The flamethrower first appears as an unwieldy piece of film equipment in Rick's movies and returns as a decisive object at his house. The context changes between the two scenes, but the character's relationship with an action he already knows how to perform remains.
A film within a film sets up the object
The flamethrower's first appearance belongs to a fragment of Rick Dalton's film career. In the fictional war film The 14 Fists of McCluskey, the actor takes part in a sequence against Nazi soldiers. The passage presents an exaggerated, immediately visual piece of action suited to condensing the kind of spectacle he has played. We are not seeing a real mission carried out by Rick, but a sample of his professional work folded into the main story.
The sequence adds a detail that breaks the image of the unflappable hero: Rick complains about the heat during the shoot. The interruption makes it possible to distinguish the character who dominates the war scene from the actor who has to endure its physical conditions. His on-screen bravery and his working discomfort can coexist. That contrast is funny because the spectacle is dismantled as soon as we hear the worker inside the costume and behind the action.
The object is thus tied to a specific experience of Rick. The film does not merely show it fleetingly as decoration; it establishes that he has used it in a performance context and remembers the difficulty of doing so. Later, when it returns, the viewer can recover that information without needing a fresh explanation. The narrative setup works because the first moment has interest in its own right: it characterises a career, a genre and the vulnerable way the actor lives his profession.
The connection with other episodes of revenge against Nazis in Tarantino's cinema can be useful for comparing motifs, but it does not prove that this is the same device within a shared continuity. Nor does it make The 14 Fists of McCluskey a real historical film ever released with Rick Dalton in it. It is a made-up work designed to give him a professional past. Keeping that distinction allows us to appreciate the play of references without turning visual similarities into unrecorded props or production facts.
The return in a house where Rick does not understand what is happening
During the final attack, Rick is in the pool, separated from the struggle taking place inside the house. His position matters: he does not organise the defence from the outset, nor does he see all of Cliff's, Francesca's and Brandy's actions. When the violence reaches him, he responds to an immediate intrusion. The flamethrower allows a man who is partly detached from the progress of the assault to become, all of a sudden, a decisive participant in its conclusion.
The presence of the device among his belongings links two stages of his life. Something kept from an earlier film remains in the domestic setting of an actor worried that he has lost relevance. In narrative terms, his professional past is not entirely dead: he still has resources that the present can activate. The choice is deliberately extravagant. The film does not try to make the object seem like an ordinary domestic solution, but to preserve the excess of the spectacle it comes from.
Rick then regains a visual position similar to that of his old role, although the situation now belongs to the fiction's main world. That repetition turns the earlier performance into a kind of involuntary rehearsal. It does not show that acting out an action provides all the skills needed to carry it out away from a set; it works within the logic of the story. Tarantino's cinema allows a fabricated image to acquire material consequences in the life of the person who performed it.
The tonal clash is strong because the pool had represented rest, drink and isolation. The arrival of fire turns that leisure space into a violent climax. The contrast between the comfort of the garden and the military device prevents the sequence from settling into a stable realistic scale. Comedy, horror and vengeful satisfaction are overlaid. The viewer can react in different ways without losing sight of the precision with which the object has been prepared.
A career prop that makes the actor the lead
The flamethrower's journey is connected to the problem of Rick Dalton: he fears that the public will only ever see him lose to other leads. On the final night, a skill associated with an old role places him at the centre of decisive action. The reversal has symbolic value, but it does not amount to a proven professional comeback. No one offers him a contract at that moment, nor do we know how his career will be received in future.
It also changes the meaning of what seemed like a dispensable fragment. The film devotes time to fictional performances that could be understood as mere cinephile play. The object's return shows that one of them forms part of the causal build-up to the ending. An actor's past is preserved in images, memories and belongings, and those materials can intervene again. The opening sequence gains a second function without losing its humour about working conditions.
Speaking of the flamethrower as a prop describes its place in cinematic representation; it does not require us to assume that any device seen on set is inert or to reconstruct how it works. What matters here is the continuity established by the edit between its two appearances. The ending of Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood turns a device from a made-up film into part of an alternative history. Rick does not know that he is taking part in that rewriting: for him, the action ends in his garden, while for the viewer it reaches the memory of cinema and a historic night.
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