It’s easy to chalk up Tarantino’s playing with history as yet more proof that he’s an irresponsible nihilist, someone who crafts narratives simply for their shock value, with no sense of loyalty to canons of accuracy and verisimilitude. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described Inglourious Basterds as “akin to Holocaust denial.” He added that “Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention—by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies—it loses its historical reality.”
By the same token, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood can be seen as insulting to the memory of the various real figures, such as Sharon Tate or Bruce Lee, whose life stories are distorted in the film. (Lee’s family has complained about his being portrayed as a belligerent boastful loudmouth who easily gets bested in a fight with Cliff Booth.)
These accusations can be partly answered by noting that Tarantino isn’t giving history but alternative history. One of the key functions of alternative history as a genre is to offer a sly commentary on real history. A famous example is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), where the Axis powers win World War II. In the novel, the victorious Nazis and Japanese imperialists divide the world between them and carry out an arms race that threatens human survival. The novel was obviously alluding to the actual Cold War, recasting it in grotesque terms as a battle between competing fascisms, to call attention to its absurdity.
In a like manner, Tarantino’s imaginary history is meant to cast a critical eye on actual history. The easy putdown of Tarantino is that he’s offering gleeful revenge fantasies by creating scenarios where violence can be inflicted on easy-to-hate bad guys (Nazis, the Manson family, or, in Django Unchained, slave owners).
Yet the thrill of righteous vengeance acquires a melancholy taste when we realize that the stories we are seeing didn’t happen. The discrepancy between what should’ve happened and what we know happened calls attention to how inadequate the real world is. At the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you don’t feel any happier that the fictional Sharon Tate survives. Rather, you feel even more acutely the loss of the real Tate.