Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Fight Club, and the Quest For Authenticity

An exploration of the struggles in constructing an authentic self

As with any of Quentin Tarantino's films, his ninth is a fountain of hot-takes. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has something for everybody with an opinion about just about anything. The film has touched off conversations about #MeToo, nostalgia, Christianity, and foot fetishism. In short, I fully understand that the last thing anybody needs is yet another angle on this movie. 

Nonetheless, I would like to propose that Tarantino's latest is not only the sweetest, most optimistic film of his career, it's also a rather profound exploration of the struggles in constructing an authentic self. By looking at this film's use of doubling, and by contrasting it with how doubling functions in David Fincher's Fight Club, I want to argue that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood offers unexpected wisdom about the possibility of finding authenticity in a world of artifice, even as it creates an artificial past.

The film is utterly unique in Tarantino's catalog, lacking (until the ending) the gruesome violence that characterizes so many of his films. The specter of that violence still hangs over this film and adds a lot of juicy tension to scenes like Cliff's visit to Spahn Ranch. One has come to expect carnage in scenes like this in the past, and Tarantino masterfully uses that expectation to create a scene that is a masterclass in suspense. 

Once Upon a Time's directorial craftsmanship is joined by absolutely stellar performances across the board. Leonardo DiCaprio's lead performance as Rick Dalton is a complex web of rage, vulnerability, and desperation and should earn the actor an Oscar nomination if there is any justice. Likewise, Margot Robbie is simply dazzling as Sharon Tate and, like the film itself, she makes the viewer long for a world in which Tate survived Charles Manson's impotent rage. 

It is Brad Pitt as Rick's stunt-double, Cliff Booth, that I want to focus this analysis on, however. Pitt's performance pairs nicely with DiCaprio's and his characterization of Cliff is a kind of negative to DiCaprio's Rick Dalton. For all Dalton's frantic, nervous desperation, Pitt's Cliff is a rock of bemused stoicism, and the two performances feed seamlessly off one another. So seamlessly that they function as two parts of a single whole, which is of primary concern to the film, I argue.

The doubling of Cliff and Rick offers substantial food for thought about the nature of identity in this film, and I want to suggest that Once Upon a Time says something important about personal redemption. Some viewers have dismissed Tarantino's latest as mere wish-fulfillment, but others, such as David Bentley Hart, see a sincere moral imagination in the film's re-imagination of the Manson tragedy, and its attempt at crafting an alternative narrative that redeems the broken past through art. Hart's reading of the film seems right to me and I think that central to the film's power is Rick Dalton's process of reconciliation with himself. He struggles with being two people at once, the biological Rick Dalton, and the Hollywood creation "Rick Dalton."

DiCaprio's Dalton is an amalgam of an old-Hollywood system actor. He is part Clint Eastwood, part James Arness, and part John Wayne. He is meant to be taken as an archetype of an actor who is a product of a star-driven system. Whatever role Dalton was playing, he was, for his audience, "Rick Dalton," and his strength was in delivering on the expectations that system created. The problem with that for Dalton is that he became a fictional version of himself in the process. His individual identity, as an artist and as a man, was lost, replaced with the product "Rick Dalton" that was crafted and sold by the entertainment industry. And as Hollywood began transitioning away from the system in which this was successful, Dalton experienced a profound identity crisis.

The forging of that artificial identity required the pairing of Rick with Cliff, his confidant, and stunt double. "Rick Dalton" could not very well be an action hero if he could not fall off a horse. However, to do so would eventually bear a heavy toll upon Rick Dalton. Cliff, the rugged stunt man, could bear the physical burdens that made the on-screen persona possible. 

The resulting partnership was a two-sided coin for Dalton. Sure it made the creation of "Rick Dalton" possible, but it stunted the human development of Rick Dalton, and in the midst of epochal changes in the industry threatened his very existence. Cliff made Rick look powerful on-screen, but off-screen, Dalton's life became similarly dependent upon Cliff, who could not fix his own TV antenna or even drive his own car. To create the heroic, powerful "Rick Dalton," Rick Dalton became nothing but a spider-web of powerlessness and anxiety. 

"Rick Dalton's" power resided fully in Cliff's preternaturally capable hands. He may or may not have killed his wife, but he is a master stuntman nonetheless, an expert driver, a skilled handyman, and he even beat Bruce Lee in a fight. This is all before his near single-handed massacre of the Manson family at the film's climax. In short, the power he brings to the creation of "Rick Dalton" is dangerous, with a mystical violence lying just below the grinning, calm surface he presents. He is the id to Dalton's superego and together, they form a precarious ego.

Here a comparison to Fight Club is in order.

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel also dealt with a character split into two halves. The crafted persona of "The Narrator" (Edward Norton) comes to depend on the unbridled violence of his other half, Tyler Durden (performed by, coincidently or not, our own Brad Pitt). Durden is the id to The Narrator's out-of-control superego, and he frees the depressed white-collar worker from the constraints put on him by consumer society, supposedly connecting him back to his state as a "natural man." 

Like Rick Dalton, The Narrator lives a life curated for success in the machinery of his industry. The demands of this effort eventually replaces any authenticity his life might contain with a manicured performance. His is a kind of simulacrum rather than a man. 

Here is precisely where Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges from Fight Club, however, and the change helps make Tarantino's film far more optimistic than Fincher's. 

For Fight Club's Narrator, Pitt’s Tyler Durden is a hammer used to destroy the carefully curated image. Trapped in a consumer nightmare existence, Norton's character invents a psychic projection of himself that frees him from the shackles of his inauthentic lifestyle. What many viewers of the film miss, however, is that, despite the apparent ethical move toward authenticity, what this actually results in is a kind of fascist movement (today we might call the Fight Club an Alt-Right group) based on a mythology of the past. In short, The Narrator and Durden replace one form of inauthenticity with another. 

Once Upon a Time inverts the relationship between Pitt and his double. Here, the free and violent Cliff is not the solution to Rick's problem of inauthenticity, he helps facilitate it in the first place. (One other major difference is, of course, that here Pitt's character literally exists and is not a psychic manifestation of The Narrator's subconscious). When, at the film's end, Rick and Cliff amicably part, both are given the new opportunity to exist without dependency upon the other in this optimistic fantasy world in which Old Hollywood and New Hollywood come together without the violent fracture of the Manson murders.

The difference is significant. Because Cliff is not leading Rick from one artificial life to another, Rick is free from his codependency upon his stunt man and free to create a whole version of himself. 

And as it turns out, Rick is a good actor. In the film's third act, while separated from Cliff, he blossoms in his craft. Hired by a director who breaks with practices of the system that created "Rick Dalton," Rick is forced to act, not merely perform "Rick Dalton." DiCaprio's performance in these scenes are the moral centerpiece of the film and we see a transformation in Dalton. Freed of the constructed identity that created "Rick Dalton," including his id, Cliff, he sheds the confines of the old system and metamorphoses into an actor that may one day star in Roman Polanski films of an imagined New Hollywood.