Not that I’m against popular art that dispenses comfort and flatters an audience’s sense of its own decency. There are worse things that movies can do, even as there are more interesting ways that movies can revise history. For example, there’s Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” a film that doesn’t just rewrite the past, but boldly erases a piece of it. Somehow, this doesn’t come across either as counter-factualism or denialism, but as a kind of magic. It’s been six months: Can we talk about that ending?

DARGIS By all means, given that it’s our job to ruin people’s happiness. So here goes: the ending of “Once Upon a Time” is both one of the film’s most deeply satisfying parts and one of the worst. On the one hand, the two heroes played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt get to save Sharon Tate, a.k.a. this fairy tale’s damsel (a.k.a. Margot Robbie), thereby gratifyingly rewriting history. It’s very touching to think of a world in which Tate (the actress killed by the Manson family in 1969) had been granted the happily ever after that Tarantino wistfully provides her, instead of dying in a murderous frenzy of violence. The what-ifs the film offers are so painful: What if she had had her baby and made more films, perhaps with her husband, the director Roman Polanski? His life might have been different too.

Yet while I love the alternative reality that Tarantino provides, it’s disappointing that he ends this otherwise supple, easygoing, beautifully observed film in a gleefully crude spasm of annihilating violence. That violence is just too easy, too grindingly obvious and familiar; it’s also unnecessarily ugly. The problem isn’t that the male heroes kill female attackers: Charles Manson sent three women and one man that night. But when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, an actor, uses a flamethrower to burn one of those women to death — becoming the hero he has always played onscreen with a fiery spew — Tarantino is exulting in an unmistakably phallic form of brutal triumphalism.

I prefer the ending of Mary Harron’s underseen “Charlie Says,” about the Manson family from the point of view of some of its female cultists. The movie doesn’t ask us to forgive the women who murder, but it does ask us to consider them politically, not just reactively, as Tarantino does. In “Charlie Says,” women surrender themselves to a misogynistic abuser, and along the way, they lose themselves. The movie thoughtfully considers female agency and free will, exploring how sexism encourages — and forces — women to collaborate in their own subjugation and in the abuse of others. It’s tough on women, who finally need to save themselves, which isn’t how Hollywood likes it.