He looks up at the house. George still here? Still live in that house up there? He strides up to confront Squeaky, pushes past televisions and replicas of Remington cowboys, goes down a hall and through a closed door to George’s bedroom. For the first time in the sequence, movie music, anxiously Hitchcockian, comes up on the soundtrack.

George (Bruce Dern) is lying in bed. Alive? Cliff shakes him, George wakes. Taking a nap, to be fresh for an evening of TV with Squeaky. All right then. George is alive, not abused, apparently supplied with sex as part of the deal. We see Cliff decide to let it go at that.

As he goes down the street toward his car, he is followed by a suddenly changed Pussy. Alarmed, angry, she dogs his steps, hectoring him like a harpy, and they have a staccato exchange. Do you think we kidnapped George? No. Do you think everything is all right then? Not exactly. You shouldn’t be here! Right. You should leave! Way ahead of you.

More girls appear under the arcades, pantomiming agitation, wavering, gesticulating, almost writhing. Some moan, some keen.

Cliff finds a tire slashed and orders a faux cowpoke, sitting on a fence rail, to fix it, and when he refuses, beats him up in a burst of focused fury. The girls send out a call for help. Another cowpoke gallops to the rescue, but too late.

Who was that masked man? Who is Cliff?

His t-shirt says CHAMPION, meaning the sparkplug but playing on the trope of Cliff as champion: avenger, rescuer, and righter of wrongs. A hero, descending into the underworld to do battle with dark forces, challenging the specter who guards the portal.

But is Cliff a hero? Or is he what the girls feared when he arrived, and dreaded all the more when he overcame their protectors?

Did Cliff kill his wife?

In the film’s gruesome finale, we will see him kill people with his bare hands.

Is Cliff Beowulf or is he Grendel, the beast from the deep?

Spahn Ranch reminds us that monsters can appear in any form, even as charming as Cliff (played by a GQ cover boy renowned for likeability), even as winsome as Pussy, who, after all, is only a step from metamorphosing into one of the Furies.

* * *

When the Coupe de Ville disappears up the road, 30 minutes have passed since Cliff arrived at the ranch – a passage that creates the illusion of being unbroken, although the clock skips ahead now and then, omitting details (such as replacing a spare tire). If all elided details were accounted for, the time represented in Spahn Ranch would be around an hour. This temporal compactness is matched by the spatial limitation: except for a glimpse of a horseback riding scene, the action is restricted to the house and the street.

Spahn Ranch, in other words, observes the classical unities of time and space. These restraints fit the empty street and the simplicity of the set, the plain camerawork (mainly long shots capturing full figures), the drained color, the actors’ limited motion, the spare dialogue, the reactive silences. Overall, the scene has the feel of a stage production, and it is suggestive of classical dramaturgy: Two or three actors, caught up in desperate entanglements, stand and address one another in an open space while the chorus comments on their predicament.

And some elements of Spahn Ranch do recall devices and themes of Attic theater. Stichomythia, for instance: a dialogue form composed of sharp, short exchanges of questions and answers, statements and responses. The testy exchange between Cliff and Pussy, as she trails him down the street (Do you think we kidnapped George? No. Is everything all right then? Not exactly.), is in stichomythia. Thematically, the substance of their exchange hinges on a foundational concern of Greek tragedy: the problem of unequal knowledge. One of the speakers knows something the other does not; the other is puzzled by what he doesn’t yet understand, resistant to what he can’t yet acknowledge. Or put another way, Cliff is caught up in a classical agon: a struggle for knowledge and control with the highest possible stakes.

Finally, the chorus – the girls who stand in a line on the boardwalk. In Greek drama, a citizen-chorus sees what is happening, can report on it and react to it, but is powerless to forestall the revelations and the outcomes. The girls, with their weird mutters and moans, vocalize distress at the drama unfolding in front of them, but they have no agency in it.

Whether these echoes of Athenian tragedy are conscious allusions or fruitful congruences, Cliff’s predicament at Spahn Ranch is a version of the problem dramatized by Aeschylus and Sophocles: there is a great deal we don’t know, about ourselves and each other, and what we don’t know can kill us. And Cliff’s contradictions echo the paradox of the most famous Greek tragedy: the puzzle he is trying to solve, the evil he suspects is lurking here, the murderous rage that can trigger it – all have parallels in his own character.

* * *

When the Coupe de Ville leaves Spahn Ranch, on the narrative level it is heading back to LA. On the metaphorical level – the level of the portents we have just witnessed – it is heading for an unfathomable future, beyond the boundaries of the film, which includes the slaughter of Sharon Tate and her friends, and the mass murders that are now commonplace.

In movie-time, the Cadillac delivers us to the final act, where the dominant aesthetic of the film kicks in again: loud, fast, and flashy, generous with motion, music, and cinematic virtuosity, laden with luscious dollops of LA by day and by night. As if Tarantino, having done his onerous work – planted the time bomb of his tragic theme – can resume being our genial host. And he can now bring closure to the Lancer shoot.

As Cliff drives up to the studio lot – the day’s filming wrapped, time to pick up Rick – the windshield camera catches James Stacy leaving on his motorcycle, heading into his real life. Like other futures extending beyond the film’s boundaries, Stacy’s will be a disaster. His downfall will begin with a motorcycle accident that kills his girlfriend and maims him (he loses an arm and a leg), continue with a bungled suicide attempt (he jumped from a cliff), and end with a prison sentence for molesting a 12-year-old girl. The life of another monster on the loose . . .

The camera then toggles back and forth between the two buddies driving home and Sharon leaving the movie theater, her day also done. At Cliff’s house that evening, Rick and Cliff watch The FBI (an episode with Rick as guest star). Unseen by us, Squeaky Fromme and George Spahn are watching the same show. Watching at home – we do see this – is Marvin Schwarz, an eye still on Rick, still pushing Italy as a career move.

With that segue, the film leaps forward, SIX MONTHS LATER, to another Pan Am flight, bringing Cliff and Rick (and Francesca, Rick’s new Italian wife) home from Rome, with three spaghetti westerns in the can. The interval allows time for Polanski to be away in Europe, and for Tate to be pregnant, hosting houseguests at her Cielo Drive home.

Our dread of what we expect to happen on Cielo Drive is amped up by Tarantino’s bait-and-switch: rumbling music, a quickening pace, stentorian voice-overs, and the time-and-place markers beloved of procedurals and thrillers. At Rick’s house, midnight looms. Cliff, smoking an acid-dipped cigarette, takes his dog for a walk. Rick makes more margaritas. When the Mansonites drive up in their belching Ford – come to the wrong house – Rick chases them off.

Cliff comes back and feeds his dog. Rick floats in the pool. The killers return, and the stage is set for the surprise ending. In a frenzied mash-up of savagery and slapstick, the intruders are killed and more than killed: they are gored, battered, crushed, and incinerated – an ultraviolent orgy that rouses audiences to shocked outcries, hoots of protest, embarrassed laughter.

After the corpses are removed and the injured Cliff taken off in an ambulance, the camera has a final trick up its silken sleeve. It lifts into the dark, one more time, and floats slowly back down, through enchanted branches, into the golden glow of the coda. Rick is invited to Sharon’s house for a drink with her friends, and the film ends to the sound of chimes, having delivered on the fairy-tale promise of its title.

* * *

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood has proved to be Tarantino’s biggest box-office hit (its lifetime gross passed Pulp Fiction three months after its release). The sources of this popular success are, obviously, its eagerness to please and the resources it devotes to keeping us happy: The lavish spectacles of light and sound (the ravishing cinematography of Robert Richardson is worth the price of admission in itself, as is the lovingly curated soundtrack of period pop music). The committed and nuanced performances of A-list stars DiCaprio and Pitt. The narrative pulse. The engaging stories. And the extra treats Tarantino fans expect – his avid rummaging through movie history, his doting appropriations of genre and period styles.

But what makes Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood a serious film, and an important one, is the expressive structure it builds around Spahn Ranch. The film ends happily, thanks to the magical-thinking Tarantino delights in (recall the miraculous survivals of Pulp Fiction, and the history-revising of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained); the giddy ending provides the escape we expect from a conventional Hollywood entertainment. But Spahn Ranch, the bleak and brooding heart at its center, remembers what we might like to forget: that the reprieve from tragedy, and from the monsters among us, is only temporary.