Film Comment – July 01, 2019

July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 31

has already attested, Tarantino is not above revising history out-
landishly when it will make for a dy-no-mite third act.)
Setting Hardin aside for a moment, take Burt Reynolds as
another slightly more puzzling case study/partial inspiration. He
had a higher profile but still toiled doggedly for years in canceled
series and useless B-movies. Finally the yin-yang synergy of
Deliveranceand his snarky talk-show appearances made him an
icon almost in spite of himself. Yet the singular, crushing lack of
glamour to ’60s series television—show business at its most delib-
erately unimaginative and diabolically monotonous—was so single-
minded as to bury someone as vital as Reynolds alive. Television
had turned the idea of the proverbial Dream Factory on its head,
and driven it into the ground like a spike, hostile to the idea of self,
let alone expression. The absence of mystique became television’s
most distinguishing feature, every facet converted into unyieldingly
formulaic premises, rote performances, sexual denial, and sanitized
violence. The networks had finally found a way to eliminate all
those pesky human variables and idiosyncrasies from the entertain-
ment equation, with the Westerns like so much discount furniture:
sofas and love seats, leatherette recliners and dinette sets.
Sidelined behind this grim stasis, there was another gravita-
tional-generational force waiting to assert itself: all those then-
peripheral actors from Jack Nicholson to Bruce Dern (who is also
in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, as George Spahn—ironically
the part meant for Reynolds before he died), James Coburn, War-
ren Oates, and even Robert Redford, who kicked around playing

psychos, noble half-breeds, or shell-shocked Civil War vets. TV

managed to keep the ’60s at bay, but series refugees McQueen and

Eastwood were each avatars of something different—a cipher-like

cool or a nihilistic shrug. Signs of life, or at least of not giving a shit.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywoodis one mythopoetic way of

contextualizing how Hollywood cracked up (or cracked open) over

these fault lines, like a glass house with a gas leak. Instead of the

usual catalysts—’Nam, Civil Rights, Assassinations, Bad Karma—I

might suggest one tiny personal moment to stand in for the historic

upheavals and aesthetic discontents. Around 1970, as a 12-year-old I

was taken to a double feature consisting of two western “spoofs.”

Meaning the broadest, most inane western burlesques draped in

smuttier-than-TV-allowed innuendo—dumbed-down versions of

Playboy’s Party Jokes, if such can even be imagined. Dirty Dingus

Magee starred Frank Sinatra and George Kennedy, at once so self-

infantilized and male-menopausal, so gratingly unhip and boorish,

as to make even a kid want to crawl into a hole and die of embar-

rassment. Waterhole # 3 was the second feature, starring the hipper

Coburn, here smirking all the way to a paycheck big enough to erase

this debacle from his mental résumé. Pure movie mortification—a

formative enough trauma to turn an impressionable viewer into

a critic or a madman. Or, who knows—a film director exorcising,

castigating, and venerating his ghosts. 

Howard Hamptonfrequently writes about organized chaos for

Film Comment.

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