With today being Quentin Tarantino’s birthday, I almost feel like I have no choice but to pick this scene from the explosive finale of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood as my scene that I love for the day.
When this film, there was a lot of controversy by Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) using a flame thrower to set a hippie on fire in his swimming pool. Never mind that the hippie in question (played by future Oscar-winner Mikey Madison) was specifically in Rick’s bungalow to try to kill him. On twitter, there were cries about how this scene proved that Tarantino misogynist. On TV Tropes, someone actually wrote, “You have to feel a little sorry for the hippie at the end….”
No, actually, you don’t have to feel sorry for her in the least. In this scene, Madison is playing Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz. In real life, Susan Atkins was the most enthusiastic of Charles Manson’s band of hippie killers. She was the one who personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death while Sharon, 8 and a half months pregnant at the time, begged for the life of her baby. I won’t quote what Atkins said to Sharon while killing her but you can find it in any of the books written about the case. How do we know what Atkins said? Because she bragged about it in prison. She didn’t show a shred of remorse until after she realized she was going to spend the rest of her life in prison, which is when she suddenly decided she was born again and started claiming she was brainwashed. In real life, Sharon Tate, only 26 years old, died in 1969. Susan Atkins lived to be 61, saved just because the Supreme Court temporarily suspended the death penalty in the 70s.
So, as far as I’m concerned, turn those flames up, Rick. In Tarantino’s world, Sharon lived and had her baby. If the choice is between Tarantino’s alternate reality or the world in which Atkins spent 40 years having her food and housing paid for by the same California taxpayers that she wanted to kill, I know which one I’m going with.
