MovieChat Forums > Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019) Discussion > Why did the hippie girls demeanor change...

Why did the hippie girls demeanor change?


They were singing and skipping down the street to go dumpster diving, then their faces go from happy to sad when they look up at the supermarket wall and are carrying their food home?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YY7pq3E790

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Nice catch. I don't recall seeing that demeanor change when I first saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood .

Looking at the clip now, perhaps it suggests that the "front" these girls projected to the outside world -- here expressed by a rather anthem-like song evidently written by Charles Manson himself -- really WAS a front -- these girls were "throwaway people," cut off from their families (either thrown out or runaways) with no real sense of identity. Maybe in those last moments of the clip they all remembered how empty their lives really were.

PS. That anthem-like song has always reminded me a bit of the song sung by schoolkids at the schoolhouse (Nickety, Nackety) in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963.)

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The filmmakers were just cutting back and forth and back to 1) Them on the way to the dumpsters, skipping along happily; 2) Them inside the dumpsters, still happy but less so; 3) On the way home...hands full, they were just in dumpsters, thrill has worn off, not as happy. (It's harder to sing and dance and skip when your hands are full and you just got out of a dumpster is all.)

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Thanks for both your thoughts. I figured it was this too but they were still joyful while picking out what to take, they were so happy when that one shouted "hot dog buns!".

I saw Helter Skelter on TV a few year ago and it was on the scene of Manson on the stand talking about this very thing about having to eat food that society throws away, making the most of what they can, cutting around bad parts of vegetable that were still good etc.

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