19 min.
A Revisionist History of Violence THE NOSTALGIA AND FANTASY OF ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD
It’s just after midnight on 9 August 1969. Actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) – who once starred as bounty hunter Jake Cahill in a now-cancelled cowboy TV series called ‘Bounty Law’ – is in his Los Angeles home, drunkenly making frozen margaritas, when he hears a noisy car idling outside. He stomps out in his bathrobe, blender in hand, to confront a ‘bunch of goddamn fucking hippies’, and berates the shocked young driver, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson Jr (Austin Butler), into reversing back down Cielo Drive.
Tex and his three passengers are not lost. They’ve come, dressed in black and carrying knives and guns, to kill Rick’s next-door neighbours – a crime that in real life would become known, infamously, as the ‘Manson Family murders’.1 Now, at the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s…
