Last night was the one-year anniversary of the release of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time  in Hollywood (originally released on July 26, 2019). 

So I watched it again on its one-year anniversary.

I recommend watching Tarantino's movies more than one time and thinking about what that director might be trying to say with each one of his movies. He is obviously brilliantly talented (inspired) and  through his art exploring extremely important subjects which may appear on the surface to be about events that happened in the past but which ingeniously expose forces which continue to profoundly shape our lives and our world right up to this day.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is of course the fact that the movie builds up to one of the most notorious multiple-slayings in American history and then subverts the viewer's fears with an unexpected alternative outcome -- which may at first be extremely off-putting, but which invites us to ask ourselves what on earth director Quentin Tarantino may be trying to say with this plot twist in a movie with a title that invokes the opening formula of fairy tales while simultaneously exposing at every turn the ability of Hollywood to entrance and those who buy into its illusion-generating machine.

I would argue that it is very possible to interpret Tarantino's latest masterpiece as suggesting that everything we actually believe (to this very day) about the notorious "Manson murders" is a fairy tale, shaped by the powerful media machine which has the power to create unreality and make the world buy into it.

To this day, the vast majority of the men and women who were alive during the summer of 1969 -- and those who grew up afterwards -- have a very twisted understanding of what those horrific murders were actually about, in large part because the media machine (including Hollywood) has imposed an alternate reality on our minds . . . which Tarantino may be pointing out (and poking fun at us, as he does so).

If you want to hear a penetrating alternative analysis of what the brutal murders of the summer of 1969 were actually about -- in contrast to the fiction that has been woven around those despicable killings -- then I would recommend going over to the website of the long-running Guns and Butter radio show and podcast, where you can visit the "archived shows" section and scroll almost all the way down to the very bottom, in order to find and listen to show #91, which is a replay of a broadcast by legendary investigator Mae Brussell (1922 - 1988) which she delivered on October 13th, 1971 (just two years after the murders) and in which she points out abundant evidence which suggests that these killings were part of a deliberate campaign of terror designed to petrify "middle America" and push the country towards fascism, while simultaneously crushing the "counter-culture" and associating the communal, anti-war hippie movement as violent, militaristic, and dangerous.

You can also read a transcript of that entire 1971 broadcast by Mae Brussell at the Mae Brussell website here (and at that website you can also purchase a set of discs containing audio files of all of Mae's seventeen years of weekly broadcasts).

In that remarkable hour of analysis from October of 1971, Mae argues that the "Manson Family" were agents provocateurs, given resources including money but also weapons and vehicles and military equipment, and noting that certain specific figures appear to have been involved with interpreting and spreading the Manson story who previously appeared in connection with the assassination of President John Kennedy.

She also argues that the electoral process in the United States had been subverted in order to institute  corporate fascism, while promoting a narrative of "capitalism versus communism" (ushering in corporate fascism while getting everyone to look in another direction, distracted by a narrative that didn't even mention fascism). Eerily, Mae describes the fascist coup taking place in Greece during that same time period, in which nationwide edicts were imposed which declared:

"No gathering in the open country of more than five persons.
No gathering in any closed space at all.
No anti-national propaganda, such as anti-war or anything against a public official.
No marches or dissentions."

Does any of that sound familiar to the listener today?

Mae says that when she saw the restrictions being imposed on the people of Greece in the late 1960s, she asked herself: “Is this a test case of what the United States could do to its people if it had to?”

Near the very beginning of the interview, Mae says that one of the reasons so many people have a very difficult time seeing through what is going on is that clandestine operations use deception which can best be compared to actors on a stage, playing roles. She says:

In this world, in this strange world of covert overthrow of the governments and clandestine armies and secret operations, the problem we're facing is that you are working with two realities: you're working with what we assume is the real way to function and move, and we are working with a system of what we call power: exchange of power, economic power, power over people, controlling their lives. In order to do that you disguise certain persons and send them into roles to influence; they become actors on a stage and they influence our minds in a way that is not real but effects a reality that will touch us later.

She argues that Manson was consistently portrayed as a hippie in the media, but that he actually hated hippies:

He was not a hippie or a part of the youth culture. They bought him a guitar, let his hair grow, put a leather jacket on him, gave him money, gave him a bus and credit cards, and told him to do his thing. [. . .] He was used by the news media to slam down on the hippies. [. . .] Charlie Manson was taught because he was going to pretend to be a hippie. He hated being called a hippie -- the book mentions it: he disliked being called a hippie.

Do these passages remind you of anything in the Tarantino movie? How about the fact that struggling western star Rick Dalton is told by director Sam Wanamaker (in preparation for the upcoming TV series Lancer) that Wanamaker wants Dalton's character to have longer hair ("something more . . . hippie-ish," Sam declares), a big droopy mustache, and a "hippie jacket" -- at which the costume director Rebecca says she can give him a fringed Custer-jacket and dye it dark brown: the exact description of Manson's most iconic garment!

In a direct parallel to the analysis of the Manson situation from Mae Brussell in 1971, we learn throughout the film that Dalton absolutely detests hippies.

So, what is director Tarantino exploring here? Is he perhaps suggesting that it is actually the violence-obsessed establishment (including the important "reality-creation" branch of the establishment represented by Hollywood) which in a very real sense acts out the terrorizing of the world population represented by the so-called "Manson murders" (murders which, as Mae Brussell points out, were not even carried out by Manson by rather by Charles "Tex" Watson)?

Is he perhaps saying that we are living in an absolutely commoditizing society, which reduces everyone and everything to a dollar sign (a theme epitomized by the plot-line of the fictional show Bounty Law in which Dalton stars at the outset of Once Upon a Time, the theme of reducing lives to a bounty of cash being a consistent pattern in other earlier Tarantino films as well), and that it is actually this system which is traumatizing the men and women of the world (in part through the reality-creation machine of Hollywood), and at the same time infantilizing them -- and that the Manson Family and the murders of the summer of '69 were actually an integral part of the society we are living in, rather than an alien force introduced by the "dangerous hippies" the way that the media told everyone at the time (and the way these murders are still portrayed and understood to this day)?

I suggest everyone take the opportunity afforded by this one-year anniversary to watch Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood again, and meditate carefully on what it might be trying to tell us.

I am convinced that anytime Tarantino shows us an "ending" which is blatantly different from the "actual historical events" that we think we know about some part of our past, he might be trying to tell us that we have been sold a pack of lies, made into a kind of "alternate reality" via the mighty Wurlitzer of the powers of the media.

If so, then the ending of his earlier film Inglourious Basterds (2009) might be suggesting that much of what we have been told -- and presently believe -- about the purported resolution of World War II might also be in need of re-examination.

As an aside (not really an aside), it is also possible to see in the characters of Rick and Cliff a classic expression of the ancient pattern of the "twinned pair" consisting of the anguished "doubting self" and the impervious and unwavering "essential self. See previous discussions such as this one and this one.

Post-script, July 28:

I received an excellent comment from a reader who says in part:

I did not enjoy this film. I question the motives behind assassinating the character of Bruce Lee, the most revered of Chinese film stars here in the West. I see this as naked propaganda in an anti-China agenda. His myth was instrumental in creating our relationship with China during the '70s and destroying that myth is part of a co-ordinated effort to redefine it. Hollywood is a tool to shape our opinions. That it was once something else has become a fairytale.

My response was as follows:

Very valid comment: I dislike that part also. I have studied Wing Chun since 1992, including in China and from a friend of Bruce Lee who has been in many physical fights and attests to the fact that Bruce was an incredible fighter, "way better than you see in those god-damn movies." In fact, I used to hate all Tarantino films with a passion. However, I now believe he is exploring some powerful issues with his art and that he is (quite openly) saying, "this didn't happen: this is a fairy tale" and that throughout the movie he is calling attention to the difference between real and Hollywood-manufactured, with "Hollywood" standing for more that just "Hollywood" but in fact for the entire engine of manufacturing the violent and objectifying and commoditizing society that we live in, which works to reduce everyone to a dollar-sign just as we hear declared in the opening narration of the fictitious "Bounty Law" series. Whether Tarantino is saying all of this consciously or whether the gods are saying it through him, I don't know, although I suspect it is mostly or entirely conscious on his part because he explores these themes constantly throughout his films.  

I take this movie as deliberately trying to be unsettling at certain points by blatantly inverting reality, in order to send us the message that our reality has been inverted and manipulated and that it continues to be. But, no, I don't like that scene -- and I don't like watching people being fried with flame-throwers either, even if it is on film and I know that it is done with special effects. I don't like seeing history inverted, as it is in many points in that film, but I now believe that Tarantino is doing something quite important in this film (and exploring and exposing many important subjects in his many other films). 

Even the part in the movie where the dog Brandy notices the intruders could be seen as a message calling attention to a very important discrepancy in the actual summer of '69 murders, if you listen closely to Mae Brussell in her 1971 analysis linked above (or read the transcript of her broadcast, also linked above). 

Thank you for your comment because it is an important point that I should have addressed.