Once Upon A Time In.... Hollywood - Esquire Interview with Tarantino,DiCaprio, Pitt By Michael Hainey

What An Interview!

Reading this interview with The Three through Leslie Fiedler's critical essays, Le Carre's character Leiser in Looking Glass War, Roberto Bolano's 2666 and of course Luce Irigaray's SPECULUM of the Other Woman. 

Leiser smiled. It was the best ever, that week, John. It's funny, isn't it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it's the men that matter; just the men. From 

Le Carre's Looking Glass War

SOME EXCERPTS:

The beginning of the interview

Pitt settles in, looks into a small...rise. He looks up and says, "There's nothing I can do about boner pants, is there?" 

Tarantino looks at him confused.

"Remember that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode?" Pitt says. "Where the woman thinks he popped one in the movie theater?" Tarantino laughs.

I offer Pitt a pillow. For his lap. He tries it for a minute and then flips it to the side.


Brad Pitt refers to his unintentional erection attributing it to his pants? Too tight? Hainey refers to women as CHICKS and that completes this good ol boy group sealing him the writer into its seams. 

Any woman is aware that in these days, if she were present, they would not be speaking this way. It would not be a Male Discourse only which is what we are reading.

This is the way men speak when women are not present.

In Bolano's 2666 it will be constantly  brought to your attention, especially during The Part About the Crimes - 300 plus pages of autopsies -  as the officers discuss the bodies, the crime scene, of the murdered women or their dumping as road kill in the desert,  as if they are commodities rather than victims of men. The only exception is the murdered bodies of the two kidnapped girls ages 14 and 9 is it? One of them weeps.

This is the way they talk about us when we are not present. Margot Robbie is in this film but she is not present at this Esquire Interview. 

Bolano will tell us that in these crimes in St. Teresa - exact copy of the real ones in Cuidad Juarez  - conceals

The Secret of the World.

Luce Irigaray will be more direct:

The world is ruled by male homosexual, homoerotic collusion that they know but do not know they know. Heterosexuality is the MASK that conceals this. 

Men hate openly gay men because then they have made themselves into commodities just like women. 

To be accumulated and exchanged.

And anyone familiar with the reviews, essays and writings of Leslie Fiedler will already know that ALL his work was directed at this undetected homoerotic homosexuality permeating all group activities where men gather together. He hones in on the great American novels: Moby Dick; Huckleberry Finn; and those of James Fenimore Cooper. Nor does Hemingway escape. He takes on football and the men who arbitrated the Treaty of Versailles to end up giving us Hitler and World war II. My rude awakening when I read Come Back To The Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (LINK is pdf for you) led to associations of my own that I had felt, but never uttered and hardly even dared to think I might have intuitively grasped something universal in the world until I was validated. Now of course I see it everywhere so here is a recent recognition in this Esquire interview which I am sharing here. 



As things are changing in Hollywood in 1969 Michael Hainey summarizes: 

MH: What's fascinating __ there is the rise of the pretty leading man, but there is also the rise of the anti-leading man. Again, look at 1969. Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo in a corrupted western, Midnight Cowboy. And then, who is the complete embodiment of the new anti-leading man? Charles Manson! He's hairy and charismatic and young. Plus, he gets the chicks. And he literally steals the old dream factories from these guys; he's living on an old movie set. Manson usurps it all! Even the headlines. He becomes more famous than all of them.

BP : Right! Well put, well put.

Here Pitt comments on what Hainey has said. He does not say Wow! Nor does he just nod his head in agreement or say yes. The subtext I am reading here is the misogynist male automatic comment of placing a judgement on what Hainey has said. Right! Well put. well put. Pitt has assumed dominance here in the masculine DISCOURSE of this  conversation where Hainey is not asking questions but commenting on what the Three are saying, often to each other. Sort of like women tend to do in this situation.

Or is Pitt assuming the femme position of agreeing and praising? Is this becoming trans now?

But above Hainey has done the same thing:

QT: But the thing is, Rick was sold a bill of goods everyone else was sold. To be a young leading man is to be macho and masculine and sexy and handsome and chiseled.

MH: Well, for his generation, that's the epitome of manhood, of male identity. And here Hainey is agreeing and rephrasing Tarantino. He is not the journalist asking questions that can be labeled "interrogative" forcing their replies into the Binary Discourse. This interview is free association. That makes it different.

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LD: As I'm thinking about it, I've had these relationships in the industry too. You need your support system. You need that guy you can sit there and watch TV with and not say a fucking word with for five hours. You need to know somebody is "there." When we were doing the movie, my relationship with Brad clicked. It was very early on where he improvised a line and it changed everything. In the scene, as it was written, I'm coming to set hungover and I am basically getting my fate handed to me, discovering what my future is going to be in this industry. And I'm really down. And in the scene, Brad ad-libs. He just comes out with this line: He looks at me and says, "Hey you're Rick fucking Dalton. Don't you forget that."

I find this use of another guy to just be there very like the guy who wants the woman - eye candy type? - to just be there, chilling. This is exactly a description of rapprochement from psychoanalysis telling about that early pre specking stage of development when the young child plays in the room where the mother is. Mother does not have to be interacting with her child, she just has to be there. If she gets up and goes to check the oven the spell is broken and the child follows her rather than continue playing. Mother's presence is a necessary part of this tiny world the child requires to play creatively. Mahler's work on Separation and Individuation. clearly Leo has not completed this stage and the fact that he talks about it means that he wants to understand it.

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They are talking together about how the movie industry is changing now. That we are in a moment in time where it is shifting just as it did in 1969. And yes it is. I have felt it for a long time.

BP:  What I always loved about going to a cinema was letting something slowly unfold, and to luxuriate in that story and watch and see where it goes. I'm curious to see if that whole form of movie watching is just out the window with the younger generations. I don't think so completely. 

Walter Benjamin has written beautifully on this understanding. Time is slower. There is time for contemplation, for memory. Today's young people are mostly ADD - medicated or not - and they want FAST. They want to be entertained, amused. They are not looking for contemplation, associations with their memories or connecting dots with other films. 

The classic BP must read

QT: It requires the right kind of movie - one that hits the right kind of nerve where it becomes a conversation.  "Get Out" achieved that. Everyone was talking about it, and the whole metaphor of the Sunken Place was something everyone started to use. It sparked genuine conversation. It used to be movies were the pop-culture conversation and it was much rarer for a TV show to break into that place. But now that's where it is.

For me in the early 1960's while teaching in an elementary school the topic in the teachers's room was always TV and rarely movies. I dont think these three know that.

Leo goes on to say that there is always that chance to do something really fine with your part. Yes there are those wonderful moments when a mediocre film comes alive when that great moment comes. Who can ever forget James Dean in Giant when his oil well hits and he is telling the group all covered in oil and happiness. It was a rare moment then in those times and we all felt it. The same is true in that moment in Thelma and Louise when Brad is caught and being dragged away and shouting to Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. It was a WOW moment and I just knew, sitting in Singapore watching it, that Brad was going to be the new big star. It was his time to take a small part and make it great.

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QT:  Then you ask, "How does the Manson Family fit in?" Well, that's the trick. And that is, actually, how it is supposed to work. "How does this rancidness figure into everything?" And I want the audience asking that question, and I hope that's one of the things that helps lead you to the theater. It's like we've got a perfectly good body and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus. 

FLEETING MOMENTS

MH: One of the crazy facts about Manson:He was not an outsider in Hollywood. He crosseed paths with many famous people in town. Like Brian Wilson. Or like doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, the record producer. you guys have lived in this town a long time.what six degrees of weirdness do you have?

BP: I remember back in the early days I hung out with Brandon Lee.....We went out one night and everyone else had peeled off, and we ended up back at his place and it was like six in the morning. A real, you know, drunk and stony night, and he proceeded that night to tell me how he thought he was going to die young like his dad. And I just chalked it up to, you know, stony 6:00 A.M. talk. Then he got The Crow next year.

LD: I have one. One of the most ominous and sad ones. I grew up revering River Phoenix as the great actor of my generation, and all I ever wanted was to have just an opportunity to shake his hand. And one night, at a party in Silver Lake, I saw him walk up a flight of stairs. It was almost like something you would see in Vertigo, because I saw there was something in his face, and I'd never met him - always wanted to meet him, always wanted to just have an encounter with him  - and he was walking toward me and I kind of froze. And then the crowd got in my way, and I looked back and he was gone.  I walked back up the stairs and back down, and I was like, "Where did he go?" And he was ...on his way to the Viper Room.  It was almost as if - I don't know how to describe it, but it's this existential thing where I felt like ...he disappeared in front of my very eyes, and the tragedy that I felt afterward of having lost this great influence for me and all of my friends. The actor we all talked about. Just to be able to have that, always wanting to just - and I remember extending my hand out, and then ...Two people came in front and then I looked back, and then he wasn't there.

BP: I'll tell you one of the greatest moments  I've had in this town: getting to spend two days with Burt Reynolds on this film. 

QT: Yeah.

LD: Yeah.

MH: He was originally cast to play George Spahn, correct?

QT Yeah. The last performance Burt Reynolds gave was when he came down and did a rehearsal day for that sequence, and then the script reading. And that was really amazing.

BP: It was a fucking pleasure.

QT: I found out from three different people that the last thing he did just before he died was run lines with his assistant. Then he went to the bathroom, and that's when he had his heart attack.

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Did anyone notice that all these "moments" were about other men? 

Tarantino is an original and accomplished writer and director of unique films. Leo and Brad have been the objects of desire for many women. Yet none of these three have ever been able to sustain a mature emotional relationship with a mature emotional woman, have they. Brad comes close with Joli but they have a public breakdown on an airplane! Over the eldest son's public argument with his adopted father. so Maddox and Brad go at it and it seems Brad is abusive. This is a very normal occurrence between teen sons and fathers. The old Oedipal who owns the mother, the son or the father? Evidently that was never addressed in the family dynamics. Why? IDK.