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Once Upon a Time had its première at the Cannes Film Festival, where many in the audience were taken with its tone—wistful verging on elegiac. Tarantino was compared to John Ford. Others, less susceptible to cowboy romance, have found Tarantino’s nostalgia as reactionary as Trump’s, some even suggesting that, as displaced white men, Rick and Cliff are prototypical MAGA-hat heroes. (One need only step back from the story to see that insouciant roughnecks like these were not being phased out in 1969; it’s more that, fifty years later, they have become anachronisms replaced by the CGI cyborgs of Hollywood’s comic-book movies.)
Where the critique may be closer to the mark is that to be nostalgic for the Western is, in some ways, to be nostalgic for a particular regime—call it white supremacy, manifest destiny, or Hollywood über alles. Cliff’s casual disparagement of Mexicans is a deliberate inoculation, signaled by Tarantino to seem “old-fashioned”—however topical that bigotry may in fact be today. A more overt, explicitly comic example of nativist revenge is directed at the martial arts star Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh), in which he is mocked by Cliff, picks a fight with him, and gets his comeuppance.
Lee’s daughter has complained about what she sees as a slanderous scene. In actual fact, Lee, who was at the time a featured player on The Green Hornet TV show as well as a martial arts instructor to the stars, did brawl with a stunt man. But that was not until 1973, and it is unlikely Lee suffered the ridiculous mortification shown here.
It’s excusable that Tarantino chose to portray Lee, the only significant person of color in the movie, as an obnoxious braggart—showbiz is full of such types. We, in 2019, are meant to understand that Cliff is fighting to protect his status. But Tarantino seems to have little awareness of how his joke would have played in 1969. Back then, a murderous hatred of “orientals” and “gooks” was common currency and practically government-sponsored, given all the American grunts waging war in the jungles and paddy fields of Indochina. The scene is thus Rambo avant la lettre: by humiliating Lee, Cliff was paying back the VC.
full: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/19/once-upon-a-time-in-tarantinos-hollywood/
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