When the signs light up, the city seems to be preparing to carry on with its routine. Music can introduce a different emotion: the viewer contemplates a present it knows is under threat, while the characters continue making plans.
A montage gives the city its own time
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood devotes attention to the transition between afternoon and night. The illuminated signs begin to stand out, businesses signal activity and the characters head towards concrete plans. The film allows Los Angeles to exist beyond a conversation or a conflict. During those intervals, the setting occupies the centre of the experience.
Music connects images that do not need to share an immediate action. A change of frontage or vehicle can retain emotional continuity thanks to the song. The montage brings together separate places and turns them into parts of the same night. There is no need to assume that every light switch-on happens at exactly the same second: the sequence builds a shared perception of the beginning of night-time activity.
Out of Time, by the Rolling Stones, accompanies the return sequence and the August day. The version with orchestral arrangements and Mick Jagger’s voice has a different character from a stripped-back guitar-only performance. That sonic breadth allows images of travel and everyday life to gain an elegiac dimension without the characters having to express sadness in every shot.
The association between song and time lends itself to a particularly clear reading because of the title, but it does not require every image to become a literal illustration of the lyrics. The past is felt as something that continues and yet drifts away. Music introduces that double sensation while the characters’ movement maintains a practical direction: getting home, going out or meeting other people.
Melancholy belongs to the viewer’s position
The characters do not know the full set of events that the audience may associate with August 1969. That difference alters the listening experience. A song can sound pleasant within a day and generate unease when linked to the historical context. The film works with that unequal distribution of information without having to insert a warning every time Sharon appears.
The soundtrack of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood contains very diverse registers. The contemplative montage does not sum up its whole function. There are songs that accompany energy, conversation or violence, while others allow us to linger in a mood. Recognising the difference avoids describing the whole selection as a uniform nostalgia.
The switching-on of a sign also has a visual ambivalence. It announces that a business is opening or that night is beginning, but its brief duration can make it seem like a signal that will soon disappear. That reading comes from the way the montage presents the gesture within a story about change and memory. It does not oblige us to attribute a secret meaning to every business.
The neon lighting transforms the visibility of space. The shapes that during the day competed with façades and traffic gain autonomy once darkness falls. The sign seems to float and condense a promise of leisure or consumption. The song can make that promise feel affectionate, distant or sad, depending on the relationship between rhythm and duration.
The city retains commercial activity while the light changes.
Watching does not mean bringing the narrative to a complete stop
These intervals still add information. They indicate a change in time, place destinations and prepare the coincidence of later actions. The film can move forward without resorting to a new argument or obstacle. Atmospheric time also organises the story: it makes you feel that a day has travelled far enough for the night to have its own weight.
The comparison with other musical journeys in Tarantino requires attention to their differences. A night-time drive in Death Proof can charge the space with threat and surveillance; Hollywood’s dusk gives greater breadth to a shared city. Both cases use movement and music, but they do not necessarily produce the same emotion or signal the same kind of danger.
Melancholy does not turn the characters into mere museum figures either. They continue to want immediate things and make decisions. The viewer can recognise the fragility of their present while they live it normally. That coexistence allows the scene to retain joy without erasing unease, and for unease not to reduce everything visible to a harbinger.
The montage needs balance to maintain that complexity. If every cut insisted on a sign of threat, everyday life would lose its autonomy. If the music were completely neutral, awareness of time would diminish. The sequence finds its effect by allowing the same movement to feel like a continuation of routine and as an image of something about to change.
The lights do not by themselves announce the end of an era. They are concrete objects in a city that works and has fun. Combined with songs and with the historical position of the story, they can be read as memory. Cinema preserves that glow for a few moments and lets us inhabit it before the narrative once again demands decisions, encounters and consequences.
Back to the music and soundtracks of Tarantino.