Since bursting onto the scene with 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino has established himself as one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers in America. Early on, Tarantino movies were defined by their clever, voluminous reams of dialogue, witty, often darkly comic violence, labyrinthine plots and timelines, and, perhaps most of all, their full immersion in the world of movies. A movie like Kill Bill, for example, isn’t just a movie about revenge, it’s a movie about revenge movies.
The second half of Tarantino’s career has seen his fascination with the movie-ness of his movies taken in a new direction. With Revisionist Westerns like Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, and fantastical alternate histories like Ingloruious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has explored how movies shape the stories we tell ourselves about who we are as a society and how these stories, in turn, might transform that society, for better or worse.
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Revenge Writ Large: Inglourious Basterds
Universal Pictures
2009’s Inglorious Basterds marks a turning point in Tarantino’s career. While this is a war movie set within the universe of war movies, in keeping with the director’s unending love of movies, it also makes clear that this interest in movies and insistence in its own status as a movie does not lighten the film’s thematic messages or make its treatment of them somehow more superficial. On the contrary, it insists that movies are, in and of themselves, historically important.
Few would claim, of course, that war movies shaped history to the same extent that World War II did. Those films, though, are and always have been vital in shaping the way we think about the war.
The valorization of both war and America as a force for good in the world was accomplished in large part thanks to movies like The Bridge over the River Kwai and Tarantino favorite The Dirty Dozen. Indeed, much of the tremendous disillusionment surrounding the Vietnam War can be attributed to ways in which the reality of that conflict flew in the face of the narrative created by countless World War II movies.
Alternate History as a Form of Revenge
With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino seizes on this aspect of movies and seeks to turn it to his own ends. If movies have this power to shape culture, after all, why not make use of it? So, with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is able to once again pick up the central theme of his work, revenge, and cast it as a sort of historical necessity.
The tragedy of fascism’s attack on the world did not have a cathartic, cinematic end; things of that scale and complexity rarely do. From the perspective of Inglorious Basterds, though, this fact denied the world of a type of closure, allowing the ideology to persist and re-emerge, just as the film’s chief villain, Colonel Hans Landa, is poised to relocate to America and move on with his life in the wake of the war. And just as Landa’s character is denied this escape when the film’s heroes carve a swastika into his forehead, Tarantino imagines the kind of fiery bloodbath that might bring a catastrophic, emotional, and definitive ending to that movement.
This is in keeping with Tarantino’s career-long stance that violence, and in particular revenge, is a potentially positive, ultimately necessary, reaction to trauma, personal or historical. It’s the stance that the villains of the past, personal or historical, must be violently punished or even destroyed (if only fictionally) before a person’s life or a society can move forward productively.
The Limits of Revision: Django Unchained
The Weinstein Company
The flaws in this approach are more noticeable in Tarantino’s follow-up, 2012’s Revisionist Western (or “Southern,” as Tarantino called it) Django Unchained. In depicting the violent revenge of a freed slave against the slave-owner who’s trafficked his wife, Django Unchained follows many of the same beats seen in Inglourious Basterds. The differences in the two movies, though, are illustrative.
Nazism and Fascism are systems of violent oppression. They rely on widespread participation and culture-wide structures, bureaucracies, and institutions. In the figure of Hitler, though, they have a sort of mascot, an individual onto whom that system can be projected and whose destruction can represent the wholesale destruction of that system.
Slavery does not provide this. Leonardo DiCaprio’s ruthless Calvin Candy is meant to stand in for all slaveholders in Django Unchained, but does so only fictionally and metaphorically. He demonstrates the evils of slavery but is not the leader and driving force behind it, a key distinction. His death and the burning of his plantation is meant to stand in for the destruction of slavery in America, but just can’t quite do that. The end of the movie, then, is haunted by the suspicion that this must surely be only a fleeting victory.
This ambiguity denies the film the kind of cathartic release it seems to seek. Despite, that, though, it does drive home the idea that systemic racism in America requires a real, painful, or even revolutionary reckoning (ironically including a clear-eyed, honest view of the past) in order to move forward improved.
The Hateful Eight and the Western Mess
Tarantino followed Django Unchained with The Hateful Eight. Another Revisionist Western, set in the wake of the Civil War, The Hateful Eight serves almost as an acknowledgment that the ending of Django Unchained is messier and more unresolved than it initially appears.
In many ways, The Hateful Eight is something of a throwback for Tarantino: a genre deconstruction like Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Death Proof, blending the Western with an Agatha Christie-style locked room mystery. It’s an uneasy fit into the rest of this stage of Tarantino’s career, though it is helpful in understanding what he’s going for.
Nothing more clearly represents the power that movies can have over history like Westerns. They are, essentially, proof of concept for Tarantino’s attempt to use movies to shape the narrative of history, which in turn informs real life going forward. Classic Westerns from the likes of John Ford formulated the settling of the west as a triumph of the individualistic American spirit over the ruthless, lawless, almost lifeless terrain. Despite having little relation to historical reality, this myth would in turn inform post-war America for real, shaping the way Americans thought about themselves, others, and their place in the world.
Like other Revisionist Westerns, The Hateful Eight seeks to revise the myth of the Wild West back toward something more closely resembling real history. It does this aesthetically, the cold and snow of the movie’s setting contrasting with the sun-bleached deserts of classic Westerns, and its use of much-fetishized 70mm footage not to capture the awesome vistas of Monument Valley, but rather intentionally undermined by the claustrophobic interior spaces of the film.
It also does so thematically with the crass, debased characters, gross Machiavellian plots, and general idea that the culture and society being imposed on the west is not, in any real way, an improvement on what was already there. The Hateful Eight reinforces the ideas at play in the other movies of this era, but is usually overshadowed by the more interesting and successful approaches of the other films.
Returning the Personal to the Historical: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Sony Pictures
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is distinct in that its heroes are not Jews achieving revenge against Hitler or slaves achieving revenge against slaveholders, but rather Hollywood types attaining a preemptive victory against the Manson Family, the people typically credited with ending the idealism of the 60s. So while it is superficially similar to Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds, with Manson as another historical villain, here the revenge is only for the audience. It seeks to take not just the trappings of a Western, but actually its primary mode: to entreat the audience to imagine the past as if it were different, and then to proceed from there. Even the title hints at its fairy-tale, imaginy nature — Once Upon a Time…
The revenge here is not for the characters or an oppressed demographic that they can represent, but only for an audience forced to live in the world that did not have this event. It is Tarantino’s most personal film in that it seems to be revenge for him, to rectify the fallen world that he (and we) have had to endure. This is a fuzzier idea than the clear, tangible targets of Nazism and slavery, and one that’s run-through with the kind of nostalgia that so often distorts our perception of the past. But if our understanding of the past is always inevitably distorted, Tarantino seems to ask — why not distort it intentionally, and most importantly, transparently?
Can a future be built out of an imaginary past in which the evils of the world were already reckoned with? If every version of history, after all, is a story filled with its own ideological biases, could an openly imaginative approach to it facilitate real progress going forward? These are complex questions, easier to ask than answer, but in his post-2008 films, Tarantino has explored the idea rigorously and with a tremendous amount of subtle variation.
What Does it All Mean, Quentin?
Tarantino’s Revisionist turn puts the metatextual nature of his work in a new context: his movies are not less significant because they are set and rooted in the world of movies themselves, but are, in fact, able to make an important statement about the role of movies in shaping the culture and society around them. They posit that revenge is fundamental, not only to the personal psychological processing of trauma, but to the cultural narratives surrounding historical traumas. Movies can replace the actual violence of revenge with the representation of it to shape the way we think about our culture and society, and what those things should look like.
