La rinascita di una nazione: The Hateful Eight e la lettera di Lincoln

Compared to the historical counternarrative of Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight – Quentin Tarantino’s eighth movie (2015) – rewrites the Reconstruction Era in ideological and political terms. By confining in a haberdashery the geography represented by the eight characters and the historical changes they are witnesses to, the film describes a specific period of American history by mingling reality and fiction through a narrative mechanism that focuses on a letter Lincoln is supposed to have written to one of the characters. Whether the letter is true or false is a central point in the film. In line with the President’s confidence in a country reunited under the umbrella of equality and democracy, a northern black and a southern white build a new political, social and ideological structure with the target to execute a woman who tries to subvert that structure. The haberdashery thus becomes the stage where the actors represent not only what the Civil War has left unresolved, but also a problematic national re-birth.