The Last Picture Show
...worth watching, ever. A tale from the Last Normal Year of our lives.
The first of September fell on Sunday in 2019. I don’t know what else happened that day or what led to my going to see the last movie I’ll ever watch in a theater, but my wife and I walked to the Vali 3 near our house to see Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.
We had no idea this was the last such September we’d know. We had no idea a fake, media-stoked “pandemic” would eventually shut this small, community-and-volunteer-run theater down. It was just a nice, pleasant afternoon in a far less hassled, far less anxious, far more reasonably priced country. A review blurb on the poster of the movie declared that the movie was “a love letter to Hollywood.”
In actuality, it was multiple love letters, love letters to far bigger things than what’s now known as “old Hollywood.” It was a love letter to the style, attitude, and aesthetic that was the year A.D. 1969. It was a love letter to a form of emotionally cool, but stern masculinity that was taken for granted then, but is all but extinct today. It was a love letter to the beauty of American women and Detroit iron, the latter of which became extinct as of 1974, post Arab Oil Embargo, post Energy Crisis, et al.
Tarantino even gifted us with the sensation of what it was like riding in the backseat with your parents in these cars, given the many from-the-backseat views he’d shot while the film’s principals were talking. And you remember you weren’t wearing a seatbelt. Your parents weren’t either. Also, mom and dad smoked.
Smoking is what impressed me greatly about the few films of Tarantino’s I’ve seen. The only other ones I’ve seen are Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but the impression I got at the sight of their stars doing such a thing against the general government/media push against smoking at the time was this is what adults used to do. It was no big deal. Some died early of cancer, but most still lived good, long lives.
I only smoke occasionally now—it’s too expensive to make a habit of now, thanks to the “sin taxes” piled on over the years—but the point missed by all the anti-smoking fussbudgets is that adults once had the choice. Those who made a big deal about smoking were generally looked down upon for what they were, prissy little busybodies who couldn’t accept that other people were out there enjoying themselves without their permission. Ashtrays were everywhere. If you didn’t like it, request the non-smoking section, or just sit outside.
[SPOILER ALERT] If I’ve taken this long to get to the plot, it’s because the plot exists as a device on which to hang the gorgeous fabric of long-gone 1969 Los Angeles. Leonardo DiCaprio is a former TV western star reduced to playing villains who gets beat up at the end of whatever TV show he’s guest-starring in. Brad Pitt, who won a much-deserved Oscar for his role here, is his loyal friend, stuntman, bodyguard, and handyman. They happen to live next door to the residence of director Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate, played by the last classically beautiful movie star on Earth, Margot Robbie.
Those who know the history of 1969 know that one of the notable events, aside from the moon landing and Woodstock, was the Manson family murders that took the lives of Sharon Tate and others in Roman Polanski’s absence. The “Once upon a time” in the title of the movie takes on a special poignancy as Manson’s killers are redirected to DiCaprio’s house, only to meet Brad Pitt’s character and his well-trained pit bull and a flame thrower DiCaprio’s character took away from a war movie he’d acted in. Manson’s murder squad is destroyed, Sharon Tate is saved, and DiCaprio’s character is invited into the Polanski estate. The fairy tale nature of the movie is made complete as DiCaprio’s character is seen walking through the open gates into what will be not only be the presumed revival of his career by a grateful Roman Polanski, but the critical respectability DiCaprio’s washed-up TV actor has always craved.
It’s the happy ending all of us who remember 1969 wished had happened. That it didn’t—well, this was a fairy tale, after all. Thanks to the magic of Hollywood, as conjured by writer and director Quentin Tarantino, we were able to experience it.
My wife and I stepped outside into the cool, early evening air feeling good for the time well spent, blissfully unaware of all that was about to unravel shortly after that first-of-September Sunday. Our oldest cat, Otis, whom we’d acquired while our children were still small, would become incontinent a week later. He would be unable to sleep with us as he’d done for 17 years, spending the last six months of his life alone in the mud room. My birthday in October was a minor disaster, as we’d made the decision to eat a new place in Del Norte, only to suffer comically awful service. The memory of that is all the more bitter because I could have, and should have eaten at our usual place, which would be one more casualty following the onset of the fake pandemic. One of our outdoor cats, whom we’d been planning on taking in at the passing of Otis, vanished just before Thanksgiving. That’s just the personal stuff. It didn’t help that I was drinking rather heavily that year. A.D. 2019 was the Last Normal Year for everyone. I wish I had been more present for it.
The COVID-19 hysteria and lockdowns that followed proved to be every bit as destructive to the national mood and culture as the 11 September 2001 catastrophe. Nothing has been the same ever since. As with those who long for the “post-9/11 unity,” we have some seriously sick people out there who long for the good old days of lockdowns and mask mandates. The best thing we can say about all that is we know who the crazies among us are now. That there are so many of them is quite dismaying, to say the least.
That so many more people have forgotten how good things used to be, not only in terms of prices, but in terms of customer service and general social stability, is even worse. We take for granted that not only are our cars and trucks are uglier now, but even our movie stars aren’t as glamorously lovely as they used to be.
I will go so far as to say that Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood was the last great movie ever made, certainly the last one worthy of seeing on the big screen. It had everything, comedy, drama, suspense, and a happy, hopeful-for-the-future ending. Most of all, it had glamor, from Margot Robbie’s largely quiet, just-walking-around-looking-beautiful presence, to the old school automobiles you only see at car shows today. It had everything today’s slop passing as cinema cannot possibly comprehend, let alone possess.
To think that was seven years ago—longer, depending upon when you read this. Like the 1969 of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, it was another world, long ago and so, so far away.
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