At this point, you can’t fault Quentin Tarantino for hiding or obscuring his influences. Maybe around the time he first made a splash with Reservoir Dogs on the 1990s film festival circuit, he could’ve been accused of lifting images & ideas from the Hong Kong action cinema that directly preceded him without citing his sources, but by now we’re all used to his schtick. Tarantino is more of a genre film DJ than a traditional director, remixing & recontextualizing pre-existing media in an act of creation through curation. Still, there is something a little deflating about catching up with those sources of inspiration after seeing them regurgitated in one of Tarantino’s post-modern mashups. I understood as a teenager that Kill Bill, vol. 1 visually referenced a long history of vintage Japanese cinema & manga, but it wasn’t until recently watching Lady Snowblood for the first time that it really became clear how much more potent & vivid those source texts can be compared to their photocopied American version. I loved Jackie Brown when I first saw it in high school as well, but at this point in my life I’m way more likely to return to Pam Grier classics like Coffy & Foxy Brown than I am to their adoring echoes in Tarantino’s homage. This exact phenomenon hit me again while watching the 1975 Hal Ashby comedy Shampoo for the first time last month, which in retrospect made Tarantino’s most recent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feel a little hollow in its redundancy. There was already a perfectly executed post-mortem on the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s, made just a few years after the fact, while the corpse was still fresh. Only, Ashby’s film ties that world’s death and the sinister hedonism of the hippie-dippy takeover that followed to the presidential election of Richard Nixon in 1968, while Tarantino ties it to the Manson Family violence of 1969. There are no murders in Ashby’s day-in-the-life story about a fuckboy hairdresser who sleeps his way across Beverly Hills, but you can still distinctly smell the stench of death bubbling up from the canyons below.
Warren Beatty is a producer & co-writer of this bad-vibes hangout comedy, in which he satirizes his own real-life reputation as a handsome playboy & sex addict. He plays an extremely popular, promiscuous hairdresser who compulsively sleeps with all of his clients. He’s proud of his actual, professional salon work and insistent that he is not a gigolo, since he sleeps with the women purely for the pleasure of the act, and they return for more because he’s genuinely talented with hair. The hairdressing is 100% part of the foreplay, though, as he practically dry-humps his clients’ heads while blowing them dry, then thrusts his instruments into his waistband like a cowboy’s phallic pistol. Haircuts are unavoidably intimate acts in all circumstances, but there’s something especially shameless about his technique. Usually, he gets away with this slutty, unprofessional behavior because the men outside the salon assume he is gay, a stereotype he gladly exploits for cover. Only, Beatty’s promiscuity gets the best of him when the insular small-town community of Beverly Hills offers no new conquests he hasn’t serviced, and he finds that he’s already screwed over a potential investor in his dream to open his own salon by screwing the man’s wife, mistress, and teenage daughter (a baby-faced Carrie Fisher) on separate occasions – all seedy, all within 24 hours. Meanwhile, satisfying his monogamous girlfriend at home while satisfying every other woman in the county proves to be trickier by the minute. The sitcom juggling of these conflicting, overlapping relationships can be funny in a Three’s Company kind of way, but a lot of the film feels like a bitter autopsy on the recently concluded Free Love era, dissecting it more as a covert extension of classic male entitlement than as some progressive far-out experiment. It’s a damning self-indictment that set public relations for the himbo community back for decades, so there’s something bravely vulnerable about Beatty’s involvement in the project in particular (assuming that Hal Ashby was not quietly known around town as an insatiable fuck machine).
Shampoo has somehow maintained a lasting reputation as a zany screwball comedy, which is mostly only paid off in the two party sequences at its climax. In its clearest culture clash between the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s and the upcoming druggy sleaze of the 1970s, both of the opposing sides in the hippies vs Nixon voters divide cross into enemy territory during simultaneous parties. An absurdly Conservative, buttoned-up Jack Warden plays the central figure in this sequence: the businessman investor who’s been triple-cucked by Beatty’s assumed-queer hairdresser. There’s a lot of awkward tension wound up by Warden’s Nixon-election-night party, where he’s unknowingly invited a small cadre of counterculture types, including his mistress (Julie Christie) & Beatty’s girlfriend (Goldie Hawn, looking like a boardwalk caricature of Goldie Hawn), who both get into Real Housewives-style glaring matches with Warden’s wife (Lee Grant). Where the movie really gets funny, though, is when Warden leaves his Nixon-voter safe space and follows his younger, druggier associates to a hippie party in the Hills, chaotically drunk. Warden explores the hippie party like he’s walking through an alien planet, poking at the locals like extraterrestrial specimens before experimenting with the idea of joining them. It’s a short-lived cultural exchange, but it is a memorably funny one, especially since it releases a lot of the social tension of the election-night party that precedes it. That tension immediately returns in full force when Warden catches a direct glimpse of Beatty’s passionate heterosexuality, though, and an ambient threat of violent retribution hangs over the rest of the picture. It’s the same low-key hangout turned sourly sinister vibe shift that Tarantino echoed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and although neither film explicitly marks the end of the Old Hollywood era with the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, it’s a feeling & a memory that hangs over both pictures like a dark cloud (something rarely seen in sunny LA).
If Warren Beatty’s slutty hairdresser has any direct corollary in Tarantino’s film, it’s clearly Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth: a has-been movie star whose handsome face only covered up his rotten personality for so long before the good times came to an abrupt stop. If we’re tracking the way that influence reached Tarantino’s pen, it starts with a real-life friend of Warren Beatty’s, Jay Sebring. A famously talented hairstylist, Sebring was also a close friend & former lover of Sharon Tate’s and one of the five Manson Family victims murdered in Tate’s home. Tarantino cast Emile Hirsch in a small role as Sebring in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but there’s a lengthier, indirect representation of him through Pitt’s part as the co-lead. Cliff Booth partially plays as an homage to Beatty’s hairstylist protagonist in Shampoo, who was in turn partially written in homage to the real-life Sebring. Everything in Taratino’s films works this way. It’s all fragments of reflections of ephemera from decades past, rearranged in loving homage to the media he genuinely, passionately appreciates as a consumer. His work can be incredibly rewarding & entertaining, but there’s something limiting about that practice when compared to the original movies that inspire it. Somehow, Beatty was able to convey the same darkness & brutality that concluded the Free Love 1960s in his homage to Sebring (mixed with winking reference to his own reputation) without ever evoking the death-cult violence that ended his friend’s life. It can be fun to pick apart the academic collage of art & history in Tarantino’s work, but there’s something much more direct & powerful about the original works they reference. Maybe Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was partially made as a corrective to Shampoo‘s discordant reputation as a goofy sitcom, intended to accentuate the more tragic undercurrents of its real-world context that are muffled under the humor of its hippies vs Nixonites culture clash. If so, it’s a shame that Taratino has reportedly abandoned his planned project that dramatizes the art of film criticism, since that what he’s mainly good at.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 