When I saw Quentin Tarantino’s movie Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood last summer, I knew enough about the
movie to prepare myself for a violent scene near the end, but I wasn’t prepared
for the nostalgic sensory blast that hit me as soon as the viewer is deposited
in 1969 Los Angeles. I was still in elementary school then, too young to drive
myself but having years of experience riding around in the Ford Country Sedan
with my dad at the wheel. I coveted fringed moccasins like those Brad Pitt
wears and the white go-go boots on Margot Robbie as she trips along the streets
of a bygone Westwood. My older sister had a pair of white go-go boots. They
were much too big for me, and she didn’t like my borrowing them, but how else
would you dance to Nancy Sinatra?
I may have been too young understand what “LSD” meant, but I
was old enough to know the lyrics to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—and most
of the other Beatles’ songs, thanks to my older brother’s ample LP collection
that included Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and many more. A
number of the tracks in Once Upon a Time weren’t
entirely familiar to me, but one tune
stood out: the radio jingle for “93KHJ, Los Angeles.” That sound, which I
hadn’t heard for decades, immediately struck a chord in me. Like a tuning fork
that, once struck, precipitates a vibration in another one nearby, that simple
set of call letters set my heart humming the tune—a sonic Proustian Madeleine.
The movie would not have been complete without a scene in the
long, iconic corridor at LAX, a mosaic of blocky stripes in sixties colors:
midnight blue and pale turquoise, dull yellow, ecru, gray, grass green. Just a
ten-minute drive away from our house, the airport was always an exciting place
to visit, even if we ourselves weren’t going anywhere. People crowding the
sidewalks, maybe speaking different languages; people who had travelled the
world and had seen wonderful things. If we were there to pick someone up, we
would walk down that tiled corridor and meet them—at the gate. If we were seeing them off—at the gate!—we’d wave one last time as
they filed down the jetway.
Tarantino, born in 1963, was even younger than me in 1969,
and his movie has been called a valentine to the era; the title itself
acknowledges the fairy-tale vibe. For those who lived through the late sixties
and early seventies as adults, however, it wasn't all peace and love and a Yellow Submarine vibe. The times were also rife with racism,
misogyny, and violence. LA’s smog was thick and impenetrable, shrouding the
city so thoroughly that we usually couldn’t see the Hollywood Hills twenty miles
away. My brother and father argued about Vietnam. Even so, I take an undeserved
pride in growing up in that time. I was all for peace, though I didn’t know
what that meant, really. The vibrant colors—the cartoony flowers of Laugh In and wild Peter Max posters—seemed tailor-made for a kid
like me who insisted on the primacy of fantasy and imagination. Part of my belief system even then was the environment; I was all for the Ecology movement, whose logo was a green lower-case “e,” and
which asked us to “reduce, reuse, recycle.” We bundled up our newspapers with
string and collected them for a recycling competition at school; we returned
bottles for the dime deposit. What if we had all made that consciousness a way
of life throughout the ensuing decades? Would the Earth still be facing an
existential peril? If we had embraced the messages of love, naïve though they
might have been, and cemented them as part of our national psyche, would the
hateful rhetoric of our current times be merely a dark fairy tale?
