They say that the West was won when the open frontier disappeared from the map in the home stretch of the 19th century. Many plains were left unsettled, but American history has told us that settling is in tradition with America’s drive for individualism, freedom, capitalizing on opportunity, and of daring. The story of how the West was won will always favor the men who rode on top of horseback that believed, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”. The foundation of prejudice, driven by racism and lust for gold, are the traits associated with the American textbooks that tell us the country’s wealth is determined by the winners and losers of war.
In Martin Scorsese’s monumental feature for Apple TV, Killers of the Flower Moon, the highly regarded maestro of motion pictures looks to assess the damage that comes from the tricky trades of commerce that implants monetary value on human worth. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Jesse Plemons, Flower Moon is the continuation of Scorsese using the limited opportunities he has left to reflect on his anxieties regarding faith, life, and the privilege of having the power to siphon the blood of the land with the lens of a camera. A camera that is more aware of our presence than we might realize.
Westerns have inspired more filmmakers than we can count, and the power of having movie stars like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and more starring in some of the most important movies throughout film history defined our understanding of the West. The Western was key in shaping the perception around what the West would bring to those seeking opportunity in a land that appeared free from the restraints of industrial infrastructure. The grizzled war vet with elevated charm and a low voice could fight “bad guys”, cash in on rewards, swing a woman into his arms, or insist on proving the worth of his masculinity that America has allowed him to project. American filmmakers used these traits to elevate the fair-skinned American male into a status that overthrew their normalcy to become something more than “just another guy”. They were cinema’s first superheroes.
The weathered brim of a cowboy hat, spit-shined pistol, leather boots, and calloused hands became associated with a role that leaned into what America expected of its men. Here, in Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese interrogates the Western that was sold to him all those years ago. The hats, pistols, and boots are still here, but they take on new meaning atop the heads of men who look to slither their way into money across the pools of oil. This might seem no different than many of the films in his body of work, but where Scorsese separates Flower Moon from the rest is in the hearts of the Osage women.
Lily Gladstone (Mollie Burkhart), JaNae Collins (Reta), Cara Jade Myers (Anna Brown), Tantoo Cardinal (Lizzie Q), and Jillian Dion (Minnie Brown) are the most pivotal roles in the film. Sure, the actions of William Hale (De Niro), the King of Osage Hills, and his nephew Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), are the source of the film’s movement and progressions, but their stalking and preying is vocalized by the cries of Mollie and the Osage people. The anguish that culminates with each sequential beat in the narrative aims to remove the air of mystery that surrounds the county and their people. Scorsese extends a branch of trust to the audience and the text consciously subjects itself to our moral measurements as the viewer. Through this we are able to empathize with the Osage at a level that makes the erosion of Native American culture more than something that is purely observational or emotionally passive. We are asked to become active participants caught in the gusts that howl through Osage county at a volume too deafening to ignore.
Violence – bloody violence, has been a part of Scorsese’s style for decades. Dating back to his short, The Big Shave (a metaphor for the Unites States’ self-destructive involvement in the Vietnam war), a young man takes a razor to his face to shave it clean. As the man starts to shave, blood pours down his face with each stroke, but the man seems to be content with the pain caused by his own doing. This self-inflicted harm would become a repeated gesture in most Scorsese films, and the excessive abuse of it in films like Raging Bull or The Wolf of Wall Street became the only reality Jake LaMotta or Jordan Belfort understood. In Killers of the Flower Moon, the violent murders continue the trend that Silence and The Irishman set for a more reflective, suffering, eternally painful mode of Scorsese violence.
In Flower Moon, Scorsese (and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto) pulls the camera away from the murders, and it envelopes the pain in the folds of the plains around it. The murder happens so fast, and then it’s done, it’s over. Unlike the first half of his career where Scorsese would hold on a body being stabbed to death, or beaten into a bloody pulp, he accepts this tragedy with an eerie sense of finality that is separated from the relationships the Osage victims share with their people and their land. That sense of tragic displacement is such a viscerally coded message within the D.N.A. of America’s rise to empirical power, and Scorsese captures that without missing a beat. As a juxtaposition, when an Osage accepts their final moments before passing into their next life, Scorsese allows us to cross that bridge with them. Unlike the piercing gunfire or escalating fires, this quiet passage into ancestry should move anyone with a beating heart to tears. When an Osage transcends life on their own terms, there is a somber truth to it that makes the sudden disregard of the murders feel that much more sinister.
In a body of work as excellent as Martin Scorsese’s, expectations are difficult to manage when the standard is incredibly high. Still, he shatters them with his natural ability to guide us through the course of his films without wasting time or energy on the details that could feel superfluous in someone else’s work. Perhaps it’s the collaboration he’s had with the talents of Thelma Schoonmaker, Robbie Robertson (R.I.P.), Rodrigo Prieto, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro that makes it easier for his films to exceed the complexities of cinematic storytelling, but the central force connecting all of them is him. It’s his innate ability to find the angle that is most appropriately cinematic and resoundingly informative that separates him from everyone else.
The connection we make with his films stems from the connections he is trying to make with us. In the case of Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s the connection he wants to make to a people that were overshadowed by the faces that were inaugurated as heroic trailblazers of the Western world. The heroes that leapt from horseback to stagecoach in the movies that inspired him represent something else entirely to someone else, and Flower Moon is his attempt at reckoning with that truth. You see it in the pathetic frown of DiCaprio, the cartoonish yelps of doctors and lawyers, the lazy or drunk guns for hire, and you see it at its most glaring before it’s too late. When all of the culture has been poisoned into a waning existence, all that’s remained is the color of people that infiltrated a land where they never belonged.
The search for more money came at the expense of life itself, and the seeds of corruption were etched into history as a justification for making more money. Every chance the killers have of being caught; money is thrown at it. Every attempt at dismissing illness is expressed in the cost of medication. A proper burial has a price. Car insurance has a price. A train ride has a price. To even exist with head rights had a price put on it by someone who believed that putting a dollar sign in front of it increased the value of life itself. What America misunderstands about culture, and where culture places value, is that the Osage celebrated life and all of the gifts that come with having a chance to live. You can’t put a price on that.
What Scorsese wants to make clear is that he has been gifted with an incredible amount of privilege and opportunity, and the thought of using whatever time he has left to connect us to the blood-soaked soil of America’s past tells me that there is always time to tell a story. Sure, Scorsese may not be equipped to administer a perspective true to the Osage, but what he does have is the chance to take control of having an opportunity to directly express to us that cinema is our chance to engage with the past well beyond its time before it’s too late. We’ll remember the Osage murders and the names of the people who lost their lives to White America’s conquest, but we’ll never remember how much money William Hale made.
No one will ever be remembered for how much money they made. They will be remembered for what they gave back to the world.
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