When the signs light up, the city seems to get ready to continue its routine. Music can introduce a different feeling: the viewer looks at a present they know is under threat, while the characters keep making plans.
A montage gives the city its own time
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood pays attention to the transition between late afternoon and night. The illuminated signs begin to stand out, businesses announce activity, and the characters move toward specific plans. The film lets Los Angeles exist beyond a conversation or a conflict. During those intervals, the setting takes center stage in the experience.
Music connects images that do not need to share an immediate action. A change of facade or vehicle can retain emotional continuity thanks to the song. The editing 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 start of nighttime activity.
Out of Time, by the Rolling Stones, accompanies the return block and the August day. The version with orchestral arrangements and Mick Jagger's voice has a different character from a stripped-down guitar performance. That sonic breadth allows images of travel and everyday life to take on an elegiac dimension without the characters expressing sadness in every shot.
The association between song and time admits a particularly clear reading because of the title, but it does not require turning every image into a literal illustration of the lyrics. The past is perceived as something that continues and at the same time recedes. Music introduces that double feeling while the characters' movement maintains a practical direction: go home, head out, or meet 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 changes the act of listening. A song can sound pleasant within a day and create unease when linked to the historical context. The film works with that unequal access to information without needing to insert a warning every time Sharon appears.
The soundtrack of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood contains a wide range of registers. The contemplative montage does not sum up its whole function. Some songs accompany energy, conversation, or violence, while others allow the viewer to linger in a mood. Recognizing the difference keeps us from describing the whole selection as uniform nostalgia.
Switching on 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 how the montage presents the gesture within a story about change and memory. It does not require assigning a secret meaning to every establishment.
The neon lighting transforms the visibility of space. The shapes that during the day competed with facades and traffic gain autonomy after dark. 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 keeps commercial activity going as the light changes.
To contemplate does not mean to stop the narrative completely
These intervals still provide information. They indicate a change in time, place destinations, and prepare for the coincidence of later actions. The film can move forward without resorting to a new argument or obstacle. Atmospheric time also organizes the story: it lets us feel that a day has traveled far enough for the night to have its own weight.
Comparing this with other musical journeys in Tarantino requires attention to their differences. A nighttime drive in Death Proof can charge the space with threat and watchfulness; 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 still want immediate things and make decisions. The viewer can recognize the fragility of their present while they experience it as normal. That coexistence allows the scene to remain joyful without erasing unease, and keeps unease from reducing everything visible to a premonition.
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, the awareness of time would diminish. The sequence finds its effect by allowing the same movement to be felt both as the continuation of a routine and as an image of something about to change.
The lights do not announce the end of an era on their own. They are concrete objects in a city that works and has fun. The combination with songs and with the story's historical position allows us to read them as memory. For a few moments, cinema preserves that illumination and lets us inhabit it before the narrative once again demands decisions, meetings, and consequences.
Back to the music and soundtracks of Tarantino.