Jordan Cole
White Lodge
- Sep 22, 2022
- 725
- 1,132
Every time I watch it, I feel it more deeply and tear up within the last few minutes, as all that the film represents and mourns creeps up and suddenly overwhelms me (that's how the film is meticulously built, in my experience): the senseless death of human beings, the premature end of an era, the eternal what-if of how things might have been different, and the power of storytelling--particularly cinema in a film about cinema with a bittersweet title that evokes both classic Leone films and fairy tale lore--to resurrect the past and evoke all of this at once.
Oh, this reminded me. I also tear up when Tate goes to see herself at the movie theater, which of course connects to all these themes. Jesus this is an emotional scene. How can anyone not feel something here? Granted, it wasn't until the second and third time that I kind of "got" what was going as opposed to the usual Tarantino first-time experience, "!! where's this going ??! !!"
I mean there's a lot of layers here. Fictional Tate is seeing the real version of her in a movie and lovingly watching it with an appreciative (but small) audience, in a film about the real Tate that fictionalizes her murder to have never happened at all. Tarantino makes my head spin. I only wish others experienced this when seeing some of his films. Those that dismissed this as "just another revenge film"...I get it, but try to dig a little deeper. There's so much more heart to this one.
The end of the novel he wrote also made me cry. It's so grateful and personal and vulnerable about him and his entire life and career. It stunned me.