Flower power

Killers of the Flower Moon is a genocidal dream from which we may be awakening

I mentioned in my 2019 account of The Irishman — the previous three-and-a-half-hour Martin Scorsese movie — a segment of that movie that seemed like a dream to me:

The sense of time passing in the characters’ lives, too, gets heavier; the intrinsic excitement of blood and guts palls. There is a late section in which Sheeran does a vitally important job that plays like a dream sequence: repeated vistas and actions, endless meaningless chat, a seemingly deserted suburb, the key incident half-hidden; like something out of David Lynch…

Killers of the Flower Moon — the latest 3.5 hour Scorsese — also has a dreamlike quality. Except instead of David Lynch, it looks more like George Stevens. It got me thinking of Giant and Stevens’ use of the wide-open spaces of the American West. It also reminds me of Stevens’ effort to connect his oil-boom story to a political theme — which Scorsese manages more successfully, in my estimation, than Stevens did.

It may be more accurate to say Killers is a waking nightmare, and the main reason is not some shrouded, obliquitous style in the filmmaking — the storytelling is very straightforward — but rather the obliquity of the characters, and how their behavior turns the story from a common procedural into a kind of high-end horror story about how the great, murderous con of white supremacy is played.

The basic story focuses on Ernest Burkhart, just back from World War I, still wearing his uniform, notwithstanding he was merely an Army cook. “You cooked the food for the men who won the war,” fluffs William Hale, the Oklahoma uncle Ernest has come to stay with. One soon sees why Ernest has no nearer kin who’ll put him up; he’s dumb as a post and has no evident good qualities; he’d much rather spend than earn money and he says so out loud to the Osage woman he’s partly attracted and partly steered to, Molly, who is not charmed so much as disarmed by his honesty.

Hale, who is widely called King — he suggests rather than insists Ernest call him that, the first glimpse of his modus operandi — is widely known as a friend to the Osage tribe, who own lots of land with oil on it and who have worked out a deal with the government whereby Indian landowners, while paternalistically circumscribed in their use of their own money, can pass down the rich properties to their children, leaving Indian women especially prey to white men hungry for easy riches.

That would be bad enough, but some of these women have started turning up dead, along with other people whose continued existence thwarts the wider plans of King Hale, who is clearly working to direct all the Osage landowners’ fortunes into white hands — mainly because that makes it easier for him to control those fortunes, though we moderns can smell the supremacism under it.

In any crime story you’ll have characters pretending with greater or lesser degrees of success to be something they’re not and to be not doing something they are in fact doing. In Killers King is doing that very successfully, but Scorsese makes this situation more horrifying by showing us how little Hale has to conceal his subterfuges to make them work.

They work partly because, after all, the people whose patrimony King is stealing are a subject class. (One hardly needs it, but at one point a killer for hire dubious about taking on a job relaxes when he’s told the victim is an Indian.) But it’s also because King has both the Osage and the whites convinced that he’s a friend to the Indian people. He code-switches beautifully, speaks the Osage language, honors their rituals; he’s known most of these people, Indian and white, including those he gets killed, all their lives. He even adds a great sum to the rewards posted for the apprehension of the killers — an easy bet for him, since local law enforcement is all in his pocket.

It sounds like Bad Day at Black Rock territory, but the really brilliant thing Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth do is show how little King has to work to cover his tracks. That is, we hear his schemes as he lays them out to Ernest, and see the flimsiness of his cover story that those schemes are really for the good of all — and how readily Ernest accepts them.

When King goes so far as to say, as he does often, that the Osage are “sickly” and that the Indians he has specifically targeted for death are “finished, their time is over,” no suspicion crosses Ernest’s face (though he often has the stupefied expression of a mark who is swallowing, against what better judgment he has, an absurdity); he takes these, not as half-concealed confessions, but for lordly, philosophical, Great White Father pronouncements — and, anyone with any grasp of American history will notice, that’s what they are, and that such as these have been used to con the suckers (and kill Indians and other inconvenient minorities) for centuries.

Eventually, having made him his co-conspirator, King tries to con Ernest into taking the rap for him. Why wouldn’t he? It only starts with Indians.

In fact even the Osage, even in their intimate dealings with whites, are at least partly deceived by King’s act. Many of them are suspicious of the whites and say so out loud — at tribal councils where King is seated as an honored guest. Molly knows from the beginning that Ernest wants to marry her for her money — though she also sees in him a capacity for tenderness and affection that she needs, which is why she marries him — and seems to also know, as Ernest’s enmeshment in King’s schemes increases, that he is going to kill her, too. In fact she is more aware of it than Ernest is.

That is the nightmare: A murderous, indeed genocidal, plot that is enacted more or less in broad daylight because no one, in early-20^th-Century America, has the political philosophy to comprehend or language to see and describe what is happening. (King tells his white and Indian friends that he disapproves of the KKK amassing more power, though he greets Klansmen jovially when he sees them on parade.) Everyone moves through the nightmare as if preordained to play their parts until the spell is broken by the arrival of the Bureau of Investigation, not yet famous as the FBI nor omnipotent; Ernest takes the agent Tom White for a Pinkerton and blows him off until it becomes obvious that these boys are not to be dissuaded.

If you’re making a connection between this federal agency enforcing the rights of the dispossessed that local authorities have abrogated and other historical events, you can go right ahead, because you’re meant to. But though the conclusions to which Flowers of the Killer Moon leads are political, it is storytelling and craft rather than polemics that do the work.

If you remember Robert DeNiro blandly waving Karen Hill toward what he hopes is her doom in Goodfellas, you have a hint of what his manipulator King Hale is like (I would also cite his excellent Bernie Madoff in The Wizard of Lies); he adds a folksy-faux-friendly veneer that reminds me of the meanest 60s caricatures of LBJ. Leonardo DiCaprio has the guts and skill to show where Ernest’s true stupidity ends and his cowardly pretense of innocence begins. Lily Gladstone pulls off a still harder trick: Revealing the simplicity of Molly’s needs and beliefs, and also that they don’t mean Molly herself is simple; she chooses not to fight for survival but, once recovered, insists on her rights — or rather the truth, which amounts to the same thing.  Oh, in case you’re wondering, Jason Isbell is terrific as a laconic fellow who is slightly but not sufficiently ahead of the game. I believe he has a future in pictures.