Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon opens with a holy man’s prayer before a burial. Curiously, this rite doesn’t feature a human body. It’s a pipe. “Tomorrow we will bury this one,” he says, as if speaking about a departed friend. “It is time to bury this pipe with dignity, and put away its teachings.” It’s a totem imbued with life, carrying with it the whole history of the Osage people, as the children—seen peering into the dome hut—“will learn new ways” under the dominion of the whites who will take charge of a new generation’s language, education and religion. A procession carries the pipe outside, and it is reverently buried beneath the weeping prairie.
The film cuts to lifeless dirt and a low rumble, oil bubbling to the surface. Bursting into the sun, the black shower anoints some dancing Osage. This beleaguered people, after wandering so long through the continent, have at last been blessed by Providence.
But this ostensible blessing swerves into grave misfortune. Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction account of the 1920s Osage murders in Oklahoma, where dozens of Native Americans were killed for their oil-rich headrights by a widespread cabal of white residents wanting to capitalize on the oil boom. Grann’s book is a procedural, where the mysterious deaths of dozens of Osage become the focus of the newly minted Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scorsese (who collaborated on the screenplay with Eric Roth) turns it into a tragic American myth. He descends into an intimate corridor of the history—centered on the doomed marriage of an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), to a white man, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio)—showing how the ideals of the republic are undermined by human greed. This conflict is more than narrative motif; it surrounds the film’s whole existence, a spare-no-expense epic (reportedly $200 million) made under the aegis of the Apple corporation.
Whatever its artistry, like all studio movies Killers of the Flower Moon is a corporate product, and its narrative a commodity. No one knows this better than Scorsese, who in a 2021 Harper’s essay lamented that “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’” Scorsese even nods to this paradox in his latest film’s epilogue, where the fates of the characters with whom we lived and suffered for 195 minutes are now repurposed into air-wave content for a Lucky Strike Cigarettes-sponsored true-crime radio show. Can we still feel history reverberating through all the bells and whistles, the canned noise and cheap audience clapter, or are the heartbreak of Mollie, sins of Ernest and multitude of outrageous deaths little more than content streaming in the ether?
Killers of the Flower Moon’s dominating mood is funereal, and it’s a film that wonders about our relationship to the dead, its chorus of funerals for its forgotten players like prayers to keep the history dramatized in the film etched in memory before the film goes where all films now go, into the great stream of content. Indeed, a question the film is asking has to do with its own usefulness, or the usefulness of any art in an age of algorithmically engineered taste, the primacy of the profit motive and the looming threat to human creativity posed by AI—to say nothing of the charnel house of history where the significance of billions of lives are muted by humankind’s knack for atrocity atop atrocity.
What’s the use of a film? Or a funeral? And what do we care?
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Throughout his nearly sixty-year career, Scorsese has used cinema as a medium where images, edits, sounds and music draw us into characters’ inner lives, where prayers become more than mere words and images more than external phenomena. For him, cinema is sacramental. Objects and gestures bear ferocious human sentiment, and in the most indelible shots of his films—the violent clashes of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, the crucifixions in The Last Temptation of Christ, the sand paintings woven into the Dalai Lama’s escape in Kundun, or Christ at last speaking through a battered portrait in Silence—motion pictures become canvases of spiritual meaning, the subjectivity of the characters we witness refracted back onto us. The camera captures time, which in the artist’s hands is stylistically augmented and unspooled in motion and the projector’s light, creating a holy intimation of immortality, a means of reconciling with death. Now in his crepuscular late period, Killers of the Flower Moon not only exercises this theme but, as the epilogue reminds us, wrestles with it. Scorsese admonishes us to see and pay witness.
From the very first frame, Scorsese drives home the idea of cinema as not just an animating force but a soul-giving one. The solemnity of the pipe ceremony and the flickering stock footage of oil bubbling through the ground explodes into rapture: silent movie footage introduces us to the wealthy Osage, a “chosen people of chance,” with their stylish automobiles, fine clothes and prestigious schools, flying planes and playing golf at their leisure. We soon see a morbid roll call of lively figures playing football, dining with family and mugging for their close-ups before the images starkly cut to their respective corpses laid out in empty rooms. After a silent century, the long-forgotten dead are, through big-budget movie mimesis, resurrected. Just as quickly, though, the dead are shuffled off screen and out of history, the truth of their deaths—and the abundant content and potential of their lives—conveniently swept away with “no investigation.”
Black and white fades into color as Ernest returns home from war to composer Robbie Robertson’s waltzing guitars—the camera encircling him like the embrace of his uncle, cattle baron William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), at the family ranch. The classical Hollywood Western stylings of Ernest’s homecoming demonstrate how the whites have infiltrated this world and assumed full narrative supremacy in a film that just a few minutes ago wasn’t theirs at all. It’s an ironic setup, reflective of the nation’s own historical arc. In 1783, after America won its war for independence, General George Washington proclaimed that the nation’s (white) citizens were “Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre” of the vast continental interior—the original cast, Native American residents, absent and unacknowledged.
Ernest and Mollie’s love story is corrupted from the start. By the time they meet, we already know that Ernest’s intentions are not pure: Hale has been prodding him to marry an Osage to gain access to their oil headrights, which can only be inherited, not bought, and the full-blood Osage spinster Mollie makes for an appealing target. Still, Ernest’s courtship doesn’t read as duplicitous; his affection feels genuine. During their courtship, she exhibits rhetorical dominance and points out how she knows he’s a “coyote who wants money,” which opens up an unexpected air of apparent frankness. “That money’s real nice,” he admits, but he also just wants to be settled. His stilted clumsiness carries with it a tenderness that endears him to her. At their wedding, one of Mollie’s sisters comes down with a mysterious “wasting illness,” and dies soon after. Before long, a cascade of her family members will die under suspicious circumstances, murdered by Hale and his cronies, and Mollie herself will fall ill, poisoned at the hands of her own husband.
By the time the new Bureau of Investigation closes in, headed by stalwart Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons), Ernest is trapped in a thicket of his misdeeds. He chooses to testify against his uncle in a plea deal to “go back home.” His “home,” of course, was built on a foundation of sin, and there is no going back. Mollie recuperates but is heartbroken, knowing that her family’s tragedy was just one of many similar ones happening to the Osage. She cannot forgive Ernest, who goes to prison, as does Hale. Mollie will die in 1937 and be buried close to her mother, sisters and daughter, her griefs and lamentations buried with her. What’s left of her life is now fodder for FBI propaganda on the radio—and prestige content available to stream on Apple TV.
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Even the dead can’t rest: their graves are regularly defiled. The town undertaker customarily removes family jewels buried with the Osage corpses, and rowdy miscreants rob them for whatever’s left. The desecration doesn’t stop there. During the autopsy of one of Mollie’s sisters, the doctors (both white) cut into her head to find a bullet, but there’s no question, as Scorsese films it, that the procedure is a vicious scalping. Likewise, when would-be rescuers find another of her sisters dead, her house a smoking ruins, the back of her head sticks to the floorboard as they lift her.
What is scalping? According to an account written by the nineteenth-century Indian hunter James Hobbs, “Business men always took receipts, and I wanted something to show our success.” Another hunter, Richard Irving Dodge, wrote in 1882, “Scalping is annihilation; the soul ceases to exist … Let the scalp be torn off, and the body becomes mere carrion, not even worthy of burial.” William Hale just wants his headrights. He doesn’t care about “receipts” or “spiritual annihilation.” But through his stylized—and grotesque—artistic prism, Scorsese presents these deaths for what they are: frontier murders where the victims have been scalped for financial incentive, and where their worth as human beings becomes negligible once they’ve been cashed in. (Hale hammers the point repeatedly that the Osage are a sick people whose time is up. “In the turning of the Earth, they’re gonna go!” he says in a Freemason temple. Hale’s speech again recalls George Washington—also a Freemason—who heralded the Enlightenment’s triumph over the “gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition” and wrote in 1767 that the displacement of the Indians was inevitable. Democratic ideals, much less moralism, are no match for historical necessity.1
This callous and indifferent attitude toward human life—wherein everything is instrumental in the march toward progress and prosperity, and a once-living body is nothing more than a decaying vessel of decomposing guts—is contrasted with the Osage’s religious ceremonies, where the living pay homage to their ancestors and give offerings to the dead for their afterlife journey. Mollie’s family, notably, are also practicing Catholics. Scorsese, a former seminarian, probably saw the similarities between the Osage pipe ceremony and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, an enduring link between the living and the dead. That the white leaders of Fairfax are likely Protestants is, I think, a significant—however oblique—factor in how we parse out one of the central conflicts in the story, between the sacred, which humbles and mystifies, and the secular, which offers the promise (or illusion) of mastery. During the Reformation, the prayer over funeral rites changed from “I commend thy soul to God and thy body to the ground” (as if speaking to the departed as if he or she was still there) to “We commit his body to the ground.” The departed is gone, and there’s no sense in lighting candles or saying prayers to them as they purge their sins in now-abolished Purgatory. Life belongs solely to the living.
This is not how the Osage experience the world. The world above and below us is interconnected, speaking to us. The sun and moon have familial relation to the earth. All senses porously blend. During a storm, Mollie instructs Ernest to keep open the window he was about to close, then to sit with her (shushing him more than once), so they can be together absorbed into the sound of thunder and rain. When Mollie and her mother Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) are visited by owls—harbingers of death—it’s not necessarily an inner vision separate from the tapestry of the film’s mimetic reality. For the onlooker, the owl is real and present. The film’s most spectral sequence is the death of Lizzie. She is on her deathbed, surrounded by family tending to her, and the sound goes out. She opens her eyes and sees a shamanic figure with two of her ancestors, smiling, beckoning her to rise and follow. The moment is emotionally arresting and overwhelming, a suspension from the confusion and sorrow that precedes and follows it, but it is presented very sparsely—no music or whooshing sound that might serve to signal that these are supernatural visitors from another world. The scene very naturally conveys a character’s perspective that others—Ernest and Hale perhaps foremost—are simply not psychologically disposed to experience. The sound comes back up, a woman is dead, and we’re left with her loved ones’ grief.
Such porousness extends to how the audience experiences the film. As with the living and the dead, in Killers of the Flower Moon good and evil flow together, often uncomfortably for a modern audience paying witness to Ernest, who’s contemptible but not at all beneath our sympathy. It is true that he loves Mollie and is avariciously, murderously complicit in the plot to destroy her. The film embodies this cognitive dissonance, such that we experience it, embroiled in the confusion. Early on we see Ernest drunkenly walking out of a saloon at dawn after gambling away all the cherished trinkets he robbed from some Osage the night before. “Dawn was always a sacred time for prayers,” Ernest says in voice-over—reading from an Osage history book—and the image cuts to a golden cove where Lizzie prays to the rising sun. In a single cut, the profane and sacred are twisted together. Ernest and Mollie’s wedding radiates with an earnest warmth complemented by Robinson’s glimmering music, even though we’re all too aware of how this picture full of smiles and promises is stalked by hungry wolves in waiting.
The audience might then find themselves wishing, against their better judgment, for Hale’s cut-and-dry perspectivism. Hale, who prides himself on bringing the Osage “into the great twentieth century,” sees the world in as stark black-and-white as the pattern on the Masonic temple’s checkered floor. While angrily complaining about a botched murder where the hitman shot his target in the back of the head when it was supposed to look like a suicide, Hale spits, “The front is the front! The back is the back!” Or, later on, when arguing with an insurance man about the geographic significance of a particular claim, “You keep saying Denver. It’s not Denver, it’s Fairfax!” Such outbursts reinforce an absolutist worldview where everything stays in its own lane. The appeal of such a view is not hard to understand while watching the film: we want to believe good is good, evil is evil. But that’s the same disposition that would decree a pipe is just a pipe. Hale’s utilitarian individualism (where the only thing another person stands for in his eyes is an insurance claim or inheritance windfall) is, in the context of the film’s mythological mosaic, the chief antagonist to the ineffable wholeness of a Great Spirit.
A metaphor for the impulse to seal and separate life into neat categories while subsuming the world around him, Hale is drawn in the mold of an Old Testament tyrant (his nickname is “King”), a hungry leviathan who demands blood sacrifices for land. It’s one of De Niro’s best performances—he is a figure of beguiling charm, with a good humor that cloaks bottomless indifference. While the bow-tied dandy appearance necessarily carries the baggage of our memories of De Niro’s vicious characters from Taxi Driver, The Untouchables, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, etc., there’s an almost cosmological aspect to Hale that makes him even more frightening. The white supremacy he represents goes beyond race and commingles with the meditations of Herman Melville (one of Scorsese’s favorite writers) in Moby-Dick: whiteness as representative of a consuming leviathan, utter annihilation, blankness, the “colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” Hale has the habit of quoting Bible verses ad nauseam (another one of his nicknames is “Reverend”), but we get no deeper insight into his reflection of modernity’s cold indifference than when he says, leaning in close to Ernest: “You believe in the Bible? Miracles of old? … You know they don’t happen anymore.” Most disconcertingly, Hale is not wrong. When Ernest decides to break with Hale and testify against him, Hale predicts accurately that the Bureau will not hold to any plea deals. And Hale is also correct when he says, “People forget. They don’t care.” The violent steamroller of history will keep moving long after the trial, and long after Scorsese’s film.
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And yet we see that miracles do occur and the dead may still speak (as art may). Mollie dreams of her mother telling her that she needs to talk to “the man in the hat.” Ernest dismisses this as a nonsensical raving born of Mollie’s worsening illness, but as he exits the bedroom he hears a knock at the front door. For someone with the mindset of Hale, a knock could just be a knock. But for Scorsese—whose first feature was Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, about a young Catholic man’s disturbed conscience—that knocking is God. (It’s a reference to Jesus knocking in Revelation 3:20.) Standing at the door is indeed a man in a big Stetson hat, Agent Tom White, who will eventually arrest Ernest and Hale, and whose agents will rehabilitate Mollie.
While Ernest buys some time, getting White to agree to come back later, his psychological unraveling accelerates. As Hale’s ranch burns outside (he set a fire to collect on the insurance), Ernest has a drink and administers Mollie’s tainted insulin. In and out of consciousness, she tells him, “You’re next.” Disturbed, he pours a narcotic into his whiskey, drinking the poison he’s administering, sharing in Mollie’s decimation. As the fiery haze surrounds the windows, Ernest finds himself in hell, Hale’s blurred ranchers with their shovels like demonic specters. On the soundtrack is Blind Willie Johnson’s wailing blues track “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” the title a reference to Christ praying at Gethsemane before his arrest and trial. The song is used famously—and anachronistically—in one of Scorsese’s favorite films, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), though not during the night at Gethsemane, but rather when the aggrieved traitor Judas sees his beloved master Jesus condemned and says, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” throwing back the thirty pieces of silver. Killers of the Flower Moon is about a great betrayal after a long line of broken treaties. Scorsese—who has given us sympathetic Judas figures before in The Last Temptation of Christ’s Judas and the serial apostate Kichjiro in Silence—introduces Ernest with a gut hernia, the very mark of Judas Iscariot, the archetypal betrayer whose intestines burst open over the Field of Blood.
Hale and his associates pull off their crimes without inhibition, yet Ernest is a stuttering sinner, an all-too-human miscreant whose weak will is subservient to incontinent appetites and his uncle’s whims. What makes him different? Ernest is watchful, and particularly with Mollie, who is framed so memorably in his cab’s rearview mirror, and whom he comes to “look on” with his hands. In seeing her, there’s a sense that he might have the hope of recognizing his own integrity. Gladstone’s probing gaze back at Ernest digs deep enough to uncover a truer, undiscovered self beneath his bullshit, and when he lies to her, we see a man who might as well be lying to himself. DiCaprio can be accused of overplaying, but he’s deliberately giving a kabuki performance here, his face masklike, Ernest’s false teeth denoting something artificial to his speech. By his birth, privilege and associations, Ernest is doomed when we first see him, and finally we see him psychologically lacerated in the hell of his own making, like Judas in Satan’s jaws in Dante’s Inferno. Flies surround him like a rotting corpse. He thinks he’s living life but really—echoing the protagonist of Scorsese’s previous narrative film, Frank Sheeran in The Irishman—he’s perpetually dying his death.
Killers of the Flower Moon thus overleaps the tropes of period moviemaking, descending into an unsavory fever dream induced by the psychological discord of living under totalizing power and greed. In an episode that mirrors the tragedy of Ernest and Mollie’s relationship—set almost exactly at the film’s midpoint—Hale’s friend, Henry Roan (William Belleau), and his hired killer, Ramsey, drink, play cards and entertain prostitutes together, laughing and ostensibly growing close. While driving together on the prairie to get some stowed moonshine, Ramsey tells Roan to wait, exits the car, and shoots Roan in the back of the head. Back in town, Ramsey tells Ernest that the job is done, but he’s visibly troubled, giving the pistol back and saying, “I’m done with this outfit.” Though he is a racist who dislikes Indians, it’s implied that Ramsey had inadvertently found a genuine friend in his victim. He might have bungled the murder not just out of foolhardy drunkenness but guilt, which prevents him from looking his mark in the face. (The bullet in the back of the head shows the murder for what it is: yet another scalping.) What’s curious about how this episode is presented is how, again, the spiritual and metaphorical dimension breaks through the plot. Before the murder takes place, we see oil workers, slicked black, looking at the two men, even though there’s no indication that Ramsey and Roan are anywhere near an oil-pump outpost. We’ve entered the realm of metaphor, and these tar-colored workers function—like in a Bosch painting—as demons looking on as a mortal sin is carried out.
Ramsey is played by Ty Mitchell, who has one of the most indelible countenances in a recent movie. He tells the feds to “get your pencils” and spills the beans, owning up to everything. I think we’re meant to compare his face to DiCaprio’s strenuous affectations, his expressions denoting a man in flight from who he is and what he’s done. At the end, after he testifies publicly in court, Ernest still cannot confess “all the truths” to Mollie, facing up to what he put in her insulin needles. Gladstone’s face radiates scorching heartbreak, screaming through her silent expression. She walks away as he sinks deeper into himself, unforgiven, unsalvable, dead to his wife, and perhaps wishing he were dead himself. The only other man in the room, Plemons’s Agent White, is compelled to look away from a sight so pathetic. At least Judas hanged himself in his despair, and Oedipus clawed out his eyes when he saw the truth of what he’d done.
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These theological dimensions of Killers of the Flower Moon have commanded much less attention than its politics, which were predictably hashed out in reviews and on social media immediately following the film’s fall release. Some on the right scoffed that Scorsese had “gone woke,” surrendering to identitarian political trends and white guilt. Some more progressive viewers were critical of how the indigenous victims are overshadowed by their colonial victimizers. The film, they argued, was little more than a self-congratulatory tale by a revered Hollywood director acting out his white savior complex while glossing over the government’s role in perpetrating the genocide. Scorsese would likely shrug at such complaints. As his films go, Killers of the Flower Moon is not uniquely left-wing (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Gangs of New York, The Departed and Silence all deal with formidable and indifferent political systems quashing disempowered groups and individuals.) Nor is Scorsese’s formal approach sentimental or pearl-clutching: he doesn’t need to demonstrate how Mollie Burkhart is a “strong woman” with crowd-pleasing affirmations; the character as performed by Gladstone more than adequately conveys her fortitude. As for representation, the multiplicity of perspectives—including those of the guiltiest—is consistent with a work that wants to be honest with the viewer. Scorsese refuses to other the Osage or their victimizers.
While responding to charges from the film’s detractors, some critics (myself included) have tended to look to the epilogue in order to defend Scorsese and decode his true intentions. Indeed, it’s not inaccurate to recognize the scene as a self-reflexive gesture on the director’s part: the epic story of the Osage, directed and cowritten by a white director speaking directly to his audience, will become little more than mass entertainment. The craft is magnificent, the performances impeccable, the ten Oscar nominations secured, and hey, everybody got paid! For three and a half hours, viewers may be captivated and moved but, as Hale remarked, they’ll probably forget and move on with their lives, grabbing some chips and binging the next season of Love Is Blind.
And yet, there is more to the ending than this cynicism. After the director himself admits the limitations of his art, we are given one more ritual to break through our knowingness. Even at his most jaded—about American history, Hollywood, human nature—81-year-old Scorsese has not lost his faith in filmmaking as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation if not redemption.
The last image of the film begins with a close-up of a drum. The camera pulls back to show the Osage, today, dancing around it. The weathered drum looks like a full moon, the colorful formation around it look like petals—as if the film’s title were being translated into visual form—the image shot in the same space where so many of their ancestors were killed. The dance showing the flower moon is a victory over metaphor. And then, look closer. As the exposure begins to dim, this flower-like formation marrying the sky and earth transmutes into something grander, a revolving milky way, as if we’re moving through the stars. The credits roll, the Osage song ends, and for those of us still with the film, we sit—as Mollie would advise us—and quietly absorb the prairie storm sounds in porous surrender. Of course Scorsese recognizes that his art, even this mythic tragedy, is inevitably subject to and implicated in the cold blankness of capitalism, or colonialism, or American imperialism. But the film’s finale stands up as a final salvo against it. That’s what art aspires to do, whatever its limitations, like a prayer whispered against the great white nothing. Even that blankness is but one mote in an unfathomable cosmos that permeates and surrounds it, an awesome and humbling fullness in which all history is woven together.
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon opens with a holy man’s prayer before a burial. Curiously, this rite doesn’t feature a human body. It’s a pipe. “Tomorrow we will bury this one,” he says, as if speaking about a departed friend. “It is time to bury this pipe with dignity, and put away its teachings.” It’s a totem imbued with life, carrying with it the whole history of the Osage people, as the children—seen peering into the dome hut—“will learn new ways” under the dominion of the whites who will take charge of a new generation’s language, education and religion. A procession carries the pipe outside, and it is reverently buried beneath the weeping prairie.
The film cuts to lifeless dirt and a low rumble, oil bubbling to the surface. Bursting into the sun, the black shower anoints some dancing Osage. This beleaguered people, after wandering so long through the continent, have at last been blessed by Providence.
But this ostensible blessing swerves into grave misfortune. Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction account of the 1920s Osage murders in Oklahoma, where dozens of Native Americans were killed for their oil-rich headrights by a widespread cabal of white residents wanting to capitalize on the oil boom. Grann’s book is a procedural, where the mysterious deaths of dozens of Osage become the focus of the newly minted Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scorsese (who collaborated on the screenplay with Eric Roth) turns it into a tragic American myth. He descends into an intimate corridor of the history—centered on the doomed marriage of an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), to a white man, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio)—showing how the ideals of the republic are undermined by human greed. This conflict is more than narrative motif; it surrounds the film’s whole existence, a spare-no-expense epic (reportedly $200 million) made under the aegis of the Apple corporation.
Whatever its artistry, like all studio movies Killers of the Flower Moon is a corporate product, and its narrative a commodity. No one knows this better than Scorsese, who in a 2021 Harper’s essay lamented that “the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’” Scorsese even nods to this paradox in his latest film’s epilogue, where the fates of the characters with whom we lived and suffered for 195 minutes are now repurposed into air-wave content for a Lucky Strike Cigarettes-sponsored true-crime radio show. Can we still feel history reverberating through all the bells and whistles, the canned noise and cheap audience clapter, or are the heartbreak of Mollie, sins of Ernest and multitude of outrageous deaths little more than content streaming in the ether?
Killers of the Flower Moon’s dominating mood is funereal, and it’s a film that wonders about our relationship to the dead, its chorus of funerals for its forgotten players like prayers to keep the history dramatized in the film etched in memory before the film goes where all films now go, into the great stream of content. Indeed, a question the film is asking has to do with its own usefulness, or the usefulness of any art in an age of algorithmically engineered taste, the primacy of the profit motive and the looming threat to human creativity posed by AI—to say nothing of the charnel house of history where the significance of billions of lives are muted by humankind’s knack for atrocity atop atrocity.
What’s the use of a film? Or a funeral? And what do we care?
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Throughout his nearly sixty-year career, Scorsese has used cinema as a medium where images, edits, sounds and music draw us into characters’ inner lives, where prayers become more than mere words and images more than external phenomena. For him, cinema is sacramental. Objects and gestures bear ferocious human sentiment, and in the most indelible shots of his films—the violent clashes of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, the crucifixions in The Last Temptation of Christ, the sand paintings woven into the Dalai Lama’s escape in Kundun, or Christ at last speaking through a battered portrait in Silence—motion pictures become canvases of spiritual meaning, the subjectivity of the characters we witness refracted back onto us. The camera captures time, which in the artist’s hands is stylistically augmented and unspooled in motion and the projector’s light, creating a holy intimation of immortality, a means of reconciling with death. Now in his crepuscular late period, Killers of the Flower Moon not only exercises this theme but, as the epilogue reminds us, wrestles with it. Scorsese admonishes us to see and pay witness.
From the very first frame, Scorsese drives home the idea of cinema as not just an animating force but a soul-giving one. The solemnity of the pipe ceremony and the flickering stock footage of oil bubbling through the ground explodes into rapture: silent movie footage introduces us to the wealthy Osage, a “chosen people of chance,” with their stylish automobiles, fine clothes and prestigious schools, flying planes and playing golf at their leisure. We soon see a morbid roll call of lively figures playing football, dining with family and mugging for their close-ups before the images starkly cut to their respective corpses laid out in empty rooms. After a silent century, the long-forgotten dead are, through big-budget movie mimesis, resurrected. Just as quickly, though, the dead are shuffled off screen and out of history, the truth of their deaths—and the abundant content and potential of their lives—conveniently swept away with “no investigation.”
Black and white fades into color as Ernest returns home from war to composer Robbie Robertson’s waltzing guitars—the camera encircling him like the embrace of his uncle, cattle baron William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), at the family ranch. The classical Hollywood Western stylings of Ernest’s homecoming demonstrate how the whites have infiltrated this world and assumed full narrative supremacy in a film that just a few minutes ago wasn’t theirs at all. It’s an ironic setup, reflective of the nation’s own historical arc. In 1783, after America won its war for independence, General George Washington proclaimed that the nation’s (white) citizens were “Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre” of the vast continental interior—the original cast, Native American residents, absent and unacknowledged.
Ernest and Mollie’s love story is corrupted from the start. By the time they meet, we already know that Ernest’s intentions are not pure: Hale has been prodding him to marry an Osage to gain access to their oil headrights, which can only be inherited, not bought, and the full-blood Osage spinster Mollie makes for an appealing target. Still, Ernest’s courtship doesn’t read as duplicitous; his affection feels genuine. During their courtship, she exhibits rhetorical dominance and points out how she knows he’s a “coyote who wants money,” which opens up an unexpected air of apparent frankness. “That money’s real nice,” he admits, but he also just wants to be settled. His stilted clumsiness carries with it a tenderness that endears him to her. At their wedding, one of Mollie’s sisters comes down with a mysterious “wasting illness,” and dies soon after. Before long, a cascade of her family members will die under suspicious circumstances, murdered by Hale and his cronies, and Mollie herself will fall ill, poisoned at the hands of her own husband.
By the time the new Bureau of Investigation closes in, headed by stalwart Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons), Ernest is trapped in a thicket of his misdeeds. He chooses to testify against his uncle in a plea deal to “go back home.” His “home,” of course, was built on a foundation of sin, and there is no going back. Mollie recuperates but is heartbroken, knowing that her family’s tragedy was just one of many similar ones happening to the Osage. She cannot forgive Ernest, who goes to prison, as does Hale. Mollie will die in 1937 and be buried close to her mother, sisters and daughter, her griefs and lamentations buried with her. What’s left of her life is now fodder for FBI propaganda on the radio—and prestige content available to stream on Apple TV.
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Even the dead can’t rest: their graves are regularly defiled. The town undertaker customarily removes family jewels buried with the Osage corpses, and rowdy miscreants rob them for whatever’s left. The desecration doesn’t stop there. During the autopsy of one of Mollie’s sisters, the doctors (both white) cut into her head to find a bullet, but there’s no question, as Scorsese films it, that the procedure is a vicious scalping. Likewise, when would-be rescuers find another of her sisters dead, her house a smoking ruins, the back of her head sticks to the floorboard as they lift her.
What is scalping? According to an account written by the nineteenth-century Indian hunter James Hobbs, “Business men always took receipts, and I wanted something to show our success.” Another hunter, Richard Irving Dodge, wrote in 1882, “Scalping is annihilation; the soul ceases to exist … Let the scalp be torn off, and the body becomes mere carrion, not even worthy of burial.” William Hale just wants his headrights. He doesn’t care about “receipts” or “spiritual annihilation.” But through his stylized—and grotesque—artistic prism, Scorsese presents these deaths for what they are: frontier murders where the victims have been scalped for financial incentive, and where their worth as human beings becomes negligible once they’ve been cashed in. (Hale hammers the point repeatedly that the Osage are a sick people whose time is up. “In the turning of the Earth, they’re gonna go!” he says in a Freemason temple. Hale’s speech again recalls George Washington—also a Freemason—who heralded the Enlightenment’s triumph over the “gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition” and wrote in 1767 that the displacement of the Indians was inevitable. Democratic ideals, much less moralism, are no match for historical necessity.11. It should be noted that after his presidential inauguration, Washington—in large part due to counsel by his Secretary of War, Henry Knox—was conscious of how treatment of the Native Americans was at odds with the nation’s revolutionary ideals. He considered his inability to salve the issue his presidency’s most glaring failure and admitted, “They, poor wretches, have no Press thro’ which their grievances are related; and it is well known, that when one side only of a Story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.”
This callous and indifferent attitude toward human life—wherein everything is instrumental in the march toward progress and prosperity, and a once-living body is nothing more than a decaying vessel of decomposing guts—is contrasted with the Osage’s religious ceremonies, where the living pay homage to their ancestors and give offerings to the dead for their afterlife journey. Mollie’s family, notably, are also practicing Catholics. Scorsese, a former seminarian, probably saw the similarities between the Osage pipe ceremony and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, an enduring link between the living and the dead. That the white leaders of Fairfax are likely Protestants is, I think, a significant—however oblique—factor in how we parse out one of the central conflicts in the story, between the sacred, which humbles and mystifies, and the secular, which offers the promise (or illusion) of mastery. During the Reformation, the prayer over funeral rites changed from “I commend thy soul to God and thy body to the ground” (as if speaking to the departed as if he or she was still there) to “We commit his body to the ground.” The departed is gone, and there’s no sense in lighting candles or saying prayers to them as they purge their sins in now-abolished Purgatory. Life belongs solely to the living.
This is not how the Osage experience the world. The world above and below us is interconnected, speaking to us. The sun and moon have familial relation to the earth. All senses porously blend. During a storm, Mollie instructs Ernest to keep open the window he was about to close, then to sit with her (shushing him more than once), so they can be together absorbed into the sound of thunder and rain. When Mollie and her mother Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) are visited by owls—harbingers of death—it’s not necessarily an inner vision separate from the tapestry of the film’s mimetic reality. For the onlooker, the owl is real and present. The film’s most spectral sequence is the death of Lizzie. She is on her deathbed, surrounded by family tending to her, and the sound goes out. She opens her eyes and sees a shamanic figure with two of her ancestors, smiling, beckoning her to rise and follow. The moment is emotionally arresting and overwhelming, a suspension from the confusion and sorrow that precedes and follows it, but it is presented very sparsely—no music or whooshing sound that might serve to signal that these are supernatural visitors from another world. The scene very naturally conveys a character’s perspective that others—Ernest and Hale perhaps foremost—are simply not psychologically disposed to experience. The sound comes back up, a woman is dead, and we’re left with her loved ones’ grief.
Such porousness extends to how the audience experiences the film. As with the living and the dead, in Killers of the Flower Moon good and evil flow together, often uncomfortably for a modern audience paying witness to Ernest, who’s contemptible but not at all beneath our sympathy. It is true that he loves Mollie and is avariciously, murderously complicit in the plot to destroy her. The film embodies this cognitive dissonance, such that we experience it, embroiled in the confusion. Early on we see Ernest drunkenly walking out of a saloon at dawn after gambling away all the cherished trinkets he robbed from some Osage the night before. “Dawn was always a sacred time for prayers,” Ernest says in voice-over—reading from an Osage history book—and the image cuts to a golden cove where Lizzie prays to the rising sun. In a single cut, the profane and sacred are twisted together. Ernest and Mollie’s wedding radiates with an earnest warmth complemented by Robinson’s glimmering music, even though we’re all too aware of how this picture full of smiles and promises is stalked by hungry wolves in waiting.
The audience might then find themselves wishing, against their better judgment, for Hale’s cut-and-dry perspectivism. Hale, who prides himself on bringing the Osage “into the great twentieth century,” sees the world in as stark black-and-white as the pattern on the Masonic temple’s checkered floor. While angrily complaining about a botched murder where the hitman shot his target in the back of the head when it was supposed to look like a suicide, Hale spits, “The front is the front! The back is the back!” Or, later on, when arguing with an insurance man about the geographic significance of a particular claim, “You keep saying Denver. It’s not Denver, it’s Fairfax!” Such outbursts reinforce an absolutist worldview where everything stays in its own lane. The appeal of such a view is not hard to understand while watching the film: we want to believe good is good, evil is evil. But that’s the same disposition that would decree a pipe is just a pipe. Hale’s utilitarian individualism (where the only thing another person stands for in his eyes is an insurance claim or inheritance windfall) is, in the context of the film’s mythological mosaic, the chief antagonist to the ineffable wholeness of a Great Spirit.
A metaphor for the impulse to seal and separate life into neat categories while subsuming the world around him, Hale is drawn in the mold of an Old Testament tyrant (his nickname is “King”), a hungry leviathan who demands blood sacrifices for land. It’s one of De Niro’s best performances—he is a figure of beguiling charm, with a good humor that cloaks bottomless indifference. While the bow-tied dandy appearance necessarily carries the baggage of our memories of De Niro’s vicious characters from Taxi Driver, The Untouchables, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, etc., there’s an almost cosmological aspect to Hale that makes him even more frightening. The white supremacy he represents goes beyond race and commingles with the meditations of Herman Melville (one of Scorsese’s favorite writers) in Moby-Dick: whiteness as representative of a consuming leviathan, utter annihilation, blankness, the “colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” Hale has the habit of quoting Bible verses ad nauseam (another one of his nicknames is “Reverend”), but we get no deeper insight into his reflection of modernity’s cold indifference than when he says, leaning in close to Ernest: “You believe in the Bible? Miracles of old? … You know they don’t happen anymore.” Most disconcertingly, Hale is not wrong. When Ernest decides to break with Hale and testify against him, Hale predicts accurately that the Bureau will not hold to any plea deals. And Hale is also correct when he says, “People forget. They don’t care.” The violent steamroller of history will keep moving long after the trial, and long after Scorsese’s film.
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And yet we see that miracles do occur and the dead may still speak (as art may). Mollie dreams of her mother telling her that she needs to talk to “the man in the hat.” Ernest dismisses this as a nonsensical raving born of Mollie’s worsening illness, but as he exits the bedroom he hears a knock at the front door. For someone with the mindset of Hale, a knock could just be a knock. But for Scorsese—whose first feature was Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, about a young Catholic man’s disturbed conscience—that knocking is God. (It’s a reference to Jesus knocking in Revelation 3:20.) Standing at the door is indeed a man in a big Stetson hat, Agent Tom White, who will eventually arrest Ernest and Hale, and whose agents will rehabilitate Mollie.
While Ernest buys some time, getting White to agree to come back later, his psychological unraveling accelerates. As Hale’s ranch burns outside (he set a fire to collect on the insurance), Ernest has a drink and administers Mollie’s tainted insulin. In and out of consciousness, she tells him, “You’re next.” Disturbed, he pours a narcotic into his whiskey, drinking the poison he’s administering, sharing in Mollie’s decimation. As the fiery haze surrounds the windows, Ernest finds himself in hell, Hale’s blurred ranchers with their shovels like demonic specters. On the soundtrack is Blind Willie Johnson’s wailing blues track “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” the title a reference to Christ praying at Gethsemane before his arrest and trial. The song is used famously—and anachronistically—in one of Scorsese’s favorite films, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), though not during the night at Gethsemane, but rather when the aggrieved traitor Judas sees his beloved master Jesus condemned and says, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” throwing back the thirty pieces of silver. Killers of the Flower Moon is about a great betrayal after a long line of broken treaties. Scorsese—who has given us sympathetic Judas figures before in The Last Temptation of Christ’s Judas and the serial apostate Kichjiro in Silence—introduces Ernest with a gut hernia, the very mark of Judas Iscariot, the archetypal betrayer whose intestines burst open over the Field of Blood.
Hale and his associates pull off their crimes without inhibition, yet Ernest is a stuttering sinner, an all-too-human miscreant whose weak will is subservient to incontinent appetites and his uncle’s whims. What makes him different? Ernest is watchful, and particularly with Mollie, who is framed so memorably in his cab’s rearview mirror, and whom he comes to “look on” with his hands. In seeing her, there’s a sense that he might have the hope of recognizing his own integrity. Gladstone’s probing gaze back at Ernest digs deep enough to uncover a truer, undiscovered self beneath his bullshit, and when he lies to her, we see a man who might as well be lying to himself. DiCaprio can be accused of overplaying, but he’s deliberately giving a kabuki performance here, his face masklike, Ernest’s false teeth denoting something artificial to his speech. By his birth, privilege and associations, Ernest is doomed when we first see him, and finally we see him psychologically lacerated in the hell of his own making, like Judas in Satan’s jaws in Dante’s Inferno. Flies surround him like a rotting corpse. He thinks he’s living life but really—echoing the protagonist of Scorsese’s previous narrative film, Frank Sheeran in The Irishman—he’s perpetually dying his death.
Killers of the Flower Moon thus overleaps the tropes of period moviemaking, descending into an unsavory fever dream induced by the psychological discord of living under totalizing power and greed. In an episode that mirrors the tragedy of Ernest and Mollie’s relationship—set almost exactly at the film’s midpoint—Hale’s friend, Henry Roan (William Belleau), and his hired killer, Ramsey, drink, play cards and entertain prostitutes together, laughing and ostensibly growing close. While driving together on the prairie to get some stowed moonshine, Ramsey tells Roan to wait, exits the car, and shoots Roan in the back of the head. Back in town, Ramsey tells Ernest that the job is done, but he’s visibly troubled, giving the pistol back and saying, “I’m done with this outfit.” Though he is a racist who dislikes Indians, it’s implied that Ramsey had inadvertently found a genuine friend in his victim. He might have bungled the murder not just out of foolhardy drunkenness but guilt, which prevents him from looking his mark in the face. (The bullet in the back of the head shows the murder for what it is: yet another scalping.) What’s curious about how this episode is presented is how, again, the spiritual and metaphorical dimension breaks through the plot. Before the murder takes place, we see oil workers, slicked black, looking at the two men, even though there’s no indication that Ramsey and Roan are anywhere near an oil-pump outpost. We’ve entered the realm of metaphor, and these tar-colored workers function—like in a Bosch painting—as demons looking on as a mortal sin is carried out.
Ramsey is played by Ty Mitchell, who has one of the most indelible countenances in a recent movie. He tells the feds to “get your pencils” and spills the beans, owning up to everything. I think we’re meant to compare his face to DiCaprio’s strenuous affectations, his expressions denoting a man in flight from who he is and what he’s done. At the end, after he testifies publicly in court, Ernest still cannot confess “all the truths” to Mollie, facing up to what he put in her insulin needles. Gladstone’s face radiates scorching heartbreak, screaming through her silent expression. She walks away as he sinks deeper into himself, unforgiven, unsalvable, dead to his wife, and perhaps wishing he were dead himself. The only other man in the room, Plemons’s Agent White, is compelled to look away from a sight so pathetic. At least Judas hanged himself in his despair, and Oedipus clawed out his eyes when he saw the truth of what he’d done.
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These theological dimensions of Killers of the Flower Moon have commanded much less attention than its politics, which were predictably hashed out in reviews and on social media immediately following the film’s fall release. Some on the right scoffed that Scorsese had “gone woke,” surrendering to identitarian political trends and white guilt. Some more progressive viewers were critical of how the indigenous victims are overshadowed by their colonial victimizers. The film, they argued, was little more than a self-congratulatory tale by a revered Hollywood director acting out his white savior complex while glossing over the government’s role in perpetrating the genocide. Scorsese would likely shrug at such complaints. As his films go, Killers of the Flower Moon is not uniquely left-wing (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Gangs of New York, The Departed and Silence all deal with formidable and indifferent political systems quashing disempowered groups and individuals.) Nor is Scorsese’s formal approach sentimental or pearl-clutching: he doesn’t need to demonstrate how Mollie Burkhart is a “strong woman” with crowd-pleasing affirmations; the character as performed by Gladstone more than adequately conveys her fortitude. As for representation, the multiplicity of perspectives—including those of the guiltiest—is consistent with a work that wants to be honest with the viewer. Scorsese refuses to other the Osage or their victimizers.
While responding to charges from the film’s detractors, some critics (myself included) have tended to look to the epilogue in order to defend Scorsese and decode his true intentions. Indeed, it’s not inaccurate to recognize the scene as a self-reflexive gesture on the director’s part: the epic story of the Osage, directed and cowritten by a white director speaking directly to his audience, will become little more than mass entertainment. The craft is magnificent, the performances impeccable, the ten Oscar nominations secured, and hey, everybody got paid! For three and a half hours, viewers may be captivated and moved but, as Hale remarked, they’ll probably forget and move on with their lives, grabbing some chips and binging the next season of Love Is Blind.
And yet, there is more to the ending than this cynicism. After the director himself admits the limitations of his art, we are given one more ritual to break through our knowingness. Even at his most jaded—about American history, Hollywood, human nature—81-year-old Scorsese has not lost his faith in filmmaking as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation if not redemption.
The last image of the film begins with a close-up of a drum. The camera pulls back to show the Osage, today, dancing around it. The weathered drum looks like a full moon, the colorful formation around it look like petals—as if the film’s title were being translated into visual form—the image shot in the same space where so many of their ancestors were killed. The dance showing the flower moon is a victory over metaphor. And then, look closer. As the exposure begins to dim, this flower-like formation marrying the sky and earth transmutes into something grander, a revolving milky way, as if we’re moving through the stars. The credits roll, the Osage song ends, and for those of us still with the film, we sit—as Mollie would advise us—and quietly absorb the prairie storm sounds in porous surrender. Of course Scorsese recognizes that his art, even this mythic tragedy, is inevitably subject to and implicated in the cold blankness of capitalism, or colonialism, or American imperialism. But the film’s finale stands up as a final salvo against it. That’s what art aspires to do, whatever its limitations, like a prayer whispered against the great white nothing. Even that blankness is but one mote in an unfathomable cosmos that permeates and surrounds it, an awesome and humbling fullness in which all history is woven together.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.