The Hidden Villain in Killers of The Flower Moon

there's a moment early on in killers of the flower Moon where the protagonist Ernest reads a book about the oage natives at the end of the book he gets to this line can you find the wolves in this picture and it felt to me as if scorsi who is now 81 and nearing the end of a long and industrious career was making the thesis statement of many of his most successful films explicit looking back through his filmography there are plenty of wolves to spot you don't even have to spot them really they're right there Bright illuminated on the screen one of his ma recent protagonists is even called a wolf by the film's title from Travis ble to Jordan Belfor scorsi is maybe the director who most thoroughly explored evil especially in a specifically American masculine form killers of the flower moon is yet another entry in this catalog but there are some differences after Ernest reads this line the camera immediately whip pans up to reveal one of the wolves in this picture Ernest brother Byron Burkhart is a vile guy he could easily go toe-to-toe with some of the most vile guys from scorsi filmography like Tommy from Goodfellas plotting murder against those closest to you is just another Tuesday for this guy it's time for me to take her home now but unlike Tommy he has none of the Sinister Charisma of a cinematic villain this left me thinking why is coresi tipping his hand more heavily this time is he simply trying to be more clear with how he intends to depict this evil so that it's not misunderstood that's a valid possibility but for me this moment acted as a call to look more deeply and closely into the film maybe there are hidden wolves that aren't so obvious it's in finding these less obvious and more hidden wolves that will find what makes killers of the flower Moon one of sori's most provocative films to date this is a painting titled American progress painted by John Gast in 1872 it depicts white settlers moving Westward bringing with them waves of techn ological advancement and modern civilization the native people are driven away replaced with wagons Prospectors farmers and eventually trains wild bison and bears flee as domesticated horses and oxen take their place but what is most revealing about this painting is the way the whole thing is imbued with a kind of spiritual significance a floating goddess-like figure carries a school book and Telegraph Wire as this figure and the technological progress she brings with her moves Westward she seems to push away Darkness replacing it with light it's the most explicit depiction of the ideology we call Manifest Destiny that I think I've ever seen in a piece of art does anybody know why this stage has a Cavalry escort the calvary is here to represent our Manifest Destiny oh what to protect us from the Indians you may have noticed that we white people have a way of taking what we want without regard to what the present owner might think about it some people could call that steel it we call it Manifest Destiny Manifest Destiny was a vague but powerful vision from that time that was a driving force in a lot of the westward expansion by white American settlers the sentiment behind this ideology was that the expansion of democracy technological progress and education weren't simply justifiable but in fact a kind of divinely given right when King hail sees his murderous seizing of the oage head writes as something not just inevitable but justifiable I love him but in the Turning of the earth they're going to go their time is Over Manifest Destiny is the ideology underpinning that belief Manifest Destiny is an ideology that the Western as a genre has to Grapple with almost inescapably at times it's reinforced it grappled with it both explicitly and implicitly and at other times it's attempted to deconstruct Ed killers of the flower moon is scor's first foray into the Western as a genre and it doesn't hold a lot of the stylistic tropes and Hallmarks of a western but it does engage with the conflict that is the central conflict of a lot of westerns killers of the flower Moon isn't just about Manifest Destiny though that's just one ingredient in a larger examination of evil here but I'm getting ahead of myself killers of the flower Moon doesn't begin here with the perspective of the white settlers put pushing out the native population as is often the case in westerns but instead here inside the perspective of those being pushed out the movie opens with a lamentation the Osage Nation Mourns the loss of their culture as it is written over by the colonizing culture they bury a ceremonial pipe placing it into the ground Heritage is buried in the earth and there's a match cut to something new bursting forth from that Earth in killers of the flower Moon the subtext of the John Gast painting is flipped instead of light pushing out Darkness we see light being pushed out by an expanding Shadow oil bursts forth into the sky and young oage watch in awe the lamentation has turned into a celebration and Robbie Robertson's score is pulling a lot of weight in this moment in this section we hear drums that are evocative of the traditional oage music will hear again at the end of the film but these sounds are almost drowned out by a layer of driving bass and guitar these distorted guitar and bass sounds are what Robertson will use as a motif to underscore many of the scenes where the film's villains plot and conduct their m Massacre oil feels like just as much a symbol of the impending technological age as Telegraph lines and trains from this prologue we move into a section that sets up the film's context but before any of that context is explained we can feel the film's central tension the middle 2 and a half hours of the movie are honestly pretty horrifying and difficult to get through the nature of the crimes why they're happening and who they're going to happen to is laid out fairly explicitly pretty early on and so the movie avoids the usual thrill and tension that we associate with true crime stories violence is not really used to create any kind of salacious thrill here when it happens it happens very quickly and from a removed perspective with no buildup I think it's worth noting that this is a departure from some of the ways scorsi has depicted violence in the past when he shown it in a much more energetic and intimate way this movie is not just an examination of evil though it also in part tells the story of Molly's resilience and fight for her people instead of with thrilling suspense the movie proceeds with a kind of dull dread and its length works to place us inside the perspective of just how hopeless things must feel for Molly by the time the credits are rolling on most movies in this movie still no help has come and no meaningful change has happened killers of the flower moon in this way more than any of scor's other films shows us the other side of the evil he's depicting but the characters enacting the evil itself is still his primary focus here it's late in the movie when the real hidden wolves begin to emerge there's a subtle reveal that was chilling to me Ernest agrees to testify against hail but when he gets onto the stand he's talked out of it by Brendan Frasier he's taken to what he thinks will be a meeting with his lawyer and he finds himself in a room full of members from the community you know Mr Solway uh Solway oil and of course Mr cion cron oil among them are the oil Executives themselves it's the Revelation that what's been going on isn't just an isolated set of Acts conducted by hail Byron Ernest and their few cronies instead it's a conspiracy that runs through a significant portion of the community Ernest and hail are revealed here to be not lone villains but geared within a larger machine one fueled in part by the lingering Spectre of manifest destiny and Manifest Destiny is ultimately just one flavor of white supremacy which the film alludes to through the inclusion of the Tulsa Massacre discreetly drawing parallels between these two acts of violence but the movie is 3 and 1 half hours long and scorsi isn't just interested in examining the social political and cultural dynamics of this evil instead the film turns it over inspecting it from all sides and ultimately Manifest Destiny and the sociopolitical conspiracy are just a backdrop for another question what makes a man like Ernest susceptible to these forces I haven't done nothing wrong in this world hail is a character who has ideological conviction Ernest on the other hand while he passively absorbs his ideology from his uncle and doesn't seem to object to it does not seem driven by this ideology instead he's motivated by something else no that's crazy I love money I love money I think this is partly where we see scorsese's Catholic background influencing the film in the Book of Matthew Jesus says this no one can serve two masters either you will hate one and love the other or you will be devoted to one and despise the other you cannot serve both God and money while scari is an active in the Catholic Church he's made a movie about Jesus in the past and he's working on another one as I make this video I think Jesus's words here have clearly had an influence on the director when he has one of his villains say something like this do love that money sir I think it tells us a lot about what scorsi sees as the root of ernest's evil I don't want to get caught up on this because I don't think scorsi here is interested in the tension between serving God or money in a religious sense although he does depict Molly as being religious practicing some combination of her native TR tradition and Catholicism but he also depicts hail as a religious man God bless you and a child so it's not about the conflict between being religious and serving money I think the way soresi portrays it it's much more about a conflict between Earnest's love of money and his ability to actually love I don't think the suggestion here is that the two actually coexist how take care of that man because he's my neighbor and he's my best friend that's $25,000 laying there I love this Girl Molly but rather that their love of money has rendered their professed love of these people meaningless this way for sure the money stays in the family the corrupting power of money is kind of an undercurrent throughout the film similar to the undercurrent of manifest destiny I don't want to be reductive here I'm not saying and I don't think the movie is saying that technological progress or money is always bad or the root of all evil it's the valuing of these things above human life that leads to horrific violence and I think it's the violence itself that is the great wrong but I think we should be willing to consider the conditions and beliefs that allow dehumanization racism and violence to flourish history has shown us just how much violence can happen when we place the pursuit of financial gain and power Above All Else and when we see one cultures technological advancement as a sign of its superiority money and perceived superiority or what these people are receiving that motivates them to either turn a blind eye to or just not care about the violence that is taking place they may not be personally committing acts of violence but to resist those acts of violence or to speak out against them would disrupt the status quo that they benefit from but it's not just evil that exists out there somewhere else in history in other people's lives I think scorsi ultimately wants to provoke us towards something deeper [Music] true crime stories has been brought to you through the courtesy of Jay Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation the movie's second to last scene I think is one of its most provocative the story we've just seen play out gets depicted as a cartoonish stage and radio show it's a little bit of tonal Whiplash but the first thing this does is reveal to us how this story has been treated by the media in the past mostly As material for a thrilling True Crime Story rather than a moral Reckoning with Injustice but then scorsi himself steps onto the stage and it gives this scene another layer of context to me it feels as if scorsi is Reckoning with his own role in telling this story and perhaps the way he's told crime stories in the past is he also just an outsider turning other people's suffering into a crime Thriller Byron got her drunk and I did the rest and are we as the audience just here to be entertained let's return to the image of the Wolves what do we actually see here in this image we are not a native looking for the Wolves hiding somewhere in the distance the picture is actually from the perspective of the Wolves is it possible that we watching the movie are on the side of the Wolves he uses this story to examine his own culpability as a Storyteller and our complicity as an audience that consumes retellings of the suffering of other in the past even as we might sit by passively complicit in the suffering of our own time but I don't think the goal here is to instill an aimless sense of guilt guilt itself really accomplishes nothing instead I think the goal of telling a story like this is twofold first it should Challenge and motivate us to examine the nature of this kind of evil so that we can hopefully recognize it and resist it in ourselves and our culture here again I think scor's Catholic influence comes into play with the character of Ernest it seems as if a kind of redemption for him hangs in the balance my soul is clean now Molly it's a it's a relief to me to be out from under all this this final scene between Ernest and Molly is an interesting one Ernest confesses his wrongdoing partially but Molly seems to sense that there is still something left unconfessed what did you give me it's his inability ility to do this that ultimately leads to Molly's rejection of him this moment is fictionalized we don't really know what went down between these to and so this is a kind of thematic conjecture on scor's part the way I read this scene I don't think scorsi is suggesting that confession alone makes up for wrongs as great as the ones we see Ernest do in killers of the flower moon but I think there is a suggestion here towards a path away from being the kind of person Ernest is and that path in scorsese's view seems to include self-examination and confession how do you how do you make the change well isn't it in Behavior how do you do that it's very hard but that's where it begins and that's where we get to the truth of it and compassion and love and that without that won't be any species we shouldn't use the fear of possibly being found guilty to avoid necessary self-examination instead we should see our own reflection here and the audience and see that as an opportunity to examine our own relationship to this story and how we respond to it because if we can it's the ability to truthfully and honestly examine ourselves that might set us apart from being a person like the character of Ernest the second reason for telling a story like this is the other thing that scorsi does here at the end which is to recognize and honor the suffering and survival of those whose stories have long been marginalized and forgotten the movie begins with a lamentation but ends with a celebration of the surviving oage a condemnation of the total Destruction that hail saw as inevitable he breaks the fourth wall here to bring you into the story almost as if to say it's not a story This is the real world and the film ends after this not with the fictional construction of Cinema but with a documentarian image this is not simply a story from our history this is a story we live inside of today one of the best ways I think to understand a movie is to consider the perspective it's coming from and the context that surrounds the story but this doesn't just apply to understanding movies it applies to understanding all kinds of media including 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Channel: Thomas Flight

Views: 189,962

Keywords: Video Essay, Thomas Flight

Id: XRqu4OQ-iok

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024