THE QT CONNECTION: A CROSS COMPARISON

It’s no state secret that Tarantino is a Kubrick fanboy. He openly admitted that Reservoir Dogs was his version of The Killing. And for a man who once said, “Hopefully, the way I define success when I finish my career is that I’m considered one of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived. And going further, a great artist, not just filmmaker,” you can imagine he had some other of the greatest filmmakers that ever lived on his mind. Kurosawa. Ramsay. Lee.

Kubrick?

The comparison between these titans of cinema is largely stylistic/thematic, as opposed to the more direct comparisons that can be drawn between The Shining and the other Shine Babies. But the fact that QT’s career began with such a Kubrick-heavy film and that his own self-described masterpiece (Inglourious Basterds) bears the most thematic similarity to The Shining‘s subtext (the one about rethinking the nature of war and violence), I thought I would keep a slice of my mind devoted to the unconscious task of seeking out Shine Babyisms.

I did these first from memory, thinking I’d forego visual aids. But for the films I remembered least–Jackie Brown and Inglourious Basterds–I had to do watch throughs. This lead to fleet-footed watch-throughs of the other films (this section was written in 4 days), for things I might’ve missed, with the exception of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, which I was happy with, as was. If I ever go back to do a more thorough job on those, I’ll let you know. Update: I did do a little more Dogs watching, and discovered the bit about the yellow Beetle, but not much else.

One last thing, this section is not meant to suggest that Tarantino sits around thinking “How next can I rip off The Shining?” The man once said “I steal from every single movie ever made.” And I think that’s a very apt self-assessment. Nevertheless, you’re going to notice some very intriguing, very seemingly direct connections to Kubrick’s masterpiece, and at times it’s going to seem like Tarantino is just a Kubrick syphon. That’s simply the effect of isolating these details. The movies contain mountains of other details that have nothing to do with The Shining. And I don’t think that Tarantino is the same kind of craftsman as Kubrick, whatsoever. I simply think the admiration is so strong, he couldn’t help packing him in, and The Shining happens to be Kubrick’s most Tarantino-esque film. It’s grounded, it’s poppy, it’s big, it’s slow, it’s violent, and it’s bursting with references of all kinds. As this analysis progresses, I’ll expect you, gentle reader, to know, without links, which of the techniques I’m noticing when I point something out. And at times I’ll simply be observing the ways in which the QTverse connects with itself, which I think is something not a lot of major directors feel the need to do, or have any reason to do. But this strikes me as part of being an eye screamer, so I think if we’re to understand Kubrick’s full impact on QT, we have to look at that. That said, I’ve left out probably 75% of the inner connections I’ve noticed between the films, mainly because they felt more particular to Tarantino’s oeuvre than to anything Shinery.

Also: spoiler alert for the entire Tarantino canon. Not kidding.

RESERVOIR DOGS

Preamble: As I said, I did this from memory, then went back for the illustrative images. This process is what prompted me to do a full analysis of each QT film, not just Dogs and Basterds. Those other examples will, therefore, be in sequential order, but I’m gonna keep this primordial analysis as is, for the fun of preserving the order that things occurred to me in.

• A stylistic descendent of The Killing.
• It’s called Reservoir Dogs, and Mr. Blonde calls Mr. White a “little doggie”. Dogs are associated to the Overlook in the Four Directions set up. So, these are not good guys (in spite of the fact that they spend most of the movie trying to figure out who the “bad guy” is).
• During the opening breakfast scene Joe is in his own little world trying to remember who “TOBY” is, a name in his little black book. When White and Pink are trying to figure out who the rat might be, there’s an AC unit with a sign reading “TONY DO NOT USE”. If QT understands Tonys the way I do, this could be a sly suggestion of the fact that nobody will understand that Orange is the rat. Nobody’s using their “Tony”. Joe shows up at the very end to explain that he knows it’s Orange based entirely on “instincts”. But his instincts weren’t perfect. He only had a Toby.

• A large part of the first bit, the Mr. White chapter, involves White and Pink looking in a mirror, while they try to figure out what went wrong. There’s a lot of set up about morality and the ethics of the situation they’re in. If memory serves, there’s a bit about cops not being “real people”. Funnily enough, the cops in the commode story are literally not real people.
• The code names of the men (White, Blonde (Yellow), Brown, Pink, Blue, Orange), almost seem to reference the shot of Danny playing outside 237. Orange and Brown are the dominant colours of the carpet, Pink and Yellow are the two colours of the toys in the two different versions of the film, and Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater is Blue and White. When the fight erupts about whether Mr. Pink can be Mr. Purple, Joe Cabot shuts it down (“You’re not Mr. Purple. Some guy on some other job is Mr. Purple. You’re Mr. Pink!”). Purple and Green are the colours of the 237 carpet. Was that the “other job”?
• Taking that a step further, Orange is a double agent (orange is the hotel’s colour). Blonde is a psychopath who lives to cause pain and suffering (even Pink and White are disturbed by his “kill-crazy rampage” at the bank), while Pink (the anti-tipper) is the most interested in abandoning the others and saving his own skin (the pink and yellow tennis balls come from the 237 ghost, who traumatizes Danny almost for the fun of it). And finally, White is the dominant perspective character, who is betrayed in various ways by everyone but Blue and Brown, who die in the botched job (I actually don’t remember if Brown dies, but I think he does)). And Blue’s major contribution to the drama is chiding Pink for not tipping, which suggests he’s sympathetic to the plight of women, or just looking to chisel at Pink.

• And taking that a step further, there’s a conversation early on between White and Orange, when a blood-sopping Orange’s been shot in the belly, where White rhetorically asks if Orange is a doctor, to which Orange must reluctantly admit he is not. White then doles out some doctorly wisdom about the nature of belly wounds, giving him a kind of Doc cred.

• A cover of Magic Carpet Ride is on the soundtrack, at the start of Freddie incepting the gang. The orange/brown carpet outside 237 shrinks between shots.

• In Joe Cabot’s office there’s a pair of enormous tusks that end up looking like some kind of horns.

• The film opens with a lengthy analysis of a Madonna song (Like a Virgin), which bleeds into a debate about tipping waitresses, which suggests the real social and economic inequality suffered by women generally in society. The first painting that Wendy Torrance is seen beside is Woman and Terrier, which Colville described as his “Madonna and Child”, in which an imposing woman figure is eclipsed by the significance of her offspring.

• Mr. Orange (an undercover cop, real name Freddy Newandyke) breaks his way into the group of criminals by his memorization and delivery of something his partner calls “the commode story”. A major element of the final phase of the film is Freddy getting so good at telling the story that, while he’s delivering it to the gang, the audience (along with the gang of criminals, and even Freddy) go visually inside this make-believe story, to feel it (or narrate it) in its sensual entirety. In other words, Freddy/Orange is incepting the gang with a kind of shine. And like Tony’s first shine to Danny, it involves the shiner (Danny/Freddie). And like the last shine Danny receives from Tony (REDRUM), it involves a commode (bathroom). Jack also receives a major shine from the hotel inside two commodes.

• Actually, the commode story is kind of an interesting rebuff to All work and no play, etc. By repeating the lines over and over the “actor” is able to immerse into his character. Of course, there’s nuances to Freddie’s evolution of the story that make it his own. And keep it from being pure twinnery. But the idea is still that by doing the same thing over and over will get him in good with the underworld. So perhaps it’s less a rebuff and more a Gentleman’s Guide to Becoming a Dirtbag. Also, Freddie swings a baseball bat as he does this, and there’s a Jack Kirby illustration in the room of the Silver Surfer (Jack’s typewriter turns from white to grey-silver). And is that a pear, a lemon, or a tennis ball behind Freddie there?

• A cop (who is spying on Freddy’s undercover activity) quips that Freddy must have “rocks in his head the size of Gibraltar” to be doing what he’s doing. Gibraltar is the northern pillar of Hercules. The cops friend then asks for a “bear claw” (donut).

• Hallorann asks Wendy if she’s a “Winnie or a Freddy?” I’m not sure what connecting Wendy and Mr. Orange would do, since I don’t think Wendy’s as clever or duplicitous as Freddy. But when Danny sees the ball atop the orange carpet, he thinks it’s from Wendy. And that’s why he enters 237. I also think it’s interesting that Freddy’s secret name rhymes with the openly real name of Joe Cabot’s son Nice Guy Eddie Cabot. (Also, there’s a funny bit of dialogue, when Freddie’s cop friend says, “That’s what a ‘Nice Guy’ he is.” But he’s referring to a different character named Long Beach Mike, but his emphasis on “‘Nice Guy'” makes you think he means Eddie for a second.)
• Freddy describes Joe Cabot as looking like The Thing from the Fantastic Four. I’d probably have to rewatch the film to know if this could be a sly invocation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but if so, who would the four be? Joe, Eddie, Freddy and Vic? With Larry as the fifth horseman? Also, a second after Freddy gives this description, we see he has a toy and poster of the Thing.

• No Tarantino film operates without a concern for how this story connects to other stories within this universe (Michael Madsen’s character, Vic Vega (Mr. Blonde), is famously the brother of John Travolta’s character, Vincent Vega, in Pulp Fiction, for instance). Kubrick’s films were (almost) all based on pre-existing books, which means that he could only create a sense of “cinematic universe” by reusing actors (like he did here by casting Philip Stone as Grady, who also appeared in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon), or putting in references to his other movies as movies (like when the soundtrack for 2001 appeared in A Clockwork Orange), or by simply wedging them in (though I honestly can’t think of an example of a painting that shows up in multiple films, or a song he reused, or what have you–and his process was so slow compared to most directors, you can imagine he wouldn’t want to waste breath covering old ground). That said, Kubrick tried to get Osamu Tezuka to be the art director for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Tezuka’s vast series of graphic novels is famous for having a “cast” of recurring characters who would appear in dramatically different “roles” throughout his books. So Kubrick doubtlessly had a concern for internal universes.

• Also, there’s a conversation between the men at one point about the career of Pam Grier, who would go on to star in QT’s third film. There’s this spooky thing that happens a lot in his films where something happens in an earlier film that seems to perfectly foreshadow some future film of his, and you have to wonder if these weren’t coincidences. If they weren’t, but were in fact perfectly seized moments, performed intentionally, then QT’s a master of foreseeing his own zeitgeist. A rare quality in an artist.

• At the start of the section leading to the revelation about Mr. Orange, an orange balloon follows Nice Guy Eddie’s car, as it blows down the road. Nice Guy will get real squirrelly in a bit at the notion that he might be being accused of being the undercover agent. This balloon is like the ones Jack sees on the way to the ghostball. And sure enough, everyone but Pink dies at the end, so the titular reservoir dogs are a ghostball unto themselves.
• Also, did you notice the trunkless yellow Beetle there? (The soundtrack at this moment is Joe Tex’s incredible I Gotcha, which contains the line, “You thought I didn’t see ya!”)

• Actually, this bug also appears earlier, during the story of Pink’s escape, right before he gets hit by the car that he’ll hijack, and shoot the cops from (note how it appears in front of a fire engine).
• And the cops pass it later when they’re tailing Orange near the beginning of the planning of the heist. So all three (if there’s only three) appearances of the yellow Beetle have to do with cops. Nice Guy Eddie is telling the mysterious “Dov” (a name that gets reused in Death Proof, fun fact) about how Blonde’s driving around with a cop in his trunk. Pink shoots cops as the Beetle speeds by, and the cops themselves pass it. And of course, there’s a cop in Eddie’s trunk, and this trunk is missing a door, or something. Someone on the Internet Movie Car Database thinks it was modified by a surfer dude. If that’s so, could it be that QT was “modifying” Kubrick’s vision?

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PULP FICTION

• I should probably start by noting that this was one of the few 90’s films that Kubrick expressed approval of, and in his 60s, no less.
• The name and nature of the film both derive from a type of literature that we’ve seen a good few examples of in the literature section.
• Ezekiel 25:17, the fictitious bible verse that Jules quotes from is made from numbers that add to one of The Shining‘s most infamous numbers: 42. And almost makes perfect thirds of that number. 17-18-17. In case you’ve read my Fibonacci analysis already, you might wonder if 25 makes a golden ratio of 42. It doesn’t come as close as 26, which is the number that’s 0.003 points away from perfect…but it’s still close. Also, 2517 is 3 seconds short of 42 minutes.
• And just for your consideration: at 25:17 (subtracting the opening Miramax logo), Vincent meets Butch, who will be his untimely demise (after Jules and Paul were chiding Vincent about having to take Mia out on the town). At 2517 seconds into the movie (making the same correction for time) Vincent is saying “But don’t feel bad, we just met each other.”

• Jules Winnfield (Sam Jackson) happens to almost share a name with Dr. Julius Winfield Erving II, who appears in a poster in the radio room of the hotel. This could also mean that Jules is meant as a Caesar figure, which would jive with his final description of himself as “the tyranny of evil men”.
• Actually, Jules’ whole dissection of Ezekiel 25:17 at the end with Ringo reminds me a lot of my general work on Eye Scream. He takes the faux bible verse and wonders about the specific meaning of each part, wondering how he and his victims fit into its metaphoric properties, like a good little narratologist. This shows not only how the eye screamer analyses story forms, but also shows the true nature of the bible, and indeed all myths, which is to act as a master key, a master legend, through which the adherent can decipher everything they experience in life. I’ve often wondered if this is what Christians find so repugnant about the science of evolution: it reveals how narrative fits into the bigger picture of scientific reality. Which is to say, the best stories survive by their fitness, and Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought, alongside their main competitors in Buddhism and Hinduism, have enjoyed the prized peach position, beating out the thousands of competitors that have sprung up in the thousands of years since the advent of the big five. But they will struggle to maintain that position if science itself becomes the new dominant filter through which sapiens experience life and the natural world. Because once religion/myth is no longer about its own authority to dictate the fact of metaphysical life, its stories become as viable as Snow White, or an episode of The Simpsons. Nevertheless, what Jules is showing here is that even someone who murders, and steals back (stolen?) gold for a living, can use the occasionally brilliant narrative conduits of myth to better understand his own situation.
• The character who might have acquired a speech impediment for touching Mia Wallace’s feet, Antoine Rockamora, is nicknamed “Tony Rocky Horror”. The Rocky Horror Picture Show came out in 1975. Danny is 5 in 1979, and Tony was created when Jack broke his 2-year-old arm, presumably in 1976. Is that a near miss? One thing that that film and The Shining have in common is that Aileen Lewis appeared as a background character in both. Another is that producer Lou Adler produced Shelley Duvall’s first picture, Brewster McCloud.
• Big Kahuna Burger is interesting. The restaurant doesn’t exist. The name originates from the novel Gidget, but also means “shaman” or “wizard” in Hawaiian. Check out that last link for an excerpt from the novel where we learn that the Kahoona’s name is Cass, after Cassius, which, the Kahoona says, refers to nobody. Of course, Gaius Cassius Longinus was the leader of the assassination of Caesar. Jules shares a name with Caesar. And here, he’s gulping down the “tasty beverage” to the very last drop, as if symbolically draining the life out of Bret before his eyes. Bret and his boys tried to hamstring Marcellus, and Jules is here to achieve vengeance and furious anger. Also, later, when Butch and Esmerelda are talking about the meaning of their names, Butch will say “I’m American, honey, our names don’t mean shit.” Not only does “butch” have great meaning (it derives from “butcher” for starters), but it is in fact of American origin. So Butch is at least a little more informed than Kahoona Cass.
• Paul Calderon has the line “My name’s Paul, and this is between y’all.” This is an echo of Jules’ earlier line, “My name’s Pitt. And your ass ain’t talkin’ your way outta this shit.” But also, this is the only instance of a character being named the same as their actor, and the character’s line draws direct attention to this. Kathy Griffin is listed as playing Kathy Griffin, which is both completely fair, but probably more of a tongue-in-cheek joke.
• Mia Wallace has three very easy-to-read books in the intercom room: something called Baseball (could be this Ken Burns book, but it’s a close call), Frank Talbot’s Oceans and Islands (1991), and Ella Foshay’s Mr. Luman Reeds Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (1990). In any case you’ve got art, sports and the natural world, there. The islands bit ties nicely to the Big Kahuna business.

• Jack Rabbit Slims could take its name from The Shining’s three main characters. Jack is Jack, Danny is Bugs Bunny, and Wendy smokes Virginia Slims. Also, the titular icon holds a trophy like the one Mia will cradle all the walk home.

• Vincent describes Jack Rabbit Slims as something like a “wax museum with a pulse”. The director of Carson City, André DeToth, most famously directed House of Wax, a horror movie about a wax museum of sorts.
• Also, I just want to expound on a small, personal theory of small account. I realize that QT, the great truth teller, who would never, and could never tell a lie, has “confirmed” that Mr. Pink dies at the end of Reservoir Dogs, but if you crank the volume at the end, while the sounds of Pink’s attempted escape are heard (including many gun shot sounds), a cop is heard shouting “Put your hands behind your back!” or “Put your hands behind your head!” and no gun shots follow that remark, but a small silence, followed by the cops busting in, White shooting Orange, and the cops shooting White. Now, you could say that Pink made an escape attempt during those gun shots, and his death shots were eclipsed by White’s, but that could never be confirmed. What is demonstrably in the film is the sound of Pink not getting shot. So what’s the likelihood of him getting shot? To make sense of that, you have to imagine that another criminal (Dov? Long Beach Mike?) happened by at that moment and got arrested over Pink’s corpse. If, however, Pink did survive, Steve Buscemi only makes one other QTverse appearance (that I know of), and that’s in Jack Rabbit Slim’s as Buddy Holly. He’s seen in front of a poster for Sorority Girl, which, as you can see in this Google search, and in every place that features a poster for the film, wasn’t pink, but grey. So Pink (who’s connected to the death of Vincent’s brother, remember) probably rolled over on somebody to get out of trouble, and now all he can do is get this shit job, hence his extreme awkwardness at it. As an added karmic slap, he’s depending on tips to survive, the thing the world’s tiniest violin was playing about in his last appearance.
• But if I am right about the 237 colour connection to the colour criminals, and if this is Pink, then if absolutely nothing else, that part of the Shining influence would’ve bled into Pulp.

• Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) wakes from two dreams with a start, the first of which is coming out of the memory(?) of how he received his father’s gold watch. When he wakes up from the second, he tells Fabienne that he never remembers his dreams. It’s a weak link, but it reminded me of Jack’s nightmare, and how that affects his connection to Wendy. After Butch wakes from the second dream he flies into a near-murderous frenzy when he learns that Fabienne forgot the gold watch. Basic reason would suggest that the contents of the mystery suitcase is gold, since even a street thug like Ringo can recognize it in an insight, and it glows gold. So it would seem that Pulp Fiction is similarly concerned with what gold (the Gold Room, the gold rush) makes men do.

• The characters Butch and Esmerelda Villalobos discuss the meanings of their names during his flight from the boxing manslaughter. Villalobos means “town of wolves” in Spanish, but a villa can also be a word describing a large country estate. “House of wolves”. As discussed in the Four Directions intro of the animals analysis, the Overlook hotel is most associated to canines. The character played by Harvey Keitel (who is looking rather Overlooky in his tuxedo and bowtie) is also named Winston Wolf.
• Also, does this hosing count as this film’s bloodfall? It’s an unpleasant water experience anyway.

• When Winston arrives 9:37 later (23 seconds faster than he said he’d be), there’s two Volkswagens. The truck that’s closest has the name legibly printed out on the back, and there’s a blue Beetle right above the “n” in “seven”.

• Oh, and here in his final scene, a yellow one.

• Butch and Fabienne are hiding out in a hotel to pull off their heist (though, opposite to The Shining, it’s by returning to civilization that gets Butch in trouble).
• When Zed is picking who to rape first, he uses Eenie Meenie Miney Mo, and while he does it, he replaces the word “tiger” with the n-word. In The Shining tigers are associated to Danny’s protectors, which includes the ill-fated Hallorann. In fact, in the mirrorform, while Hallorann’s getting axed, there’s a tiger mask behind the doctor in Danny’s bedroom. Also, Hallorann has the same slur slurred against him by Jack and Grady.
• The film begins in the same location where it ends, which is sort of mirrorformy (though the ending diner scene is probably 3-4 times as long as the intro). And on that note, Vincent Vega is probably killed by Butch right around the middle of the movie, which could be something like Pulp Fiction’s middle-end.
• Having not done a thorough analysis, I can’t say if there’s a profundity of absurdities-style elements to shake up our sense of reality, but I don’t think that’s generally the mission statement of Pulp Fiction. One thing that does come to mind is that, for a film that is generally consistent in the way it links all its looping narrative twists, it allows for at least one glaring inconsistency. In the beginning, when Yolanda starts robbing the diner, she says “I’m gonna execute every motherfucking last one of you!” but in the finale version of this scene she says, “I’m gonna execute every one of you motherfuckers.” I’d always chalked that up to adhering to the trashy, sloppy, pulpy style of its inspirations, but maybe it’s part of something larger.

• When Jules describes his “moment of clarity” he says this is what alcoholics call it. He’s wearing a golden “J” around his neck (Jack, the alcoholic?) as he contemplates the reality of his message to Vincent.

• Butch owns a copy of 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. A blue car sits on top. A reference to the blue Beetle near Jimmy’s house?

• Near the end, Jules starts calling Pumpkin (Tim Roth) “Ringo”. There’s a deleted scene (skip to 7:00) where Mia Wallace, upon first meeting Vincent Vega, records him with a video camera before we’ve ever seen her full face, where she goes on a tangent including how there’s two types of people in the world: Beatles people and Elvis people. She deduces that Vincent is an Elvis man, and given that QT wrote a character in True Romance who is both Elvis and a guardian angel to the main character, and given QT’s open admiration for the likes of Eddie Cochrane, I think we can deduce which type he is. But the Ringo dig on Pumpkin certainly makes it seem like this is another instance of Tarantino hoisting style (Sam Jackson) above soul (Tim Roth). Or, to paraphrase The Tree of Life, putting the way of nature below the way of grace.
• In fact, according to IMDb trivia, the chopper that Butch and Fabienne escape on, called Grace, is a reference to Easy Rider. The indigenous sculpture with the hand axe is a nice touch.

• The show child Butch watches is called Clutch Cargo, and the episode features an Inuit man talking about how a dog thinks a totem pole is alive, and how silly this must be. So, besides the indigenous element, the voice actor is Hal Smith, who provided the voice for Winnie-the-Pooh and Owl in multiple Pooh-based properties. You might also make a note about the way a white man was voicing an indigenous person, like how QT has put words in the mouths of quite a few non-white performers.

• Vincent calls Ringo a “nimrod” in the line that goes something like, “Jules, you give this fuckin’ nimrod your money, I’m gonna shoot em on general principle.” Nimrod is one of the three names of the man who had the Tower of Babel built, in Christian mythology.
• A lot of scenes take place in bathrooms, or reference bathrooms, like how Vincent interrupts the diner job while returning from an unseen trip to the bathroom. Actually, every major section of the film features at least one bathroom scene. Also, Vincent talks to himself in Mia’s bathroom mirror, like how Jack’s talking in a mirror invents Lloyd.

• The film uses a lot of subtle (and some not so subtle) references to Asia.
• A tonne of references to animals in the script.
• I’m not sure if there’s Red Apple cigarettes appear in Reservoir Dogs, but if not, they appear here, and I’m sure you’ve guessed that I’ve wondered about their possible connection to Snow White. Butch smokes them for sure, and Mia. Mia is rendered mute by some snow, and Butch is rendered mute by a red ball in his mouth.
• Zed has a licence plate on his wall that reads “X 732”, visible when Butch catches Marcellus and when he’s is debating leaving Marcellus behind. Could be a coincidence. Seems unlikely. The song on the radio in the first part is If Love Is A Red Dress (red dress backwards is sserdder!) and when he’s leaving, it’s Comanche (named for an indigenous nation of modern day Colorado).

• The slow shot of Butch’s hand going to reveal the dungeon interior, and rape scene, is reminiscent of Jack’s hand slowly pushing back the 237 bathroom door.

• Butch’s licence plate is a kind of warped/disrupted golden ratio (1.618).

Actually, the film’s golden ratio moment is at 92:41, which still features 2010 book, and is not that far from the moment we see Butch’s licence plate, 67 seconds later. This is the car that will smash a donut-carrying Marcellus, remember. “Marvellous donuts.” What’s that from again?

• Butch gets his watch off a ceramic boxing kangaroo, which will reappear in Jackie Brown, as we’ll see in a bit. There’s a nice touch in the butterfly art piece appearing in this scene, which introduces the middle section of the film. It’s in the same general area as Fabienne (fa-bee-on), which sounds like the French for butterfly, papillon (pa-pee-on).

• It’s hard to make out, but there’s an ad for tricycles in the bottom left corner, while Butch cycles through his murder weapon options.

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JACKIE BROWN

• This is the one I know the least, so I’ll have to do a watch through. I’m not expecting to find much, since this is Tarantino’s one film based on pre-existing material. We’ll see what happens.
• Do I need to point out how the main character is Jackie?
• This film features two sets of two closely linked characters played by actors with the same first name, Robert (Forster and De Niro) and Michael (Keaton and Bowen). Barry Nelson and Barry Dennen play Ullman and his right hand man Watson in The Shining.
• Bridget Fonda playing Melanie brings to mind her father Peter Fonda, most famous for Easy Rider, with Jack Nicholson. Bridget also appeared in that film as a hippie child.
• It seems that a portion of the drama will take place in “The City of Carson”, a subtitle that appears at 10:34. Carson City appears in The Shining at 10:59. This is where the bail bonds store is located.

• Max Cherry has a fishing portrait that looks like a couple of the ones around the hotel

• Cherry also has a Ringling Bros. poster that features a Roman charioteer driving a team of black and white horses. The Torrance apartment contains a reference to a trapeze, and Kubrick directed Spartacus, which had cover art quite similar in colour to this poster.

• Ordell brings the bail money in a Toronto Raptors gym bag. He calls it his “Raptor bag”. So, besides the cute bit where Sam Jackson was torn to bits by raptors in Jurassic Park (an offscreen death worthy of the ages), which is probably why that team has that name (the fact that Jurassic Park exists, not the fact that Jackson was torn to bits in it), there’s also the subtle reference to Canada, with which The Shining is flush.

• Beaumont’s last name is revealed to be Livingston (Chris Tucker). Livingston could be a subtle invocation of David Livingstone, the Christian pioneer who upon meeting Henry Morton Stanley in Zanzibar, Africa heard the words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Livingstone is also referenced on the Sgt. Pepper cover. So there’s a conquest bit there, and maybe a Beatles thing too.
• Just for fun I’ll point out that Ordell Robbie pronounces his name “roh-bee”, which is how I always pronounced Margot Robbie, until I heard it in the popular pronouncement. Robbie would appear in QT’s ninth picture.
• On his way to kill Beaumont, Ordell plays Strawberry Letter 23, which contains the line, “Rainbows and waterfalls running through my mind”. That felt like a sly reference to the rainbow/flood imagery surrounding death in The Shining. And when he kills him, there’s an oil pump (red box) pumping oil out of the ground (oil extraction being a subtext of The Shining). There’s also an extreme uncanny valley effect to this sequence, since Ordell tricks Beaumont into the trunk of the car under the pretence of needing him as backup. Jackson’s delivery of this sequence gives no clue as to what he intends to do with Beaumont or why. Pure psychopathy. He laughs casually about Beaumont’s demise later on with Cherry.

• Simone, a mutual friend of Ordell and Louis (Robert De Niro), has the exact same porcelain kangaroo that Butch’s gold watch hangs on at home. This would seem to foreshadow the death of one of these men by the other. Ordell wears two caps throughout the film, a white one and a black one, which both seem to feature a little kangaroo design. Ordell kills Louis.

• When Ordell is fucking with Cherry over moving Beaumont’s bail onto Jackie, Cherry says “This isn’t a bar. You don’t have a tab.” Jack Torrance gets a tab going with the Overlook.
• Cherry reads Len Deighton’s Berlin Game right before meeting Jackie Brown for the first time. Berlin Game is the first of the Bernard Samson novels. Mythological Samson is the Christian iteration of Hercules, in the eyes of some, and is referenced in the painting Maligne Lake, Jasper Park. I also thought it was interesting that Deighton felt the need to tell readers that “Readers who take Bernard’s words literally are missing a lot of the intended content.” (It’s interesting that Cherry would be interested in an unreliable narrator.)

• Brown suggests Cherry take her to a bar with a sign reading “COCKATOO INN – HOTEL LOBBY AND Restaurant Entrance”. There’s something like a cockatoo in a blurry painting by the entrance to room 237. We’re told this is in “The City of Hawthorne” by a subtitle. Hawthorne was the name of the diner from Pulp Fiction, where Ringo and Jules collide. Also, later on, when Brown and Ordell meet here, there’s a glowing sign that simply reads THE BULL, with a blue electric bull illustration. This scene takes place right before the middle of the movie, and Ordell brings Louis here after a short scene between the two. So if the Cockatoo Inn is the room 237 of Jackie Brown, it makes some similar appearances, in terms of screen time.

• There’s a few references to Brown “standing mute” at her trial. That’s not something you hear in a lot of court dramas. Of course, Danny Torrance is quite the mute stander.
• Brown’s apartment is awash in cultural references–albums, books, artworks–a lot to sink our teeth into, but requiring a deeper analysis than I think I want to give. I couldn’t help noticing a Donald E. Westlake novel, 1995’s Smoke, which is an invisible man burglar story. And Frank Frazier’s an interesting character. As

• The morning coffee scene between is reminiscent of the coffee scene in Summer of ’42. Both involve the male character approving of taking the coffee black. That scene also involves Dorothy giving Hermie a bag of “marvellous donuts”, and later, in the mall, several characters will eat at Teriyaki Donuts.
• The Cockatoo Inn bar has a glowing neon sign that reads THE BULL, with a blue bull looming.

• Ordell confuses Helmut Berger for Rutger Hauer. Hauer most famously appeared in Blade Runner, which used some leftover footage from the opening shots of The Shining.
• During the ever so romantic love scene between De Niro and Fonda, there’s a picture on the fridge of Jackson’s character in Goodfellas, Stacks, in a bathtub. De Niro was in Goodfellas, but not the scene where Pesci kills Jackson. Still, De Niro’s character is close with Pesci’s, so maybe this implies Louis’s eventual betrayal of Ordell, or his present betrayal, since he isn’t sure (as we later find out) if Melanie is Ordell’s girlfriend. And Ordell will kill Louis before the end, so, like with the Jules-Kahuna thing in Pulp Fiction, this photo could imply the reverse revenge of Sam Jackson. Also, Louis will surprise kill Melanie, just as Pesci surprise kills Jackson in Goodfellas.

• Just to note: there’s a tonne of numbers in the dialogue. Like, numbers make up a whole number percentage of the spoken words in this film, I have little doubt.
• So yeah, a major part of the action takes place in Torrance, California. “Del Amo” means “from the owner”. This mall appears at 79 minutes. At 84 minutes Lloyd is telling Jack “orders from the house” about his free drink. Anyway, this is the first scene where Jackie Brown is seen wearing a Kangol cap (same brand as Ordell wears), which, if it’s meant to link to the Butch’s gold watch subtext, means that we’re now being told that Jackie will do in Ordell.
• There’s an uncredited song that plays over this scene called Off the Shelf by Dick Walter. If you’ve heard the opening of Midnight, the Stars, and You enough times, it’s hard not to hear a striking similarity between these pieces.

• Cherry goes to see The American President (1995), while at the mall. As he walks out, he passes a poster for Jack Nicholson’s Wolf (1994). The American President came out in November, and, given the lack of ubiquitous Christmas decorations, we might assume this is taking place in the new year. Which means the Wolf poster is out-of-date by about a year. Oh, actually, there was a calendar earlier in the film, open to June, so both movies are seriously out-of-date, unless The American President had a very lengthy stay in theatres. Also, the credits music Cherry’s walking out on is the credits music for this film, Monte Carlo Nights, which is not the end theme to any other film, so Cherry would have to, impossibly, be walking out of Jackie Brown. This could be an absurd nod to Cherry’s generally mellow response to everything about Brown’s plan, as if he already knows how things turn out.

• Cherry tells Brown that getting out of the bonds business was “a long time coming” but that he finally made up his mind…”Thursday”. There’s two significant Thursdays in The Shining. The first is only a minute long, and features Jack’s first creepy stare. The second takes up most of the last third of the movie, and features Jack’s complete disintegration. During this whole scene Cherry has an Orange Julius behind his head. Do I need to explain that? But also, the “Julius” is obscured by a drooping flag, which happens to be the Kenyan flag. This flag also appears in a blink-and-miss-it moment from Inception.

• Max says he’s been doing this job for 19 years, meaning he started in 1977, the year The Shining novel came out.
• Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) announces that the trail run of the money exchange is happening at 3:07 on July 1st, 1995. So either The American President bit is an intended anachronism, or Nicolette is a complete idiot (which he certainly seems to be at times). 3:07 would be 187 minutes after noon, 187 being police code for homicide (which is what this gang will basically commit on Ordell at the end). And if Nicolette is somehow correct about the date, this would be 74 years almost to the day after photo Jack’s July 4th ball at the Overlook.
• Nicolette describes the white/purple/pink bag as “white”. Brown and Dargus correct him. With Brown being “Brown”, we’re only missing “Orange” and “Blonde”, the colours on the other bag. Oh, and “Blue”, which is the colour Brown’s wearing in spades. Blue and Brown are the two who die on the way out of the heist. This blue-wearing Brown (kinda resembles Django, in his chosen attire) is the big winner of the heist.
• But anyway, that wasn’t the point I stopped to make. The addition of “pink” and “purple” to Ray Nicolette’s list frustrates him, and it reminds of the fight between Joe Cabot and Mr. Pink, when Pink elects to be Mr. Purple. That would make for yet another invocation of Mr. Pink in a future QT film.

• Cherry walks past a story called Things Remembered. This just reminds me of Danny Torrance’s status as the “one who will remember”.

• Just wanted to point out that when we see Melanie Ralston’s (Bridget Fonda) name outside her apartment, the names above and below hers are S Haig and J Hill. Sid Haig played the judge who was lenient with Jackie near the beginning, and he also costarred in Spider Baby of, The Maddest Story Ever Told, which was written by Jack Hill, who also wrote and directed Coffy and Foxy Brown, two of the Pam Grier films which doubtlessly inspired Jackie Brown. But what I thought was worth mentioning is that Jonah Hill would go on to play a Klansman in Django Unchained. So if you overlooked the Jack Hill connection somehow, you might’ve misinterpreted this as a crazy bit of prophecy.

• Brown’s beeper shows that it is indeed July 2nd the day after the test run.

• In the restaurant where Brown and Nicolette meet, there’s stained glass all around.

• Bridget Fonda watches Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (referenced in Death Proof) at once point, which features her dad in the starring role. During this she toes Robert De Niro’s leg, who flinches away. De Niro is only three years younger than Peter Fonda. This feels something like an inverse of the Wendy-Danny sexual undertone.

• The song Street Life, which plays on Brown’s drive to the big heist, includes the line “Attempts at masquerade“.
• Brown’s Honda Civic licence plate has “KUJ0” (a Stephen King novel) and a 237 jumble. Also, I was just noticing on IMCDb that there’s a few doubles of car models throughout the film. This could just be a quirk of what the users on that site has taken the time to notice, but I thought it was worth pointing out. It might’ve been a bit cuter, though, if the time was 3:57 (237 minutes after noon), but then the question would be: why is the heist a 237 parable/reflection/distortion/metaphor/whateverthefuck?
• If the Cujo reference was intentional, that novel is set in the summer of 1980, the same time that The Shining was in theatres.
• Also, just to note, this is presumably July 3rd.

• Brown fills the bag with cheap novels (pulp fiction) including Donald Hamilton’s Line of Fire (about a botched assassination, and the fallout game of survival), Peter M. Emshweller’s Short Blade (about gender bending in a future Manhattan), and Donald Hamilton’s Murderers’ Row (about a US spy on some kind of savage rampage). Murderers’ Row is almost impossible to see going in the bag, and in the next shot it’s being covered in stacks of money. It’s also the fifth in a series, but I think it was more significant for that “MURDER” bit. Louis will murder Melanie in this very parking lot, possibly very close to here.

• Okay! We have an in-movie reference to July 4th, on this sign on the Del Amo Mall door, listing the day as a Friday. That means definitively, that this was 1997. It’s funny QT would go to the trouble of getting that sign in the shot, but not correct for the weekday, if he actually wanted this set in 1995. Obviously, The American President ruins that, but still. Oh, I guess I should’ve noted how The Shining is also concerned with American presidents.

• Jackie has a deep moment contemplating herself in the mirror at Billingsley (looking like a Reservoir Dog or a member of O-Ren Ishii’s posse). She passes between two mirrors on an escalator during her escape.

• Also, the cost of her purchase was 267 dollars. The taxes at the time mean that the original price would’ve been 248 something. That’s 237 + 11. But whatever.
• Louis drives a white VW Bus, and there’s a blue-black Beetle seen at the other end of heist. It’s 4:12pm when they arrive. There’s a 4pm placard in The Shining, and it’s after that that, at 5:25, that Jack kills Hallorann. So it’s sometime between these times when Louis kills Melanie in the city of Torrance, and sometime not long after that when Ordell kills Louis.

• The way the film gives us three experiences of the Billingsley gambit (Brown’s, Cherry’s, and Louis/Melanie’s) is reminiscent of the unclear perspective 237 walkthrough. As Cherry approaches the store clerk to complete the gambit, we get (I think) the film’s first point-of-view shot, which would certainly suggest a certain 237-ness.
• Louis’ van has a decal of a roaring bear, with the word BEAR across it.

• When Ordell finds that his money’s gone, he reveals (for a split second) Charlotte Vale-Allen’s Promises (1980), and Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed (1975). It’s probably a coincidence that these books mark the years Barry Lyndon and The Shining came out. But what’s neat is how the first is about surviving the Great Depression and the second is about foiling a Nazi plot to kidnap Churchill. It’s interesting that the back of the Higgins book features the line, “At precisely one o’clock on the morning of Saturday, November 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS, received a simple message: “The Eagle has landed.” This concept of the significance of times and dates is central to much of Jackie Brown and The Shining. Also, Vale-Allen’s first book, Daddy’s Girl, was about incest, and considered too risqué for 1971. It was finally published in 1980, same year as Promises, and…

• Oh, Ordell’s watch, near when he kills Louis shows around 6:10. So, well after Jack kills Hallorann.
• Sheronda’s address is 348, which is a 237 plus 111. Weak link, but the place is rather odious.

• Cherry has a very old map of the world in his office, a la Ullman. And a fighter jet photograph (this is the city of Carson, and Summer of ’42 is about a bomber pilot). They were visible at other points before, but they’re most clear right before the end.
• Oh, wow, there’s actually Ullman-level old maps on the wall closer to the exit that are only visible as Brown’s leaving. Behold.

• Incidentally, there’s a July 1995 copy of Movieline in the room with Drew Barrymore on the cover, but whatever.
• The timeline becomes a bit fuzzy after July 2nd, which is the day after the practice run. But if the day of the heist and Ordell’s downfall is the 3rd, the final day, the day of Brown’s liberation would be the 6th, since it’s…

KILL BILL

• First off, the idea for the movie legendarily came from Thurman and QT laughing about the Fox Force Five concept while making Pulp Fiction. This just reminds me of Kubrick sort of getting the idea to make the scariest movie of all time while making Dr. Strangelove.
• Bill says he could fry an egg on Bea’s head. Weak link maybe, but eggs are a running subtext in The Shining. From Jack’s breakfast, to the advocaat, to the little painted egg in Boulder.
• A one and a two.

• Vernita Green is a bit of a twin name, since Vernita means “spring green”. So her name is green-green.
• There’s a turned-over tricycle and a right-side-up one on Vernita Green’s lawn.

• After the battle (through the house littered with cultural and animal references), Vernita (Vivica A. Fox) offers Bea coffee.
• Vernita recommends a baseball diamond for their final showdown. Also, the lighting in the Bell kitchen is quite similar to the lighting in the Boulder apartment.

• The yellow/red design of the Pussy Wagon is reminiscent of the red and yellow beetles.
• Having a real life father/son play Earl and Edgar McGraw feels related.
• Earl’s shades make Bea look green unto death. When he removes them, Bea regains her colour. Bit of a resurrection bit there.

• Bea’s resting heart rate is shown to be 69. Like a yin-yang. Also, an important Shining year.
• Elle Driver wears an eyepatch, like André DeToth.
• Bill’s katana case features a man with horns. A demon, most like.

• The super zoom on the mosquito, and the fades in on tighter shots of it drinking Bea’s blood reminds me of the final fades on photo Jack.

• Buck, the nurse prostituting Bea, uses the word “shiner” to describe what the rapist shouldn’t do to Bea. Shiner is the beer brand in Death Proof, a film in which the paying rapist will appear as Jasper.
• Bea gets a kind of shine of something Buck said while she was in a coma.

• O-Ren’s origin story involves hiding under a bed while horrible things happen to her parents. Fairly similar to Danny’s story. Danny sees Hallorann’s murder in a shine, and O-Ren (age 9) sees her father take a katana to the skull. Her mother’s blood rains down on her through the mattress. And the room burns from a cigarette being kicked into alcohol. O-Ren (age 11) gets hit by a flood of blood coming out of Boss Matsumoto. Her (age 20) assassin suit is a full body suit of just red.

• Also, is O-Ren a backwards Nero? Like Franco Nero, who played Django, in Django (1966)? Or the one who fiddled while Rome burned?
• Bea refers to her toes as “piggies“.
• Hattori Hanzo’s sashimi knife does a little dance behind him between shots, sort of like Ullman’s eagle.

• There’s a show or something playing for no one in Hanzo’s sword sanctuary, heavily obscured and easy to miss. This reminds of the mystery show Wendy passes.

• Hanzo’s way of testing Bea’s skill is to throw a baseball, which she cuts in half.

• The placard that follows Hanzo’s agreement to make the sword reads “ONE MONTH LATER”. Almost, the same words appear in The Shining on a placard.
• Bea describes O-Ren’s ascent to power as “Shakespearean in magnitude”.
• Gogo’s murder of the Ferrari man at the bar in her flashback is a bit like the 237 ghost messing with Jack, turning an implied offer of sex into something much deadlier. This also leads to a bloodbath image, as the man’s insides flood out.

• An open admission of racism leads to the death of boss Tanaka, whose blood flies up in a ridiculous shower head spray. But decapitation is a major subtext of The Shining, and perhaps all this upward flowing blood is meant to oppose the downward flowing blood of the bloodfall. Perhaps the flames bursting around the other boss is meant to suggest that the upward flow of blood is more like fire than water.

• The shot of the Air-O plane flying to Tokyo is hilariously fake, but similar to the shot of Hallorann flying to the rescue.
• The song Flight of the Bumblebee (the version used in The Green Hornet) plays over Bea’s whole arrival in Tokyo. As later discussed, Bea is “not a worker bee”, but “a renegade killer bee”. That’s a similar trick to The Dream of Jacob playing a dreaming Jack.
• The licence plate on Bea’s bike is 21-79. These are the two years Jack “dies” in. 1921 (photo) and 1979 (reality).

• Bea’s yellow bike and outfit turn a blood orange in the red lights of the intersection.

• Sophie Fatale’s ringtone is Auld Lang Syne, a New Year’s anthem. New Year’s is referenced on the cover of the Playgirl Jack is reading.
• Just wanted to point something out for fun, that I first noticed 16 years ago. Right before we see O-Ren’s posse, who are dressed not unlike the reservoir dogs, two cars pass each other, after Bea speeds through the red light. Well, this happens backwards in the intro to Dogs. After we see the long intro posse strut, two cars pass right at the middle.

• The maitre ‘d at the House of Blue Leaves looks enough like Charlie Brown that one of O-Ren’s posse points this out. Numerous Peanuts characters appear in The Shining, but Charlie is almost conspicuously absent. Bea’s outfit is a bit like a sideways Charlie Brown.

• The first song the 5, 6, 7, 8s play is I’m Blue, which goes well with the House of Blue Leaves. Part of the song involves the main singer singing “Gone gone gone gone gone gone gone–yeah!” overtop of a snooping Gogo.

• Charlie Brown brings the gang Tenke beers. The name of this beer could be read as “Heavens Shine”.

• The first henchman O-Ren sends after Bea is Miki (whose name sounds like Mickey as in Mouse). This name is also fairly similar to Nikki, Vernita Green’s daughter, who may one day seek revenge on Bea and BB.
• Bea throws Miki into a little pool, which has turned red by the time Bea’s finished dispatching the first round of thugs.

• There’s a bit of an uncanny valley thing when Bea asks “So, O-Ren…any more subordinates for me to kill?” Gogo steps out and says “Hi!” while waving. But “Hai!” would mean “yes” in Japanese. Indeed Bea will kill her.
• O-Ren and Bea quote a TV commercial at each other, as one of the last things they say to each other. “Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.” Also, them sharing this line about rabbits might be the final underscore to show that these two are evenly matched shiners.
• When the “Crazy 88” descend upon O-Ren en masse, there’s only 42 swords worth of fighters at first, plus Johnny Mo. 14 in the outer ring, 28 in the inner ring. Seems like a missed opportunity to do a 25:17.

• The flip between black and white and colour (a trick he’ll repeat in Death Proof), seems like a call to the colour-changing Carson City in Boulder.
• Mini silver-headed, wooden-handled axes get thrown around in the battle. Fighters fall into the bloodpool. More decapitations. A man gets cut right in half. There’s a strong sense of geometry in the House of Blue Leaves.
• Bea and O-Ren both have a premonition of someone sneaking up on them. O-Ren with Bea. Bea with Johnny Mo.
• O-Ren has swastikas woven into her outfit.

• The code names for the Deadly Vipers all have certain Shining-subtext connotations. Black Mamba and Cottonmouth could connect to slavery, Copperhead to the gold connection, Sidewinder is a city near the Overlook that’s mentioned a few times, and California Mountain Snake invokes a mountain in a certain state. Snake Charmer (Bill’s code name) is a phrase used in Reservoir Dogs (fun fact), but also sounds like the Overlook to Jack, since Jack is like a snake, and the hotel charms him. There’s a lot of neat patterning going on between their real names too. Bill and Budd are like distorted twins. Elle and Bea sound like letters, spoken aloud, and of course they spell most of Bill. Ishii has that “she” in it, which is what “elle” means in French.
• Also, when Bea starts to write Bill’s name, she writes it with extremely similar motions and style as Hattori Hanzo did, when he wrote it on the foggy windows of his sword sanctuary. Sort of a twinning.

• It occurred to me that the name of the murder chapel, Two Pines, would in French be “Deux Pin”. And “Dupin” (pronounced similarly), was the name of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous detective, who starred in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered the first modern detective story. And The Masque of the Red Death was a major influence on The Shining.
• A nice light dose of twin imagery. Also, Matsumoto, the boss O-Ren killed as a child, has a named that means “the base of a pine”.

• Incidentally, Chapter Five is 44.5 minutes of a 104 minute film, so, like the final unnamed Thursday of The Shining, there’s a stretching out of the audience’s experience of time. The Final Chapter of the film does a similar trick on the second four.
• Bea saying at the beginning of Vol. 2 that she’s gonna “kill Bill” is the name of the movie being spoken aloud.
• Rufus offers to play Love Me Tender an Elvis hit, for the wedding.
• Rufus tells them he used to play for Rufus Thomas, who died a few years before this came out. So that’s definitely two Rufuses. Reverend Harmony refers to Rufus as “the man”, which is how Bill will self-identify in a little while. Rufus is never shown close-up in detail from the front. Bill’s face wasn’t shown at all in the first film.

• Bea’s friends wear shirts with tigers and eagles on them.

• The road that the chapel’s own is called Aqua Caliente (Hot Water)

• Bea’s fake name, Arlene Machiavelli, could be read as Charlie Satan, for the way people used to characterize Machiavelli as the unholiest of unholies, and for the way Arlene is the feminine form of Charles (sort of a Grady-Lloyd/Grady-Ullman mashup?). But it’s curious what that has to do with the reality of that name within the film. Bea wants out of the killing business, and we want that for her. But the name seems to jive with what Bill says later, that Bea is not part of the normie world.
• Bill says to Tommy, “In the surprise department, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
• Bea’s cover story for her absent father was that he was mining silver in Perth.
• Budd drinks from a bottle of Icelandic booze called Black Death. This refers to a period of time spanning much of the 14th century. If The Shining‘s Great Famine references are intentional, so does it.

• Chapter Seven is called The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz. Need I say more? Well, I will say that in the QTverse (Cutieverse?) this woman (1823-1898) could be a contemporary of Dr. King Schultz from Django Unchained, who was in his 50s in the 1850s. And I guess I’ll point out that when “Arlene” gets buried there, she’d be a female Charles Schultz.
• A dancer named Trixie is being advertised at the My Oh My Club. Bea has a topless dancer twin?
• Larry Gomez (Larry Bishop), Budd’s boss, has a rainbow-kinda-thing with a shotgun pointed at it in his office. Ullman has a similar rainbow-kinda-thing on his wall. Also, I’m reminded of how Wendy’s food chart had a broom handle pointing at a twin set of snails. He also seems to have a little blue Beetle on a keychain (red box; could be a different car, but the style is similar enough to draw attention). And there’s a sign above his head that reads “#1 DAD”. And there’s a list (other red box) of the other employees above the calendar which includes a Mark and a Polo. Marco Polo? Could this be Larry’s version of the map of the new world?

• Larry starts “I don’t know what car wash you worked at that let you stroll in 20 minutes late, but it wasn’t owned by me, and I own a fuckin’ car wash.” When Jack explodes at Wendy about his dismal prospects in Boulder, he says, “Shovelling out driveways! Working at a car wash! Would any of that appeal to you?”
• Also, according to Larry’s calendar it’s the 12 of whatever month this is. It’s a fill-in calendar, so all we know is it has 31 days. Bea killed O-Ren in a snowfall, so unless a lot of time has passed (does that seem likely?), it’s winter.
• Budd is instructed by “Rocket” to clean up after a toilet that’s overflowed, flooding the bathroom with “shitty water”.
• Paula Schultz’ corpse is making bunny ears on the inside of the coffin, during the grave-digging scene. Hallorann’s hands make a similar bunny shape during a part of the kitchen scene with Danny.

• Besides animalistic grunts, Bea isn’t seen saying a word for 27:43, this goes from screaming “Bill! No!” at the wedding massacre (Chapter Six), to saying “And what, pray tell, is the five point palm exploding heart technique?” (Chapter Eight)
• The name Pai Mei contains the sound for May, the month of the bull and the twins.
• As Bill leaves Bea to be trained by Pai Mei, she says, “When will I see you again?” to which he responds, “That’s the name of my favourite soul song of the 70s.” That song is about a woman wondering about the status of her burgeoning romance with a lover. And it contains the line, “Is this the beginning, or is it the end?” That reminds of the mirrorform. And the reference comes here, midway through Chapter Eight of the five making up Vol. 2.
• As Bill instructs Bea about how to behave with Pai Mei, he appears in his jeep’s large side mirror, which gives the impression that he’s instructing himself, or, since it overlaps with Bea, that there’s a part of Bea that is Bill-like.

• Pai Mei is played by the same actor who played Johnny Mo (Chia-Hui Liu). Although Vol. 1 and 2 are not the “same” movie, I would count this as the first instance of QT using one actor to play multiple roles in the same film. A technique that would recur in Django Unchained (James Remar plays two villains).
• Bea meets Pai Mei in a graveyard. Is this an old White Lotus burial ground?

• Bea reveals that her style is the “Tiger-Crane style”. Pai Mei’s is Eagle’s Claw. Two very Danny animals.
• It occurs to me that 75 is a significant number for QT. It’s the number of years Paula Schultz lived, according to her tombstone. It’s the number of dollars Django stands to gain for helping Dr. King Schultz kill the Brittle Brothers. It’s the number of years between photo Jack’s photoness and Jackie Brown’s liberation. Perhaps a closer look at his entire canon would reveal many more 75s. But what’s the significance? Six of QT’s top ten films came out within 4 years of 1975, but only Jaws came out that year. I know some people have conspiracy theories about that film, similar to the ones in Room 237. Is that the connection? If we did another pass through his canon, would we discover a heap of Jaws connections?
• Bea’s climbing out of the grave has fairly obvious resurrection connotation.

• A shot of the sun as Elle and Budd meet resembles Hal 9000. This crossfades with a shot of Bea walking towards her death date with Elle and Budd. So the resurrection motif goes well with this sun imagery.

• Budd has a Tom Clancy novel in a box. Could this be Red Rabbit (as in, an angry Bea), the last of the Jack Ryan series?

• Budd wears a second hand shirt from somewhere called Quality Store. The clerk’s name was evidently Charlie. This pairs well with the poster next to Budd as he sits, for Mr. Majestyk, starring Charles Bronson, which was based on an Elmore Leonard script (Jackie Brown was based on his novel Rum Punch), and shot entirely in Colorado.

• Budd says, “Nobody buffaloed Bill the way she buffaloed Bill.” Mannix will make a Buffalo Bill reference in The Hateful Eight. I’ve long wondered if these both might be a nod to The Silence of the Lambs, which is another rather eye screamy film.
• Elle kills Budd with a black mamba snake, Bea’s nicknamesake. For the only live snake in the film, that twinning seems apt. Elle proceeds to recite information she got about the snake by looking it up on the internet. She tells Budd that there’s an African saying that goes, “An elephant can kill you, a leopard can kill you, and a black mamba can kill you.” Danny has an artwork in his bedroom which features an elephant and a leopard-like cat of some kind. But the third animal is a dog. Jack, meanwhile, does a lot of tongue flicks, like some kind of serpent man.
• Budd has a bull image on his belt buckle.

• Elle tells Budd that death can come from a Black Mamba bite in 4 hours or 20 minutes, depending on the location of the bite. 4-2.
• In the flashback to Beatrix Kiddo’s youth, there’s a large picture of Jimmy Carter beside the teacher.

• Bea defends herself against Elle with a rabbit ear she tears off Budd’s TV. Incidentally, as she whips the ear back to use it, the tip tips the Black Death atop Budd’s TV, but in the next shot it’s back in place.

• When Bea and Elle kick each other, equally, and the screen splits into two halves, there’s a twinniness to that.

• Elle reveals that the way she killed Pai Mei was by poisoning his fish heads. Hallorann has a strong connection to fish.
• Bea stepping on Elle’s eyeball, while Elle thrashes around in porno mags screaming, is an eye scream of a different colour.

• Esteban Vihaio, Bill’s progenitor, is played by Michael Parks in the film’s second dual performance. He’s reading a fictional novel as Bea arrives: The Carrucan’s of Kurrajong. Given that Curtis Carrucan (Bruce Dern) is the man who formally owned Django and Broomhilda in Django Unchained, we might assume that the apostrophe is not unintentional. The novel’s reddish cover sports a golden kangaroo, not unlike the ones on the caps in Jackie Brown. It seems that Kangaroos are agents of death in the QTverse. Both the scenes I’m referring to here also contain references to the Acuña Boys. Also, Esteban will set the book down on a Wall Street Journal talking about European support for American action in Iraq.
• Vihaio’s lounge features references to Sol brand beer. Sol means sun. Also, he possesses an oversized dart board, which might be for some other sort of projectile, since it doesn’t resemble any conventional dart board.

• Esteban references a time when Bill was five years old, and Esteban showed him The Postman Always Rings Twice, a fairly noir film about adultery and murder. Danny Torrance is five years old when Wendy tries to show him Summer of ’42, which concerns adultery, and murder of a different sort. Also, Jack Nicholson’s next film after The Shining was the 1981 remake The Postman Always Rings Twice.
• Esteban says Bill’s at the Villa Quattro on the road to Salina. I’m not sure what kind of four-ness this might refer to, but we’ve seen a lot of fours in our Shining study, haven’t we? Also, the Villa Quattro seems to be a hotel kind of villa. And “road to Salina” is likely a reference to the film of the same name, which has a very subtle linking reference in The Shining.
• Bea drives a VW to get her revenge on Bill.

• Bill’s tale of BB’s realization of life and death involves the murder of a goldfish.
• Bea’s story of comatising and reviving are vaguely Snow White-esque. Bill gets BB to say that when she saw Bea in a photograph, BB exclaims that Bea was, “The most beautifulest woman in the whole white world.” You’ll have to watch the film to hear the “white” that BB utters in that moment. But you can see all throughout the last chapter of the story that Bea’s colours are blue and white now. Like in this shot, where she clutches a black-haired doll.

• BB’s final film request is Shogun Assassin, which came out the same year as The Shining, and concerns the legendary Lone Wolf and Cub. Wendy’s not a wolf, but like Bea and BB, she and Danny will outlive the villainous father figure in their lives. The clip we overhear while Bea and BB watch includes the word “decapitator”. Jack experiences a kind of decapitation.
• There’s windows in BB’s room that have the didrachm symbol. Her bed features spiral shapes. Also, as Bill moves to the door, he’s seen next to two VHS tapes(?) of Samurai Jack. Is Bill our Jack Samurai?

• There’s a lot of horse imagery around Bill’s living room. When Bea enters for the final showdown, a film plays on Bill’s TV called The Golden Stallion. The female protagonist in that is Stormy Billings.

• At this moment, sliding along Bill’s Satan sword, he’s saying “If you wanna get old school about it. And you know I’m…all about old school…” It occurred to me that the Old School Inc. is the company that made the nude posters that hang in Hallorann’s apartment.

• But before we get too comfortable with my comparison of Bea to Snow White, Bill steps in to compare her to Superman.
• I’ve always thought that Bea trying to resist the truth serum looked a lot like Sméagol telling Gollum to leave now and never come back. That jives with the Superman comparison, in a weird way. Beatrix Kiddo is not Arlene Plympton anymore than Kal-El is Clark Kent anymore than Sméagol is Gollum. But none of these figures wants to be their alter ego. They were all forced to take on these less savoury personas because of their situation.

• Karen Kim tries to assassinate Bea in a hotel. Kim says she’s “fucking surgeon” with her shotgun. Bea compares herself to Annie Oakley (a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show), who appeared in one of the first films ever made, as it happens.
• Bill drinks an entire bottle of Tres Generaciones (Three Generations), throughout the final chapter. While we don’t learn anything about Bea’s pre-Bill family, we do, in this chapter learn about Bill’s siring, and BB is, as far as the film’s concerned, Bill’s baby. In The Shining the movie, we don’t learn about Jack Torrance’s father, but in the book we learn that he’s somewhat the product of his father’s alcoholic abuses.

• Tarantino, who’s already used a fake cereal once (and very near the beginning) to convey plot information (Kaboom), uses a real cereal at the end to do the same. As we pan across a box of Lucky Charms (with its rainbow and its pot of gold), a character (Heckel or Jeckel) in the cartoon BB’s watching says, “Do you have a magpie in your home? If you do, you’re most fortunate. The magpie is the most charming bird in all the world.”

DEATH PROOF

• Opens with a lengthy sequence of a car driving through the remote wilderness on a highway.

• Julia lays in a twin pose to Brigitte Bardot (twin Brigittes will be a feature of Inglourious Basterds). Michael Parks’ credit happens here, and he had a twin role in the last film.

• Jungle Julia has a very visible poster for the film Soldier Blue, which was critiqued in its day for being one of the most violent films ever filmed, but just so happens to be explicitly about the Sand Creek massacre, which may have a long river of buried clues in The Shining.

• Julia has a poster for Paranoia (the alternate name for A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)). The neat thing here is this film’s director, Umberto Lenzi, already put out a film called Paranoia the year before, which was released as Orgasmo. Bit of a twin title. Orgazmo happens to be the name of a Trey Parker film. Parker parodied Kill Bill in Team America: World Police.

• The Alamo Drafthouse is showing Heaven Can Wait. This appears shortly after we see the Bardot picture The Night Heaven Fell. So which is it? What is heaven gonna do?!

• During the first drive with the first team of ladies chatting, the background street footage is wildly different from shot to shot. Like I was saying about the dialogue discrepancy in Pulp Fiction, this isn’t so much an intentional absurdity as an homage to bad filmmaking. That said, there could be some labyrinthine design at play here, I’m just too wrecked from my Shining analysis to want to go balls deep on QT’s entire oeuvre.

• Arlene wears a fairly symmetrical shirt, bearing an image of the Golden Gate bridge (see above). So there’s a “gold” element hovering throughout the whole first half, basically.
• Jungle Julia brings up a one Jesse Letterman. Letterman shares a name with a famous late night host, which is like a modern day Here’s Johnny.
• Güero’s has a decal on its front face which bears an awful similarity to the Four Directions. Except the bull is a cow, the eagle’s a rooster, the bear’s an ass, and the dog’s a pig. If that is a pig.

• Arlene finds out at Güero’s that her new identity is “Butterfly”, in accordance with the radio promotion Julia dreamt up, where if someone comes up to her and recites a slightly altered version of Robert Frost’s poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, she’ll have to lap dance them. Butterflies are a major symbol of the Shining, expressing numerous themes, but majorly murder. Arlene will be murdered by the one who recites this poem to her. Also, Jack invokes White Man’s Burden, a poem, to Lloyd.
• Marcy (played to perfection by Marcy Hariell), in playacting the “Butterfly” scenario with Arlene, gives the name Barry. As noted, Barry Nelson and Barry Dennen play Ullman and Watson. Also, there’s a lot of mirror/echo phrases (repeated lines) in this sequence.
• The beers outside and inside the Texas Chili Parlor are “Shiners”. There’s signs all over the bar for them, too.

• Warren (QT) says chartreuse is the only liqueur so good they named a colour after it. There’s a Mandela effect instance of people remembering chartreuse as a reddish colour, when in fact it’s a yellow-green. The Shining contains a similar pseudo-Mandela effect by there being two versions of the film, one in which the tennis ball that rolls up to Danny is yellow, and one in which it’s a shade of pink. People could’ve disagreed on this point, including many others, if some were more familiar with the 119 minute version. But the other thing that occurred to me there is how many first time viewers/readers would mistake “redrum” as a reference to Jack’s drinking or to the blood spilling from the elevator. Jack never drinks a red anything (though Grady spilling advocaat into his bourbon turns it from light yellow to dark brown), and by the time we see the bloodfall for real, we know that redrum is murder. Anyway, red rum is a colour and a liquor, so there’s that.
• Woody Woodpecker appears on a big sticker/tin plate behind the jukebox. Kubrick wanted Woody instead of Roadrunner for The Shining. Also, Kurt Russell’s tank-top from Big Trouble in Little China is hanging right over Jungle Julia’s head, here. Little bit of uncanny valley/fourth-wall-busting.

• There’s a subtle reference to an American president in the “Lake LBJ” conversation.
• A large board behind Eli Roth as he plots to ply the ladies with Jäger shots lists all the things you cannot do in the bar, and the last rule is “NO TALKING TO IMAGINARY PEOPLE”. Roth then notices Stuntman Mike scarfing down nachos, and quips, “Wonder if BJ brought the bear with him.” There’s an imaginary bear giving an imaginary BJ in Wendy’s Conquest vision. When the shot reverses, to show Mike’s view of the bar, there’s an illustration of an indigenous chief on the mirror next to a South Dakota licence plate, a reference to firefighters, and apparently a still shot from Barfly. Also, there’s a licence plate on the wall near the rules sign that says I ROCKY. And yes, I’m aware there is an old show BJ and the Bear, starring Greg Evigan as BJ McKay, but were you aware that when Mike meets the girls outside on the veranda, he introduces himself as “Stuntman Mike McKay”?

• There’s a sign above these signs, Terlingua Ranch, referring to a large resort hotel near Terlingua, Texas, which just so happens to be the best dern ghost town in the lone star state. It began as a mercury extraction point for companies like Marfa and Mariposa. Mariposa is Spanish for Butterfly.

• There’s a reference to Wolf Creek in both this and The Shining. The reference in this is likely to the Australian horror movie. The reference in Kubrick’s film is to a (closed) mountain pass in Colorado by that name.
• Stuntman Mike says his brother got him into the stuntman business. When asked who his brother was he replies, “Stuntman Bob.” Recall that Robert and Michael were the two dual actor names from Jackie Brown. Mike later calls himself a wolf.
• Julia says Arlene did the lap dance earlier at “Anton’s”. Tony Rocky Horror’s real name (Pulp Fiction) was Antoine. It’s interesting that the group sitting under the SHINER sign all night drinking Shiners would mention a Tony.
• It just hit me that two characters are playing characters with their real names, Marcy is played by Marcy Harriell and Tim-boy the Bartender is played by Tim Murphy. There’s also two people playing themselves: Zoë Bell and April March. There’s one other fun name bit, with Omar Doom playing Nate and Michael Bacall playing Omar (he even wears a name tag to highlight this fact). Oh, and Arlene has the word ROSE tattooed on the back on her arm, and Rose McGowan is in most of the same sequence as her, with signs around her head like ROSE BOWL. And there’s Sydney Poitier (Jungle Julia), of course, who possesses virtually the same name as her father, the legendary Sidney Poitier.

• Mike invokes Big Kahuna Burger standing over Julia. He’s referencing her billboard near there, when there’s another enormous one looming in the distance. Real Julia is reclining oppositely to how billboard Julia is reclining. But again, as in Pulp Fiction, Kahoona is being invoked near someone with a name deriving from Julius Caesar. This Julia is in the shadow of the big Julia behind her.
• Also, Julia calls Mike “Zatoichi”, which is the name of a famous blind swordsmen in one of, if not the longest-running film series of all time. This would draw a subtle link between Mike and Elle Driver, made blind in her final scene of Kill Bill. Mike kills by driving.

• During the lapdance, the babysitter twins (from Planet Terror) magically appear, and one of them seems to be wearing a similar shirt as the one Vincent wears at the end of Pulp Fiction. Clearly not the same, but perhaps featuring a similar mascot. Also, note the twin bull head silhouettes.

• How Stuntman Mike reveals his dark intentions to Pam (Rose McGowan) is over the 50/50 question of whether she was going left or right. This reminds of Danny’s left-right lesson-escapes. Only here, the killer is in complete control of the left-rights.
• The silver rubber ducky hood ornament on Mike’s “death proof” Chevy Nova is reminiscent of the one that moves around Danny in Boulder.
• Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) makes a quick appearance in this film, first of all letting us know that Death Proof predates Planet Terror, but I also just wanted to note how much her son in that film, Tony Block looks like Danny Torrance, when he’s been taken over by Tony, with the red sweater. Tony (played by the director’s son, Rebel), only has a few lines of dialogue, which include “I’m gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge” and “No dead bodies for dada tonight”.

• When Earl McGraw is describing Mike’s murder of the four girls, he says, “Used a car, not a hatchet.”
• The overall conceit of Death Proof is something of a grand twinnery. Four girlfriends, two black and two white, are stalked by Stuntman Mike. Once successfully, once unsuccessfully. The coup de grace delivered by Abernathy could be seen as revenge coming direct from her antecedent, the lap dancing Arlene/Butterfly. The name Abernathy might mean “gleaming river”. Also, the movie is split almost perfectly in half between the two sets of women.
• In the gas station Pan’s Labyrinth is on the cover of a magazine (according to someone on IMDb; I could not find evidence of this). Also, the bit about getting the copy of Italian Vogue, invokes the difference between European and American fashion in a similar way to how Burda Moden does.
• Oh, also: Jack lives here.
• Oh, also: Abernathy requested Red Bull, but Kim said they didn’t have any. Also, Abernathy’s ringtone is the same as the song Elle Driver was whistling in her first scene, Twisted Nerve.

• Zoë Bell references The Wizard of Oz when she says “Oh, that’s a horse of a different colour.” Bell being a Kiwi (from New Zealand) ties with the later scene where the girls mess with their friends head about mistaking her for an Aussie (from Australian = Oz). The girl she’s talking to, Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), is wearing a gilded rainbow necklace. So, you could say she’s somewhere over that rainbow.

• Over lunch, Zoë whips out a newspaper (the Lebanon News Sentinel), with a headline about a major airline under investigation for maintenance failures. That’s fairly similar to the Vela Incident.

• The second team of women drive a Ford Mustang with the vanity plate “BRAND X” (and a Pussy Wagon decal, and yeah). It occurred to me that this could be a subtle nod to Nicholson’s performance as the Joker, which invokes Brand X, in this scene. But it could also refer to X Brands, a German actor commended by a Pawnee spokesman for his authenticity in portraying their people. “Brand X” will also be on the jacket Zoë gives Kim, which includes a “United Stuntwomen’s Association” patch, and “Stunt Guild of New Zealand” patch.

• Bell wears a small bag with a spiral on it.

• The guy who owns the Vanishing Point Challenger is named Jasper. Jasper is referenced in at least one of the paintings in The Shining.
• Zoë tells Kim she’ll be her “back-cracking slave”. Considering what the word “cracker” could mean in this context, this is perhaps a bit too cheeky by half. Still, it’s an interesting inversion to have a white Australian offering slavehood to a black American. Especially given what happens in Django, with the LeQuint-Dickey slaving group. Karen Kim is also the name of Bea’s would be assassin at the end of Kill Bill, and Bell is a bit of a Bea-by-association. Not that that has to do with this, but this moment is the most tense moment between Zoë and Kim (vis-a-vis their friendship).
• When Abernathy shows Jasper the Allure with Lee in it, the picture of her in the magazine and the real person across the way are posed in almost perfectly opposite positions.

• Mike’s new Death-not-so-Proof vehicle is a ’69 Charger, and has the licence plate 639 DAN (the same as a car from Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, I am told). The Challenger is DA 5599 (Vernita Green/Jeannie Bell’s address in Kill Bill was 5500). If that’s a reference to Danny Torrance and his da, Jack Torrance, the roles are being somewhat reversed there. Maybe the repeated references to Zoë “The Fucking Cat(!)” Bell is meant to imply that Mike has become the mouse. The song that plays after they decide to go kill Mike is Jack Nitzsche’s The Last Race, which played first in the intro, while Mike was stalking the first team of women. The Jackness has switched sides.

• The alcohol Mike grabs from the glove compartment is Four Roses bourbon. Mike killed Rose McGowan, then the four women in the first team.

• During the pursuit, Kim drives the team through a cow field (cows are a significant Shining motif). Then past an oil pump (remember Beaumont died near an oil pump in Jackie Brown).

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

• Opens with a man chopping with an axe. This man will be partly responsible for the murder of a family.

• Opens with Fur Elise (Beethoven) worked into another song. So you’ve got a song overlay there, but also, Kubrick made a film where Beethoven was practically a character. Fur Elise will reappear in Django Unchained, just as Kill Bill tracks will reappear here.
• Eagle on the Hans Landa/the Jew Hunter’s (Christophe Waltz) belt buckle.

• The grandfather clock at the LaPedite’s shows 11:37 (237?), but the sunlight outside suggests sunrise or sunset. Kubrick also manipulates time. Also there’s a tiny set of horns mounted by the door, and a basket of apples, of course.

• “…slight duplication of efforts….” Landa says this, to explain his presence. He’s re-crossing the tracks of former officers.
• The first scene between Landa and LaPedite is like an interview. Also, LaPedite happens to strongly resemble a young Stanley Kubrick, while Landa happens to resemble a young Charlie Chaplin.

• Landa insists on speaking English. While this makes a good cover for his purposes, and a convenience for American audiences, it also contextualizes this conversation in the domain of the Anglo.
• Perrier LaPedite says the Dreyfus patriarch was named Jacob. The Awakening of Jacob features in The Shining.
• The son of the Dreyfuses, LaPedite says, was 9 or 10, which we see Landa write down. This reminds me of the Ullman description of the Grady girls “about 8 or 10”.

• Both men smoke during this scene, and Landa’s pipe is ridiculously large; a calabash, the same model as used by Sherlock Holmes in the novels. He pulls this out while comparing Jews and Germans to animals. A dark reflection on the Four Directions philosophy.

• A keyring hangs by LaPedite’s door; a keyring hangs near Hallorann’s office.
• A ridiculous amount of time passes between Landa seeing Shoshanna escaping and him moving to the door to aim for her. Apparently the “cunning and predatory instincts” of this hawk have let him down.

• Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) wears a shoulder patch that shows USA + CANADA overtop a red decal that looks like a coniferous tree or possibly a spearhead, his collar also has a brass pendant of two crossed arrows. Also the name Aldo Raine is a bit like an abstract flood reference. Aldo means “the tall one”.

• Aldo describes their “battle plan” as “that of an Apache resistance”. He claims to be a “direct descendant of the mountain man, Jim Bridger.”
• Eli Roth, who plays Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew, directed the Nazi propaganda material that’s in the movie, and is a close friend of QT; Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter, directed the making of video for The Shining.
• Aldo says a lot of numbers “8 jews”, “5,000 miles”, “100 Nazi scalps” he repeated the scalps line. There’s also quite a bit of repetition, both of phrases and of sounds within Aldo’s dialogue.
• There’s a giant map next to Hitler, like the ones next to Ullman.

• Lots of references to animals: hawk, eagle, rat, bear, flies, pig (“weinershnitzl-lickin’ finger”), dogs, “bird’s nest”, cheetah, poodle, horses, duck, etc.
• Hitler describes the beating of his boys with a bat. Wendy beats Jack with one.
• Eagles all over Hitler’s boardroom.
• The Nazis discuss the Bear Jew being a golem. A golem is like a fake person, sort of like Frankenstein’s monster, and certainly has an uncanny valley aspect. Hitler replies that the Basterds are like apparitions, who can appear and disappear at will.
• While Hitler rants, a painter behind him paints a portrait of Hitler that is comically unreflective of the character of the man we’re seeing, and both men wear a red and white cape.

• The painting scaffold is made up of two step ladders not unlike the ones seen on CLOSING DAY.
• One of the Nazis who survived the Basterds (as told by Private Butz) to talk to Hitler was named Ludwig. Another Beethoven reference?
• The title of the movie is referenced in the movie. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is scratched into the butt of Aldo’s rifle.

• The violence against the Nazis is grotesque and absurd, sort of like the brutality of the Grady story, and the sight of the dead girls. It seems to me like these techniques are an intentional way to push the audiences’ threshold past good taste (not too far, but just enough) in order to get them to realize that, stylism aside, what we’re talking isn’t purely symbolic, or dog-whistling. We’re talking about actual bloody murder.

• Sports terminology: “…your status as a Nazi killer is amateur, we’re here to see if you wanna go pro.”
• Werner calls Aldo “Aldo the Apache”
• Aldo says they’re in the “killin’ Nazi business. And business is a-boomin’.”
• Aldo describes the Nazi sniper nest as a “party”. “I need to know how many’s a-comin’ and what they brought to play with.”
• The Bear Jew hitting the tunnel wall with the bat makes a ticking sound, sort of like Jack’s ball on the wall with the indigenous mural.

• “He bashes their brains in with a baseball bat, what he does.” = “I’m just gonna bash your brains in. I’m just gonna bash them right the fuck…in!”
• The reversal of German and American nobility in a WWII movie is a lot like the patriarchal reversal in The Shining. This is a movie saying, we don’t need to just slavishly adhere to old cultural modalities anymore.
• The first two Nazis we see killed by the Basterds die side by side in a twin formation, one up, one down, like the Grady twins.

• The Bear Jew uses a Louisville Slugger, exactly like the one Wendy uses
• The Bear Jew’s name is Donny Donowitz, which has that mirror/echo quality. It literally means Donny Son of Don. Donny sounds like Danny.
• A yellow maple leaf seems to fall on the shoulder of the translator, Wicki, who doesn’t brush it off. This might be a Canadian reference. Also, I’ve thought for a while that Wicki might be a reference to wiki, as in, a database of related information. In a way, films create their own internal wikis (is it a coincidence that many long-running TV shows create what they call the show’s bible, for easy reference to continuity details?), and QT’s whole oeuvre is like a wiki unto itself. Also, Wicki’s gun keeps trained on Aldo’s face or chest, even as they approach the young squealer. So perhaps Aldo’s indigenous status is being subtly invoked here. The Canadian reaction to indigenous peoples has been abominable, historically.

• There’s two very similar shots (in QT’s trunk’s-eye-view style) of Basterds carving Nazi foreheads. These shots include the two Basterds with the most Shining-esque names: Donny the Bear Jew and Utivich. The Utes are heavily referenced by The Shining. And the comments made by Aldo in these moments are both about honing one’s craft. “You know how to get to Carnegie Hall, don’t ya? Practice.” “You know something Utivich. I think this might be my masterpiece.” Also, the first shot is at 37 minutes and change, while the second is at 149 minutes. 37 x 4 = 148.

• The first two years referenced in the film are 1941 and 1944. The year before (major) American involvement and the year before victory.
• Leni Riefenstahl is referenced right as we’re meeting Shoshanna’s later iteration, Emmanuelle Mimieux. This could be an exonerating touch for Shoshanna, given that Leni was famously forced to become an artist for the Nazis. Shoshanna is similarly forced into a secret, binding involvement in the war, and uses it to end the war. Also, I like how Mimieux looks like mimic, mime, and two me’s. Her new self is a copy of her old self. But a) we didn’t really know the old Shoshanna, and b) this new version doesn’t seem like she’s changed for anything but the sake of survival. She also shares two names with two of Snake Charmer Bill’s henchmen: Emmanuelle contains Elle, and Dreyfus is the last name of the actor who plays Sophie, the half-French/half-Japanese assistant of O-Ren, whose arms are cut off by Bea. Julie Dreyfus will appear here as a Nazi.
• The placard tells us that we are seeing Shoshanna four years after the murder of her family, but we’ve also just been told that it’s only been three years (’41-’44). More time distortion.

• G. W. Pabst is the director of the film Shoshanna is taking down. The undercover actor (Bridget von Hammersmark) from later in the film will have Pabst on her head during the bar scene.
• The word Shoshanna is taking down during her first chat with the Nazi hero, Zoller, is “blanc”, or “white”.
• Zoller says he prefers Max Linder to Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s Gold Rush is possibly referenced by The Shining, but is the only other film about cabin fever. Also, the hero boy says Linder never made a film as good as The Kid, and says that the chase scene is “superb”. Besides the final chase in The Shining, The Kid was in theatres at the same time as photo Jack was supposedly having his photo taken. Also, Daniel Brühl, who plays Zoller, resembles Linder in about equal measure to Waltz and Ménochet resembling Chaplin and Kubrick. Naturally, Zoller would see himself more in Linder than in the Jew Hunter.

• Lots of small artworks and film posters buried throughout the film.

• Shoshanna’s cover name, Emmanuelle Mimieux is perhaps a reference to Yvette Mimieux (born in 1942) who was in the 1960 The Time Machine (which starred Rod Taylor, who appears here as Churchill).
• As Zoller walks away, a nearby clock is pointing either to 10:30 or 5:50, but neither time would make sense for the position of the hands. The nighttime ambiance would suggest 10:30, but still.

• Shoshanna reads a French translation of The Saint in New York (1935). It was the most popular in its series, launched the popularity of the book series, and launched a series of films (the film version of this volume featured the actor Jack Carson). The book apparently appears later when Shoshanna’s plotting the murder of the Nazis. The cover of the book features a basement club in some big city (much like the one that will appear later), and part of the Wiki description says that Templar (The Saint) comes to find that “rather than being a daring and idealistic vigilante, as he thought of himself, Templar finds that he had been made into a gangland hit man – and very much dislikes to see himself in such a role.” This reflects the reaction of some audience members to Basterds.

• Another soldier introduces himself to Zoller in passing as Wolfgang. Like Mozart?
• A sign in Shoshanna’s café has a sign obscured somewhat that reads, “d’Or” or “of gold”; a sign above it reads “antisite” which refers to crystallographic defects; does this mean, “a defect of gold”? Does this make this café The Gold Room?

• The woman who asks Zoller for an autograph is Babette. Could this be a Babette’s Feast reference (a favourite film of Kubrick’s)? That film also concerned a French war refugee living in hiding.

• Zoller plays himself in A Nation’s Pride, the movie within the movie. This would be like the Edith Piaf/Marion Cotillard connection in Inception, or the Jack/Jack/Danny/Danny connection in The Shining.
• Zoller says he killed 68 men one day, 150 the second day, and 32 men the third day, out of 300, who fled on the fourth day. So 50 fled. There’s a cleanness to these figures that feels deliberate.
• Zoller compares himself to Van Johnson, a boy-soldier-next-door in a lot of his films. Fittingly, Johnson was scalped during a car accident, and was left with scars. Unfittingly, Johnson was never in war, like Zoller. Though there’s another connection in that Johnson starred in The Caine Mutiny, which used the same hotel as The Shining as a setting (if very briefly).
• QT reuses music he famously used to great effect in Kill Bill during a rather ordinary scene of some officers getting out of a car and calling up at Shoshanna. This is like an uncanny valley effect for cinephiles, and certainly twisted my nose during the watching. I hated it because I felt like it ripped me from the scene, and cheapened both films. I’ve come around somewhat, but if these song references are meant to connect the universe that QT’s films exist in, it seems strange that his first three films would be cut off from this technique.
• Shoshanna is showing Le Corbeau when the Nazis come for her. She’s putting up the sign for the film, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who would go on to direct one of my (and Stephen King’s!) favourite films, The Wages of Fear. This one was the one that got him into trouble, since he made it in 1943 (another case of possible time manipulation, since the film got him banned for life), when he was under the control of German occupation. The film was accused of vilifying the French people. Clouzot was blacklisted. This is something Basterds now too shares with The Shining: an interest in blacklisted artists. Also, Le Corbeau means The Raven, which is probably the thing Edgar Allen Poe is most famous for writing.

• The first we see Goebbels, he’s opining that it’s “only the offspring of slaves that allows America to be competitive athletically.” So that’s pretty on the nose. Also, his lady friend wears a garish cheetah outfit, which brings Africa to mind.

• Also, the guy playing Goebbels had played him in the German war satire Mein Führer just two years prior. Another case of Tarantino’s universe building and cinema building, and of the uncanny valley for certain cinephiles. Although, since it’s the same actor, maybe it’s less uncanny valley and more like cinematic world building. I haven’t seen it. Does Hitler live at the end?
• The woman playing his lady friend is Julie Dreyfus, and Melanie Laurent will sit down at their table in a second, playing Shoshanna Dreyfus pretending to be Emmanuelle Mimieux; Julie Dreyfus also plays a French translator to the 3^rd Reich upper brass, whereas in Kill Bill, she plays a Japanese-English translator for a Japanese-American Yakuza crime boss.
• There’s a display wall behind Goebbels with a calabash on it, the exact same as the one Landa unveiled earlier. This foreshadows Landa’s arrival. The calabash dramatically alters positions between shots. Not sure what that’s about. Impossibilities? The change in venue?

• Zoller claims to have killed 250 men of 300. Later, Shoshanna is asked how many seats her theatre contains and she says 350, and Goebbels scoffs and says that’s 400 less than the Ritz. I’m not sure if this 50, 50, 50 increase has a subliminal purpose, but it’s interesting. Also, this reference to the occupation of the French Ritz is likely part of The Shining‘s subtext.
• Goebbels tells Zoller that a career in politics awaits him, thanks to his public speaking ability. I wonder how many actors who break into politics enter through right-wing voters versus left-wing voters?
• Goebbels calls Mondino (Dreyfus) a “French slave driver.” Also, his performance is way over the top, like a few of the main performances. Just as some of the more sympathetic characters are played softer and more realistic.

• Landa orders Shoshanna a glass of milk, which again, has that uncanny valley quality (he ordered milk before killing her family). Does he do this to everyone who might be Shoshanna?
• When Landa arrives we no longer see shots of the calabash, which is out of view now, right above his head. He doesn’t smoke his pipe in this scene, but he does bring out cigarettes for them both, and stubs his out in his strudel.

• Landa’s French, we now find is potentially inexhaustible, against his earlier claim, which lead to the speaking of English.
• Shoshanna is forced to enjoy this strudel-and-cream with the man who killed her family. The resultant pleasure now mixed with her fear and terror. This decadence has been ruined for her.
• Landa tries to make a racist comment about Marcel, Shoshanna’s black projectionist and secret lover. He does this perhaps to test her sensitivity to stereotyping. Also, had she been cozened by this, or given that pretence, it would’ve been like the n-word scene from The Shining. She describes him as “The best [projectionist]”; like Ullman’s “All the best people.”
• Goebbels suggests scattering Greek nudes about the theatre from the Louvre. An invocation of Greco-Roman times, if nothing else.
• I’m wondering if Goebbels outburst about Lillian Harvey means anything, but I’m too rushed right now. Same with the L’assassin habite au 21 e poster behind Marcel. The song Ich wollt’ ich wär’ ein Huhn by Lillian Harvey and Willy Fritsch comes on during the underground bar scene. If Lillian was somehow correlated to von Hammersmark, Wilhelm father of Max is later referred to as Willy by Aldo. And speaking of Max: this is 1944. Could Max be…Max Cherry? Robert Forster, who played Cherry, was born in 1941, so it’s about right. Of course, there’s also the Max Linder film festival, which was interrupted by A Nation’s Pride.

• The Domino poster behind Shoshanna: a reference to the assassin, Domino Harvey?

• Marcel repeats the line “What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
• Shoshanna has 350 nitrate film prints, and her theatre seats 350 viewers. A burned reel for every dead Nazi. Coincidence?
• There are well-known comedians peppered throughout the film, but the inclusion of Mike Myers, possibly the best-known and most recognizable Canadian comedian seems like a nod to Canadiana, generally. Sort of like the Group of Seven in The Shining.
• The drinks that General Ed Fenech (Mike Myers; and is that name supposed to look like “French”) offers to Lt. Archie Hicox (Fassbender) are located inside a globe. And by the look of it this globe is antique, sort of like the old map on Ullman’s wall. That the symbol here is that alcohol is somehow at the heart of the world (and that drinks are a major feature of this film, and all of QT’s films) is interesting. Hicox asks for a “Scotch and water.” Myer’s orders a “Whiskey. Straight. No junk in it.” Jack Daniels is whiskey. Also, Hicox, it has been confirmed, is a descendent of Pete Hicox, the outlaw from The Hateful Eight.
• “The bar’s in the globe.”

• Lt. Hicox’s books are called “Art of the Eyes, the Heart and the Mind: A Study of German Cinema in the Twenties” and “Twenty-Four Frame Da Vinci”. He says it’s “a subtextual film criticism study of the work of German director G. W. Pabst.” The Da Vinci reference feels like a knowing nod to the Fibonacci technique of Kubrick’s.
• Fenech (and his silent Churchill at the piano) have a giant map on their wall not unlike Hitler’s. They also have large red curtains in this room, of the red tone of the Nazi flag.

• Churchill approves of Hicox after a brief interview, and Churchill is never named in the scene. This seems like an odd way to approach the figure. Almost like a David Lynch movie.
• The swaggering self-confidence of the British is almost as parodic as the tough-as-nails Aldo Raine, or the manic 3rd Reich upper brass.
• The city of Nadine, pointed out by Fenech, is close to a Charly

• Bridget von Hammersmark, the German film star who will double agent for the brits is a fiction. Reminiscent of the fictitious story told by Jungle Julia in Death Proof about Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mich, and Tich, this seems like yet another instant of QT playing with smart Alecs in the crowd who might be inclined to feign awareness of this seemingly trivial inclusion. Also, many of the old film posters are alluding to real films, and many real world figures have appeared already (who will meet unhistoric ends), there would seemingly be no point to create a fiction out of this character. One connection would seem to be the “bridge” in Bridget’s name. Aldo Raine earlier said he was a descendent of Jim Bridger (this was the actual guy who ditches Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Revenant). So maybe this refrain of bridges is meant to suggest the connection between characters. Bridger was also a multi-linguist like Landa and von Hammersmark, which suggests the intellectual decay in this American descendent. Raine wants the cool of being Bridger’s descendent without having to earn a similarly reputable character. Also, Hicox is meant to recognize von Hammersmark, a point that is tastily savoured by Fenech, as if his brilliant plan is finally coming to fruition. So, Hicox’s recognition invites us to feel a similar recognition. But it’s a recognition of a fake person. Lots of attention to celebrity already in this film. What seems especially strange is that Michael Fassbender was a relative unknown at the time of this film’s release, and is now one of the most recognizable A-listers.
• The venture is called Operation Kino; Kino is both a worldwide movement of amateur filmmakers and a Berlin theatre and a company that specializes in distributing World cinema and arthouse films. The word means film. So Tarantino, tongue-in-cheekly, is suggesting the link between film as propaganda and the war effort.
• Hicox quotes the 15^th century French poet François Villon, known for being sentenced for several serious crimes to several serious jail terms, but always slipped his trappings. All Hicox does in the film, basically, is to go into a basement and die, so this seems like another instance of a historical reference being used by a braggart who isn’t half so xyz as his supposed inspiration. The poem is basically the French answer to Ozymandius, asking the listener what happened to all these great figures of the past, or to the mythological figures, and equivocates them to “But where are the snows of yesteryear?” Hicox says this, and it’s quite a nihilistic sentiment. Another White Man’s Burden kind of moment.
• The Basterds plus Hicox will dress up as Nazis for operation Kino. So, again we’ve got duplicity and the theme of pretending that you are what you are not (a theme that the identity guessing game will call into starker relief in a moment). Indeed, most characters throughout the film experience either a large switch/transformation in character, or have to pretend to be something they aren’t, or are duped by such possum-play. The only spycraft that pulls off is the kind where the characters can’t help being who they are. Raine and Shoshanna are the only characters who achieve their goals (however much they get to enjoy those ends), and it’s only because they’re so good at being themselves. All the other tricksters in the film get screwed.
• All the names on the head cards of the soldiers playing the game seem to have inference potential. Von Hammersmark wears Genghis Khan, bringing to mind a long dead conqueror, like Hitler. The first soldier to guess his identity is Winnetou, a fictional Apache warrior, written by the German novelist, Karl May (another May reference, like Pai Mei). Winnetou is a German romantic vision of the Apaches, according to Wikipedia, and contains no real reference to Apache life and culture. What’s interesting is that the German people were so in love with the series that the Nazis didn’t ban them, despite the way it seemingly lionized non-white peoples. Beethoven shows up on another headcard, which is obvious. Edgar Wallace is on another, an English war correspondent who covered the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and who went on to write some novels and plays, and even created King Kong. He’s also credited with being a writer of ‘the colonial imagination’, like Rudyard Kipling, I suppose. Pola Negri was the first European actor to be signed in Hollywood, a Polish-Russian femme fatale/tragedienne, who might reflect von Hammersmark’s role at the table. Mata Hari was a Dutch exotic dancer who shortened her long name dramatically, perhaps to pass as some kind of Asian (sort of a David Carradine type?). She was convicted of being a spy for Germany in WWI, and executed by a French firing squad. Again, this would seem to reflect von Hammersmark. The barmaid who is invited to play later is Napoleon, which is, perhaps, a rather pointed reference to Kubrick’s great passion. As well, all these old names that we know the parties present would recognize would be relatively hard to place for today’s youth, and echoes the effect of the Villon quote from not too long ago. It’s all forgotten now.

• The first of the dummy Nazis in the bar is named Wilhelm. This could foreshadow the fact that Wilhelm is going to die, thanks to the Wilhelm scream. Ironically, in a way anyway, Wilhelm is seemingly the only one to survive the bloodbath that ensues. Wilhelm is also Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s middle name. Wilhelm is also the name of Cpl. Wilhelm Wicki, who is the Basterds’ translator who is in the room as well. Three Wilhelms, three Brigettes.
• At the second of the 37-minute marks (the halfway point of the film), von Hammersmark removes her Genghis Khan card upon leaving the game. Recall that the first and last 37-minute mark are about carving swastikas into Nazi foreheads. So this forehead identity game is rather apt. Also, Genghis Khan is considered one of the most influential people in world history, both for how he committed genocide and for how he procreated. So, this German traitor “never” would’ve gotten that she was branded by such a figure.

• The savvy officer, Hellstrom, who detects the flaw in Hicox’s accent is reading a book in German with two bears on the front. The lighting and angles and focus obscures the name of the book, which seems very Shining. Its name seems to be Soren the Viking, or Saren the Viking (Søren der Wikinger(?)), but I can’t seem to get a handle on it, whether it’s real or not. In any case, that’s another Wiki.

• Hellstrom calls Wicki “München”, but the subtitle says “Munich”. München means someone from Munich, basically, but given the Wiki-Wicki business, it seemed like an interesting discrepancy. At first, I couldn’t discover the meaning of “Munchin”, hence my curiosity–I thought it might be a secret reference, for German ears only kind of thing.
• Hicox’s cover for having a wonky accent (musically, his accent is basically as British as Italian Raine’s is later American) is that he was from the village in the film White Hell of Piz Palü; this was the film that Shoshanna was showing earlier in the film. Also, “white hell” is a phrase that comes up a few times in The Hateful Eight, and which introduces Oswaldo Mobrey and Jody Domengre, in a sense. It seems white hells are good for second introductions.
• Incidentally, near the beginning, when the Jew Hunter, Landa, is reflecting on his moniker, he alludes to the fact that another of the SS’s high commander, nicknamed The Hangman, doesn’t appreciate his unofficial title. John Ruth, of The Hateful Eight, also blessed with this title, seems much more comfortable with it. Is that a slight against John Ruth? Or a favourable cross-comparison?
• August Diehl, who plays Hellstrom, also played real-life Adolf Burger, a concentration camp counterfeiter, (deliberately poorly) making British money to try to disrupt their society and war effort.
• As Hellstrom is putting it together that his card reads King Kong, the cards on the heads of the officers at the next table are Pola Negri and Edgar Wallace. Wallace created Kong. Negri, I suppose, was brought to America for her gifts, and ultimately returned home. Negri, of course, too, has a name that is highly reminiscent of negro, which is what Kong is subtextually linked to (in QT’s opinion). “Am I the story of the negro in America?” Hellstrom asks, to which Hicox replies, “No.” At which point he guesses the answer instantly. The question is either ridiculous or bizarrely framed, since how would Stiglitz convey “the story of the negro in America” in a person’s name? Of course, that’s exactly what King Kong is, whether it can be shown to be intentional or not on the part of the authors. That’s what Kong represents to a lot of people. So QT seems to be making a point here about what people read into things vs. what is obvious by observing the surface qualities of a thing. This is the inherent problem of all art. Even when you state the fact that such a thing occurs in the world, even when you show that there was a time when people read even less into the meaning of art than they do now, even when you establish that, right or wrong, people do have a way of embedding pattern-recognition into or against a fiction, it’s still not enough to say that that is what this particular fiction is actually doing.
• Also, Wicki gives a lot of unnecessarily helpful replies to Hellstrom’s questions, which might have something to do with Søren the Viking.

• The new head cards include Brigitte Horney (on the head of Hicox, written by Hellstrom), a famous German actor whose mother was the noted psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and who once stuck her thumb in the eye of the Nazis by attending the funeral of her friend, another actor who was disliked by the Nazis—it’s interesting that Hellstrom would mark Hicox in this way, with someone who’d slighted the regime (also, Hicox’s card flips around from shot-to-shot); G. W. Pabst, making his fourth(?) appearance in the film thus far, on the head of von Hammersmark, written by Hicox; Marco Polo (on the head of Stiglitz, written by Wicki), who is another major explorer (and who might be referenced in Kill Bill), the likes of which Kubrick was so taken with, it seems; Brigitte Helm (written by Bridget von Hammersmark, for the head of Wicki) who was once saved by Hitler from manslaughter charges, but who fled Germany in 1935 during the rise of Nazi fascism, and never made another film (most famous for her first role playing the dual roles Machine Man/Maria in Metropolis). Again, we have two Brigittes who were both German film stars, on either side of Bridget von Hammersmark. One written by Bridget, and one written by Hellstrom. Both these women were disgraced by the Nazis in one sense or other long before 1944. So why would von Hammersmark and Hellstrom both think to do this? Also, the words Horney and Helm both seem to reflect on von Hammersmark: all three start with H; von Hammersmark carries herself with the air of a (Howard Hawk-directed) flirt; and she herself writes the Helm, creating a back and forth between her “helm” and Wicki’s “helm”. The character is trying to make this evening all about herself, to draw focus away from the “monkeyshines”, as Hellstrom puts it. So, by writing Brigitte Helm she’s thinking of a colleague, but she’s also writing words that are synonymous for her with “my head”. And on her head is Pabst.
• Hellstrom repeats phrases. “Joking! Joking! Of course I’m intruding. Of course I’m intruding.”
• The Basterds drink some 33-year-old whiskey while Hellstrom is putting it together what’s really going on. This is a nice repeat of Landa ruining the pastry for Shoshanna.
• Stiglitz paraphrases a line from Kill Bill: “Not that I have to be at this range, but I’m a goddamn surgeon with this shotgun.”  Stiglitz: “At this range, I’m a real Frederick Zoller.”
• Multiple characters (at this point) have said, “No no no no no no no”: Hitler, Hellstrom, Utivich, Zoller.
• The barman, Eric, is seen reading poetry.

• Stiglitz says, “Say auf weidesen to your Nazi balls.” Jody Domengre will say in Hateful Eight, “Say adios to your ouevos.”
• Aldo says to Wilhelm, “You go your way, we go ours.” Major Warren in Hateful 8 says, quoting Chester Charles Smithers, “You go your’n, I’ll go mine.” To which General Smithers replies, “Yer a goddamn lie!” Are QT villains learning…? Not well enough, if they are.
• There’s a major Dutch angle at the moment when Aldo is torturing von Hammersmark. I wondered if this was a reference to Mata Hari (the Dutch spy executed by the French), the one head card name that was largely covered by the Nazi’s bangs. Probably a reach (sorry, I’m Dutch, so I always want the Dutch-angle-Dutch connection).

• Von Hammersmark says, “I like smoking, drinking, and ordering in restaurants.” Pai Mei, in Kill Bill 2 says that, “Like all Yankee women…all you can do is order in restaurants and spend a man’s money.”
• Omar Doom is named Omar in the movie. In Death Proof he was specifically not Omar. Oh, while I’m on the subject, there’s a conversation in that film about the difference Shanas and Shannas, and here we have a Shoshanna. And there’s a Shana Stein in Kill Bill, who plays one of Arlene Plympton-Machiavelli’s wedding chapel friends.
• Stiglitz’ dead body is noted by Landa next to a bloody playing card. It’s unclear what it is, but it’s not a suicide king. It’s some kind of king or Jack.

• The one Volkswagen in the film gets blown to smithereens.

• At the start of part five “Revenge of the Giant Face” Shoshanna is seen leaning near a circular window across the alley from a giant poster of a woman looking not unlike her, who is Bridget von Hammersmark in a film with the title, “[Something something]…in Doktor” that seems like an odd reference to the prior scene.

• Shoshanna applies her blush like war paint.

• Shoshanna threatens to bury her axe in the skull of the person they get to develop their revenge film.

• Another keyring is seen in Shoshanna’s editing room. Next to a calendar showing…July!
• Actually, on the note of what day this is, I don’t think it’s ever mentioned, but it’s noted that the lobby of the theatre looks exactly like one in Action in Arabia, which came out in Mexico July 6th 1944. Jackie Brown escapes her old life on July 6th 1995/6/7, 41/42/43 years later. Oh, and that film was directed by Léonide Moguy, who a character in Django Unchained is named for.

• The David Bowie song is from the film Cat People (1982) by Paul Schrader. QT claimed to love the film, but felt like the song was wasted by Schrader, since the song had been composed by Bowie specifically for use in that film, and then something like Schrader used a shorter cut of it than QT felt was adequate, or he put it over the credits, or some such. This is a funny criticism since QT also cuts the song way short, only using 4 minutes of the almost 7 minute song (the Australian version is over 9 minutes). To great effect, but still.
• As Shoshanna passes a ceiling fan, it makes a whomp-whomp-whomp sound not unlike the sound in the Bowie song that just ended, an effect that enhances our sense of the intrinsic nature of the song against the images.
• Emil Jannings, an actual, famous German actor (who became a tool of Nazi propaganda films), appears at the Nation’s Pride opening night, and is introduced to Shoshanna. Jannings was the first actor to ever be awarded the Oscar for Best Actor, and still the only German to have won the award (for The Way of All Flesh, a lost film). He was Mephisto in Faust (1926), which was referenced in Room 237 as a possible influence on The Shining. I’m wondering if using Jannings was a bit of a joke for QT. Or just as a contrast to the traitorous von Hammersmark. His third-last film before this fictional meeting was as the titular Uncle Kruger, the first president of South Africa. Von Hammersmark is played by Diane Kruger.

• The third quarter of the film doesn’t feature anyone with swastikas on their heads, but it does feature Raine staring dubiously at the man he’ll be carving while that man mocks gentility with the woman he’ll be murdering in not long. There’s a lot of that going on in this room, actually.

• Raine’s cover name, Enzo Gorlami, is a reference to Enzo Girolami Castellari, an Italian director who made Few Dollars for Django, and…The Inglorious Bastards (1977). So the title is a bit of an uncanny valley effect, while combining a kind of British-Canadian spelling of Inglorious and a Frenchified spelling of Bastards. Incidentally, Castellari’s in Basterds, playing himself.
• The bad accent sequence playing out here, the second in the film, is a kind of drone sequence, and since we know how the last one played out, we expect this one to play out the same, and it don’t. At least, not in the same way. There is a bloodbath, but of a much different colour.
• It also occurs to me that the three men are all slightly different in their colours. Roth and Doom are almost twins but for their bowties. Does Pitt’s dollop of red signal his survival? Unlikely. There’s an extended shot of it laying on the floor after the scuffle leading to his being dragged out.

• The Basterds get seats at 23 and 24 in the theatre. For what’s it’s worth, 23 is close to 237.
• Marcel calls Shoshanna Danielle Darrieux, one of the most famous French actors of all time. Shoshanna holds up her red and black purse in reply. Darrieux was the star of The Red and the Black, but also the legendary Ophüls film The Earrings of Madame De…, and also 5 Fingers (like an exploding heart technique?–that’s not a complete joke: parts of this sequence are shot like the end of Kill Bill Vol. 1), with James Mason, who would later appear in Lolita. And there’s the Dani-Danny connection there.

• A trapper’s camp…? (Could that little picture behind the bookshelf be this film’s Trapper’s Camp? Could this explain the mystery of why Landa kills von Hammersmark?)

• Landa sits in front of what might be the oldest reference in the movie poster movie: 1915’s Les Vampires, about a secret society of criminals (call me crazy, but I was pretty disappointed it wasn’t about actual vampires–and it’s 7 ungodly hours long).

• Von Hammersmark wears a jewel-encrusted keyhole-shaped pendant to the premiere. In the interrogation room, a wall of key rings is behind her head on the back wall. Is Bridget a key like Danny’s Keys? Are Bridgets (or Bridgers?) the Keys of the film?

• Landa trying the slipper on von Hammersmark feels like a bizarre Cinderella revamp; if intentional, that would be an interesting fairytale connection (in that both The Shining and this invoke them).
• As Landa lunges to destroy his prey, a black typewriter is revealed.

• Landa says, “As Stanley said to Livingstone, Aldo Raine, I presume?” This is a reference to Henry Morton Stanley whose pioneering work “enabled the plundering of the Congo Basin region by King Leopold II of Belgium”. Livingstone sought the source of the Nile river as a way to “remedy an immense evil” referring to the Arab-Swahili slave trade. There’s also a character in Jackie Brown named Beaumont Livingstone. Also, the first man Landa meets in the film resembles another Stanley. Raine is the last character he meets.
• An ad for Chartreuse in the tavern where Landa makes his deal with Raine. This drink was referenced by name in Death Proof.

• Landa makes two references to American expressions about shoes and feet. “If the shoe fits, you must wear it” (to von Hammersmark) and “Looks like the shoe’s on the other foot” (to Raine).

• Landa meets Raine and Utivich with a bottle of Chianti next to him. This could be this film’s Silence of the Lambs reference. But why is Landa only Lecter now? His opportunism? His dawning entrapment?

• Landa scoffs at his Jew Hunter handle during the bargain. He seems genuine in this moment. Meaning that the business about himself and the Hangman was just blowing smoke at LaPadite. So perhaps what we’re meant to realize about Landa is that he’s either a purely opportunistic psychopath, who means nothing he says (the uncanny valley of the self) and is just looking for the next chance to take a life, or that he somehow really was swept up in this role, and is only doing it, cuz…why not? And it’s better than the alternative. But my feeling is leaning to the (Chianti) former.
• Landa’s short speech that ends, “…and if you get all four…you end the war” bears a resemblance to the rhyming, repetitive speech delivered by Kiddo to Bill at the end of Kill Bill. “Before that strip turned blue…I would’ve flown a motorcycle onto a speeding train…for you. But when that strip turned blue…” (I’m paraphrasing)
• The town Aldo says he’s from–Maynardville, Tennessee–is also (and perhaps only otherwise) referenced by the Robert Mitchum film Thunder Road. This is just a bit of QT trivia, since he had a distribution company called Rolling Thunder, named for the film Rolling Thunder (one of his favourites). Oh, well, actually, that film is about moonshine runners, and Raine claims to come from a family of moonshiners. Maynard is also the name of the rapist pawn shop owner in Pulp Fiction who traps Butch and Marcellus, the spider who caught a couple flies. But also, Tarantino is from Knoxville, Tennessee, which is 33 minutes up Route 33 from Maynardville. And the failed operation Kino failed over a 33-year-old whiskey. Hmm…
• And speaking of numbers, Landa says something kind of idiotic here: “…999.999 times out of a million, you would be correct.” So you’d be incorrect 999,000.001 times out of a million. I’m just pointing this out as a possible absurdity/code, but I doubt it.
• The officer that Raine speaks to over the phone to agree to Landa’s plan is Harvey Keitel, who played Mr. White and the Wolf in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, respectively. Mr. White seems like a play on the “White Hell” referenced throughout, and the Wolf is a fixer, brought in at the 11^th hour, to fix the film’s second last major problem.
• It’s funny that Zoller is triggered by the depiction of murder in the film he’s watching where he’s playing himself doing something that he did in real life. It’s almost like a comment about the way that, at the end of the day, film has the power to contextualize reality in a way that circumvents our psychological resistance to what others tell us might be true, or what we suspect might be true and don’t want to believe, and upsets what we tell ourselves to be true. We can behave like Jack Torrance, and get called out for it, and do nothing to change our behaviour. But in the privacy of our own minds, observing Jack descend into madness, we can decide to be less like that without having to seek clemency. Zoller can’t do that with his own self in his own story. And it practically has the opposite effect on him.
• Marcel runs past a poster for Un Chapeau De Paille D’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat), which is a famous French five-act comedy (there was also a variant poster for it in Shoshanna’s office, behind Landa). I’m not sure the relevance, other than its notorious popularity among the French. It’s about a man trying to replace his hat, which was eaten by a horse, in order that a wedding can happen. Orson Welles did a famous staging of it…

• The “cigarette burns” that tell camera operators when to switch reels are a feature of the final act of the film. Explanation of what these are was also famously covered in another Brad Pitt film, Fight Club. The ones in this film resemble didrachms.

• Shoshanna says, “For the 57^th time, yes.” 237 could be expressed that way, with some manipulation.

• The Wilhelm scream happens in the fake movie, Nation’s Pride, and it almost instantly cuts to a shot of Hitler laughing maniacally about it.
• Shoshanna put her gun on top of a film can when she went to get shot by Zoller. The image is that of film as a weapon.

• Omar pulls a French newspaper out of the trash referencing Eisenhower retarding the offensive. The Shining references “the Eisenhower tunnel”.

• I just have to say, this might be my favourite shot from any QT picture. It’s supernatural how good this shot is. Also, it seems to reference the “I’m a smoker” moment from Team America, which was spoofing his work. So it’s like QT took a sling against him (if that’s what Parker was doing), embraced it, and used it to make his own work stronger. Simply marvellous.

• Giant Face Shoshanna says, “I am Shoshanna Dreyfus, and this is the face of Jewish vengeance.” It seems like a comment on all the war films (of which there are so, so, so many) that have come to represent what WWII is and was in the minds of so many. Also, this dialogue comes five seconds after Omar Doom makes silly putty out of Julie Dreyfus.

• The face of Jewish vengeance is a Wizard of Oz parody? But that movie came out in…1939…

• Aldo: “I’m a slave to appearances.”
• The way the last scene is shot is highly reminiscent of a similar scene in Miller’s Crossing. In that scene, which is actually two scenes, a man who has done wrong once is shown mercy, and in the next iteration, he’s obliterated. Here, Landa is in a position he’s not been in before, and he will be shown a kind of mercy. But his future is being obliterated by this marking.

• The last line in the movie has always struck me as too pompous by half, though QT was saying as far back as the 90s that Basterds was his Great American Novel. Maybe this is why he put the moment at 142:00-143:00 when Hitler tells Goebbels that Nation’s Pride is his finest work. Goebbels is comically moved by this statement, which is proceeded by Hitler laughing ghoulishly at all the incessant violence on screen. It’s almost like QT’s saying that such praise is ultimately not what he’s interested in, or, if he’s interested in it, then he knows that it’s about as silly as Goebbels’ being so moved here.

• Also, the film that Hitler is enjoying so much was actually directed by Eli Roth, who also plays the Basterd (Donny Donowitz) who is gonna be blowing his face into a rubber mask pulp 70-150 seconds from that moment.
• Again, I’m not sure I did this justice before: Landa’s murder of von Hammersmark–what was the point? Landa not only planned to sell himself out to the Americans, he planned to do so through the Basterds. We later find out, as he’s revealing his intent to help, that he put Raine’s explosives in the Führer’s opera box himself. Now, he hatches the nuts and bolts of this plan presumably after killing von Hammersmark and seizing Raine. But why go through that trouble? He even says to Raine and Utivich that the two Basterds back in the theatre planning to blow themselves up would never get to the Führer if he stops them. So he’s not worried about that (though he might’ve been, since they would’ve killed Hitler and Goebbels either way with their improv, so long as Landa was equally delayed). If he’s outraged by her collusion and betrayal of her people and abuse of her power position, he’s no different. If he simply doesn’t like being duped or lied to, he opens himself up entirely to the Basterds’ duplicity that leads to his downfall. One of the only explanations that makes surface-level sense is the idea that he just likes killing people. Maybe traitors specifically. If the film has a Shining-esque embedded message meant to seep into the subconscious of the viewer, perhaps it’s about demonizing duplicity, and making people more honest, or more fearful of all the ways a regime can go wrong.
• Also, it’s interesting that the film ends with such a major conflict left unresolved: the relationship between Landa and Shoshanna.
• Since the Basterds carve swastikas into the Nazis’ foreheads, could these be called third eye screams?

• In closing, here’s some stuff I learned from IMDb trivia that felt relevant: one of the names on the Bear Jew’s bat is Anne Frank (there are names carved all over it, but they’re very difficult to discern); Shoshanna Dreyfus’ father, Jakob, was played by Patrick Elias, a second cousin to Anne Frank; the Lillian Harvey thing is apparently about how she fled Germany in 1939 after helping a Jewish choreographer escape; apparently Le Corbeau contains hidden anti-Nazi messages that slipped past the censors; Eli Roth’s alias, Antonio Margheriti, is the name of the director of Cannibal Holocaust—I guess I knew that, but forgot; Aldo Raine’s name comes in part from a character from Rolling Thunder, Charles Rane; I was noticing a lot of bits in the script that were missing from the film and also a lot of moments where someone seems to be turning to say something that cuts to a shot of them doing something else—I thought this was an intentional way to create a feeling of lost time, but apparently QT and Sally Menke cut over 30 minutes from the final cut of the film in two days before the first screening; King Kong was one of Hitler’s favourite movies (that feels related to Calvin Candie (Django Unchained) not knowing who Alexandre Dumas was); the USA/CANADA patch worn by Aldo is for the “Black Devils”, the 1^st Special Service Force, composed of Canadian and American soldiers; Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz is based on a Mexican B-movie actor by the same name, famous for playing Robinson Crusoe (however, there’s a Stiglitz name that’s come up a million times in my Shining research, and I can’t seem to think of it); there’s a second Sherlock Holmes reference, when Landa says “A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty.”; the three-finger gesture made by the officer guessing himself to be Winnetou was made famous by the film version of this character from the 1960s, making what results from Hicox’s mistake possibly a subtextual anachronism; the Bear Jew taps the walls under the bridge 27 times—Jack screams 27 times in his nightmare; QT also modelled Shoshanna’s theatre heavily on real life theatres—namely the Vista Cinema Silverlake and the Los Angeles Theatre (you know, there’s something under the Silverlake…); just as the Dreyfuses would not have understood the English being spoken by Landa and LaPadite before getting massacred, the Germans at the ill-fated Nation’s Pride screening would not (necessarily) have understood Shoshanna’s English; the same actor, Sönke Möhring, plays two German officers who have no relation, so I’m wondering if this was, again, for that uncanny valley feeling; Chapter Three is the only one where someone doesn’t die and nobody speaks English.

DJANGO UNCHAINED

• Dr. King Schultz could be a sly mash-up of MLK and Charles Schultz.

• There’s a scar on Django’s face very similar to the one on Stuntman Mike’s. This seems like another way to “bring balance to the force” as it were. Giving a villain and a hero identical flaws.

• The tooth atop King’s carriage is a bit like a 3-D symmetry, reflecting itself along the x and z-axis. The tooth is also crowned with gold, and, as we’ll later see, a hiding place for Schultz’ money.

• Schultz’ horse’s name is Fritz, which is the short form of Frederick in German. Frederic Remington painted The Cowboy, which appears in The Shining, next to the Grady twins. Frederick was also Zoller’s first name and Mr. Orange’s.
• According to Django lore, the reason actor James Remar was reused was due to a scheduling conflict with the original actor intended to play the role of Candie’s right hand man, Butch Pooch, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which I tend to believe. Still, this gives an interesting uncanny valley effect to the film, having one actor play two slavers.
• Schultz tells the men enslaved by the Speck brothers that they could take the surviving Speck back to the nearest town, which is “37 miles” back the way they came. He also references the north star at them, which is itself invoked just before the murder of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play (Cassius: “But I am constant as the northern star/Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality/There is no fellow in the firmament”). As the freed men move upon the (shortly) surviving Speck brother, he reminds one of them (he calls him “blueberry”) that he gave him an apple once, as a way of bargaining for his life. Kinda Snow White.
• As Schultz pours beers for the team, there’s a photo/sketch of some large waterfalls. Possibly Niagara.

• After killing sheriff Bill Sharp, the town lines themselves up mainly around a hotel, called the Reynolds Hotel. At least 24 guns aim from this structure. We soon find out that Bill Sharp was actually Willard Peck, a wanted criminal. Peck is close to Speck.

• Django names his horse Tony.
• The Brittle brothers are going under the alias Schaefer. Carl Schaefer painted The Johnson House, Hanover. Don Johnson is playing Big Daddy, the owner of this plantation. Also, Django’s new blue digs are thought to resemble the Thomas Gainsborough 1770 painting The Blue Boy. Gainsborough was a major influence on Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. But also, the boy painted was in real life named Tony. So Tony’s riding a Tony. Django is pure shine.

• Jody (the slave about to be whipped by John Brittle) first sees Django’s full form somewhat impossibly in a large mirror (Django’s too far away, and the mirror angle doesn’t make sense–more evidence he’s a shiner?).

• At least two of the men who come upon Django and Schultz after a kill refer to them as “jokers”.
• Schultz tells Django about the origin of Broomhilda’s name, being the daughter of Odin, the “god of all gods”. Those familiar with my mirrorform analysis will understand the significance of Odin to The Shining. This story involves a mountain (as all German legends must, Schultz assures us), and the rock formation above him resembles a mountain. Of course, The Shining is quite concerned with mountains.

• Bathing in a creek, Django sees Broomhilda in with him, through some steam. A bit of a shine. This happens again twice on the trek to Candie Land, once right before they arrive, which gives a very uncanny valley feeling.

• The man playing Smitty Bacall (Django’s first bounty, who could never be made out with the naked eye) is Michael Bacall, of Omar (but not really Omar) fame from Death Proof. Smitty has gang members with names that could connect to Marvin Nash (the tortured cop from Reservoir Dogs) and Captain Koons (the man who gives Butch his father’s gold watch). Tarantino will do this effect again (of a villain being the progenitor of an authority figure) when it’s revealed that English Pete Hicox (Tim Roth in The Hateful Eight, is the antecedent of Michael Fassbender’s Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds). All these authority figures meet grisly ends (or endure grisly tortures).

• Calvin Candie’s slave ranch is called Candieland. Danny has a copy of Candy Land on his shelves at home. Oh, and speaking of Django’s scar and it’s connection to a villain, a slave up from Broomhilda in this ledger named Lewis is blind in the right eye. Louis Gara from Jackie Brown was a henchmen of Ordell, and Elle Driver was (for a while), blind in only her right eye.

• Django and Broomhilda get branded with small r’s on their faces as punishment for being runaways. Seminoles, who figure in The Shining (actually the reference is made on the same shelf as Candy Land), minorly, are called that in part because the word may descend from the Spanish word cimarron, meaning “runaway” or “wild one”.
• The place where the boys meet Candie is called the Cleopatra Club. Kleopatra, being who she was, most certainly had many a slave herself. This name almost seems like a Make America Great Again for the slavery loving kind. Mr. Moguy informs them that Calvin is “in the Julius Caesar room”. The wallpaper in this room has a similarity to the outside-237 carpet, but it’s far from exact.

• The man who loses the mandingo fight to Candie is Amerigo Vessepi, played by Franco Nero, who played Django in Django (1966). So when he and Django stand at the bar, it’s a pseudo-mirror effect.

• A bit of neat dialogue: Calvin: “Bright day, huh, bright boy?” Django: “The sun is up.” Calvin: “Shining on all of us.” This occurs after an interrupting scene where Calvin is expounding on the idea that, contrary to the larger concept within the “science” of phrenology, one in every ten thousand black people must be especially intelligent. Returning to the interrupting scenario, Calvin calls Django “bright boy” again.
• Also, Candie’s companion is Mr. Moguy, named for Léonide Moguy, who directed Action in Arabia, which may’ve inspired Shoshanna’s theatre in Basterds.

• Candieland is located in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, which has areas known as Egypt and Sparta.
• Zoë Bell’s undeveloped bounty hunter character is first seen with a hatchet on her shoulder.

• One of Candie’s henchmen (the mushmouth one) is named Stonesipher. Philip Stone played Grady, and a cypher is a method of encryption or decryption.
• Calvin’s lead slave is a man named Stephen. Django’s lead partner in crime is a man named King. Stephen King. I don’t think anyone ever refers to King by his first name alone.
• Candie calls Schultz a “little Dickens“. Schultz and Dickens, the writers, were both Charles.
• Stephen tells Calvin that Broomhilda’s been the hot box “all damn day” and that she’s “got 10 more days to be in there”. 10 days is how long Susan Robertson’s been missing in the news broadcast, and the number of days of action in The Shining.
• The three men Schultz and Django approve of from Candie’s collection of fighters are Samson, Goldie and Eskimo Joe. They agree that Samson is the champion. If you’ve read this far, I probably don’t need to explain the significance. Schultz goes on to say he wants to bill him as the “Black Hercules“. So, Samson being the best is fairly apt. Also, the wrestling sculpture behind Candie here highlights the toxic-to-the-point-of-madness masculinity going on in this room.

• Stephen repeats a lot of the words coming out of Calvin’s mouth. Like an Echo.
• Many minor lines of dialogue recur in The Hateful Eight.
• Schultz says he must go talk to his lawyer, a one Mr. Tuttle. This could be a reference to the episode of M*A*S*H (the novel which inspired the show could appear in The Shining) about an imaginary Mr. Tuttle, whose pseudo-existence is used as a way to divert funds to an orphanage.
• There’s a painting in Candie’s drawing room that looks enough like a Thomas Gainsborough that I would bet it were one. It’s funny. Django so owns that Blue Boy look, that, on top of every other odious quality of Calvin’s, this feels like appropriation.

• Could the LeQuint Dickey slavers be a Jaws reference?
• Zoë Bell’s tracker character is seen looking at a 3D image of an ancient Roman ruin kind of building for some reason.

• As Stephen is left to explode in the Big House, he barks about how there’ll always be a Candieland.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT

• Almost starts with a shot that will have an imperfect twin shot at the 2 hour mark. The second version will cut to the opposite side of the figure. Jack’s Christ pose scene will do a similar trick.
• Also, there’s a cross marker (similar in purpose to this one, but different shape, and in England) on a postcard stuck to the Torrance fridge. Also, as discussed elsewhere, there’s a Red Rock both on Going-to-the-Sun Road and in Wyoming, but neither is a town, but moments on a road that travellers have used to guide their way.

• Early on we get reference to an encroaching blizzard in the mountains, from a driver on a winding road through them.
• Also, OB might be a reference to director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, who had the same nickname. Ôbayashi directed one of the most famous haunted house films in Japanese cinema, Hausu (1977).
• Minnie’s Haberdashery shares (half) a name with one of the stickers on Danny’s door. Minnie mouse. We later find out Minnie’s last name is also an alliterative mammal: Mink.
• The Overland Stage Coach has a bison painted on its door. Overland, Overlook…(the coach name is a reference to 3:10 to Yuma, but still)

• The Shining connects its major black character to rabbits. Major Marquis Warren has a last name that can mean the place where rabbits live. Warren can also refer to a building where a lot of people live in close quarters, as in Minnie’s Haberdashery, or like a small hotel.
• Daisy sports a major black eye throughout the entire film. As shown in the mirrorform, there’s a scene where the overlapping of a piece of art and Wendy Torrance’s face give her a black eye, though it’s the other eye.

• John Ruth says Daisy’s “no John Wilkes Booth”, bringing a president to mind, but of course, Lincoln will become a major off screen character in the film.
• The road from the opening of The Shining is called Going-to-the-Sun Road which passes through Red Rock Point, and everyone in H8 is supposedly trying to get to a town called Red Rock (and there is no Red Rock, Wyoming (besides this fictional one), but there is a rock formation in Wyoming called that, which was used by travellers to record signature inscriptions from passersby)—it could also be a reference to Bad Day at Black Rock (Basterds had that reference to The Red and the Black). Also, Red Rock, if it needs to be said, sounds like redrum.
• Jack White’s Apple Blossom is the first thing in the movie to invoke apples.
• Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) calls John Ruth “Bob Ruth” a few times. In Death Proof Kurt Russell was Stuntman Mike with the brother Stuntman Bob, which may’ve referred to the Mike and Bob twins from Jackie Brown. The first of the Domengre gang to encounter the heroes is Señor Bob.
• Mannix’ derisive comment about newspapers is like Jack’s derisive comment about television, also made while travelling in a yellow vehicle up a mountain.

• Mannix mentions that Warren was spared from a worse fate in part thanks to his killing of indigenous folks.
• The first thing we see upon entering the haberdashery is a chessboard with a candlestick in the middle, obstructing play. I’ve wondered if The Shining has chess on its mind for a few reasons. Here, I wonder if the candlestick represents the way the drama won’t really progress for another hour or so. Warren killing Smithers will cause Smithers to topple the gameboard, at which point, the matter of the hiding Domengre gang will push to the front of the drama.

• While John and Daisy are coming in, General Smithers (Bruce Dern) makes a very sneaky move of looking right at the camera, very slowly (and twice!), while the audience is focused on the hammering of the door. I forgot to mention how Kurt Russell does this in Death Proof. Jack Nicholson does this in The Shining.

• An animal skull (elk?) by the door seems to have golden antlers.
• Oswaldo Mobrey (Tim Roth) says “About 40 minutes ago” (in response to a question about when they arrived) at 39:14 into the film.

• Introducing himself as “the hangman in these parts” we think that John Ruth, who is called “the Hangman” because he always brings his bounties in to hang, is meeting someone more fit to carry the title. In fact they’re closer to twins in that neither is a hangman. There’s also a bit in Inglourious Basterds when the Jew Hunter makes a reference to a fellow officer who resents his nickname of “the hangman”, despite (in his opinion) it being perfectly earned. So perhaps QT is suggesting that a real hangman wouldn’t enjoy the association as much as either of these men do.
• The subject of coffee, and the making of it for others, is a surprisingly large aspect of this story. It’s also a subject of conversation in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill. Death Proof, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds also feature copious amounts of drinking, but the drinks are of a differently mentally altering nature.

• Remington worked on a thing with Owen Wister, The Evolution of the Cowpuncher (1893), which apparently spawned the entire canon of Western films and fiction. Grouch Douglas (Michael Madsen) identifies himself as a cowpuncher to John Ruth, using the alias Joe Gage. This could also be a subtle reference to Emergency!, since the main character of that show is John Gage, while the fourth main character is Joe Early. Señor Bob is revealed to be Marco the Mexican, and one of the firefighters in the show was Marco Lopez, who was a real firefighter. Joe Gage is writing his “life story” while sitting at a table with a mess of uneaten peanuts. The Emergency! reference in Danny’s bedroom is surrounded by Peanuts references. Gage also claims to be coming home to spend Christmas with mother. Danny and Wendy escape the Overlook 12 days before Christmas.
• Both films reference Navajo by name (Ullman and Mannix).
• Mannix calls Mobrey “Buffalo Bill”, an important name in The Silence of the Lambs. Another fairly eye screamy film.
• When Mobrey says, “Well, well, well, looks like Minnie’s Haberdashery’s about to get cozy for the next few days” it seems like a reference to the subgenre of mystery/crime novels know as “cozies“, in which someone becomes an amateur detective due to their proximity to a murder (and their natural aptitude and special interest in the case). Marquis Warren will become this after the poisoning of the coffee (though he begins collecting clues once he notices the peculiarity of Señor Bob). The Shining is also concerned with a mystery subgenre.
• The almost comedic line of dialogue that is Mobrey’s bewildered, “A n-word?” In The Shining it’s spoken by Grady and Jack.
• When Mannix recognizes General Smithers we learn that his first name is Sandy. That could be a mild Sand Creek reference.
• There’s also some insinuation that the events of Hateful Eight take place during the period known as the Interbellum (between wars) generation (1901-1913), since Sandy Don’t-Give-A-Damn Smithers is in his 80s, and probably wouldn’t have been a general if he was older than 40-50 in the war (the average age for a general is 52), and the war ended in 1865, and this would be about 30-40 years later…well, the Overlook was constructed in 1907-09. The future’s right around the corner…
• We find out from General Smithers that his son’s middle name is Charles. Warren was not in the room to hear this. But this is how Warren proves his knowledge of the family and the veracity of his story. Charles is also a significant name in The Shining, one that has caused much ponderance, and claim of fact.
• Warren recognizes Smithers from the battle of Baton Rouge. The name means “red stick”. Several Hateful Eight promotionals featured seven red sticks shapes.
• When OB goes to dump the guns down into the outhouse, the exterior buildings are lit with floodlights, much like the Overlook. Only, these floodlights are all behind the buildings being shot, because it doesn’t make any damn sense that anything from this point on is as well-lit as it is. But what can you do? What can you do when you’re making a giant spiritual remake of The Thing? This motherfucker…looks just like…The Thing. (Hey, is that why Tim Roth’s in this movie?)

• The shot of OB dumping the guns is the only shot from within a bathroom in the whole movie. Fairly un-Shining, that. Un-QT, even.

• Daisy gets two liquids thrown in her face: yellow (John’s stew), and red (John’s blood vomit). In both cases, she’s laughing. Yellow and red are important Wendy colours.

• When OB comes back from dumping the guns, he says he “ain’t ever goin’ out in that shit ever again!” Then he grabs a bear hide and slumps by the blazing hearth to get warm. He looks in this moment the way John Ruth will look once he’s dead next to Daisy. OB is the other one to die by poison. Two dead bears (on either side of the chess board, no less). Also, OB will go out in that shit again, when he loses the straw-drawing contest about disposing of Smithers. Also, when Warren shoots John Ruth’s corpse to antagonize Daisy after destroying the key to her handcuff, she sticks her tongue like a snake, and a lot like Nicholson so often does.

• Smithers says his wife was from Augusta, Georgia. Augusta would be named for Augustus Caesar.
• As Warren unfolds his tale of “black dicks in white mouths”, we get this long superimposition of Sandy’s eyes overlooking Charles’ imminent demise. Bit of a shine there. At the end of this sequence, Warren will say, “Startin’ to see pictures, ain’t ya?” He’s become the director of Sandy’s last nightmare.

• QT takes the role of narrator in this film (in a performance, I just want to say, that feels heavily influenced by Zak Orth’s work as the narrator in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger), and lets us know that 40 seconds before 15 minutes ago, when Warren killed Smithers, someone poisoned the coffee. This business of stating the exact timing of events reminds me a lot of the work I did on Eye Scream. Funnily though, the poisoning of the coffee would’ve taken place about 70-60 seconds before the murder, going by what the film shows us. This seems like an easy mistake to correct and/or fact check. But the “40” goes along with the “40 minutes ago” spoken at 39.25 minutes into the movie.
• Daisy changes a line of dialogue from the Botany Bay song to remove the name Jack Donahue, and replace it with a line about killing John Ruth. Jack Donahue (also known as Donohoe…sort of like Domergue/Domengre, or even Donowitz…) was a bushranger, meaning an escaped convict living in the Australian bush to elude authorities. Of course, John and Jack were already more interchangeable in the past, but still. The removal of a Jack for a John feels meaningful.
• Jack whipping a tennis ball at the bog wood sculpture is a lot like Kurt smashing the vintage guitar. Both these films risked damaging actual herstory in order to tell their subtextually herstorical stories (in The Hateful Eight herstory was actually destroyed).

• John’s blood vomit wave is a bit like the bloodfall, but you know, there’s so much blood in QT movies it’s really hard to say which is the most appropriate comparison. Collectively, the fake blood used in his films might actually amount to Kubrick’s bloodfall.
• Daisy’s bloody face of murderous glee and vindication is quite similar to Carrie’s pig-blood-soaked face in Carrie (1976), another Stephen King story.

• In Warren’s example for how one person’s stew always tastes like their stew, he invokes an “uncle Charly” from the plantation he grew up on.
• When Señor Bob gets shot and falls, his coat comes open, revealing an indigenous design on his inner jacket.

• I just noticed that the chapter names are said in very secretive ways by the script. I’m not sure if every single one is, but probably.
• Minnie’s stable man is named Charly, we soon find out. He later tells his killer (Grouch Douglas/Joe Gage) that he wasn’t hired long ago, in bargaining for his life. So it seems unlikely (if that’s true about the hiring) that Warren would be making a sly reference to Charly the hired hand as a way to trip anyone up. So, most like these are two Charlies.
• Six Horse Judy (Zoë Bell) has a very similar name to Jody Domengre (Channing Tatum). Judy and Charly are both shot dead by Grouch Douglas.
• Also, upon meeting Bob, Minnie doesn’t fly into a racist whirlwind and throw him from the premises. Neither does Sweet Dave make anything but pleasant conversation with the man about their game (“Just never could keep the moves in my head”). So we know that Warren’s final bit about “No dogs or Mexicans allowed” was part of his way of testing Bob for his reactions. An innocent man on trial for his life would’ve angrily denounced Warren’s accusations, and used examples from his lived experience to refute Warren’s analysis. Bob probably didn’t expect Warren to unload on him when he did, or else he might’ve tried something. This is why I think of The Hateful Eight as a true inherent twice film.

• There’s a funny thing about the four-ness of the five Domengre gang characters, that reminds me of my four/five horsemen theory: there’s about 70 seconds between Bob’s head exploding and Warren’s balls exploding (meaning the arrival of Jody), and that’s the only amount of time in the film (once Daisy rejoins her gang) that there’s less than four “passengers” on screen. That is, until the final chapter, when they start getting picked off. And in the first two chapters, the large part of the drama takes place between four characters: OB, Warren, the Hangman and Daisy in chapter one, then OB more or less switches with Mannix in chapter two. Somewhat similarly, the killing spree does in four characters inside (Minnie, Sweet Dave, Jenna, and Judy) and one outside (Charly).
• Grouch finds Charly by following his thin trail of blood through the snow to the storage shed. He even chuckles about how easy this’ll be. Too bad there wasn’t a maze nearby. Also, the song that plays here is from Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.

• When Minnie gets plugged, there’s the sound of a cat rearing. Zoë Bell (called “the cat” by her friends in Death Proof) gets plugged a second later. A little later, Jody tells Smithers “…if you…was a cat…this woulda counted as one of your nine lives.” Of course, Bell showed up again in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. But still.
• I just have to point out the way Smithers says “I’ll do my best!” somewhat feebly to Jody, his final line in the movie. According to Hollywood lore, QT was an uncredited screenwriter on Michael Bay’s The Rock. There’s a scene which makes a cute little narrative curlicue out of this same line. Also, in Death Proof, one of the girls from the second team is dating someone who looks enough like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson that they’ve nicknamed him that.
• Daisy, thoroughly soaked in blood for the remainder, mentions butterflies by way of telling Mannix the other men don’t have “butterflies in their bellies” over her, but that they’re part of a gang.
• Mannix and Warren look fairly twin-like at this point, in their matching tones of red, white, and black. Overlook colours. So really, this is a story about working together.

• The song Bestiality by Ennio Morricone plays twice in the film, once while Daisy’s getting blood vomited on and once while she’s hanging to death. I’m reminded of Wendy stumbling upon the BJ bear. Also, the song was part of the unused collection of songs Morricone wrote for Carpenter’s The Thing in 1982, another movie about people trapped in a snowy waste, with heaps of paranoia and radio rooms and such.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN…HOLLYWOOD

• I just saw this, and only the once. It struck me that there seem to be references to all of QT’s filmography in this, making it the QTest pastiche of all pastiches. There’s a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey (how could he resist?), but, you know, having been marinating in this project all the past year, it stood out to me that Once Upon felt uniquely removed from the cruel tutelage of Kubrick. I mean, it’s set in 1969, yeah, and Peter Fonda’s in it, sure, and there’s alcoholism, and there’s plenty of characters named after animals (including one Butterfly), and Manson got his kooky ideas from listening to the Beatles. But it really feels cut from such a different cloth. And it made me wonder if QT, having mastered the pastiche form better than maybe anyone else ever will again, had to make something this personal, if only to show that he could, or if only to see if all the tricks he’s personalized along the way could work in isolation, before his self-imposed exile from filmmaking.
• One thing that jumped out at me was that the vanity poster in Rick’s driving spot was like a backwards “Here’s Johnny!” face. And we’ve heard tell that Jack Nicholson had a small role in the film that was cut out of the wide release, but which might make it into some future director’s cut.

• And you can imagine how this struck me, with its Ringo rhyme scheme. Or the general conceit of Rick and Cliff as doubles of each other. And it does have at least a couple Volkswagens.

Alright, the movie came out for the screencapping, so let’s get into it.

Well, before diving right in, I just want to draw your attention to the fact that this analysis makes up almost a quarter of this page at the moment. A big part of the reason why has to do with the absurd abundance of references QT was able to make just by throwing movie posters and TV bus-stop ads all over the place. This cornucopia of interconnections is epically dizzying in stature, to the point where I’m starting to think this film might just be an Eye Scream all its own. I don’t have the energy to do a mirrorform analysis or anything like I’ve done for The Shining, but if anyone’s interested, I strongly suggest you use these notes of mine to unravel this towering weave.

• The first shot in the film is of a notorious badman named Carson. Also “Kid” Carson sounds like Kitt Carson, the man whom Carson City is named for.
• Also, both Carson and his fellow Outlaw, Sam Brazelton, here, are the same height and weight: 69 inches tall, 168 pounds. The film is 161 minutes long, so maybe a director’s cut will be 7 minutes longer.
• The bill suggests you call a US Marshall if you nab the badman, and DiCaprio played a US Marshall in Shutter Island.

• The other individual wanted was named Horace “Colt” Tonkin (also 69″ tall and 168 pounds, and, like Carson, has blond hair and blue eyes). Horace was the name of the Overlook’s most significant of dead owner’s, Horace Derwent.
• As for Tonkin, this is a corruption of the name Hanoi, in Vietnam. Most probably know about it thanks to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which reminds me of The Shining alluding to the Vela Incident early on. But that Hanoi reference also reminds of the tale of Col. Koontz from Pulp Fiction. Hanoi is where he was when his plane was shot down, leading to his keeping the golden watch up his derriere.
• “Colt” is a word heard often in Django Unchained in the song about how Django “keeps alive with his Colt .45”.
• As for the “Doolin Gang” this was a real thing, but it was the Dalton Gang, AKA, the Dalton-Doolin Gang, AKA, the Wild Bunch. The 1969 film The Wild Bunch wasn’t about this group, but it was directed by one of QT’s favourite’s, Sam Peckinpah. As for “Dynamite” Dan, there was a Dan “Dynamite Dick” Clifton. And later, we’ll see that Dalton stars in the Italian spy film, Operazione Dy-no-mite. Dick Clifton. Rick and Cliff.
• Also, when Booth wakes George Spahn at his ranch toward the end, he thinks Cliff is saying he’s “John Wilkes Booth” and then a minute later thinks he’s saying “the Dalton brothers”. So, he’s mistaking Booth for famous killers. And Booth may very be that, even before he definitely becomes one before our eyes at the end.

• The first thing “Jake Cahill” passes in Bounty Law is a hotel. As for “Jake”, that’s short for Jacob, a name with considerable import to The Shining. DiCaprio’s character will spend a good deal of time worrying about his limited amount of life, which speaks to the concept of Jacob’s Ladder.
• Since Bounty Law airs on NBC, Thursdays at 8:30pm (the same time Ullman and Watson’s plane leaves, but that’s on a Friday), I wondered if Jake Cahill might be a reference to Jane Cahill, the first chairwoman of NBC, who ascended to power during The Shining‘s early production, and stepped down after that film went into theatres (1978-1980).

• The interviewer is named Allen Kincaid. Alan Kincaid was the newspaper reporter brother of “Silent” Jeff Kincaid, the main character of Carson City.
• He’s also saying not to adjust our television sets if we think we’re “seeing double”, and right at this moment, there’s a man walking right past DiCaprio’s shoulder who resembles his character near the end of Shutter Island.

• Throughout the interview, the camera angle cuts somewhat impossibly between the two perspectives. The camera that should be shooting Kincaid should be easily visible between Booth and Dalton. This would suggest that Kincaid reshot all his questions for some reason, but why? Wouldn’t it be 1000% easier to simply shoot according to the 180-degree rule? But what’s happening here is that that rule’s being smashed to create a sense of intimacy. Kubrick smashed the rule famously in the Gold Room bathroom scene to jangle our sense of what side of reality Jack was finding himself on. Here, the interplay seems to be more about balance and division. In Kincaid, we may have a balanced mind, a man part of the great artistic empire of America (a pursuit we may think of as “liberal”), who dresses with the sharp sophistication of a Mad Men character (a concern typically branded with a “conservative” mind). In Dalton and Booth, these qualities are seemingly separated out at mild extremes, but these men nevertheless enjoy their opposites-attract kinship.
• Speaking of, their names speak to the opposite. “Dalton” reminds of Timothy Dalton, who played the terse James Bond (a staple of The Shining‘s subtext), while “Booth” reminds of John Wilkes Booth, an emotionally unstable actor.

• A moment later, when we see the boys pulling out to start the opening credits, this effect is employed again, reversing the actor’s names over the performers on screen.

• I’m going to skip over pointing out all the Volkswagens in the film, but you could almost make a drinking game out of it.
• Austin Butler’s name appears over some twinsomely dressed airport ladies. Butler will play Tex, who will get his comeuppance storming the Dalton residence at the end, and who identifies himself as “The devil”, and who’s “here to do the devil’s work”. Also, this is probably a happy coincidence, but this does remind of “the butler did it“.
• I didn’t make a shot of it in my watch-through (and this website’s almost out of free space), but if you can take my word for it, Sharon Tate is carrying a different dog bag in all the other shots of her striding through the airport coming up.

• Not the first time QT’s used dates in fonts like this to mark the progression of time, but he is using them, so I thought it worth pointing out.
• Also, small thing, but Dalton’s drinking out of two white straws, which makes him look a bit vampiric, while Booth stares at his tree-like celery stick as he slurps from one black straw. This struck me as another way to gently divide these men into another binary: the vampire and the werewolf.

• Marvin Schwarz corrects Dalton calling him “Schwartz”. This reminded me of the bit in Django when Stephen asks Dr. King Schultz what his name is again, and upon hearing it’s Schultz, repronounces it “Schooltz” as if to get it wrong on purpose.
• Also, Marvin shares a name with the Phil LaMarr character who gets shot in the face in Pulp Fiction. That happens to Marvin in a segment of that film called “The Bonnie Situation”. It always struck me as funny they wouldn’t call it “The Marvin Situation”, since he’s the one who paid the highest price, and since his corpse and shattered skull feature much more prominently in the main action of that passage. Calling it “The Bonnie Situation” draws our focus to something almost never seen in the film (and only seen during a hypothetical moment of Bonnie walking in on the transgressions). Similarly, one of the greatest actors of his generation appears here to motivate this film’s action, and then largely disappears from it. And like the insignificant brain-blown Marvin, this Marvin functions like the Dude’s rug in The Big Lebowski: he makes us think the story we really care about (the fate of Sharon Tate), could have something to do with him, and this meeting.
• Marvin has a wife named “Mary-Alice” who we only see from behind (like Bonnie). But also, Mary and Alice are two big subtextual Shining names. Not to mention the homonymity between “Marvin” and “Mary”.
• Marvin also expresses enthusiasm for Dalton’s older series Tanner, which I couldn’t help hearing as a reference to the Robert Altman miniseries Tanner ’88, about Jack Tanner, a fictional presidential candidate. I’ve read that this is more likely a reference to John Tanner, the lead character of Sam Peckinpah’s last film. But since Altman started Shelley Duvall’s career, I’ll just mention it.

• Our hero is an alcoholic who drunk drives his way into needing Cliff to drive him everywhere.

• A shot of a Hitler youth climbing a spiral stair in The 14 Fists of McCluskey bears incredible resemblance to a similar moment from Shutter Island. Of course, Robert Richardson was the DP on both films, but still. DiCaprio’s character in both that film and this are trying to ferret out and destroy Nazis.

• I probably don’t need to point this out, but QT spends a good deal of time throughout the film, but especially during the opening revue of Dalton’s career, satirizing his own career. This sequence of McCluskey(?) roasting the SS officers bears a hard-to-ignore similarity to Inglourious Basterds. And he wears an eyepatch similar to Elle Driver’s in Kill Bill.
• Dalton says he practiced with the flame-thrower 3 hours a day for 2 weeks. That always struck me as sounding like a lot of time to prepare for something like this. 3 x 14 = 42.

• A moment later, Jake Cahill announces that a “Jody Janus” is wanted for “cattle rustlin’ in the state of Wyoming” dead or alive on a bounty of $425. Michael Madsen here played “Joe Gage” in The Hateful Eight, a self-titled “cowpuncher”, who is actually a member of the Jody Domengre gang.
• Janus–besides being the name of a famous film distributor known for proliferating the masterpieces of Kurosawa, Bergman, Eisenstein and others–is also the Roman god of beginnings, duality, and endings (among other traits). He’s probably best known for having two faces, one pointing to the future, and one to the past. Again, a major concern of Dalton’s: where he’s been and where he’s heading.
• Madsen informs Dalton that the town he’s in is called Janus Town, and that the bounty he’s bringing in is the son of the Grand Poobah, Major Nathan Maxwell Janus. Perhaps Maxwell will be bringing down a silver hammer on ol’ Jake.

• The hullabaloos of Hullabaloo make pyramids, which is a shape of mysterious concern to The Shining, in numerous places.
• Dalton is singing the Jim Lowe hit Green Door. This song replaced Elvis’s Love Me Tender at the top of the charts that year. Love Me Tender is what Rufus offers to play at the Bride’s wedding in Kill Bill 2.
• The song was also written by Marvin Moore, and we’re hearing about it from Marvin Schwarz. Marvin says the clip was sent to him by “a couple of jokers”. That reminded me of Bill describing the Bride’s dead friends at the wedding rehearsal as “jokers”.

• As Marvin unfurls his notion about Dalton getting beat up by heroes too often, he starts with the example of “Bingo Martin” trouncing him, and ends on the likes of Mannix and Batman. Bingo is a rather pointed reference in Inglourious Basterds, while Walton Goggins’s character in The Hateful Eight, Chris Mannix, belonged to Mannix’s Marauders, and there will be a commercial for Batman heard at the end of this film.
• Marvin suggests Dalton “go to Rome” to “star in westerns”. Is that like saying Dalton will go to “Janus Town”? In fact, the reason we see the Janus Town episode of Bounty Law is because these are the episodes that Schwarz watched before taking this meeting. So it’s like he saw Dalton in Future/Past Land (in an episode that’s 6 years old according to the reel we see), and thought, hey, he should go forward by going back. He’ll really exceed his cowboy image…if he goes and makes more westerns! This prospect understandably throws Dalton into a tizzy, which is funny, since his next big activity is prepping for his role on another western.

• We’ve got a Chaplin painting here while Cliff drives their yellow Caddy past a blue Beetle. Dalton’s other car is a Volkswagen this same colour blue. Jack Torrance drives a yellow Beetle.
• Also, apparently this Caddy was in Reservoir Dogs, and belongs to QT.

• While Booth eyeballs someone way underage, Mrs. Robinson plays on the radio. This song was immortalized by the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate, about a young man’s being seduced by a much older woman. Here, Cliff will resist the allure of this young woman, much to her chagrin.

• Dalton lives on Cielo Dr., which we could take to be a simple way of tying the story to the Manson murders. But Cielo in Spanish means “sky”. And the Zapotec mural that hangs over Jack in the Colorado lounge comes from a people whose name for themselves (Ben’za) also means sky. They are the sky people.

• As Dalton and Booth drive straight into a giant picture of Dalton’s face, an ad on the radio comes on for Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. When I was growing up, I was curious about the title, and many adults told me it was a reference to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. If you google “da vinci ill” you’ll get “da vinci illustrated man” as an early result, which leads you to Vitruvian Man. So perhaps this is just one of those weird cultural ideas that are based in nothing. Putting da Vinci aside (with his golden spiral reference), Dalton is still approaching his own illustration of himself.
• The Illustrated Man was a commercial and critical failure, so it pairs well with this, the tail end of Dalton’s feeling sorry for himself.

• As Tate and Polanski park near Booth and Dalton, a commercial on the radio for Numero Uno Cologne assures us that, “in all the world there are only four basic masculine scents” going on to list their colours as gold, green, red, and silver. If that “green” had been “blue” we would’ve had four very Shining colours there. But anyway, this four humours approach to selling cologne speaks to this Booth-and-Dalton-and-their-screen-selves thing going on here.
• Also, the thing that inspires Dalton to change his tune is seeing Roman Polanski, but just a short while ago he was dreading the idea of going to Rome. In his speech he’ll cite Polanski as “the director of Rosemary’s fuckin’ Baby”. Kubrick cited Rosemary’s Baby as the height of cinematic achievements in horror.

• When Booth shadowboxes Dalton for his glasses back, Dalton jokingly calls him “Audie Murphy”. Murphy was a veteran of WWII, which lead to him starring in the film version of his account of being in the war, which lead to him being a major film star. That means Murphy lead an existence that started out similarly to Frederick Zoller, the Daniel Brühl character from Inglourious Basterds. Zoller of course would not go on to enjoy the film career he hoped for, while Murphy would. Similarly, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood tells of a burgeoning star whose fame would be cut disturbingly short…except that in this film, she goes on.

• Booth drives past a Shakespeare film (by an Italian director, no less).

• As Booth arrives home, there’s a small flurry of little references, it seems. 1) We get that Funky Fanfare sting that QT started putting at the beginning of his films for a bit, playing before a film at the drive-in near Booth’s trailer. 2) Booth lives near these oil pumps, like the ones seen in Jackie Brown and Death Proof. 3) Aretha Franklin’s The House That Jack Built is heard briefly on his radio. I like to think that The Shining is almost influential enough to describe the entire movie industry that way.

• Booth drinks Old Chattanooga Tennessee lager. This is where Major Marquis Warren last showed John Ruth the Lincoln letter, eight months before the events of The Hateful Eight.

• And he serves his dog rat flavoured Wolf’s Tooth. In Kill Bill, Bill implies that Elle is a rat for skulking into the hospital room to kill the Bride in her sleep. In Inglourious Basterds there’s a rather lengthy bit of business where the Jew hunter compares the entire Jewish people to rats. Elle would get her second eye ripped out in a trailer like this, of course. While the Jew hunter’s rat story is told in a house about the size of a trailer.

• Booth has a series of books being propped up by a rat flavour Wolf’s Tooth can. Among these are Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (which is cited to revise history to the author’s liking). Also, QT described this film as his “memory piece” in the fashion of something like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. But of course, he’s toying with history in the same way as Genet, who was also attempting to otherwise tell the story of his life from a French prison cell.
• Knock-Out by Sapper (which is the 8th in a series of Bulldog Drummond detective stories).
• The Cool World by Warren Miller, is a little-known book by a “caucasian academic” written entirely in “African-American street slang”. So, probably someone QT relates to. Is this part of why The Hateful Eight‘s Major Warren has that name?
• And there’s a heap of titles from Donald Hamilton, including Line of Fire, Death of a Citizen, The Interlopers and The Devastators. Hamilton wrote the novel The Wrecking Crew, which became the film of the same name starring Sharon Tate, which the character in this film will go watch in a little bit. Death of a Citizen, the first in the Matt Helm series of spy novels, came out the same year as The Wrecking Crew. Incidentally, the Dean Martin movies that came out of these novels are only very loosely based on them, and The Wrecking Crew was almost called The House of Seven Joys.
• There’s several other books I can make out parts of, but not the whole thing. I don’t want to kill myself on this one, so I’ll just tell you there’s another Donald Hamilton one I can’t quite make out, but I’d guess it was The Removers. There’s one called (Something/Madler(?)) In Chains, by someone with a small, short name. There’s one that looks like The Bounty Major, but I can’t find anything for that. One looks like Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, but we’ve already got a James Bond reference or two by now, so, you can imagine that’s the case or not, I suppose.

• 3 in the Attic starred Yvette Mimieux. Shoshanna Dreyfuss becomes Emanuelle Mimieux in Inglourious Basterds.

• Speaking of outlaws named “Kid” and “Colt”, Booth reads Kid Colt, Outlaw, a comic series by Stan Lee. Whose name sounds like the first half of Stanley Kubrick. But yeah, this callback is calling back to the first shot in this film, featuring the bounty posters for “Kid” Carson and “Colt” Tonkin. In the scene of Booth driving Dalton away from his meeting with Schwarz, there’s a news bulletin talking about how “100 communists” were killed in the latest round of the Vietnam war. So the gulf of Tonkin reference might not be so idle. But yes, it seems that Kubrick’s not the only director who knows how to make sly references to his opening shot.
• I can’t help wondering if the Sgt. Fury reference here is about Brad Pitt starring in the 2014 war film Fury. You can just hear QT calling him that.

• Booth watches an episode of Mannix, with a copy of Pat Suzuki’s Broadway ’59 underneath. Suzuki was a survivor of the American internment camps Roosevelt created during WWII, best known for starring in the musical Flower Drum Song. That seems like a light comment on Our Lady of the Flowers from before. But also, the moment of Mannix we watch along with Booth has Mannix saying, “Those musicians are temperamental cats. Who knows what got into ’em?” To which Booth chimes agreement.

• Dalton has a giant poster of The Golden Stallion, which was the film Bill shoots in the face when the Bride goes for the sword sitting atop his TV. Bill is sitting as his bar as he does this.

• The faux MAD Magazine cover framed on Dalton’s wall satirizes the film’s opening shot. So I suppose it’s not only Booth’s place doing this.

• While Jack Torrance reads a Playgirl, Tate and Polanski attend the Playboy Mansion. They pass Steve McQueen, who (as we’ll later learn) stole the Great Escape role from Rick Dalton, and maybe his fame along with it. This is where Dalton might be if it weren’t for that moment, we’ll later wonder. The song that plays in a moment while Tate and her friends storm to the dance floor is Son of a Lovin’ Man. At the risk of psychoanalyzing the man, Tarantino’s mother divorced two men within a few short years of marrying them in QT’s youth, and after hearing this track a few times, I couldn’t help wondering if it was meant to exaggerate the director’s own sense of longing for that impossible, seemingly better life.

• An ad for Tanya brand cocoa butter whizzes over Booth’s head driving home, and then is heard on the radio the night after the Playboy party.
• I also noticed while going back for this that he passes a theatre showing 3 in the Attic, which he’ll see the ad for at home.

• The episode director Sam Wannamaker (Nicolas Hammond) bears enough of a resemblance to Peter Fonda, that I thought this was him for most of this short (amazing) performance. When he references “Hell’s angels” as inspiration for the look of Dalton’s character on Lancer, he pretends to be revving a motorcycle. Peter Fonda starred in The Wild Angels, one of many biker movies of the era, but a clear precursor to Easy Rider. Since there’s apparently a deleted scene from this with Jack Nicholson, and since Dalton will later address Tex as “Dennis Hopper”, I’m guessing these swirling Easy Rider notes were intentional (it was in theatres at the time of the Manson murders).
• The film Hell’s Angels (1930), by one of QT’s favourite directors, Howard Hawks, was also on Kubrick’s top ten list of films that most influenced him as a director.
• Also, given that this is our most up-close relationship with any filmmaker in this film about filmmakers, I can’t help noting that Sam Wannamaker might be a way of referencing Sam Peckinpah, who QT “wanted to make” films like.

• As Booth is about to interact with Pussycat for the first time (Pussycat also being the name of some kind of adult establishment he drives past on his first night ride home), there’s a Good Humor Ice Cream truck before him, which is first seen between two Volkswagen Kombi convertibles, a white and a black one.

• At the light, Booth catches up with a Carnation milk truck that looks an awful lot like the Overlook Gold Room bathroom colour scheme. There’s also a Greyhound bus across the street (Greyhounds are listed on the Overlook bus letter board).
• Pussycat is sitting outside a place we can see here is called Pandora’s Box. I know QT doesn’t like hippies, but this might be taking it to extremes.
• A commercial plays here for a fragrance called “Heaven Scent”. Is that what “eye scream” is? Something sent from heaven? Booth won’t pick up Pussycat because he’s going the other way. This is communicated purely through hand signals. So perhaps the ice cream is what saved him from whatever would’ve happened if they had been going the same way. Also, the issue of whether a driver and a traveler are going the same way is a staple of Death Proof.

• The STP label seen here is seen all over Durkin’s garage. Also, here’s our second sighting of Betty, the flamethrower.

• The Spirit of ’67 is the record Tate puts on of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Funny that the second record we see in the film should feature another year at the end of it. This album also features the track Oh! To Be A Man, while Suzuki’s album featured the track I Enjoy Being a Girl. Booth talks to Dalton about enjoying being the supporting character in his boss’s life during their ride home, and is rather mothering when he lays down the law about their needing to be out the door for work at 7:15am. Meanwhile, Tate is married to Polanski while basically living with the man she broke off her engagement with to be with Polanski, Jay Sebring. So, she’s living a life verging on a rather masculine polyamory. Neither character presents particularly against gender norm stylings, but their lifestyles suggest otherwise. Also, as we’ll see in a moment, Tate is wearing a shirt with the four colours from the Numero Uno cologne ad (gold, green, red, and silver–except her “silver” would be flat white, but I think the point stands). These are the four colours of masculinity.
• As if to second my point, the record popping up behind the player is The Lovin’ Spoonful’s You’re a Big Boy Now.
• Also, “Paul Revere and the Raiders” is a fairly conquest-y name for anything.

• Tate dances to Alphonse Mucha’s Autumn 1900-1903. This painting comes with the following French poem attached, “Autumn symbolizes the coming of age of the year and gathers the bounty of the grapes, giving the fruit which the Summer had turned to gold.” In reality, Tate would never live to see the next autumn, but in the QTverse she will.

• Booth has a tattoo of a chieftain on his left bicep. And an eagle with wings spread on his left pec. In this moment, Booth remembers Dalton’s line about how he won’t get a job on Lancer since the gaffer knows someone from The Green Hornet, and that’s why Booth won’t get business. In Kill Bill, the Bride rides through Tokyo to Al Hirt’s rendition of the theme from The Green Hornet.
• Also, I keep missing my chance to mention this (I’m sure it’ll work out at some point), but Booth’s shirt reads CHAMPION across the chest, and there’s a good deal of talk about what makes a “champion” in Django Unchained, between Django, Calvin Candie and Dr. King Schultz. The three men cited as champions are Samson, Goldie, and Eskimo Joe.

• Kubrick was recalled to have said that he liked Tora! Tora! Tora!, noting the cleverness of having the Japanese actually speak Japanese in the film. The scene that’s quickly approaching here is the one where Bruce Lee rhapsodizes in English about what makes a champion.

• Dalton suggests all manor of nightmares Randy could visit upon Booth, including throwing “into a fuckin’ Lincoln”. Booth will throw Bruce Lee into exactly that in a moment.

• Booth drinks Carnation milk, of recently-associated-with-eye-scream fame. And continues drinking it all throughout the chat with Bruce Lee, setting it down only when it comes time to make a fool of himself. Not in the sense that he trounces Lee, but in the sense that he destroys the Lincoln car, owned by Zoë Bell. In The Hateful Eight, Jennifer Jason Leigh spits blood on a Lincoln letter, which gets her punched out of the stagecoach with Kurt Russell attached. That shot starts with Domergue’s head turned into the punch so it’s hard to say if it’s really Leigh or her (uncredited?) stunt double.
• Booth’s next line is “That’s a great idea, Kato!” The Bride refers to Johnnie Mo’s face mask as a “Kato mask” in her introduction of him. Bruce Lee is here being played by Mike Moh.

• The Marx brothers appear in the middle artwork here. Karl Marx put “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in Das Kapital. Also, Karl Marx, along with Oliver Hardy (the third artwork) appeared on the Sgt. Pepper cover. As for Barrymore…I don’t know.

• Tate starred in a film with Tony Curtis, of Kubrick’s Spartacus fame.
• She passes this Don’t Make Waves poster while Manson’s at the stoop making inquiries. And it was here that it occurred to me for the first time that there’s a bit of a loose conquest theme going on here. Earlier, Dalton was impressed by the fact that Polanski had moved in next door, and spoke about how the great thing about living in Hollywood is owning the land. That’s how you know someone’s serious to be doing important things. They own the land. And this (in the QTverse) might be when Manson gets the idea to do the devil’s work. When he realizes that someone else has moved on to the land that his friends used to own. Also, Jay Sebring just referred to Candice Bergan as “Candy” in saying she doesn’t live here anymore. Bergan was, of course, the star of Soldier Blue, the film whose poster is enormously seen in Jungle Julia’s apartment in Death Proof, the film about the Sand Creek massacre. Also, Candy sounds like Calvin Candie, played by DiCaprio who is living next door to here. But maybe I shouldn’t make waves.

• Talking to Maribelle Lancer, Dalton tells her he thought his character’s name (Caleb DeCoteau) was pronounced “Dakota”. That’s the name of the building where John Lennon was living when he was killed, in similarly maniacal fashion to Manson’s murders. Also, the Dakota are closely related to the Nakota.
• Maribelle’s reading a book about Walt Disney, who she describes as a “once in every 50 or 100 years kind of genius”. Earlier, in the trailer with Sam Wannamaker, the energized director tells his wardrobe person to find a look that shows “where 1869 meets 1969”.
• Also, Maribelle, though fictional in this context, is our second character whose name starts with a “Mary”, the first was Mary-Alice Schwarz, the wife of the man who wants Dalton to stop “losing fights” as he’s about to do in the context of Lancer. Of course, Dalton will derive great meaning from the younger actor’s pronouncement that he just delivered the best acting she ever saw. But that’s not my point. My point is that these two Marys have Disney character names attached to the end of their names. Belle for Beauty and the Beast (which I’m sure is how these two seem right now), and Alice for Alice in Wonderland. Of course, in 1969, there was only one Beauty and the Beast masterpiece, Jean Cocteau’s 1948 picture. And Cocteau does look a good bit like DeCoteau.

• Dalton reads Ride a Wild Bronc, by…but this book doesn’t seem to exist. He tells Maribelle all about its main character, Tom “Easy” Breezy, who serves as a cute foil for the child to access the aging man’s mind.
• Both Dalton and Maribelle are “about midway” through their respective tomes, which is about how far everyone in The Shining is through their books.

• As Tate picks up a hitchhiker and drives to the lot, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s The Circle Game plays on the soundtrack. Sainte-Marie was abandoned by her Cree parents as an infant in modern day Saskatchewan and was raised by a Mi’kmaq couple there. The Circle Game was written by fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell in 1970. Which means there’s a good chance that song was inspired by their fellow Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood’s collection The Circle Game, which won the Governor General’s award in 1966. Both the award-winning poem and that song feature the phrase “round and round” several times. The song seems to be about the basic revolving, repeating nature of reality, the inexorable forward motion of time, and learning to accept our mortal relationship to it all. Quite similar to “Easy” Breezy’s story. Atwood’s The Circle Game (the poem) seems to be about similar notions, but vastly more complex and intricate in its meaning, possibly suggesting the (disputed) connection that might exist between the children’s game Ring Around the Rosie and the Black Death that killed 30-60% of Europe’s population in 4 years of the 14th century. Atwood’s poem ends with the line “I want the circle/broken”, and if she were thinking about the metaphoric circles that arise on bodies from disease, or even if she were just thinking about the cyclical nature of existence (and the war, pestilence, famine and death that comes with it), well, this is a tall order. In any event, the QTverse Tate is seen here with a big NAVAJO truck behind her, and another of them ubiquitous Beetles before her. And Once Upon A Time in…Hollywood breaks the circle for the departed miss Tate. Sainte-Marie’s Circle Game was sung as the theme song to the 1970 film The Strawberry Statement, which was a based on a book about the Columbia Student protests of 1968.
• As for Joanna (who’s top banana), this film was to compete at Cannes in 1968, but the annual festival was cancelled thanks to the a massive series of anti-capitalist strikes in France that affected much of French (and world) culture. This also reminded me of the line from Death Proof, where Shanna tells Eli Roth’s character that there’s exactly one thing all girls named Shanna hate and that’s being called Shana. “It’s Shanna banana. Not Shana buh-naw-na.” Tate is driving a very similar Chevy to Stuntman Mike’s Chevy Nova (this one’s a Chevy Fleetside). Also, Sainte-Marie was married to Jack Nietzsche, who wrote the song from the opening of Death Proof
• Navajo is also something Chris Mannix exclaims in The Hateful Eight, after wrapping himself in a blanket.
• Also, Navajo and Joanna have almost all the same letters, which is fun.

• This is February 9th, and Pendulum wasn’t released until March 21st. I don’t know if that’s the joke, or something else here. But it would seem that time’s being messed with again. Also, the names of the three stars are like, what if the Beatles never had Paul McCartney? That’s a stretch, I know. Also, there’s a Paul, like, three jumps down in the cast.

• The headline on the Free Press says, “L.A. Times Kills Sister George”. This is most likely in reference to The Killing of Sister George, a film that came out 10 days before The Wrecking Crew ever did. Sister George is aging lesbian June Buckridge, who plays completely against her own masculine nature on a hit TV series. She’s so known for the role, people call her “George”. A series of misfortunes brings her producer to realize that “Sister George” keeps a lovely young Lolita-type woman in her care, and a love triangle ensues. The film tanked due to the subject matter and the X rating it received, though it seems it’s gained popularity in these enlightened times.
• The comparisons are probably obvious, but, yes, Tate finds herself in a love triangle, and her “character” won’t be killed off here.
• When the Fore Econoline drives out of the way here, it’ll reveal a bus bench ad for Hobo Kelly, AKA Sally Baker, a kid’s show host who wore “magic glasses” that would let her speak directly to the children at home. So, Hobo Kelly‘s trademark was breaking the 4th wall (not uncommon for kid’s shows). Perhaps that speaks to the Sister George business.

• The first easily visible book when Tate opens the door to the book shop is Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. The film version of which swept the Oscars 10 years prior to this, setting the record at eleven wins, a score that would only ever be matched by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 44 years later.
• Tate’s here to pick up a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles, which was the real Tate’s last gift to Polanski, who would go on to make the three-time Oscar-winning drama Tess in 1979, 10 years after this. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point out that Tess being centrally about the rape of its titular character is an odd historic pairing with Polanski having raped a 13-year-old girl 2 years prior (a day after a photo shoot with her at Jack Nicholson’s house, which, in March of 1977, would’ve been not long before production on The Shining began).

• A neat thing is going on here: Tate is fondling (without realizing it?) the actual Maltese falcon from The Maltese Falcon (apparently DiCaprio owns it). Meanwhile, who should just have appeared on screen, but none other than veteran b-movie actor extraordinaire, ancient handsome cowboy man, and winner of the Funnest Name to Say in History Award, Clu Gulager. And “clews” is something The Shining knows a think or two about. So, seriously, let’s not overlook the fact that Tate just strolled past a picture of Mark Twain, or that the curtain at the rear of the store looks like a chess board where all the white spaces seem to be the heads of famous authors. Or how there’s an arm blade from a pair of sunglasses (I’m guessing) sticking out of that blue dish. Or the fact that we have an owl mug here. I don’t think QT would be so simple as to suggest his “clews” are the same as Kubrick’s, but what are his clews? John Huston famously plotted out every detail of how The Maltese Falcon would be shot so that production could run as smoothly as possible. Is QT saying that’s what happened here? Seems unlikely given the amount of reporting going down on the film’s (unique for QT) improvisational elements. Anyway, I’m not here to get to the bottom of it, just to point out the fact that this is what he seems to be ever so cleverly doing. Maybe it’s just about the ’59/’69/’79 connection from before.
• One thing’s for sure, in the QTverse, Polanski might never attract the damnation of the world if he instead goes on to cast his new wife in a film where her character’s raped into pregnancy.

• In the very next scene, Dalton meets Lancer himself, Jim Stacy, who tells him how close he came to appearing in The 14 Fists of McCluskey with Dalton. Dalton replies that he himself almost didn’t get the part, which had originally been Fabian’s, until he threw his shoulder out in an episode of The Virginian. The episode in question would almost have to be Two Men Named Laredo, where Fabian played the dual roles of Eddie and Josh Laredo. Why it would almost have to be that one, is because, of the three episodes Fabian appeared on, only one also featured…Clu Gulager! As the recurring Emmett Ryker.
• This scene also features an odd glitch, where Stacy goes from not wearing a hat to wearing a hat in a flash, with a little sound bump to suggest a scene’s been cut. Was our “clew” in that missing scene…? Or is our Clu about the existence of all these dual roles? I guess we’ll never know.

• At the risk of this sounding like a critique, he keeps doing this thing where the something appears on a sign or a billboard or poster, and then it shows up in the dialogue later. When Stacy asks him about who else might’ve been on the list of actors being considered for the McQueen role in The Great Escape, Dalton tells him it was between him, and “three Georges”. Peppard, Maharis and Chakiris. Peppard’s name was just above the Pendulum marquee. And if that “three Beatles” thought of mine had any weight, this could be our hint that Dalton is the McCartney figure, since his former rival George is currently starring in his own feature.
• As for Maharis and Chakiris, Dalton says their names in a rhyming, sing-song kind of way, though, as you can see, their names probably don’t really rhyme aloud. And besides Maharis having a significant role in West Side Story, you can see that Dalton doesn’t think he failed against such outstanding company, and what does that make him?
• As for The Great Escape (and the gorgeous insertion of Dalton into it), I know I’ve said it a bunch, but, “All work and no play, etc.” was featured majorly in The Bridge on the River Kwai, another picture depicting American prisoners of war.

• On her return to see The Wrecking Crew, Tate passes another bench ad for The Invaders, a pretty groovy sounding show about an architect who encounters a UFO while stopped in a ghost town who must spend the rest of the series convincing the public that an invasion is eminent. The project was an early effort from undersung hero of high-concept b-movie ’70s-’00s metropolitan thriller/horror, Larry Cohen. I wonder if Tate passing this sign means we’re meant to remember Cohen’s best-known two films, God Told Me To, about a righteously possessed serial killer (à la Manson), and It’s Alive, a creature feature about a demon child who, immediately after birth, ravages a sleepy suburb (almost a spiritual sequel to Rosemary’s Baby).
• The other film poster seen all over the front of this theatre is Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary, his second film starring Franco Nero, who he first worked with on Django. In this film, Nero plays Sergei Kowalski, and in Death Proof Kim and Zoë drive in the “Kowalski Vanishing Point” Dodge Challenger. Perhaps all these subtle nods to Death Proof are about how Tate will prove to be just that in this film.
• The trailer playing as Tate enters the theatre is for C.C. and Company, directed by Seymour Robbie, no (obvious) relation to Margot Robbie, but their names are the same.
• The clip of The Wrecking Crew that we see features a line from Dean Martin commenting on how 1949 was “a very good year”. So we can add that to out short list of years ending in 9 and that we’re talking about.

• “Caleb” asks “Johnny Madrid” what brings him to “Royale del Oro” which means “Gold Royale”. So, besides that sounding like “The Good Room”, Gold Royale does sound a bit like Casino Royale.
• I suppose I should’ve pointed out already that Timothy Olyphantastic starred in not one but two handsome cowboy man shows, Deadwood and Justified, making him the perfect casting choice for this film about doubles and their doubles. But it’s also a fact that, just as Dalton was considered for The Great Escape, Olyphant was considered for Iron Man.

• This is one of my favourite moments in the film. On Dalton’s practice tape, he performs Pepe’s lines in a corny “si señooor” kind of anglophone mockery of an authentic Mexican accent, and in the filming moment, we feel not just the depth of the actor’s gravitas, in realizing the layers of this bit part, but also the absurdity that a man of this dramatic heft would be relegated to such roles. In light of this man’s lot in life, Dalton’s self-pity is rather disgusting.
• Also, the moment (where Caleb wants Pepe to wake his daughter to play the fiddle) is reminiscent of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Zed tells Maynard to wake up the gimp, who is also sleeping at midday, for the sake of festivities.

• When Dalton returns to crucify himself six ways from Sunday, his trailer features two wooden butterfly shelves holding a chess board (right), and a Sports Illustrated (left). The chess board makes me think of The Hateful Eight (or of the two men playing checkers in the previous scene), but the Sports Illustrated might be interesting for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most spectacularly is how, on the back of the front cover is an ad for the Timberline Lodge (where all The Shining‘s real life exterior Overlook shots come from), and a contest where you can win a trip there, complete with your own Ford Galaxy to drive around in. What’s extra creepy about this is that this is the car the Manson kids would drive on their way to “do the devil’s work” both in reality and the film. There’s also a few other Ford Galaxy’s seen throughout the film, as you can check here.
• These Shining connections are especially apt given that Dalton’s about to try to shame himself out of being a “miserable drunk”. Note how the magazine appears in the mirror door with Dalton in this early moment from the scene.

• Dalton talks to himself in the mirror across from the other mirror, but he’s looking straight at us, thanks to the angle. So, what are we supposed to think he’s looking at? Us? Is the fact that he’s not really looking at himself supposed to be like a soft “Hi, Lloyd!” moment? Like, Dalton’s not as bad as Jack, because he knows not to talk straight into the mirror?

• Right before Booth’s final, ill-fated encounter with Pussycat, he’s driving past “Genesis Hair Cuts”. Besides the opening interview with Allen Kincaid, and the passing introduction to Marvin Schwarz, the first thing we see Booth do independent of his connection to Dalton is his eyeballing Pussycat. So this moment is the realization of Booth’s “genesis”. Also, I can’t help noticing that Genesis Hair Cuts is located on a street called “Riverton”. And Kubrick compares the Book of Genesis with a river of blood.
• The street Booth crosses to get to Pussycat is Lincoln. So, he’s smashed a Lincoln, and he’s crossed a Lincoln. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for a third Lincoln, but given that Pussycat’s about to say “Third times a charm”, something tells me I overlooked one. And in case this is too subtle for some readers: actor John Wilkes Booth murdered president Abraham Lincoln.

• Behind Pussycat is an ad for George Putnam, a radio host, known to play himself and bit part newscasters like himself in a handful of films, like Independence Day (Jack Torrance is stuck in Independence Day forever and ever), but more significantly, in Helter Skelter, the miniseries dramatizing the Manson murders. Putnam also narrated a video called Perversion for Profit, where he demonizes pornography and compares homosexuality to child molestation. So it’s interesting that this face would appear before this lascivious car ride.
• There’s a billboard covered by a palm frond for the 1965-1966 series Honey West, which is name-dropped in Reservoir Dogs, when the Colour Boys are talking about female authority figures in television. The 8th episode of that series was directed by none other than Seymour Robbie, of C.C. & Company fame. Also, this is a strange ad, since the show went off the air three years earlier–bit of an anachronism, unless the ’60s were known for syndication advertising.
• Below that billboard is a sign for the “Taoist Institute”, and something called “King”.
• Also, this scene is soundtracked by Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show. There’s something fairly Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band about that title (it was also the name of the album it’s from), but the more pointed reference would seem to be to the place this Pussycat wants to go, and who runs that joint.

• On their way to Spahn’s Movie Ranch, Booth and Pussycat pass a bus ad for I Spy, another series long since departed from the small screen. The last episode of that show showed almost a year before this supposed February 9th, 1969. It starred Bill Cosby, and that might be the point of its appearing here, alongside this dubious young woman (though, the other star, Robert Culp was a star of another film referenced elsewhere, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, alongside Natalie Wood, who died in very similar circumstances to how Cliff Booth’s wife died, falling off a boat that had her husband on it). But I wonder if it isn’t more of a poke at all these hard-to-spot little clues around all these moments. Maybe it’s a poke at the fact that we feel a little nervous for Booth here with this unpredictable wildchild afoot, despite the fact that he may very well have the nerve to murder someone he married. He’ll make an obscure reference to that fact in a moment when he says he’s never gone to jail yet, and he doesn’t plan on doing so over “poon tang”.

• A bus ad for Dark Shadows passes behind the car twice in quick succession, suggesting this run of road was passed twice during filming, and I don’t know if that’s intentional, but this is where Pussycat is lauding Booth for his stuntman cred, because “actors are phony”. Dark Shadows was known (and loved) for its “vividly melodramatic performances”, so here Pussycat is aligning herself with a Holden Caulfield type, (over)concerned by the “realness” of things. It’s probably worth pointing out that Pitt won the Academy Award for this performance.
• It’s also probably worth making the point I’m sure many have made that Pussycat’s feet here are cleaner than Sharon Tate’s were, while watching The Wrecking Crew. Slightly more diseased-looking, though.

• When pussycat gets incredulous about Booth’s rejection of her blowjob offer, a van for Jack Stephan’s famous plumbing company rolls by. Stephen King saw himself in Jack Torrance.
• Also, the soundtrack here is Hey Little Girl by Dee Clark. It’s a romantic piece sung by a 21-year-old to a high schooler. So, not the creepiest thing ever, but maybe some would find a comparison there. Certainly the infantilization in the air is hard to ignore, contrasted as it is by Booth’s caution resulting from a similar perspective.

• As Dalton gets ready to give his final performance (in the film) we hear Victorville Blues by The Sounds of Harley. Margot Robbie is arguably most famous at this point for playing Harley Quinn from the DC universe, and Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith (named after that very character) appears as one of the burnout hippies at Spahn Movie Ranch. But why is Dalton aggrieved to the tune of Harley? Is it a reminder of his age? That the time of the DiCaprios has peaked and is entering twilight, while the dawn of the Harleys is upon us?
• It also occurs to me that, 90210 aside, the thing I think of Luke Perry (who just entered) the most for is his role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Buffy Sainte-Marie, who sang atop a travelling Harley, has an absurdly amazing song called The Vampire from her 1969 album Illuminations.
• This Victorville Blues track was from the soundtrack for the biker film The Hard Ride, by the same director who did The Devil’s Angels, the Peter Fonda biker film I was mentioning earlier. And though we don’t see or hear much from him after the scene in the make-up trailer, Sam Wannamaker looms over the proceedings here.

• Off-screen Wannamaker requests “evil, sexy Hamlet” from Dalton. So there’s another Shakespeare reference for us, and a reminder of Dalton’s existential suffering. In a moment, Wannamaker will inform Dalton that “evil Hamlet scares people”.

• Maribelle goes to fraternize with her twin and all is right with the world.
• In a moment, when she informs Dalton that his performance was the best acting she’s seen in her life, he’ll repeat Booth’s words to himself: “Rick fuckin’ Dalton”.

• Squeaky Fromme’s living room has a couple of Frederick Remington’s cowboy sculptures in it. The one by the TV is called Rattlesnake, because the horse is reacting to a rattlesnake on the ground before it. The one in the middle left of the screen is hard to get a positive ID on, because of the angle, but it would either be one called Bronco Buster, or one called The Outlaw. My guess is it’s The Outlaw, since a 1943 Howard Hughes/Howard Hawks/Jane Russell film called The Outlaw was filmed at Spahn Movie Ranch. Remington’s The Cowboy appears in the Overlook games room.
• Actually, in a later shot, you can see that it’s either a variation on Rattlesnake, or it’s one called Bronco Buster. I’ll leave the Outlaw analysis, since these might still be meant as a reference to that piece, and that film. But “Bronco buster” is what Dalton just sputtered out as an improv in his scene, which Wannamaker makes mention of in the moment following. Where does Dalton come up with this stuff!?! Does he have a psychic connection to Squeaky Fromme?
• Also, Kurt Russell said earlier that he doesn’t “dig” Cliff Booth, and here in Jane Russell’s old stomping grounds Pussycat prophesies that Charles Manson will really “dig” Cliff Booth.
• As for the show the gang is watching here, it’s apparently Happening ’69, a Dick Clark variety show. Dick Clark here, Dee Clark on the way here. On the episode is host Paul Revere, who appeared regularly along with his raiders. Two of their songs will play throughout this sequence, while two played throughout the sequence of Manson coming to knock on Sharon Tate’s door. So perhaps this is flipping the script on what I was saying before about the nature of conquest. Remington’s sculptures, if nothing else here, speaks to the full-body embracing of the manifest destiny spirit. And Booth has a history with this place, but didn’t especially want to come here. And unlike Manson, he finds the person he decides to check up on, George Spahn.

• As Booth and Pussycat approach Spahn Ranch, there’s an old faded ad for Randy Starr who was a stuntman famous for being able to be hanged, and dragged behind a horse. Of course, I couldn’t help seeing the Ringo Starr similarity, and sure enough, Dalton will go on to star in a film with the name Ringo in the title.

• Connie here is played by Monica Staggs, famed stuntwoman who played stunts for Elle Driver in the Kill Bill saga. That means we’ve had the stunt doubles for both Elle and the Bea as characters in the same film (actually, she played Lanna Frank in Death Proof, so she and Zoë Bell played there too). Wait a minute! L and B? Leo and Brad!!!!?!?!?
• The fellow beside her is Curt played by Mark Warrick, who did stunts for The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained, and this. I’d imagine from his build and look that he did stunts for Walton Goggins who played Chris Mannix. Brad Pitt watches an episode of Mannix in this. But also, it occurs to me that he shares a name with Kurt Russell, who plays Randy Miller in this, and John Ruth in that. Randy, Curt, Mannix. It’s all coming together.

• Omar Doom (of Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds fame) appears behind Booth here. Booth is meeting Tex who will almost prove to be Booth’s doom. In fact, it’s the other way around.

• This Linda and Abilene poster’s a bit of an anachronism. It was filmed at the ranch here in June of 1969, before the murders and while the cult still lived there. Then it was released in September. Most fascinating to me is that it was directed by the man who might proudly call himself the worst director of all time for spawning (no pun intended) the worst movie ever made, Monster a-Go Go. The X-rated plot concerns a brother and sister who fall in love after their parents die, and this leads to lesbian shenanigans. I won’t judge something I haven’t seen, but I wonder if this is meant to sit in contrast to The Killing of Sister George, by the man who brought us What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen.
• The Paul Revere song playing here is Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon, which reminds a lot of the sun/moon imagery from my Redrum Road analysis.

• Squeaky references the fact that she and George watch FBI and Bonanza, and that she’ll get “gypped” out of that if he doesn’t get his nap time. One of the cult members (Lena Dunham) is named Gypsy. Also, Dalton will be appearing on the next FBI, so if Squeaky and George do end up getting this “TV time”, then they’ll be doing exactly what Dalton and Booth will be doing in not very long (I think Bonanza was referenced in the makeup trailer by Dalton, but I’m not sure).
• Also, I probably don’t need to point this out, but this whole sequence with Booth going to Spahn Movie Ranch is like a real-life twin of what Dalton just acted out on Lancer. We don’t find out what comes of the Lancer plot line, and nothing that spectacular results from the Squeaky business. When the Manson trio sic themselves on Booth at the end, it’s totally by coincidence that he should’ve been there that night (and that event occurs (exactly) six months later).
• Also, it’s like a “tower of meta” in a way that Dakota Fanning should be playing the “heavy” in the Spahn drama. Fanning not only faded from major public exposure following the Twilight saga, but her fame’s been somewhat eclipsed by her sister Elle’s superstardom. Dakota is proving here that she’s a force to be reckoned with, and in the role relative to the role Dalton plays on Lancer. Dalton’s character, De Coteau, he first pronounces as “Dakota”, so that’s pretty on-the-nose. But we also know that Tex was just out fraternizing with an “Elle” in the countryside. Also, the Maribelle character is possibly sitting in the wrong chair, and it’s possible we don’t know here real name. Her chair reads “Trudi Fraser” and that’s how she’s credited on IMDb (which, as everyone knows, is never wrong about anything). But Dalton’s chair reads Caleb DeCoteau in the same handwriting font. So I like to imagine that Maribelle is sitting in “someone else’s” chair (it’s possible that the character name is on one side and the real name is on the other, but that’s not the impression the shots give us), and that we know nothing else about her as a real person (just as we only really know Dakota through her performances). Point being, when Caleb holds Maribelle, they’re forming a kind of Dakota Fanning spectrum, going from her introduction to the wide world in I Am Sam when she was but 7 years old (Maribelle is 8), to her moment here as an archvillain in one of the last films by one of the greatest filmmakers in history. Of course, Maribelle has that “elle” in it, and if Maribelle is an intentional reference to Beauty and the Beast Belle, Elle Fanning played Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) in Maleficent. While Dakota has not been so blessed by the Disney touch.
• Also, it just hit me that “Trudi” and “Lancer” are the names of the drug dealer and his girlfriend’s Irish friend (Lance and Trudi) in Pulp Fiction. Lance’s girlfriend is Jody, and we had a name drop of a Jody earlier.

• George has an ovular wood section painting, just like the Cattermole in Suite 3, which itself may have a rather dark connection to the Overlook’s evil. This one features monuments of France: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and something I can’t quite discern.
• This evil eye hangs above a poster of Mae West and WC Fields by Elaine Hanelock (the same woman who did the Barrymore, Marx and Laurel and Hardy). This poster was last seen beside Charlie Chaplin when Dalton and Booth were pulling out of Musso and Frank’s Grill. And while the radio was reporting the deaths of communists in Vietnam. Since Booth drove past Honey West to get here, I’m wondering if there’s something sinister about “Wests” going on here. In fact, it’s right after pulling out of the lot that we get our first seen of the Manson cult, doing their dumpster diving while singing their “All is one” song.

• There seems to be another Remington on the shelf to the left here, but I can’t see a similar sculpture for many hundreds that I’ve looked through.
• We’ve got a couple Zorros taped to the wall, and there’s a project in development, Django/Zorro, which this could have to do with.
• There’s also the mystery of whose face is perfectly occluded by the busted lampshade there. Seems like a very deliberate occlusion.

• There’s a picture of a spooky cat staring gloomily at Booth’s backside. Then in the next shot, the window fan looks like a pair of similarly baleful eyes watching him talk to George. Given that George is blind, it seems like something else has “become” his eyes. Squeaky?

• Pussycat stands upon the husk of a desiccated Beetle to declare that George Spahn is not blind, but rather that Booth is “the blind one”, while Randy Starr, Hollywood stuntman, looms in the foreground.
• As this shot continues, a song from the Roger Corman film Gas-s-s-s! called Don’t Chase Me Around by Robert Corff. The film is a post-apocalyptic tale about a gas agent (apologized for by a John Wayne parody figure) that kills everyone on earth over 25 years old. So, Cliff Booth might look a little death proof here as he wanders through a very similar social landscape. Perhaps most significantly, though, if QT knew about Redrum Road before making this, is that Gas-s-s-s! starred Bud Cort, who made four films in 1970, this being one of them. One of the others was playing Brewster McCloud in Brewster McCloud, the film that discovered Shelley Duvall. In the Abbey Road tour, Duvall is symbolizing Ringo Starr. And here we have a collapsing Beetle and a Randy Starr. Coincidence?
• When Tex is alerted about Booth kicking Clem’s ass, Sundance refers to him as “that Hawaiian guy”. Seems like a sly allusion to Booth being another “big kahuna” figure. And, since QT compared Pitt and DiCaprio in this to Redford and Newman in their films, it seems fitting that one of Booth’s (Newman’s) enemies here would bear the same name as Redford’s real life film festival, named for the character he played in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

• As all our heroes head home, and José Feliciano’s California Dreamin’ waves gently in the breeze, Booth and Dalton drive past a massive poster for Funny Girl. This was by William Wyler, who perhaps most famously directed Ben-Hur, seen right before Tate enters the Bruin theatre. The film, credited as helping transform the public’s attitude toward Jewish women, also starred Anne Francis, who you’ll recall was Honey West. So that’s a reference to Tate’s day and Booth’s day.
• The following poster is for Mackenna’s Gold, which has a few subtle connections to Dalton. 1) The lead role went to Gregory Peck over Steve McQueen. 2) The film was a major success overseas, while bombing at home. 3) The film co-stars Telly Savalas who’ll co-star in one of Dalton’s Italian pictures. 4) The plot concerns gold thought to be hidden at Cañon del Oro, and the Lancer episode took place at Royale del Oro.
• Also, Mackenna’s Gold was soundtracked by Quincy Jones and…José Feliciano.
• Both films advertised here star Omar Sharif, and Omar Doom was at the Spahn Movie Ranch.

• There’s probably something similar going on between these posters for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hell’s Angels ’69, The Sergeant, Ice Station Zebra, 3 in the Attic, and Sweet Charity. But, besides pointing out the Kubrick reference, I don’t much feel like delving into all that jazz.
• What seems most interesting here is that as the shot ends (see below) Booth is driving them right past the Frolic Room, which is where Dalton crashed his car drunkenly. And there’s a sign right to the left and under Yvette Mimieux’s name on the marquee that says FULL CIRCLE. This may very well be the shop name there, but it’s a nice touch.

• They then stream past William Friedkin’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s. This film has a lot of loose little Shining connections (it was Bert Lahr’s last film who played the Cowardly Lion in Wizard of Oz, it features Elliot Gould who featured in MASH which appears on the Suite 3 bookshelf), but perhaps the most interesting one is how star Britt Ekland divorced husband Peter Sellers just four days before it debuted.

• The episode of F.B.I. that Dalton features in (All the Streets Are Silent) was one of two episodes that ever had Burt Reynolds as a guest star. He plays Michael Murtaugh, a ruthless gang leader. Murtaugh is a name most media savvy folk would probably most quickly associate with Danny Glover’s character Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon series. And earlier Bruce Lee was saying his hands were legally considered lethal weapons. The lead character on F.B.I. is Inspector Lewis Erskine, and in Hateful Eight, Bruce Dern is perhaps the only character to exclaim the name of Chris Mannix’s father Erskine Mannix. Here, Dern occupied the role left empty when Burt Reynolds passed away.
• As for the fictional Jigsaw Jane, this F.B.I. episode was directed by William A. Graham, who directed a TV movie in 1972 called Jigsaw, which featured Richard Kiley, whose name we saw earlier as one of the stars of Pendulum. Incidentally, it occurred to me that Kiley was also the voice of Jurassic Park in the 1993 film of the same name. And the first thing we see playing on a TV set is Robert Goulet singing MacArthur Park in Booth’s trailer. Weird Al Yankovic parodied MacArthur Park as Jurassic Park the same year as that film came out. And since Dalton has all these MAD Magazine covers around his house, I don’t think that connection is too far-fetched.
• As for Suzanne Pleshette, what she was up to circa 1969 was not only starring in episodes of F.B.I., but also The Invaders, the alien show from the roadside ad.

• The poster for Hell-Fire Texas is apparently a spoof of a French poster for A Time for Killing, which was directed by Phil Karlson, who directed Tate’s film, The Wrecking Crew. So having this appear next to the Mad Magazine and TV Guide spoofs of Dalton is apt. Since Tex will die in this very room six months from now, I imagine the title of Dalton’s picture is probably about that.
• As for the painting of the six-horse carriage driving behind Dalton’s back here, it seems like a fairly overt Hateful Eight reference, but I don’t know if it goes beyond that. If we knew the album cover on the jukebox below it, that might tell us more.

• In fact, Tex’s doom may have something to do with the fact that Booth was on acid that night, and here we get the intro to that moment. The girl selling the acid-dipped cigarette (on Riverside Dr. no less) is none other than Perla Haney-Jardine, who played BB in Kill Bill. And Booth is gonna kill Tex.

• Best I can tell this is Rex Holman, who Dalton refers to as a “fuckin’ prick”. Check out his IMDb to see the vast number of series referenced in this film that Holman featured in, but most incredibly, he had an uncredited role in The Wrecking Crew, as well as a bit part of a series called Jigsaw (not the same as the above-mentioned film, but from the same year, 1972).

• So, Dalton’s playing the Burt Reynolds role.
• An ad for the Ford Cortina is the last thing we hear before jumping six months ahead. The killers will drive a Ford Galaxie to do the devil’s work. I don’t know if this really means much, though.

• The June 27, 1969 issue of Time magazine poking out at Dalton here is asking us “Is Prince Charles Necessary?” The issue also contains a reference to Valley of the Dolls, which is a Sharon Tate film, referenced when she’s trying to get into The Wrecking Crew for free.

• As Dalton is getting his offer to work with the director of Django, there’s some kind of oxen, a box of dominoes, and peeking out on his right is the February 24th, 1967 issue of LIFE magazine. In this episode “[Richard] Burton Analyzes [His Wife] Liz [Taylor]”. The scoop is on the fact that Burton and Taylor were starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew in 1967. Recall that we earlier saw Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (another Shakespeare production) during Booth’s drive home the first night.
• The offer is for Corbucci’s next film Nebraska Jim, which is probably a reference to his 1966 film Navajo Joe, which starred Burt Reynolds as an indigenous warrior seeking revenge on some outlaws. Burt Reynolds was slated to play George Spahn, so this reference was meant to be followed by Navajo Joe himself.

• One of the names on the fictional Nebraska Jim poster is “Aldo Campbell” I can’t see a real actor by this name, but Aldo was Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds, itself a spaghetti western parody of sorts.
• The artist behind this fake poster and the next is credited as Renato Casaro, who worked for Zeffirelli and Sergio Leone (Schwarz calls Sergio Corbucci the “second greatest director of spaghetti westerns” probably implying Leone is the greatest).
• In the following sequence of Dalton and his costar Daphna Ben-Cobo (played by QT’s real-life spouse, Daniella Pick) getting photographed by Italian paparazzi, there’s another of those “lost time” moments, like from the talk with Olyphant. What this shot does is crop the shot down slightly, cutting out a reflection in the car window of the number 617, as if there were a hotel door somewhere off to the left. That moment followed the “Clu” sequence. Is there something Clu-like about the Nebraska Jim poster?

• Narrator Randy Miller (Kurt Russell), tells us that Dalton didn’t like the “Tower of Babel” shooting style, meaning that every actor speaks their own language during filming, and then English would be dubbed over everyone but Dalton, presumably. Or Dalton would be dubbed Italian for Italian audiences. The Shining makes a lot of fuss about the Tower of Babel.

• On the poster for Kill Me Quick, Ringo, Said the Gringo, we get a Germán Cobos, who was the star of the 1973 film Sexy Cat. So maybe calling his wife’s character Ben-Cobo was a reference to her being a sexy cat. Who knows?
• Calvin Jackson Padget was the true-life alias of director Giorgio Ferroni who was largely interested in making “swords and sandals” pictures about ancient Roman life. One was Hercules vs. Moloch.
• Inserting Joseph Cotton is an interesting touch. He was the costar of the greatest film in history (according to many): Citizen Kane. He took a break from film acting in the ’60s to focus on the stage, only to return for the horror classic Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Earlier in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood we heard Deep Purple’s Hush, which involves the band singing “Hush…hush…” during the chorus. But by 1969, Cotton’s leading man status had diminished and it was in this year that he did exactly what Dalton’s doing, flying to Japan to make Latitude Zero (alongside his wife, no less).

• The next poster is by Jean Mascii, for the film Red Blood, Red Skin. Mascii did a lot of posters for films by a lot of the people referenced in the film already (like Bruce Lee), but the most stand out two that I noticed were for The Illustrated Man (heard about on the radio near the beginning) and the Burton/Taylor The Taming of the Shrew.
• His costar Telly Savalas is perhaps most famous for playing an iteration of James Bond’s arch nemesis, Blofeld, most recently played by one of QT’s band of merry westerners, Christophe Waltz.

• I’m sorry to say my patience with following these bread crumb trails was worn utterly thin, but given that there’s four of these fake posters, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a “law of 4” thing going on here.
• Antonio Margheriti was obviously the cover name for Eli Roth’s Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds.
• You can see Ken Wood was also in Kill Me Quick, Ringo, Said the Gringo, and Francesca Capucci was also in Red Blood, Red Skin. And this is the second film after Nebraska Jim to feature an Aldo, this time a real person.

• Dalton’s wife is Scarlet Francesca Capucci, presumably his costar in the last two films. There’s a radio host Francesca Cappucci who succeeds “the real Don Steel” on radio KIQQ in greater Los Angeles. Don Steel is heard throughout the film (and on the film’s official soundtrack), announcing radio songs rather sublimely.
• The August 8th issue of Time magazine accompanying Booth back in coach features a main article on whether or not John Wayne is the last hero of the silver screen. That seems like an odd position for anyone to take, ever. Heroes have not only endured but depressingly dominated the modern box office to the point of almost tanking the industry.
• John Wayne was also lightly referenced at the George Spahn Movie Ranch, you might recall. So the Manson storyline has not ventured far from the film’s concern.

• On the set of Red Blood, Red Skin, Dalton’s about to unfurl his vision for ending their creative partnership, as both men are dressed in identical clothes, with wine goblets blurring the area above their heads.

• The shot of Dalton and Capucci arriving home is a light parody of Tate and Polanski arriving at the intro, minus the paparazzi.

• We get some twin orange ladies down the hall again. But this time we get more of this Jackie Brown-style colour wall on the left.

• As Capucci becomes a fixture in Dalton’s life, we get our first clear view of 1939’s Range War, concerning the exploits of Hopalong Cassidy, who’s featured on four mugs on one of Dalton’s display shelves.

• As the Rolling Stones’ Out of Time howls ominously over these scenes of everyone returning to their lives, each on the verge of some major change, Sebring and Lee have a sparring similar to the one we saw earlier between him and Tate.

• They Came to Rob Las Vegas features Elke Sommer, a costar in The Wrecking Crew, but also in The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, a title rather similar to The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz, I’m sure you’ll agree. And that’s the chapter of Kill Bill featuring the most developed Chinese character across those films.

• Krakatoa: East of Java (which sounds like the Con Air of its day) is about a shipwreck salvage during a volcano eruption and a mandated convict transport gone wrong. It was directed by Bernard Kowalski (another Kowalski!) and written by Cliff Gould, whose name I probably don’t need to address.
• Other than that, Krakotoa belongs to a rather limited series of films shot in 70mm for showing in this “Cinerama” style of theatre going, which ran from 1952-1974. The only film to be shown this way since then? The Hateful Eight.
• Two other cinerama films were on those huge posters I skipped over: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ice Station Zebra. So maybe that’s why they were there, along with The Sergeant, Sweet Charity, and Hell’s Angels ’69.

• In fact, the next shot is of The Supply Sergeant’s neon sign. This sign is seen a few times throughout the film in the background of shots, like when Dalton and Booth are leaving the meeting with Schwarz.

• While Tate and the gang dine at El Coyote, just up the street from a dirty movie premier, Dalton and Booth dine at Casa Vega, in the shadow of a poster for the 1968 film Candy, a satire of pornographic stories by Dr. Strangelove screenwriter Terry Southern. The film features Ringo Starr in a noteworthy role, and was directed by actor Christian Marquand, who got his start in the aforementioned La Belle et la Bête.
• Incidentally, tunefind.com has it (at the moment) that In My Life by The Beatles appears somewhere around this period of the film, potentially in the extended version of the film. So that would be somethin’.

• Straight Shooter by The Mamas and the Papas is performed a short while before the Manson kids show up. This is shortly followed by Jay Sebring putting on Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming To the Canyon) by the same band. Straight Shooter comes from the same album as California Dreamin’: 1966’s All the Leaves Are Brown. This album included a Beatles cover in I Call Your Name. The success of the album is credited somewhat to producer Lou Adler, who was also a film producer who made The Rocky Horror Picture Show (referenced in Pulp Fiction) and Brewster McCloud (of Bud Cort/Shelley Duvall fame).

• One of Tate’s friends reads Madame Bovary, widely considered one of the greatest, most perfect novels of all time (not least of which by Vladimir Nabokov, author of Kubrick’s favourite novel, Lolita). A 1969 Italian film adaptation starred Edwige Fenech. The Mike Myers character in Inglourious Basterds is named Ed Fenech. Mike Myers sounds exactly like Michael Myers of Halloween fame, and right now we’re expecting the Manson kids to obliterate these people.

• Around the same time another friend is watching Teenage Monster, the only film directed by cinematographer Jacques R. Marquette. Marquette was the DP for The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz.

• As Sebring selects a gold-looking record we get another Alphonse Mucha painting, this one helping advertise some cognac comandon (Schwarz orders an XO drink when calling Dalton about his opened future in Italian films). Jean Comandon was a filmmaker whose subject was his own microbiology, and a leading figure in microcinematography.

• The poster for Dalton’s fictional film Comanche Uprising is apparently a parody of 1956’s Comanche by George Sherman (who made a film similar to Teenage Monster). It’s been seen in the distance before, but never in focus like this. And it hangs beside a giant key. So that feels like a big tell, but there’s not much about Comanche‘s cast and crew jumping out at me. It features Iron Eyes Cody, who has a connection to the Keep America Beautiful campaign, which is referenced all over the Overlook Hotel’s front lawn area. So I’m wondering if the more important thing is about how this poster features the picture of Dalton that sits outside his house in his parking space. Only in the real poster, he’s 90-degrees clockwise of the parking lot image. As I’ve said before the image of Dalton reminds me a lot of Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny” face, but here we see it’s really the ground he’s pressed up against. And we see this right by the phone that Booth will be smashing someone’s face into in a moment.
• Perhaps the answer lies in the fictional cast and crew of this Comanche Uprising. The director is R. G. Springsteen, who retired the year after this, and who gained recognition for his 1945 picture The Marshal from Laredo. Remember, Clu Gulager played in Two Men Named Laredo, the Virginian episode.
• Dalton’s costar Claude Akins (best known for playing in QT’s favourite film of all time, Rio Bravo) played recurring character Cotton Buckmeister on a show called Laredo.
• James Best appeared in one of QT’s other top ten films, Rolling Thunder (in which he plays “Texan”), which he named a distribution company after. Also, The Texan commits a violent home invasion on the hero of that film, and in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, one of the home invaders is named Tex (which was his name in real life).
• There’s a “Bronson” on there that is most likely Charles Bronson, who’s referenced a few times in Reservoir Dogs.
• Michael Dante I’m not sure about, though he was in a spiritual sequel to Bridge on the River Kwai (which features the line, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”): Return from the River Kwai.
• Roxie Rodriguez is not related to Robert Rodriguez so far as I know, but she did work on a few of his pictures in hair, wardrobe, and production.
• Also, in the following flashback to Booth buying the acid cigarette there’s another of those “dropped frame” moments, like the one that followed all the Clu Gulager business.

• As Sebring puts on Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming To the Canyon), we get a look at the Paul Revere and the Raiders album, Something Happening. Paul Revere, you’ll recall, has an intimate connection to the confrontation of Manson and his followers earlier in the film.
• Twelve Thirty is, according to reports, what was heard playing when the Manson murder victims were discovered, so it’s not just a clever bit of clever QT business. That said, the Tate action of this final day starts at exactly 12:30pm, and right at this moment, we’re approaching the following 12:30am.
• Also, this album (The Papas and the Mamas, itself a reversal of the band’s name), represents the beginning of the end for that band.
• We can also see the Italian poster for The Fearless Vampire Killers, the film that Polanski made and starred in with Tate. This translation of the Italian title is Please Don’t Bite Me on the Neck, and the poster seems radical for featuring an entirely nude Tate. So as Sebring is no doubt trying to control his sexual impulse toward his ex-financeé, they share the room with a naked picture of her.

• As Mikey Madison starts giving one of the funnest performances in any QT film, she says that any show that wasn’t I Love Lucy was about murder. Jack Torrance references I Love Lucy on his way to murder his family. She finishes the scene with a demonic pig-snorting session, rather similar to Kathy Bates in Misery (1990), another King film.
• Incidentally, the other killer who makes it to Dalton’s place is also named Madisen in real life, only it’s her first name. Madisen Beaty. And their characters are named Sadie and Katie. So we got Sadie, Katie, Mikey and Beaty.

• The killers dress all in black, à la the killers that descend on the Bride’s wedding rehearsal. Also, this scene of psychopathic bafoonery is reminiscent of the KKK sequence in Django, with the head bags.
• And this sequence ends with the line “Alright, pigkillers. Let’s kill some piggies.” Similar to “Alright ramblers. Let’s get ramblin’.” The line from Reservoir Dogs I probably quote more than any other. Is it because Joe Cabot is a Joe, and I’m a Joe? I guess we’ll never know.

• Aw, man! So much for all my squinting. Here’s a much brighter look at the poster.
• So we’ve got Joan Evans, who played Leonar in Zorro (there’s a comic book series and a planned film series called Django/Zorro, about Zorro and QT’s Django), and played the title character in a film about the Hatfield-McCoy feud (Jack Torrance’s career as a teacher ends because of a boy named George Hatfield). Also, there was a picture of Zorro on the wall at George Spahn’s.
• Charles Bronson is a lock.
• “J. C. Flippin” is likely a reference to Jay C. Flippen, who appeared in an episode of Johnny Ringo directed by R. G. Springsteen (who is credited as the director of Comanche Uprising), called Four Came Quietly. And four Manson cult members are about to come quietly. Flippen is best known for playing one of the main crooks in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), the film that Reservoir Dogs is largely inspired by. And Flippen’s wife Ruth was a screenwriter who wrote a good deal of Gidget, as well as two Gidget movies. Gidget is where the term “big kahuna” comes from, as in Big Kahuna Burger referenced in five different QT films.
• Michael Dante was in a series called The Texan, which was written by Samuel A. Peeples–you’ll notice that there’s a Samuel A. Pebbles on the poster, which I have some other thoughts about below.
• Billy Bob Robberts is not a real person, but Bob Roberts (1992) directed by Tim Robbins (a Robb name with two b’s) was in theatres at the same time as Reservoir Dogs when it first came out–Quentin’s first competition. Also, the villain Jay C. Flippen played in Johnny Ringo had a villainous brother named Billy Boy Jethro.
• Sam Small is likely a reference to Sam Small Leaves Town(1937), about a famous actor leaving London to go incognito at a holiday camp. But I have no idea what that has to do with QT’s life or work.
• William Lava was a composer who worked for Disney, and did scores for Road Runner, the Mickey Mouse Club and Pink Panther (all properties with loose or direct connections to The Shining). He also scored Zorro, and an episode of The Twilight Zone called Once Upon a Time, which featured an aging Buston Keaton as a time traveller from the 1890s, who zips ahead to the 1960s, and finds it discombobulating enough to want to go back to his own reality with all its familiar problems. Clearly, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood was something like the inverse of that for ol’ QT, but was he glad to return to 2019?
• As for Billy Bob Robberts, it sounds like a mashup of Billy Bob Thornton and Bob Roberts. Bob Roberts was in theatres when Reservoir Dogs came out, so maybe that has some nostalgic value for QT, like maybe he thought, “Here’s my competition.” I don’t know what the Thornton connection would be, if any. And you know, maybe the Pebbles joke is about Sam Jackson getting mistaken for Mario or Melvin Van Peebles. Melvin Van Peebles played Dick Hallorann in the 1997 TV version.
• Sam A. Pebbles seems likely to refer to Samuel A. Peeples, the creator of the series Lancer, which is featured extensively in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. But the misspelling of the names made me wonder if it might also be a mash-up of Samuel L. Jackson (longtime QT collaborator) and Mario Van Peebles (Jackson is famously frequently confused with Lawrence Fishburne, so this could be a soft allusion to that). If this is the case, then this film would contain a trace of Jackson, despite his not performing in the film.
• R. G. Springsteen was a prolific director of westerns, who directed the 1965 picture Apache Uprising, which this Comanche Uprising is likely a parody of. Springsteen also got his start directing a picture called The Marshal From Laredo (1945), and would go on to direct several episodes of the series Laredo, including the episode A Question of Discipline. Claude Akins, who we’ve discussed already, would feature in a Laredo episode called A Question of Guilt. Clu Gulager, who plays the bookstore owner in this film, featured on an episode of The Virginian (which is referenced in dialogue between Timothy Olyphant and Leonardo DiCaprio: “Up until two weeks before shootin’, Fabian was in the part. Then he breaks shoulder doin’ a Virginian–that’s how I got it.”) The episode was called Two Men Named Laredo. In fact, Gulager appears in the scene right before the Virginian reference moment.
• As for this actual moment, Booth has turned the lights on and blinded his acid-addled mind. So the fact that this Comanche Uprising poster might be all about references to QT’s past, Booth exclaiming, “Ugh…bad idea.” Could be about the nostalgia QT feels for all these things that make up who he is as a giant of his medium. Clearly, though, this film is proof that it’s not completely for the worse. It might be worth going back and considering every appearance of the parking lot face, to see how these QTisms affect those moments.

• Dalton keeps rat flavoured Wolf’s Tooth on hand, cuz he’s a buddy like that.

• Dalton sings along to Snoopy vs. the Red Baron by The Royal Guardsmen. The lyrics are reminiscent of the closing credits to The Hateful Eight. Also, Snoopy features as part of the Escape Key door in The Shining.

• We finally get a look at Dalton’s costars for Hell-Fire Texas, and they are Glenn Ford, Inger Stevens, and Paul Petersen. These are the cast members of A Time For Killing, which, as mentioned, this poster is a parody of. Dalton is replacing the George Hamilton role. Lotta Georges in this a-here picture.

• During the epic face phone smash we finally see the full name of Dalton’s costar. It was Robert Taylor, who, among many other roles, was the Hangman in The Hangman. He also played Quentin the Invincible, which is probably something QT started to see himself as after a certain point. And with good cause. Taylor, however, died exactly two months before the Manson murders of lung cancer. If Dalton heard about this, perhaps this is what made him have that talk with Booth around the filming of Red Blood, Red Skin, the third of his four Italian pictures in 6 months.
• But my trusty partner said to me after we’d seen it in theatres that QT might’ve been exorcizing a personal demon in making this film. The idea of random killers showing up at a celebrity’s house and icing everyone over nothing more than a random cult leader’s whim…that’s something that probably stung the souls of more than a few Hollywood denizens, let alone a 6-year-old QT with big dreams. Perhaps it was things like Taylor’s Quentin the Invincible that made him feel like the future was possible. Like everything that QT did go on to create, everything on that Comanche Uprising poster, was possible.
• While giving her account, Francesca sits between twin Ringo posters.

• At the beginning and the end of the final Manson sequence Booth quotes Jackie Gleason saying, “And away we go!”

• Booth gets taken away in an ambulance marked Schaefer. There was a Schaefer reference earlier that I neglected to write down like an idiot. Ah well. The Shining references a Schaefer.
• Booth’s last line to Dalton, “I try” was his first line to Marvin Schwarz. In both cases, the other man is telling him what a good friend he is.

• When Tate comes out to meet Dalton she’s wearing a sports jersey with a big 17 on it. Recall that scene earlier where the 617 is reflecting in a car window to look like 716? I don’t know what these numbers might mean for QT, but I suspect they’re related.
• Also, I can’t help pointing out that, discounting the opening company logos, this film is 2:37:32 long.
• During the finale, we hear the wistful, haunting strains of Maurice Jarre’s Miss Lily Langtry, from the film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean starring Paul Newman as Roy Bean (recall that Major Marquis Warren asks if Daisy Domergue killed Lily Langtry to get such a high bounty on her head). It was written by John Milius, who directed one of QT’s favourite films, Big Wednesday. The end of that film, and the end of this one seem to be like flip sides of a coin. Read all about it.

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