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July 29, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:30
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" The Freedomain Review
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So I went to the front lines of the cultural horrorscape known as Hollywood to get you the lowdown on the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
There are going to be spoilers in this...
But there'll be no spoiler as bad as actually going to see the movie, which is a monstrous mess.
And barely even a first draft and an alternative history without any kind of flagging.
You know, like, hey, Apollo 13 landed well.
And here's a movie about the Titanic, but it doesn't hit the iceberg.
Anyway, there's all this kind of mess.
But the movie as a whole, why did I go?
Well... I want to see what's going on culturally.
I want to inform you of what's going on culturally.
To be fair, for those of you who don't know, I went to acting school for a couple of years and did some acting in my youth.
And Leonardo DiCaprio is a fine actor.
You know, he often plays a guy who can grow a beard.
He often plays a guy who can complain about climate change while jetting back and forth on a private plane for salary negotiations.
But he is, to be fair, a very good actor.
Brad Pitt has this laid back Captain Kirk on Quaalude's Midwestern laconic charm that is kind of hypnotic.
And he is a good looking guy.
He is an aging Hollywood stallion of the highest order.
So the story, of course, takes place in 69, I think it is, in Hollywood.
and And DiCaprio plays this guy, Rick Dalton, who's kind of like a washed-up actor who did some TV shows and he's not supposed to be a very good actor.
And I remember this in theater school.
Like, it takes a very good actor to play a bad actor.
And I don't think that either Tarantino or DiCaprio could have DiCaprio play a bad actor or a mediocre actor.
Because the TV actors, they're full of charisma.
I'm thinking sort of James Garner and people like Don Johnson.
They've got a particular look.
They can play a particular kind of person, which is mostly themselves, fairly well.
But they're not actor-actors.
Like they would barely, rarely be unrecognizable in a role.
They don't have that transformation capacity.
They don't dedicate themselves to the craft as much.
They, you know, Dean Martin style, they kind of play themselves.
And that's fine.
You know, it's a known good, right?
It's a known good, right?
It's like McDonald's, right?
It's like McDonald's, right?
I mean, you go to McDonald's because it's a known quantity.
I mean, you go to McDonald's because it's a known quantity.
You're not going to get great food.
You're not going to get great food.
It's not going to be bad, bad food.
It's not going to be bad, bad food.
Maybe not great for you, but it's not going to be like some greasy spoon that doesn't have sanitation standards.
Maybe not great for you, but it's not going to be like some greasy spoon that doesn't have sanitation standards.
So DiCaprio plays this guy who's a mediocre TV actor who never rises above sort of C-grade movies.
But then, of course, there are these stories within the story, right?
So DiCaprio as the actor is in scenes in the movie that are really weird.
See, you can have a play within a play.
I mean, that's really cool, and it's a well-versed and tried-and-true technique to bring additional layers to a story.
I mean, obviously the most famous one, the play within the play, is Hamlet staging the play to catch his own Uncle Claudius in the murder of Hamlet's father.
So you can have a play within a play, but it's supposed to, first of all, be comprehensible as well within the context of the play.
And secondly, it's supposed to enhance and enrich the additional layers of narrative within the main story.
But since there isn't really a main story of any kind in this, then the play within the play is really actively annoying because...
You have these scenes that are being shot in some cheesy western TV series.
You don't know what the story is.
You don't know who the characters are.
You don't know what the motivations are.
And they just go on and on and on.
I mean, that's just weird.
That is weird. So again, you can have plays within a play, but the plays within the play have to be like Rashomon style, comprehensible to the audience.
And you just have these, you don't know who Luke Perry's character is.
You don't know who the little girl is.
You don't know who the lead is.
They have no idea even where they are.
And these scenes just go on and on.
And it's just weird. Like, I was actually bored and annoyed at that point.
Like, I don't understand this substory because it's not given any context.
So that is kind of strange.
Now, another thing you're going to get in Tarantino movies is these following kind of tropes.
First of all, there'll be endless shots of feet in the camera because the man seems to have a serious foot fetish and some of the foots he seems to like, according to at least one photograph I saw on Twitter, seemed to be appallingly small.
But you'll see lots of that kind of stuff.
What you're going to see as well is very charismatic people Living extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyles but being very, very attractive themselves, right?
So there's this completely useless scene where Brad Pitt is on top of a...
I'm just going to use because, you know, you can use the actors' names.
So Brad Pitt is on top of Leonardo DiCaprio's house because he needs to fix an antennae.
This doesn't mean anything in the story.
It doesn't show up later.
It's got no relevance to the plot.
It doesn't play out in any way, shape or form.
But it does give Brad Pitt an excuse to take his shirt off.
And yeah, a guy's in his 50s, looks fantastic.
And that's for the trailer, right?
So that you can get the ladies to come in and ogle.
You know, Brad Pitt's musculature, such as it stands.
You know, he's a good-looking guy, without a doubt.
But what does he do?
He doesn't exercise at all during the whole movie.
he smokes like a chimney and he sits in a car all day you barely ever see him moving around he sits on a couch, he sits in a car he sits on a couch, he sits at a restaurant so I'm new nutritionist I'm no doctor. But as far as I understand it, if you smoke all day and sit all day, You don't end up with the kind of physique that has women slowly inhaling popcorn through their nose when you take your shirt off.
So that's just kind of a weird thing.
And this is kind of a common trope in his movies.
People have the most appalling...
Unhealthy, degenerate lifestyles, but they're really physically attractive and perfect hair and good-looking and great bodies and all that.
And that's just a terrible thing.
That's a terrible thing to sell to people, that you can live these kinds of garbage lifestyles and still look fantastic.
It's really, really bad.
Now, another thing you're going to get in Tarantino movies, of course, is you're going to get drawn into liking someone who's then going to frack you over with appalling behavior, right?
So he gets you to bond with someone by showing vulnerability, but the vulnerability is not because Tarantino has any empathy or sympathy.
My God, just listen to Tarantino.
On the Howard Stern Show defending Roman Polanski, the rapist of a 13-year-old girl.
Like he drugged her and I think he gave her drinks and then he sexually assaulted this 13-year-old girl.
And you listen to Tarantino defending this guy.
Oh, she wanted it. She was a party girl.
I'll link to it below. It's unbelievably appalling.
And the idea that people have careers after this, it just shows you how degenerate the entertainment world has become.
So what Tarantino does is he gives you a bit of vulnerability.
He gives you a bit of good humor to draw you into liking people.
And then after you like them, they do the most appalling things.
And that's just designed to sever any genuine capacity for human connection that you have.
I know that's an overstatement, but if it happens often enough, I mean, you remember in Pulp Fiction by John, well, the main guy and his hitman friend, right, John Travolta and, was it, Samuel L. Jackson, sitting there in a car joking about what Quarter Pounders are called in...
In France, you know, joking and chatting and, you know, there's this vague kind of, you know, Harvey Ketel with good coffee stuff, right?
It's supposed to draw you into liking people and then those people do the most appalling things and then you realize that you've kind of been emotionally complicit in the committing of great evil, right?
And that's just designed to mess you up.
It's a form of verbal sadism.
It's a bait and switch. It tries to get you a Stockholm Syndrome bond with some truly...
Evil people, and if you expose yourself too much to this kind of stuff without knowledge of what's going on, how you're being manipulated into shame and complicity with imaginary evil, it's really, really bad for you.
So that's kind of important, right?
So you're drawn as a scene with the spoilers, right?
With DiCaprio and a child actress where he's got this vulnerability because he feels kind of old, he feels kind of useless, and he's coughing, right?
So there's this other thing, too. Like, when I was in theater school, I remember a lecture from...
Because I did acting and I also did playwriting.
I wrote, like, 30 plays.
And I remember my writing teacher saying, like, you can't have a gun on the mantelpiece of a play, right?
You've got a mantelpiece on stage and there's a gun there.
You've got to use that by the end of the...
You can't just have it sit there and never be used.
Similarly, when you have a chain smoker coughing and hacking and half his lung hanging out his nose, that's got to lead somewhere, right?
I mean, that's got to go somewhere, you know, in sort of that Clint Eastwood movie where he had cancer style, right?
That doesn't lead anywhere.
I mean, again, it's just one of these annoying things.
Oh, the smoker is coughing like crazy.
Well, that must mean that he's sick.
It's like, nope, it doesn't go anywhere.
It doesn't go anywhere any more than fixing the aerial so that you can see the sunscape shadows of Brad Pitt's abs goes anywhere.
But what happens, of course, is you end up kind of liking DiCaprio for his midlife crisis of feeling like he's not got a future and he's not doing particularly well.
And so you kind of like him, right?
And then you have sympathy for him when he castigates himself for not learning his lines properly and not preparing well for a role.
But then, of course, being DiCaprio, he rips off these great acting scenes and the little girl turns to him and says...
It's the greatest acting I've ever seen and all of that.
And that's just weird.
Like, if he was that good an actor, he wouldn't just be stuck playing the heavy in mediocre TV shows.
And that just doesn't make any sense.
And the whole scene, there's a scene with the late Luke Perry.
Luke Perry comes in and Leonardo DiCaprio is playing this bad guy who's got this child on his lap.
And he's making jokes. I don't get it.
Bengal lances. He's making jokes.
The little child's laughing and giggling and all of that.
It doesn't make any sense at all, right?
Why would the child be laughing and giggling?
It just makes no sense at all.
And then at the end of the scene, this guy who's kidnapped this girl and is holding her, right?
He throws the girl to the floor, you know, five, ten feet away from him, at which point people would shoot him, right?
Because, you know, if you've got the hostage, you don't throw the hostage away.
Otherwise, well, people are going to shoot you.
It's the Wild West, right? So people have got guns.
They're all in the saloon. And it just doesn't make any sense.
He's known as a bad guy.
The barkeep is afraid of him.
And it's just weird.
Like, it doesn't make any sense why he would throw this girl.
I mean, if I were the director, I'd say, well, you can't throw the girl away.
She's your hostage. So the moment you throw her away, you're going to get shot.
It makes no sense. But, you know, they don't notice that or don't care about it or whatever, right?
So you're drawn into liking DiCaprio to some degree, except there's kind of signs that he's a complete jerkwad, right?
I mean, so Brad Pitt's character, who's his best friend and used to be a stunt double now, is just his driver.
He's a war veteran, right?
And where does he live? He lives in a derelict trailer next to a drive-in theater, right?
And with his pit bull, I think, named Brandy.
Whereas, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio's character lives in this big Hollywood mansion next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.
And so why would he pay his friend so little, given that he's rich, right?
Why would he pay his friend so little that his friend has to live in this derelict trailer?
I mean, that's just, this is a garbage thing to do, right?
I mean, so you kind of like DiCaprio because he is a charismatic actor and all of that.
And then what happens is at the end of the movie and you know you sort of you're waiting for the shocking violence because you know it's Squeaky Fromm you know it's Charles Manson and I've got a presentation called The Truth About Charles Manson which I'll link to below which you should definitely check out it's a very very good presentation but you know that there's going to be appalling violence At the end,
if you know the story of what happened, and there's lots of theories about what happened between Charles Manson's cult members and Sharon Tate and so on, whether it was a drug deal gone bad or some random thing, who knows, right?
But you know there's going to be terrible violence at the end, and none of it makes any sense.
So there's this standard, you know, one guy's got a gun to the other guy, and the other guy is Brad Pitt, right?
And Brad Pitt is giggling because he's high on a LSD-laced, Cigarette.
And so it's kind of weird because there's a dog in the room.
A pit bull, right? So if you're going in to shoot someone, first of all, there's this long drawn-out scene where they're kind of laughing at each other, laughing at each other, and he doesn't shoot him.
But of course, if you're going into a room and you want to shoot someone and there's a pit bull, well, you shoot the pit bull first, right?
He doesn't do that. Pitbull's right there.
It's not like it's hidden in the shadows or something like that.
So anyway, and the violence is, I mean, it's beyond appalling.
I mean, absolutely beyond appalling.
I mean, I'm haunted by the five-minute screams of a girl getting torn apart by a pitbull.
I mean, that's just absolutely appalling stuff.
And then, of course, right, so early on, this is Tarantino, it's typical, right, this hatred of Nazis and constant killing of Nazis, which shouldn't have much to do with 1969 Hollywood, but they work it in.
He's got this flamethrower, and again, this is all spoilers and stuff, but, you know, don't see the movie, please, whatever you do, right?
The movie's got to make like $400 million to break even, and, you know, I'll see it so that you won't, right?
I mean, I'll see this slow-motion surgery channel of sadism so that you don't have to.
But there's all this unbelievable stuff.
There's gunshots going off, but Leonardo DiCaprio has headphones on.
Headphones are not, like if you ever tried to listen to music on a plane, headphones are not magic, you know?
And certainly there weren't noise-canceling headphones, I don't think, in 1969.
So this idea that Leonardo DiCaprio can't hear the gunshots, can't hear the screams of a girl being torn apart by a pit bull, and a guy having his genitals ripped off by a pit bull, I mean, just, ugh, this is appalling.
Why would you pay to see this?
Appalling. But anyway, so the girl runs out screaming, and she's disabled, right?
She's completely hysterical.
She may be dying from the pit bull attack, and she falls into his pool, and she's not armed.
She's not doing him any harm.
She's not having any threat to him, right?
No threat to him. And then Leonardo DiCaprio's character goes and gets the flamethrower that he used to kill the Nazis in the movie and he just sets fire to this wounded girl.
He doesn't know what the story is.
He doesn't know where she's from.
He certainly doesn't know that she's part of a group that's broken in to kill him.
And so he basically just this traumatized, viciously half dismembered woman falls into his pool And he just sets fire to her.
I mean, this has been an appalling act of sadistic sociopathy, right?
So you've kind of bonded with this guy because he's crying in midlife crisis.
He feels useless and so on.
And you kind of bond with him a little.
And then he just sends liquid fire into the face of a girl who's been mutilated by a pit bull.
And he burns her to death.
It's not self-defense. She's not attacking him.
She poses no threat, right?
So, what's all that about?
Well, it's about, oh look, you bonded with a guy who's capable of doing this.
Capable of doing this. Not to mention, of course, that, you know, I can sort of imagine Tarantino going to the studio head saying, oh, I want to do a movie with a young Roman Polanski in the movie, right?
And they'd be like, well, you're not going to talk about him sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl, are you?
And he's like, maybe.
And they're like, well, that movie's never getting made.
We're never going to make that movie if you give the basic...
Truths and facts about Roman Polanski.
And he's like, okay, well, maybe what I can do is show his hot, pretty wife and him in cool outfits at the Playboy Mansion dancing and having fun.
And they're like, good boy.
There's your kibble. Good boy.
Good boy, Quentin. Off you go and make that movie, right?
Just whitewashing all of this absolutely appalling history.
And I can't even watch...
Meryl Streep, after her thunderous applause and standing ovation for the very idea of Roman Polanski.
And this horrible thing about, oh, they're very talented, they're very brilliant.
It's like, ah, that's so hideous.
That is such a cult-like fetish of the capacity to imitate horrible human beings.
So people are talented.
Who cares? Who cares?
Talent, you know, there's this old story.
You sell your soul to the devil.
The devil gives you riches, fame, wealth, and power.
And in return, you give up your soul, right?
So... And in the movie, it's funny because in the movie, one of Manson's cult members says, oh, that was Rick Dalton, who just yelled at us on the road.
It doesn't really matter why. And so, you know, he taught us how to kill.
We saw so many murders growing up.
He taught us how to kill. So let's go kill the guy.
Who taught us how to kill? So Tarantino writes a script wherein he makes a very clear link between the portrayal of violence and the instigation of violence.
And then he just portrays violence.
Just portrays violence.
It's monstrous.
And then, so after the DiCaprio character burns this woman's girl, basically, to death without self-defense.
I mean, he would be tried.
Anyway... So then what happens is, you know, he's wanted to advance his career, and living next to Roman Polanski is real cool.
Now, this is before the Polanski and the girls' situation, but come on.
I mean, let's not imagine that Polanski started liking sex, sexual assault on 13-year-old girls.
That just happened later, and he was perfectly normal before then.
Let's not even picture that, right?
So then Leonardo DiCaprio's character gets invited up to chat with Sharon Tate, right, who survives in this alternate weird ending world.
And he goes up and he chats and he's perfectly fine.
Like he just flamethrowered and melted a girl to death in his swimming pool.
And he's just, well, you know, but hey, you know, if I get in good with Sharon Tate, it's going to be really good for my career and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, and, I mean, where were the—well, the Bruce Lee scene was funny, but where are the good, complex, solid female leads, right?
Why is this guy never accused of misogyny when he regularly has, you know, women—well, in this movie in particular, you know, women are beaten and mutilated and tortured and so on, and— They're just sex objects, right?
So the two sex objects, right?
There's the girl who looks about, I don't know, 14 or 15 years old, who vamps her way into Brad Pitt's car for the drive up to the deserted movie set where they used to shoot Westerns where the Manson cult is hanging out.
And, you know, there is this whole, she wants to tempt him with sexuality, and he says, no, it's not that complicated.
It's not really that complicated.
So she's just a sex figure, right?
She's like the siren that draws him into the cult and all of this, or into the cult area.
He doesn't join the cult, of course. So there's that big, complex female character.
And who else? Well, there's Sharon Tate, who is this weird, absent, alien Stepford wife who has what to do for a living?
Well, she packs a bag.
She goes to a bookstore.
She watches a movie of herself.
And, you know, with this weird, blank, vague, pristine, empty vessel of a head, smiling, physical perfection floating around...
No character there, no personality, no whatever, right?
And yet, so this woman, of course, Sharon Tate...
She was married to a guy who clearly, at least as it later was shown, had a predilection for sexually assaulting children, or 13-year-olds.
In this case, 13-year-olds. There have been accusations of even younger.
So it's kind of hard to have massive sympathy, obviously, in the history.
There's no reason why she should be killed or anything like that.
But it's hard to say, well, that's, you know, what a great human being was laid waste to by this terrible cult, right?
Because she married a guy who was into this drugging and raping girls.
So, you know, this is so terrible, right?
So, but Leonardo DiCaprio's character is like, yeah, it's good for my career to get to know Sharon Tate.
So even though I just melted a woman's or girl's head off and she's pretty young for no reason in my swimming pool, I can go and chat with this person and you're supposed to care about these people?
Supposed to care about these people?
You know, they just talked about this asteroid, just a city-ending asteroid that just brushed past the Earth and the astronomers only knew about it a few minutes before.
Now, of course, I don't want any city to be hit by an asteroid, but if I had to choose one, well, I think everyone knows.
Where I choose. So yeah, don't go see this monstrosity of a movie.
The amount of money and talent and energy and resources poured into the random, incomprehensible musings of a schizophrenic mind with the capacity to bond with charismatic actors who then do psychotically evil things.
Don't do it, man. It's bad for your soul.
You know, there's your virtue. There's this movie like a cheese grater.
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