“Startin’ to see pictures, ain't ya?”

In the second act of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (2015), Major Marquis Warren (Samuel Jackson) taunts the elderly Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) with the story of his son Chester's death. The general, sitting in an armchair in front of a roaring fire, becomes agitated by Warren's description of Chester's last moments. Cut to an outside shot of a blinding white mountainside. As Tarantino's script makes clear:

One could argue that the entire three-hour spectacle is a scheme to present to audiences this single shot: the widescreen torture and humiliation of the rugged white hero of pre-Vietnam-era American Westerns. As in a “one last job” plot, the Ultra Panavision 70 cameras and anamorphic lenses are pulled out of retirement, dusted off, and refurbished to bring the mythic figure to his knees in a sweeping celluloid corrective, fifty years after the equipment was put away. The medium is clearly part of the message, as Tarantino regularly proclaims.

Why else use 70 mm? Certainly not for a drawing-room period drama, which is also what much of The Hateful Eight resembles. If Tarantino's two previous films, Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) offer visual counter-narratives to history (and to film history) through satisfying “what ifs” in which the good guys win, The Hateful Eight seeks more fundamentally to superimpose new images over old ones. In Tarantino's western, black faces and spaces are central to the American narrative, both outside and in.

After a dazzling first act in which a stagecoach carrying bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell); his captive, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh); and two stranded wayfarers, Warren and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) rushes to safety as a Wyoming blizzard threatens, the characters take refuge in the gorgeous, gas-and fire-lit, high-ceilinged, rustic interior of Minnie's Haberdashery. The balance of the film unfolds in a small business run by a black woman.

The cavernous room, as tastefully and bountifully stocked as an upscale Adirondack country store, makes no logical sense, of course. With its unlikely Story & Clark piano, jelly beans, peppermint sticks, and dry goods stacked to the rafters, Minnie's abundance is as much of a political statement as any of the film's monologues on Civil War brutality. The capital stock required to outfit a standard haberdashery in the American West at the turn of the century was anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000. Luxury goods such as a the Navajo blanket that Mannix takes from the shelves, heaves over his shoulders, and praises by name (“Ahh, Navajo!”) cost anywhere from $150 to $200, a year's wages in 1870s dollars.

Only in the second half of the film do we find out that Minnie Mink (Dana Gourrier) was black, was married to a white man, and was a promoter of social coffee drinking, a tradition that began during the Civil War, as millions of Union soldiers drank steaming cups around the fire to keep their energy and spirits up when food supply chains failed. Only in retrospect do we see that Minnie's Haberdashery was a fantasy of postwar warmth, plenty, and fellowship—where black and white only battle on the chessboard.

Minnie's murder is not a function of race or sectional politics, however, but gang violence: a movie-star handsome man with no particular politics marshals forces to slaughter everyone solely to save his devilish sister from the hangman. The film's mood is supernatural and sinister, not angry. The anguished snow-covered face of Jesus looms over the action. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is evoked both by the snowy isolation and by strains from Ennio Morricone's repurposed score. Daisy's blood-streaked face evokes Regan's blood-streaked face from The Exorcist (1973) as does Morricone's “Regan's Theme,” from The Exorcist 2. Scattered Agatha Christie moments add refinement to the eerie paranoia. Warren's arguably legal shooting of General Smithers (and his tale of torture of his son) are the only personal—racial—vendettas. The desecration of Minnie's Haberdashery is, ominously, impersonal.

In other words, while race, the lost promise of post-Civil War America, and the ideological bankruptcy of film westerns are central concerns to The Hateful Eight, Tarantino's film ponders whether peace is possible when legal justice is illusory and cosmic justice is in doubt. The film's final scene gestures toward civic accord with the collaborative hanging of Daisy, the agente provocateuse whose crimes (like Jim Jones at Botany Bay's) are never specified, by a white Confederate army veteran and a black Union army veteran while the severed arm of an bounty hunter still dangles in handcuffs. But war never ends with the end of the war. Those who know Abraham Lincoln's stormy domestic relations are chilled by the words “Ole Mary Todd's calling,” read aloud by Mannix, however fictional they may be.

In brazen Ultra Panavision, Tarantino's widescreen spectacle muscles its way back to the era of Khartoum (1966), the last film to be shot in Ultra Panavision 70, and The Fastest Guitar Alive (1967), a farcical Confederate fantasy whose theme song, “There Won't Be Many Coming Home,” Roy Orbison croons over The Hateful Eight's credits. Freighted with allusions to the damage that white men do, Tarantino's eighth film demands to be seen not as a revisionist but a newly visioned western, using the mythmaker's tools to offer a panoramic vision of racial sovereignty undone by random violence. Our brief glimpse of Minnie in her haberdashery suggests that this strong black woman had, with charity to all and malice toward none, bound up the nation's wounds, served everyone a steaming cup of coffee, and prospered in the years after the Civil War, before being mowed down by criminal conspiracy.