![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/de91610049f2ba9d681dea6e26194a30.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Paul Tims<\/strong> argues that Tarantino’s assertion of the value of violence in his latest film has a message for anti-capitalist activists<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m a huge Tarantino fan. You\u2019re shocked, I can tell. Sarcasm aside, regular readers can probably infer from my writing style and thematic preoccupations that I\u2019m equally enthused by his violent, grind-house sensibilities and the surprisingly astute and nuanced social commentary of his meatier films. Case in point, The Hateful Eight<\/em> wasn\u2019t just about eight people in a room trying to murder one another, it was a meditation on the way the oft-romanticised values of the Old West arbitrarily legitimated some types of amoral sociopath while condemning others. Likewise, Django Unchained<\/em> was (obviously) a film about the evils of racism and the historic slave trade, but it was also a portrayal of complicity in that trade by people we usually think of as victims, or at least uninvolved bystanders.<\/p>\n Often, his films are underpinned by a shared theme of vengeance or personal outrage (which you can read more about HERE<\/a> and which will be important later). My point is that Tarantino films aren\u2019t just entertaining exercises in stylised sex and violence (although they do contain those things in wondrous abundance, thank goodness). They\u2019re also reflections on the state of culture or the history that lead to that culture. Few, however, have felt as relevant and significant as his most recent effort, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em>.<\/p>\n Spoiler Alert<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n In order to discuss the cultural import of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em>, and what it means for those of us on the left, I need to spoil the ending completely. Throughout the majority of its run-time, the film follows two minor (and entirely fictional) figures in the Hollywood eco-system who used to act in old-fashioned, two-fisted, morally uncomplicated Westerns until they started to become unfashionable and who just happen to live next to Sharon Tate. Clearly, the film is building up to the events of August 8th, 1969, when Tate and four other people were murdered by the Manson family. However, Tarantino being Tarantino, that\u2019s not what happens in the film\u2019s universe. Instead, the Manson family try to attack our fictional protagonists first and end up getting beaten to death themselves, set on fire and (in one case), partially eaten by an adorable pit-bull terrier.<\/p>\n Now, ostensibly, the reason for this is personal and pretty obvious: catharsis. Everyone (including Quentin Tarantino) hates the Manson family, yet as a culture we can\u2019t help but accord them a level of importance and keep their legend alive because of the emotional impact Tate\u2019s murder had. By showing them as a bunch of blundering, easily-eviscerated incompetents, Tarantino robs them of this posthumous power and, in fact, gives us licence to laugh at them. It\u2019s the ultimate and final \u2018screw you\u2019 to a group of people who, in the director\u2019s view, did something unforgivable to a cohort he strongly identifies with.<\/p>\n However, this analysis is far too simple. What\u2019s much more interesting to me is the film\u2019s tacit acknowledgement that something is wrong with our culture. The overriding theme of my Culture Punch articles thus far has been that the superficially cheery and harmless cornerstones of our modern western culture are built on a foundation of corruption and decay. The BBC and Facebook share an insidious right-wing bias that affects the type of content they deliver through their different mediums. Disney (whose films define so many childhoods) uses slave labour to make its merch. Even the videogames industry is built on the backs of underpaid, overworked, exploited developers. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em> is obviously specifically concerned with cinema, not society in general, but it seems to share my underlying belief that something is very wrong with the shape of modern culture. For Tarantino, this something is connected intimately with the way we, as a culture, process violence.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s briefly unpack the film\u2019s ideology and find the evidence for those assertions. Our first clue to the director\u2019s thesis comes from his choice of main characters. Both of them are intimately connected with (but not defined by) a specific type of masculinity in which violence is a central pillar. DiCaprio\u2019s character, Dalton, carved out a niche for himself playing rough-and-ready gunslingers in TV shows and films, even though he\u2019s clearly a soft, sensitive guy in real life. Pitt\u2019s character is a real-life badass who proves to be lethally effective in threatening situations but who, in his day-to-day existence, is content to potter around doing odd-jobs. Considering the wide array of Hollywood archetypes available, I think it\u2019s telling that Tarantino chose to zero in on two men who were familiar and comfortable with violence but who weren\u2019t obsessed with or imprisoned by it.<\/p>\n The second piece of the puzzle comes from the film\u2019s near-constant references to its protagonists\u2019 obsolescence in American cinema. Tarantino constantly reminds us that the world these men represent is on its way out. It\u2019s a world where violence is a tool available to comparatively ordinary people; a tool that can be used to affect positive as well as negative deeds. Indeed, even a passing familiarity with cinematic history bears this out. After the 1960s, Hollywood\u2019s relationship to violence changed profoundly. Throughout the seventies and eighties, it became the province of the exceptional and the inhuman. If you don\u2019t believe me, think about the best-known violent action films of that era. In Terminator and Robocop, violence is enacted primarily by superhuman machines, with lesser violence accorded to society\u2019s outsiders and to specific, exceptional human beings. In the Rambo films, violence is the province of specially-trained individuals who just happen to embody the American military ideal (even though they might have a complicated relationship with the military itself). Then, from the 1990s to the present day, violence became increasingly cartoonified. Supernatural and superhero movies turned it into a stylised affair with very little connection to reality and (in many cases) no visible blood or loss of life beyond that necessary to keep the audience invested.<\/p>\n Finally, Tarantino shows us a version of the Manson family massacre in which the presence of ordinary people who are used to violence leads to a radically different outcome. Instead of the Manson family murdering Tate and her friends, they are defeated completely and totally by an out-of-work actor and his stunt double, one of whom is heavily stoned at the time. Aside from framing the massacre (as it occurred in real life) as the point at which Hollywood turned its back on mundane violence (because it was used against its stars), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em> is also stating that, actually, the type of violence embodied by its lead characters has a right to cultural acknowledgement and can actually serve as a bulwark against the type of violence embodied by the Manson family.<\/p>\n Righteous violence and capitalist exploitation<\/strong><\/p>\n Now, that\u2019s all very interesting, but what on Earth does it have to do with socialism and cultural democracy? The answer is simple: the film\u2019s model of acceptable and even righteous violence is exactly counter to what capitalism wants us to believe about violence.<\/p>\n No oppressive regime or social structure has ever been dismantled without violence. The 26 Counties of the Republic of Ireland didn\u2019t free themselves from British rule with well-practised tutting: it took an armed uprising (you can read about the Easter Rising and how it turned the tide of public opinion against British occupation HERE<\/a>). The suffragettes didn\u2019t win the vote for women by peaceful deeds alone: they did it by blowing up private property, putting their own lives on the line and taking other forms of violent action (which you can read about HERE<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n Capitalism is a system of exploitation. Atrocities are perpetrated in its name every day. Around the world, people are worked to death in sweatshops. People with treatable conditions die because they or their healthcare providers can\u2019t afford the exorbitant prices charged by Big Pharma. Governments are too afraid of corporate powers to charge enough tax, and as a result welfare budgets are stretched to breaking point and people die in poverty because they don\u2019t qualify for benefits their governments can\u2019t afford. The global capitalist economic system is a plague whose symptoms are inequality, strife, misery, physical sickness, poor mental health, economic slavery and death. And the point is this \u2013 you can bet that the people who benefit from this system don\u2019t want ordinary folk realising that it is within their power to commit violence against the apparatus of their system.<\/p>\n Now, I don\u2019t think that there\u2019s a conscious conspiracy in Hollywood to disconnect fantasies of violence from any sense of real-world applicability. I also don\u2019t think that Tarantino is using his latest film to seed an anti-capitalist uprising. However, mainstream Hollywood\u2019s usual refusal to engage with plausible violence is beneficial to capitalism, regardless of whether it\u2019s intentional or not. Likewise, Tarantino\u2019s unexpected assertion of the value of violence is relevant to the struggle, even though he clearly didn\u2019t intend it as a coded message to diehard lefties.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying that it\u2019s good or appropriate to go out and physically attack the first venture capitalist or banker that you see. For a start, you\u2019d be arrested and, for another, in a world of impersonal systems, any effective violence would have to be enacted against infrastructure not people. I\u2019m not even calling for a violent uprising against capitalism right here and now. My point is merely that it behoves us to remember that we are capable of fighting back on the physical level as well as the cultural one \u2013 and this is something our oppressors would do well to bear in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Tims argues that Tarantino’s assertion of the value of violence in his latest film has a message for anti-capitalist activists I\u2019m a huge Tarantino fan. You\u2019re…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":505,"featured_media":13098,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/505"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}