Revisionist history has become a defining hallmark of Quentin Tarantino’s late-career movies. He isn’t the first storyteller to explore alternate history in his work, but he has figured out his own unique way to change the past. It started with the hilariously inaccurate death of Adolf Hitler in Inglourious Basterds. Ever since the Basterds filled Hitler with lead in a burning movie theater, Tarantino has been using the magic of cinema to right the wrongs of history and inflict brutality upon history’s brutalizers. From white slavers to Confederate war criminals to the Manson Family, no historical oppressor is safe in the Tarantino-verse.
From verbose dialogue to graphic violence to nonlinear storytelling, most of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood turned the tables on Sharon Tate’s killers. Here's a look at every time Tarantino changed history.
Inglourious Basterds Killed Off Adolf Hitler
Quentin Tarantino’s penchant for altering history originated with Inglourious Basterds, his take on the guys-on-a-mission subgenre of World War II movies, a la The Dirty Dozen. In Inglourious Basterds, the mission is to assassinate the Führer himself. Throughout the war, there were many assassination plots against Adolf Hitler – including the one depicted in the movie Valkyrie – but none were successful. Ultimately, Hitler took his own life in a bunker. Naturally, audiences went into Inglourious Basterds expecting the assassination plot to fail like all the real-life examples. Then, in the final reel, the movie shocked audiences by killing off Hitler in a spectacular and wildly inaccurate fashion.
In an appearance on Inglourious Basterds' perfect climax, with its brutal killing of Hitler, offers the ultimate version of that fantasy.
Django Unchained Moved Up The Civil War
After changing the outcome of World War II in Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino set his sights on a different historical tragedy in his next movie. Django Unchained tackles American slavery in the style of a Sergio Corbucci Spaghetti Western. A bounty hunter frees an enslaved man to help him identify his latest bounties and ends up training him in his trade to avenge fellow enslaved. The beginning of Django Unchained establishes the setting as 1858, claiming it’s “two years before the Civil War.” But the American Civil War actually began in 1861, meaning that in the alternate history of Tarantino’s cinematic universe, the deadly conflict started one year earlier.
Moving up the American Civil War by a year, and therefore bringing the Emancipation Proclamation one year sooner, is in line with Django Unchained's slavery-era revenge fantasies and Tarantino’s mission to rectify history’s mistakes. The earlier Civil War could suggest that, in the Tarantino-verse, Django’s killing spree across the plantations of the Deep South inspired political action over the abolition of slavery to happen sooner. After Django massacred slavers on the Candyland plantation, the Bennett plantation, and the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, the U.S. government would’ve gotten the message loud and clear.
The Hateful Eight Rewrote The Battle Of Baton Rouge
Quentin Tarantino’s second western, The Hateful Eight, doesn’t focus on a specific historical atrocity like World War II or American slavery. Inspired by bottle episodes of 1960s Western TV shows like Bonanza and The Virginian, The Hateful Eight is a chamber piece about an octet of cold-blooded killers trapped in a haberdashery in a bleak snowstorm. But it still has a hint of Tarantino’s signature alternate history in its characters’ origin stories. Part of the shared backstory between the characters is that Major Marquis Warren of the Union and General Sandford Smithers of the Confederacy fought against each other on opposite sides of the Battle of Baton Rouge.
While it adds an intriguing context to Warren and Smithers’ forced cohabitation, this backstory is factually inaccurate given that Warren is Black. The Battle of Baton Rouge took place in 1862 and Black soldiers didn’t see combat in the Civil War until 1863. It's another instance of Tarantino tweaking history to suit the needs of his story. The character dynamic of Warren and Smithers is more interesting if they’ve previously fought on opposite sides of the same battlefield. It’s excusable to shift the timeline of the American Civil War to make that dynamic possible. The unfinished business between the two characters gives their pistol duel an extra layer of tension.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Turned The Tables On The Manson Family
After making two Westerns back-to-back, Quentin Tarantino went for a radical change of pace with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s his first movie that doesn’t adhere to a particular genre and doesn’t have much of a plot to speak of. The movie is a snapshot of the changing film industry in Los Angeles in 1969, with Sharon Tate and the major players of the Manson Family as ing characters. Since historical revisionism had defined Tarantino’s last few movies at that point, no one expected an accurate portrayal of the Tate-LaBianca murders. It wasn’t a question of whether Tarantino would alter history; it was a question of how.
Tarantino gave Tate a fictional neighbor, has-been TV cowboy Rick Dalton, who factors into the alternate history. At the last minute, the Manson Family decide to break into Rick’s house, so they can “kill the people who taught us to kill” with violent TV shows like Bounty Law. Unfortunately for them, Rick’s tough-as-nails stuntman Cliff Booth and his badass dog Brandy are in the house, ready to take them on. Aside from a brief fight scene and the make-believe danger on the Lancer set, Once Upon a Time is unusually violence-free for a Tarantino film. But this climactic bloodbath has enough grindhouse spectacle for the whole movie.
