SPOILER WARNING: This story reveals the ending of Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood is an affectionate snapshot of Los Angeles in the late 1960s, largely focusing on two fictional characters: Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up actor relegated to guest spots on television procedurals, and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick's longtime stunt double with a hazy past. But from the moment we discover Rick lives next door to the Cielo Drive residence of actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband, director Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), real life informs a feeling of dread that quietly lurks throughout the film.
The infamous residence is where members of Charles Manson's cult brutally murdered the real Tate, along with three of her friends, in August 1969. Much of Once Upon a Time takes place in February of that year, but following a six-month jump in time, the dread ramps up. Viewers likely expect Tarantino to have blended fact and fiction by folding Rick and Cliff into the narrative, given their prominence in the film. But how would that impact his depiction of the horrific event itself?
Again, spoilers ahead: Keeping with the film's reverie, the director ended up rewriting history entirely — in this version, it's Manson followers Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Patricia "Katie" Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty) and Susan "Sadie" Atkins (Mikey Madison) who die in a bloodbath typical of Tarantino's films, and that has already become this one's most-debated scene. (In another alteration of history, Maya Hawke's Flowerchild — the movie's name for Linda Kasabian, who kept watch during the real murders and became a key prosecution witness in the trial — panics and takes off while the others walk up the private road leading to the houses.)
The climactic scene begins when Rick, disturbed by the sound of a malfunctioning car muffler, leaves his house to confront whomever is lingering outside. Believing the Manson followers to be hippies looking for a place to smoke, Rick yells at them until they back their car down the road. They recognise him as unforgiving bounty hunter Jake Cahill from the television series Bounty Law, which Rick starred in at his prime, and forgo orders from "Charlie" (Damon Herriman) to kill everyone in the house next door. Instead they decide to seek revenge on the Hollywood star who they believe helped introduce their generation to images of violence: "My idea is to kill the people who taught us to kill!" Sadie says.
After Flowerchild flees, the others break into Rick's house — only to happen upon his Italian wife and his right-hand man, who just returned from smoking an LSD-soaked cigarette while walking his pit bull. (Rick, meanwhile, hangs out with a frozen margarita in the backyard pool.) Unsure whether they're a hallucination, Cliff recognises the intruders from six months earlier, when he drove a hitchhiking Manson follower to the cult's base at Spahn Ranch. As Cliff tries to recall Tex's name, the latter proclaims, "I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business." Cliff responds, "Naw, it was dumber than that."
The dog lunges at Tex's crotch, kicking off an extraordinarily gruesome sequence in which Tex is curb-stomped to death, Katie's face is smashed into a wall and Sadie, who somehow survives extreme facial wounds, gets torched by Rick's flamethrower (which some prop master apparently let him keep). After the cops retrieve the bodies, Rick gets invited over for a drink by a curious Sharon and her ex-boyfriend, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch) — which is quite validating for the older actor, given that Tarantino juxtaposes Sharon's ascending stardom with Rick's crisis over his fading relevancy.
None of this actually happened, of course, save for Tex Watson describing himself as the devil to the victims, which included Tate, who was almost nine months pregnant; Sebring, who kept her company while Polanski was out of the country; aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old who had been visiting the property's caretaker.
Manson often spoke to his followers of an apocalyptic race war called 'Helter Skelter,' named for the Beatles song, according to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and writer Curt Gentry's book with that title. The cult leader aimed to incite the war by having his followers kill "piggies" — wealthy people, basically — and frame members of the Black Panthers. He gave Watson orders to kill everyone inside the Cielo Drive property previously rented by Terry Melcher, a record producer whom Manson partly blamed for his failed music career. After Watson, Krenwinkel and Atkins carried out Manson's order to make the murders "as gruesome as you can," one of them wrote "pig" in blood on the front door of the house.
The film's version of events echoes the revisionist histories of Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds, the latter of which features a memorable finale where a Holocaust survivor operating a Paris movie theatre orchestrates the assassination of Adolf Hitler during the screening of a Nazi propaganda film. Tarantino aims to right colossal wrongs to the extent that he can — in this case, a wrong that Joan Didion famously pointed to as the case of a widespread loss of innocence in The White Album, a collection of essays published in 1979.
"Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire throughout the community, and in a sense this is true," she wrote. "The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."
Once Upon a Time keeps that paranoia at bay, instead fulfilling Tarantino's fantasy of preserving both innocent lives and the Hollywood of yesteryear, of which he is clearly so fond.
Lorde has made a surprise appearance on the Aotearoa Music Awards red carpet tonight after releasing a new music video this afternoon. Video / Carson Bluck
