There is a point in Killers of the Flower Moon where it stops becoming a film and transforms into an experience. I found myself moved to anger, sadness, and then provoked into self-reflection. This is a film that tells us everything, in one go, about the history of the West, the plight of those who once called it home, and the duplicity of those who harp on about certain values they see fit to apply to everyone but themselves.
As the credits rolled and I made my way out of the theatre with my friend, I reflected on how history gets written by some people and how others become, as Eric Wolf put it, people without a history. Scorsese’s story is about such a people.
There is much anger and much sadness in his film, which is why it is so important. In Sri Lanka, however, important movies rarely get shown everywhere: Oppenheimer became an exception because this country is one giant Christopher Nolan fan club. Martin Scorsese, on the other hand, plays to a more esoteric crowd. If it is hard to take to his films at once, it is because the act of watching his films is an art in itself. Yet even going by this criterion, Killers of the Flower Moon seems to me as relevant as Oppenheimer.
After decades of making films about selfless white cowboys shooting down savage and brutish “Red” Indians, John Ford directed Cheyenne Autumn (1964), a highly dramatized retelling of the forced expulsion of American Indians. Killers of the Flower Moon takes place long after this episode, when one tribe, the Osages, discover oil on their land in Oklahoma and become the richest people per capita in the world. Scorsese does not fudge around with niceties in his story. Despite the film’s epic length – like Oppenheimer it runs for three hours – he cuts straight to the chase: the white characters are all schemers, and they have made it their life’s mission to kill the Osages and plunder their wealth.
What makes Killers of the Flower Moon so interesting, and ultimately relevant, is the point of view it adopts. There is hardly any attempt at humanising the white characters: even the “hero”, played by an eminently bankable star (Leonardo DiCaprio), is detestable, and only towards the end does he feel some remorse. Some criticisms of the film have targeted the supposed impassivity of the Indian characters: they accept their fates and move on, though they know their “kindly” white neighbours may not be so kindly after all.
Other criticisms point out that while attempting to depict what happened to the Osage community and country, Scorsese reinforces white saviour narratives, represented by the triumph of Tom White, the federal agent investigating the murders.
These criticisms must be addressed. It is true that their impassivity dehumanises the Indian characters, rendering them helpless before their white “benefactors.” It is also true that the film implies that were it not for the (tellingly named) White, the Osages would have been murdered into extinction. But these two plotlines are needed in the film.
On the one hand, the Osages trusted their benefactors, and felt they had no reason to doubt their motives. On the other hand, while White’s investigations did put the murderers on trial, none of those trials amounted to much, given how most of the murderers were given parole and how the Osage murders were swept under the carpet and soon forgotten. Scorsese’s point, in this regard, isn’t just that these murders took place, but that they took place in so grisly a way that they cannot and should not be forgotten.
That is why he refuses to give us an obligatory finale. A film of this sort would typically end with title cards informing us of what happened to the perpetrators, the victims, how the Osage community lives on today, and how such episodes should shake our conscience and make us confront and reconsider our histories. Instead the director gives us a Brechtian detour in the form of a live-performed radio show, where we are told of the fates of the murderers and the relatives of their victims. He does not oblige us with happily ever afters: the investigations did stop the murders, but nothing concrete came from them for the victims’ families. With this, Scorsese punctures the plot: there can be no traditional heroes or characters in this film, he implies: only villains and victims.
Hidden deep beneath the surface, and between the lines, is a snide critique of American exceptionalism. This critique centres on the character of the ranch owner and political boss Willliam Hale (Robert de Niro). Hale is a typical white hero: self-made, wealthy, smug but seemingly humble, almost always smiling, a benefactor of the Osages. He wants to usher in a Great 20th Century for them. In his own way, he is a symbol of the empiric streak which makes up much of American history after the 18th century. He doesn’t so much patronise as condescend to the Osages, their history, their way of life. Like a typical colonial official, he learns their language, their customs, and pretends to be their champion. One of the virtues of this film is that it reveals his intentions from the start, allowing us to see him for who he is and not for who he is assumed to be by his victims.
As I entered the final 15 minutes of the film, with the murderers being put behind bars and the victims coming to terms with the true nature of their benefactors, I realised how much its message resonated with the present moment. As I contemplated the lives of the many Osages murdered, their families uncared for and uncompensated, I reflected on the West’s duplicity today, on how it pontificates on the same values it saw fit to violate, with impunity, a century or so ago. Then I reflected on how far the world has changed, and how united the Global South has become against that duplicity and hypocrisy.
In the Osages, moreover, I saw the ancestors, not so much of American Indians today, as of the women and children of Gaza, forced into concentration camps and threatened with genocidal extinction. Some films do not date well. Some do. Scorsese’s film doubtless will, and that is why it is one of the year’s best.
The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.
Uditha Writes 