Intertext and Out the Other

Leonardo DiCaprio prepares to take on Nazis, while Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate is about to catch one of her movies in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

At one point in Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic fairy tale, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019), movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman/best friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) drive past a movie theatre showing The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). It’s easy to miss, and most viewers who even bother to notice would dismiss it as a just a blip. But when it comes to cultural references in Quentin Tarantino’s movies there are no blips. This is a very subtle comment on the future of actors like DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton. The Night They Raided Minsky’s marked the film debut of Elliott Gould, one of a handful of actors who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, would change the face of stardom in Hollywood. The strong-jawed aging pretty boys like Dalton would be out in favor of leading men who looked more like real people. It’s a small moment, almost a throwaway, but it indicates how thoroughly Tarantino’s film is grounded in Hollywood’s past. For Tarantino, film history, no matter now trivial to some, is part of his cinematic language.

This is all a form of intertextuality, the use of other texts to shape a text's meaning.  It's a practice that dates back to the earliest literary forms, though the term was not coined until 1980, when Julia Kristeva published Desire in Language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. Later scholars have suggested that every word is an intertext, having derived its meanings from appearances in other texts. This would suggest that all artistic creations are part of one ever-evolving master creation, and indeed, Tarantino's works suggest the existence of some master "film" encompassing all works in the medium.

The movies’ past has always figured heavily in Tarantino’s works and not just in references to culturally approved “masterpieces.” Rather, he exults in movies that move, the trashier action and horror films, particularly those that came along after the arrival of the ratings system and the proliferation of home video. In the case of ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD, he makes his central character a film and TV actor fighting to keep his career alive after leaving a successful Western series. Rick Dalton keeps himself going playing mostly villains in TV guest shots (Tarantino even cuts him into an episode of The FBI in place of original guest star Burt Reynolds, whose friendship with stuntman Hal Needham inspired the relationship between Dalton and his stunt double). His agent (Al Pacino, in a very funny cameo) advises him to sign for a series of Italian films, and Dalton returns from Italy the night of the Manson murders.

Running parallel to his story are the last days of Sharon Tate. Played by Margot Robbie, she’s an almost beatific figure who loves to dance and hug people. At one point, she watches one of her movies, the Matt Helm thriller The Wrecking Crew (1968), and giggles as the audience responds to her performance. Robbie’s resemblance to Tate is so strong Tarantino doesn’t have to cut her into that film. He just shows scenes from the original, and it works. Tate has a tenuous connection to the Rick Dalton plot. She and husband Roman Polanski are renting a house next to his. Of course, in the real world, their house on Cielo Drive didn’t have any close neighbors, but this isn’t reality; it’s fantasy. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just point out that Tarantino is the director who had Adolph Hitler killed in Occupied France in Inglorious Basterds (2009).

In Tarantino’s fantasy Hollywood, Rick Dalton appears in films and TV shows that originally starred not just Reynolds but actors like Joe Don Baker and Ty Hardin. It's interesting that Tarantino, a long-time champion of B- and even Z-grade movies, fills his picture with references to the cheap and ephemeral while offering relatively little screen time — and no on-screen references — to the more critically respectable works of Tate's husband, Roman Polanski. When Rick finally meets the people next door, they connect through Tate and former beau Jay Sebring's love of one of Rick's sketchier films, The 14 Fists of McClusky. Tarantino has always been a subversive filmmaker, and the focus on the Rick Daltons of the world seems his way of subverting the pantheon of “great” films, giving the movies he loves a greater place in the great master film of which Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a part.

Tarantino displays a lot of affection for marginal figures like Dalton and Booth. When Dalton films the pilot for the TV Western series Lancer, Tarantino lets the character connect with the series' star, James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant). They have a sweet scene together discussing Dalton's career, and when the shoot is over, Tarantino shows Olyphant getting on his motorcycle, a bittersweet reference to the accident that would cost Stacy his career. A more cynical director might have thrown in a reference to Stacy’s later conviction for child molestation, but Tarantino chooses to focus on him as part of a lost Western tradition the movies tried to keep alive. It’s a fantasy Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood perpetuates in its final scenes…but spoilers.

Sadly, Tarantino’s generosity doesn’t extend to everybody depicted in the film. At times, he’s a bit too much the gadfly for the picture’s own good. During a flashback to Dalton’s guest shot on The Green Hornet, he depicts a confrontation between Booth and that series’ star, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), who’s portrayed as a preening, egotistical fool. For plot purposes, its important that Booth prove to be a better fighter than Lee, but making Lee a buffoon into the bargain seems gratuitous and even racist, not to mention a little shallow. It’s a quick and easy way to get into the sparring match and keep the audience on Booth’s side.

Lee, at least, has a stalwart cult of fans to keep his memory alive. Sam Wanamaker doesn’t. Wanamaker directed the pilot episode of Lancer, and when he first turns up it’s great to see he’s played by Nicholas Hammond, the one genuinely hot Von Trapp kid in The Sound of Music (1965) and the first live-action Spiderman, a source of many a pubescent fantasy. But within a few lines, the character starts to come across as a pretentious fop. He wants to costume Dalton’s bad guy as if he were a Hell’s Angel, and gives him a line of bull to explain the choice. Wanamaker, who was a skilled actor and one of the co-founders of England’s Globe Theatre project, deserves a lot better.

This is particularly aggravating given Tarantino’s generosity to DiCaprio and the rest of the cast. The writer-director has consistently rehabilitated careers, giving fresh life to actors like John Travolta, Robert Forster and David Carradine. And he’s directed one of the few performances from DiCaprio that doesn’t make me cringe. As a young man, DiCaprio had an electric presence, whether playing Johnny Depp’s intellectually disabled brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) or the hotshot young gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead (1996). With stardom, however, his work has seemed primarily about appearances. His Jay Gatsby was a cipher in a sea of ciphers in that strange adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2013) in which only Toby McGuire’s Nick emerged as a fully realized human being. In Revolutionary Road (2008), he spent so much time demonstrating what the character was saying he never really got into his head.

He really seems to be inside Dalton’s head however. When he shoots the Lancer pilot there’s a very funny scene in which he excoriates himself in his trailer for not being able to remember his lines. Then he goes back to the set and nails his big scene. After Wanamaker and his child scene partner (the preternaturally self-possessed Julia Butters) compliment him on his work, Tarantino keeps the camera on DiCaprio. The play of emotions on his face — relief, pride, gratitude, grief — is a thing of beauty.

There’s a different kind of beauty in Tarantino’s handling of Booth’s visit to the Spahn Ranch, where he encounters members of the Manson family. The scene starts out on a lighter level. Booth picks up one of the family members (Margaret Qualley) while she’s hitchhiking and her version of hippie freedom is played for laughs. When they arrive at the ranch, she starts introducing him to the others, and there’s the least hint of a threat. That goes deeper when he decides to pay a visit to the ranch’s owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern), whom he hasn’t seen in years. Tarantino builds the tension subtly and simply as Booth has to fight his way past Squeaky Fromme (Dakota Fanning), who’s been keeping Spahn under control with sex and drugs. Pitt’s trip to the back room where the man is sleeping and their cryptic, tense encounter is like something out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, and is this blog turning into a giant intertextual reference itself?). You keep expecting something horrible to happen. Nothing really does, but the tension is palpable, expertly evoked through camera placement, editing and writing.

That sequence is very important to Tarantino’s overall conceit. It’s a reminder of the real threat hanging over Cielo Drive as the action moves toward the night of the murders. Without it, the film would be a mostly amiable goof on Hollywood history. With it, however, Tarantino has turned it into a stuff of Hollywood legend. The narration (by Kurt Russell) becomes not just a device for filling in information, but rather a way of telling the tale, and a very tall one it is. Tarantino turns the friendship of star and stuntman into the legend of Rick and Cliff, and when it’s time to face the truth, like the reporter in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1964), he prints the legend.

Joe Chrest, Annisston or Tinsley Price and Cara Buono share a portentous Ferris wheel ride, while Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo share some great comic teamwork in season three of Stranger Things.

The seventh episode of Stranger Things’ third season opens with a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock. As a family rides the Ferris wheel at the county fair, Fourth of July fireworks go off. Mother and father look above to enjoy the display, while their daughter looks down, a clear reference to the tennis match watched by Bruno (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train (1951). When they ask why she isn’t watching the fireworks, the girl points to the nearby trees, which are moving unnaturally. Since these characters are outside the series’ science-fiction loop, they have no way of knowing it’s an indication that the season’s big bad, the Mind Flayer, is on the loose. Later in the episode, there’s a shoot-out in a hall of mirrors, another movie reference, this time to Orson Welles’ amazing The Lady from Shanghai (1947). That may be a bit too intertextual for some, but for movie fans references like that are just part of the thrills provided by The Duffer Brothers’ vision for the series.

Stranger Things has maintained a surprising level of achievement through its first three seasons. It centers on the relationships of a group of tweens growing up in an Indiana small town in the 1980s. All of the normal traumas of young adolescence — bullying, awakening to sexual desire, rebelling against authority — are intensified by the presence of a nearby scientific facility doing research into the paranormal. In particular, they’ve opened the door to a deadly, parallel universe called “the Upside Down,” which keeps sending a variety of nasties into the area. One escapee from the lab is more benign, however. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), an unnamed child and human test subject, bonds with the kids and serves as a frequent deus ex machina thanks to her burgeoning telekinetic and psychic powers.

Season three opens with most of the youngsters sneaking into the new multiplex to see Day of the Dead (1985). The film’s opening scene, in which Lori Cardille dreams she’s attacked by hands bursting out of the wall, is a perfect metaphor for the Duffers’ seres. It’s all about threats bursting through the fragile shell of reality. The problems start mundanely in this season. During a power outage, the refrigerator magnets at Will Byers’ home drop to the floor, which leads his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder) to an investigation that unearths a Soviet lab hidden beneath the town’s new mall.

Ryder herself is something of an intertext — a one-time star who flourished during the 1980s. In a few seasons, the kids could be sneaking in to see her in films like Beetlejuice and Heathers (both 1988). The show has been something of a renaissance for Ryder, who had trouble adjusting to older roles. During the first two seasons, her Joyce was an icon of suffering and blind determination as she tried to save her son Will (Noah Schnapp), who had been kidnapped and traumatized by a creature from the Upside Down. Her storyline is a little lighter in season three, as she tentatively embarks on a romance with the town’s sheriff, Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who’s adopted Eleven and is struggling with how to parent a girl going through puberty. Even as Joyce’s investigation starts to turn up the real threat facing her family and the town, she gets a delicious comic moment telling off a government agent over the phone. It’s the kind of breathless temper tantrum at which Rosalind Russell or Doris Day were experts, and she’s right up at their level.

Stranger Things’ third season is filled with little acting gifts like that. After Eleven breaks up with her boyfriend, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) — the result of Harbour’s bumbling attempts at parenting — she starts to connect to Max (Sadie Sink), a new member of the group. Their scenes together as they share their frustration with the opposite sex and explore the joys of shopping are a delight.

Even better is the relationship between another of the tweens, the eternally dorky Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and one-time bully Steve (Joe Keery). In season one, Steve had been the show’s resident turd in the punchbowl. He was dating Mike’s sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and standing between her and Will’s brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), a relationship only the most emotionally frozen realized was TV destiny. Somewhere in season two, he lost Nancy to Jonathan but then, in an inspired, loopy bit of plotting, started helping the tweens as they fought the big bad. By season three, he’s their unofficial den mother, using his job at the new mall to break them into the movies and eventually helping Dustin investigate a radio message in Russian he picks up on his ham radio. Keery and Matarazzo are one kick-ass comic team.  Their timing should be the envy of seasoned adult comics and calls to mind the best work of Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis.

As the different groups of characters come closer to unearthing the Russian plot to access the Upside Down, the cultural references pile up. Steve and Dustin’s invasion of the Russian base could be a scene from Red Dawn (1984) played for laughs. Dustin and friend Caleb’s sister, Erica (Priah Ferguson), bond over their responses to My Little Pony. And in a moment of high delirium that leads to the season’s climax, Dustin finally manages to contact his long-distance girlfriend, Suzie (Gabriella Pizzolo), and enlists her help by joining her in a duet to the theme from The Neverending Story (1984).

This isn’t to suggest the season is all shits and giggles. There are some serious consequences to the storyline. In particular, Eleven gets into the mind of Max’s stepbrother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery), who’s been taken over by the Mind Flayer. Her digging unleashes memories of desertion and abuse that provide a context for his aggressive, often harmful behavior during the two seasons he’s been on the show. The memories are heartbreaking, and it’s to Montgomery’s credit that he unleashes the character’s vulnerability without descending into banality. It’s another little triumph in a series filled with wonderful little touches that flesh out the characters so both comedy and heartache have a solid grounding, no matter how far out the science fiction plotting may venture.

  Bette Davis hands Mary Astor a cigarette and an Oscar in The Great Lie.

The main intertexts in Edmund Goulding’s The Great Lie (1941) are classical pieces, which function as an emblem for the world of Sandra Kovak, the sophisticated concert pianist played by Mary Astor. The film doesn’t go much deeper than that. The pieces are used for their association with a more rarified life than those lived by the mass audience. Any further meaning they develop comes from their placement within the film. Paradigms take a back seat to syntax.

Madame Kovak’s signature piece is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, which provides the title music and recurs as her main theme. It’s the piece she performs in Philadelphia the night she’s supposed to be in New York getting legally married to George Brent, whom she had married before her previous divorce became final, and she plays it again at the film’s end, when she realizes she can’t use the baby from their brief, unsanctified union, to win him back. As such, the crashing chords that open the piece become a signifier for Sandra’s independence, something women weren’t supposed to aspire to in popular movies of the era.

Golden Age Hollywood tended to view classical music with a combination of awe and disdain. It was high culture, something to which the mass audience had to aspire, but it was also a signifier for snobbery and foolishness, so as not to alienate that same mass audience. The studios were constantly trying to make classical musicians, particularly singers, into stars, but they always had to temper it by having them get down and dirty with popular music. When Jeanette MacDonald did a brief jitterbug with Binnie Barnes in I Married an Angel (1942), it was one of the film’s few redeeming moments, but when pianist Jose Iturbi tried to do comedy in his MGM musicals, it was downright painful.

In The Great Lie, Astor is the other woman, the sophisticated, fast-living concert pianist who briefly steals Brent from his true love, country girl Bette Davis (playing effectively against type). When Davis goes to Philadelphia hoping to see Brent, she has to deal with Astor as the soundtrack plays Wagner’s Liebestod, which any reasonably intelligent audience member would see reflecting the death of Brent’s short-lived fling with Astor. In the opening scene in Astor’s apartment, her manager plays her character’s recording of Anton Rubinstein’s Piano Concerto No. 4, a difficult, complex piece that seems to speak to her alienation from Brent’s simpler world. Later, an unwelcome visit to Davis’ farm is heralded by the sound of Astor playing a Chopin waltz, a simpler piece that seems part of Astor’s attempt to steal Davis’ domestic bliss.

The film manages to balance being relentlessly silly with being almost irresistibly entertaining. Astor’s illegitimate, drunken marriage to Brent is a device designed to get her with child without upsetting the Production Code or local censorship boards. It also means Brent can reclaim his true love, Davis, without having to go through with what the Code viewed as “the tragedy of divorce.” Brent is a pilot who conveniently vanishes during a government mission to Brazil, leaving heartbroken new bride Davis no other option but to offer to buy Astor’s unwanted child so she can keep at least a piece of her presumed dead husband. The two adversaries go off to Arizona so Astor can have the child in private, and Davis can pass it off as her own. Three months after the blessed event, Brent returns, setting the stage for the final confrontation.

The showdowns between Davis and Astor, first in New York and then in their Arizona hideaway, are the film’s center. According to both stars, they thought the script was pure treacle, so they re-wrote their scenes together. There’s a punchiness to their dialogue, which includes lots of short, fragmented lines that resemble Noel Coward’s writing. Their scenes are a refreshing change from the rest of the film, which sometimes seems about to sink under the weight of its own sentimental improbabilities. The scenes also play well against Davis’ image (which could be seen as a different type of intertext). Knowing her lifelong predilection for Scotch and nicotine, it’s wicked fun watching her regulate Astor’s intake of cigarettes and booze. One scene of them playing cards late at night opens with Astor saying, “Who ever heard of an ounce of anything?” It’s the kind of line that captures her character perfectly, and she delivers it with just the right level of weary vitriol.

Astor always credited Davis with throwing the film to her, but the star more than holds her own. She’s more relaxed in the role than she is playing her more wicked characters (it probably helped that she did this film right after making The Letter with William Wyler in 1940; he did a great deal to help her control her energy on screen). When the doctor comes out of their Arizona cabin to inform her Astor has given birth to a son, she has a moment that shows just how sublime an actress she can be. It’s very simple, as are many of Davis’ best scenes. She just walks over to a wall and looks up at the heavens. But it’s immensely moving.

There’s one other point of interest in the film, and that’s Davis’ relationship with her housekeeper, played by Hattie McDaniel. Unlike the other black characters working on the farm, McDaniel’s Violet is portrayed as an adult. There’s an easy give and take between her Violet and Davis’ Maggie; a negotiated relationship that goes beyond race or even class. These women are colleagues in keeping the farm going, and Maggie treats her with tremendous respect. It’s interesting that McDaniel’s two best, least stereotyped roles after she won the Oscar for Gone With the Wind (1939) are in Bette Davis movies (the other is 1942’s In This Our Life).

Changing times and the actors’ futures also have an impact on the film’s meaning, particularly in the final confrontations. We’re now more than 70 years away from the values that shaped The Great Lie, so Astor’s last-ditch attempt to use the infant to win back Brent now seems more an aberration than an attempt to change her life. Maybe it’s my own prejudices as an urban gay male, but her life as a concert pianist touring the world in glamorous clothing seems pretty damned wonderful to me. It’s not something you’d want to jeopardize for someone like Brent (maybe if the leading man had been Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracy I’d feel differently). If there’s anything sad about her going off on her own, it’s the knowledge that the career resurgence Astor enjoyed as a result of this and her next film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), wouldn’t last for long. Her critical and box-office success led MGM to offer her a long-term contract with the promise of leading roles. Then they consigned her to supporting parts as the mothers of their rising young female stars. Maybe that was another result of changing times. There wasn’t much call for brittle sophistication during the World War II era. But it certainly was a loss greater than Madame Kovak’s giving up a child and husband she never really wanted in the first place.