The Human Lens of History: Didion and Tarantino

While reading Joan Didion’s The While Album, I immediately noted the connection of the work Quentin Tarantino’s latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood based on the two works’ tackling the historic event of Tate-LaBianca murders in August 1969. However, upon closer inspection, Didion’s collection of essays and Tarantino’s film have a number of other things in common like the use of the setting as a character, made possible by specific emphasis on what life was really like during that time in that particular place. The choices made to flesh out the humanity of Los Angelenos in these works speaks to both’s connection to the question we have been exploring in the course: How does one, whether they be a historian, artist, filmmaker or author, best depict history? Both Tarantino and Didion focus on representing human stories and feelings during a time, as opposed to depicting events with factual accuracy (though, the two differ in the extremity to which they disregard historical accounts). 

Both Tarantino and Didion have a deep connection to California, as it was where they both grew up. Their sentiment and nostalgia definitely characterizes both of their choices in depicting Los Angeles in the late ’60s. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been described as Tarantino’s love letter to the Los Angeles he grew up in, and the sweeping shots of the city and filming sequences at various iconic Los Angeles locations create a romantic tone for the film. Didion’s essays regarding Los Angeles, as well as those about California in general,  express similar sentiments. In the tenth essay of The White Album, Didion describes her time in Los Angeles with, “There was a jasmine vine grown and the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows...Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable.” 

Didion characterizes Los Angeles with the popular sentiment of a place where anything can happen, which, though previously might have been imagined as a positive, the Tate-LaBianca murders gave that idea a new meaning. Didion’s collection of essays in this work is organized in a fashion in which the Tate-LaBianca murders serve as the climax, which reflects how Didion felt about how the event dramatically changed the mood of Los Angeles, California, and the nation as a whole, marking a distinct change from the romantic idealism and activism of the ’60s to a cynicism in the ’70s. Tarantino’s film takes a similar approach, with his reimagining of the night of Sharon Tate’s murder serving as the climatic moment of the film, but it serves as a distinct shift in tone from the beginning of the movie which focuses on the lives of three members of the entertainment industry who see varying degrees of success in Hollywood. 

Both Didion and Tarantino take a unique approach to the telling of these stories that take place in a specific historical event. Didion focuses on her own life, describing how she heard the news, “I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when I heard about the murders.” Tarantino’s film follows the events of just one day in the life of the three leads in the film, which, similar to Didion’s essay, puts the story through a more personal lens, allowing for the audience to focus on how people felt as opposed to focusing purely on events that occured. In typical Tarantino fashion, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes the historical event of the Tate-LaBianca murders and changes it to serve the narrative arc. While many say that Tarantino distorts history to make it more “entertaining,” I think that Tarantino’s choices, similar to the work of Didion and other authors we have explored in this course, point to the complicated nature of portraying history and how, often times in doing so, we lose the humanity in these stories. In interviews, Tarantino describes how he feels that Tate became known as just this historical figure due to her death, but the history has forgotten her skill as an actress and her positive affect on many in her life. Tarantino’s movies allow for people to reimagine historical events in order to rethink how the people involved were real, complicated, multi-faceted people and exist in more ways than just what might be limited to a page in a history book.

Didion’s The White Album and Tarantino’s latest film both spoke deeply to me because, while they speak of events 50 years ago, the tension and attitude of the time seem reflective of our climate today. Didion ends her tenth essay with “I remember that no one was surprised,” which I think is a sentiment common today when we hear of the latest atrocities, scandal or corruption. Growing up in Los Angeles, I really connect to the juxtaposition of the depiction of beautiful, sunny landscapes with the turmoil boiling just below the surface, inside of us all. These works speak to how huge events, like the current pandemic, affect each one of us deeply and that human element should not be lost just because of their global scale.