The REAL Meaning Behind The Ending of ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’

I’ve got thoughts on that spectacular finale of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”

But the nonspoilery takeaway is this: It’s great. Maybe Tarantino’s best (no, that’s “Pulp Fiction”; make it second best). It’s a love letter to Hollywood, a love letter to Los Angeles and a corrective for actress Sharon Tate, whom you know only because of her death but should appreciate for her life.

It’s also a joy for L.A. geeks, Tarantino geeks and film geeks, full of easter eggs, allusions, homages and eyewinks that you’ll get if you’ve been paying attention for the last 50 years. Seeing it in Hollywood, at the Cinerama Dome, was the best possible meta experience (and during a hot summer almost exactly 50 years after the events depicted).

My spoilery thoughts are below the image. Don’t read them until you’ve seen the movie!

The fact that Tarantino’s ninth film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” features that title is a clue that what you’re going to see isn’t history but rather a fairy tale of sorts for all of its verisimilitude and historical accuracy. (And, yes, it’s also an allusion to Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”)

Fairy tales are fantasy stories about things that never happened, built to convey a moral lesson, to model ethical behavior, to depict the world as it should be. And that’s what the film is: It begins in a very specific place, milieu and time as a way to show us what we think we know, then subverts that to show us how things should have been.

And the fact that its beating heart is the angelically joyful character of Sharon Tate — a luminous Margot Robbie — tells you that Tarantino has morphed into his version of a mushy, nostalgic, sentimental old fart who so loves movies that he thinks they are the thing that can save us: That movies represent the best of us, that they are love, joy, the antidote to whatever corrosive poisons afflict society.

I can’t say I disagree.

What do I mean? Consider an earlier Tarantino movie: “Inglourious Basterds.” The end of that movie, shockingly, involves the fiery deaths of the entire Nazi high command, including Adolf Hitler himself. And the conflagration occurs in a movie theater.

This, as you may know, never happened.

“Once Upon a Time” alludes to that finale early in its run and features a flamethrower wielded by one of the film’s key protagonists, Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio). Remember what Chekhov said about guns? It applies to flamethrowers as well, apparently.

The allusion is no accident. “Once Upon a Time”’s entire story points to a fateful night in August of 1969, when the Manson family murder a pregnant Tate and her friends in a horrific and senseless crime, one of the key events cited often as the end of the flower-power Age of Aquarius 1960s, the beginning of the darkening of our national mood and our downward spiral toward cynicism and coarseness that fairly could be seen to have landed us where we are today.

But Tarantino says no. He constructs a fairy tale 1969 Hollywood in which a fictional actor and his fictional stuntman friend (Brad Pitt’s Hal Needham-esque Cliff Booth) are Tate’s next-door neighbors.

This sets up the finale, in which the Manson killers change their minds at the last minute, decide to kill the TV piggies instead of their neighbors, break into Rick Dalton’s house and meet a hilariously Tarantino-esque hyperviolent end. Cue flamethrower.

Tate survives, Dalton survives (and winds up credibly in a position to supplant Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in an alt-universe “Chinatown”), the Manson family disappears into the fog of history, the 1960s never end, and innocent love and joy prevail. All because of THE MOVIE INDUSTRY!

As you may also know, none of this ever happened.

With these two finales, Tarantino is saying: Yes, they did happen. They happened in my movies, and here is the thing that should be, that should have been, and still can be if we have heart and creativity and vision and hope. Movies — art — can show us the way, and we can be better if we follow that lead.

And I can’t say I disagree with any of that, and my heart swells with joy to have had a vision of a world in which Hitler died in fire and the lovely Sharon Tate can still invite us in for cocktails around the piano. That’s the world I want to live in, and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” gives it to us for a moment.

Have you seen it? What did you think?