12/08/2019
In the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, some questions. Was Tarantino planting a metoo commentary in this film or simply glossing over Hollywood culture of underage girls? When the girl hitchhiker is in Brad Pitt’s car, Paraphrasing here. She says I’m old enough to have s*x with you but you’re too old to have s*x with me. Pitt responds by not engaging but allowing her to lie on his lap while he drives. In a different scene, on an abandoned Hollywood set, while everyone else is lunching, DiCaprio wants privacy to read, turns a corner to discover an 8-year-old lil girl sitting alone reading. She is a mature lil girl who makes DiCaprio cry. Then, what she does is peculiar. While they both sit on chairs, once DiCaprio cries, she jumps off her chair to face him for consolation... and this part I found peculiarly placed ...the lil girl kneels down, not to the side of his legs but in between, where she’s looking up and he’s looking down. Coincidentally, Roman Polanski (genius ) but exiled from the US, accused of ra**ng a 13 year old girl. Still, it begs the question with the metoo movement and the story’s time 1968 (not at all metoo), what was Tarantino doing? I know code was used in Hollywood past...a handkerchief here and a black hat there for meaning but it was a little confusing here. Maybe he was trying to say that sort of thing was prevalent without getting into the dirty details? Without tainting the DiCaprio’s character from our metoo perspective. Because, you watch any movie from the past, and it’s cringe worthy to see how women are portrayed. I was watching Anatomy of a Murder and the judge warns the quart room audience not to giggle at the mention of “panties” because two very important things are at stake 1. a man is accused of killing another man for ra**ng his wife and 2. the man who is dead. However, the judge never mentions the woman who was r***d. It is something we shrug off but it is there. Is that what we do here?
