I'm the devil, and I'm here to do some devil shit.

A few years back, Tarantino declared that of his last two movies, he wanted at least one to be a western, because he wants to go down in history as a director of westerns and in order to do that, you have to make at least three westerns, which seems like bizarre logic but Tarantino and bizarre logic go together like Old Chattanooga beer and Red Apple cigarettes. It's hard not to see his 9th film as his 3rd western, given the title, the long loving recreation of a western tv show, the valorization of Mighty Whitey, the fantasy home defense against a demonized other, and the mythologizing of a goneby era of the "old west." The western is a fundamentally fascist genre, and as he ages Tarantino is increasingly revealing himself as a fundamentally fascist filmmaker, but I can't claim not to have enjoyed this because that cast, and with Tarantino you gotta take the inane to get the brilliant, and here at least there's more of the latter than the former. Wouldn't it be awful though if it turned out that his entire reason for making this was a stealth attempt at creating an alternate universe where Roman Polanski isn't a rapist? Fuck.

Cf. The Wonder Years