This year we have been given two new masterworks from two old masters, and they’re strikingly similar in subject. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman are both examinations of male-dominated worlds that orbit and adore violence. Both present vibrant ecosystems of toxic masculinity. And both reveal much about the largely male environments they present and the shocking violence within them, through the way they think about their central female characters.
Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate is the personification of the fantasy world Tarantino creates in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: free and joyous, and protected by Tarantino in his film from the violence wreaked on her in reality. The Irishman’s Peggy Sheeran (daughter of Robert De Niro’s mafia hitman Frank Sheeran), and her much-discussed near-muteness, represents something different. It’s through Peggy’s consistent, traumatised silence that Scorsese highlights the true horror of the milieu he’s examining; she sees the old, male world of her father for the self-destructive farce it is.
Tarantino’s take on maleness is much less critical; the gleeful, hyper-stylised violence from Leonardo DiCaprio’s failing actor Rick Dalton and his stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who off the whole gang of Manson cultists by way of pet dog, movie poster and, in a moment of unbridled theatricality, flamethrower, forms an emphatic, celebratory finale. Thud, crack, split, splat. This is a crucial element in Tarantino’s dream-1960s world: men use violence as the ultimate answer to manly problems. This assumption dominates the westerns, war films and spy romps that Tarantino spends much of the film painstakingly re-creating, and which mean so much to his central male pairing. The movie’s controversial ending is essentially Tarantino bringing on stage the enemies of his fictional world (“fuckin’ hippies”, largely), and then spectacularly reasserting his worldview against them, punctuating his argument with every gory slam of a Manson follower’s head against a telephone.
The Irishman, conversely, presents male violence as emphatically bad. It’s the repeated crime in this redemption narrative where the redemption never arrives. How could it, without apology? Within the system of overlapping male loyalties that mafia members and their affiliates subscribe to, murder is just standard practice – an easy way of clearing out those who make too much of a scene. So: “No regrets,” Sheeran says, defiantly, in his old age. The film gives him plenty of opportunity to change his mind, but he obstinately, tragically refuses. The hold of the old male code remains strong, even when its enforcers are long since dead.
And what’s left? The violent “protection” that Sheeran gives his daughter does not stimulate the kind of gratitude offered by Sharon Tate to Rick and Cliff, but instead generates frosty, irreversible alienation. Male violence doesn’t save Peggy, as it does Tate. It traumatises her. Look at the results of violence and weep, Scorsese seems to say.
In the end, we may come away from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood happy that Tarantino has had fun playing with his dollhouse. (In truth, so did we.) But that word “consequences” continues to nag away. Outside the Tarantino dreamscape, in which men enact their fantasies of aggression in defence of quasi-fictional innocents, what is the implication of violence for male relationships – with families, women, indeed other men? It’s surely devastation, Scorsese tells us, as he presents male violence as a problem rather than a solution. In doing so, he ultimately creates the more meaningful film.
