Killers of the Flower Moon and the Art of Perspective
American stories and who we choose to center
Martin Scorsese movies are known for their turn. Like a record scratch before the flip from Side A to Side B, there’s always a moment where, for lack of a better term, it all goes to shit. Where the fun stops and life comes out of nowhere to smack our characters in the face with a little thing called consequences.
In Goodfellas, extramarital relations and cocaine spell disaster for Henry Hill, who succumbs to the temptations of his vice as excess becomes his downfall. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, on the heels of a plea deal that would get the IRS and FBI off his back in exchange for stepping away from his company, gets on stage in front of his pack, and screams, “I ain’t going nowhere.” These are men who can’t help but get in their own way. And Scorsese’s greatest trick is casting the same spell on his audience. We can’t get enough until it all becomes too much and the world comes crashing down… the walls closing in.
It may be natural to go into Scorsese’s newest feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, expecting much of the same. After all, Killers touches on many of the same themes the director has circled throughout his career. It’s a movie about crime, spirituality, sin, and greed; but most importantly, it’s a movie about America. But if you went in expecting a rollicking Scorsese crime epic, you will be waiting around for 200 minutes only to walk out disappointed that the fun never came. Leaving the theater, you’ll feel the same pervading, encroaching, and inescapable sense of dread that drips throughout the entire movie. After 80 years and at least ten full-blown masterpieces, the old and weathered director still has new things to say. And it would behoove us all to listen.
Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, Killers of the Flower of Moon centers on the decades-long conspiracy centering white Oklahomans who slowly murdered and pillaged the wealthy Osage population that surrounded them. While the book documents the Bureau of Investigation’s plodding inquiry into the murders in a more procedural fashion, the film tells a much different story. Scorsese shifts his focus to the relationship between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), his wife Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), and his uncle, William ‘King’ Hale (Robert DeNiro).
The movie opens as Ernest returns from serving in World War I. He didn’t fight. He cooked for the army. And the first scene with his uncle shows he’s truly dumb as rocks. With a big ole frown, plastered on teeth, and a thick, hokey accent, DiCaprio immediately shows Ernest as someone with very little self-worth and no purpose or desire for anything aside from women and money. We follow him as he begins working for Mollie as her chauffeur and later pursues her romantically. The domestic narrative is set across a sweeping landscape and fully realized environment that brings to life the native and white Americans who lived in Oklahoma at the time. Scorsese efficiently lays out a history where the Osage were forcibly removed from their original land to new territory, and by a measure of luck, the barren land they were given was anything but, with a cornucopia of oil below it- black gold waiting to be extracted, making the Native owners of the land on which it rested the richest community in the world.
Much has been made of the perspective Scorsese chooses to center in Killers. In fact, the original Eric Roth script was much different. The first iteration followed the book more faithfully and was told from the perspective of agent Tom White. It was a procedural and a whodunnit, where White (originally slated to be played by DiCaprio), came in and solved the murders of Mollie Burkhart’s sisters and mother. According to Scorsese, once DiCaprio got his hands on it, he asked, “Where’s the heart of the story,” and found the answer in the Osage people and the people of Oklahoma- the victims and even the perpetrators of the heinous crimes. And so instead of a slow burn where the truth of the evil is revealed during the final third of the movie, you find out who the killers are within the first twenty minutes.1
“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” It’s a question featured prominently in the film’s first trailer, and a theme throughout the movie. The wolves are easy to find. They’re everywhere. The camera shows them as it slowly meanders through crowds of white folks staring at the wealthy Osage like hungry predators ready to pounce. Some might ask, where’s the drama in knowing the villain in the first few minutes of a 206-minute movie? Where’s the drama in revealing the narrative center of the movie barely after it starts?
Then, some chastise the film for not showing enough of the Osage experience. It’s a movie about the systematic killing of native people, with two of its three leads being white men. It’s a fair critique. And to be sure, there should absolutely be more films written and directed by Native folks about the native experience. But when it comes down to it, the question central to both arguments asks why we spend so much time with the perpetrators instead of the victims (the Osage) or the heroes (the FBI). The answer is in the penultimate scene.
In a typical movie, the epilogue slides across a black screen. Statements fade on and off the screen, documenting the rest of the characters’ lives beyond what’s shown in the film. Killers of the Flower Moon concludes differently. After a gut-wrenching final scene between Ernest and Mollie, Scorsese cuts to a live radio show sometime in the not-so-distant future. Presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a charismatic host wizzes through the outcomes of the events we saw depicted during the three hours before. He’s joined on stage by a live orchestra that emphasizes the emotionality of every one of his words, and a stage crew creating live sound effects. It’s all intended to illicit drama and intrigue. Oooohs and aahs emanate from the audience as we discover the fate of Ernest Burkhart and William Hale. Lastly, Mollie Burkhart. After a brief mention of her death, her eulogy is read aloud. But not by the radio host. By Martin Scorsese himself. He looks out into the audience, at us, and elegiacally delivers his homage to her. He finishes by reminding the audience that in her eulogy, there was no mention of the murders of her family.
Unlike the self-flagellating endings of far more autobiographical films, Scorsese uses his own persona to contrast this work with what came before. The radio show by the FBI is intended to inform but mostly entertain. Much like true crime podcasts and documentaries do today, these stories are consumed by audiences without sympathy for the victim. They focus on the detective work, inviting audiences to play along as sleuths and imagine their own role as pursuers of justice and the ultimate defenders of American values. But similar to the last true crime documentary you binged on Netflix, they do all of this while entertaining. In a way, they share DNA with Scorsese movies. Just like Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, this live radio show tells the story of an American criminal with kineticism and showmanship. The consequences are part of the narrative, but only because they fulfill the narrative arc.
This penultimate scene displays the type of spectacle that a movie about these murders could’ve become- a carnival of complicity revealed only later to be deeply insidious. But by subverting the audience’s expectations of a typical Scorsese movie and creating a film that is intentionally not entertaining nor fun, Killers of the Flower Moon honors the rich culture of the Osage people, the profound tragedy of their systematic elimination, and the unabashed evil and greed of the perpetrators.
“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Scorsese asks this obvious question because it’s important to him that we see the wolves. It’s what makes this film simultaneously in concert with the rest of his filmography but such a departure as well. Killers of the Flower Moon is about everything a Scorsese movie is usually about, but this time, there’s no room for misinterpretation. The wolves are wolves. It’s a movie that, much like its characters, traps and slowly poisons you. There’s no escape. There’s no reprieve. Just a slow, heart-wrenching, elegiac death.
“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” This time, Martin Scorsese makes sure you can.
https://variety.com/2023/film/news/martin-scorsese-paramount-rejecting-flower-moon-dicaprio-improv-1235760642/
I would actually argue the FBI are not the heroes of the film! I think the purpose of the radio show — which ends up making fun of the whole situation as if it wasn’t horribly painful and traumatizing — was to demonstrate that mainstream American history treats the genocide of Native Americans as a spectacle, or a blip. The show is totally trivializing and disrespectful, but that actually nails the way that white Americans fail to deliver justice to native Americans. Scorsese taking the stage to talk about the eventual exoneration of Hale (likely due to his wealth/whiteness/political connections), Ernest and Byron’s respective releases from prison, and the omission of Mollie’s family’s murders from her obituary demonstrates the total failure of the state/mainstream political establishment (eg., the FBI) to actually pursue meaningful justice on behalf of the Osage. We WANT the FBI to be the hero/savior so badly that the narrative part of the film ends the way it does, but in the true crime retelling years in the future, we learn that there were no real heroes for the Osage.