In the Flesh: Killers of the Flower Moon

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” asks the caption of an engraving in a book on Osage tribal history and custom. It’s a child’s question in a book for children, the equivalent of a “spot the differences” side-by-side comparison in Highlights magazine, but for a man like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) it’s the wrong question altogether. Ernest knows who and where the wolves are; he’s one of them. His Osage wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone, who plays her role of bored, horny, and iron-spined housewife increasingly unable to escape the knowledge that she’s being tortured to death so brilliantly they ought to just write her name on the Oscar now), even fondly calls him “the coyote” in reference to his laziness and love of money and the many comforts it brings. She’s surrounded by slavering jaws and shining eyes, by a bottomless, insatiable hunger for the wealth her people have accrued through the exploitation of oil on tribal land. It’s a hunger so great that again and again it hollows out the skin of love and wears it like a grotesque suit, stretched and deformed by the monster within. Between whites and the Osage, loving and taking become enmeshed as concepts, and then inseparable. The wolves are in the house. The wolves are in your doctor’s office, and your children’s school, and in the whiteness of your children themselves. “Can you find the wolves?” There’s no escaping them.

Killers of the Flower Moon wastes no time on unnecessary subtleties. In one scene Scorsese shoots the men conducting the controlled burning of crime boss William King Hale’s (Robert De Niro) pasturage for the purposes of insurance fraud like damned souls burning in Hell, their silhouettes rippling in a liquid blaze of red and gold. The film’s opening presents a litany of real murders committed by whites against the Osage people with a repeated refrain of “no investigation”, each more horrific than the last. A man poisoned and left to choke to death in solitude. A woman shot by her white husband while readying their baby’s pram for a walk, the baby scooped up as an afterthought. The cruelty is the point. The depth of whiteness’s savagery. When called for, though, the script is as precise and deadly as a stiletto. After a protracted segment of the film concerned with Mollie’s complex relationships with her mother and sisters, a graceful and difficult masterclass in sketching fully human characters, the white husbands begin referring to their Osage wives as “blankets”, slang for the woven blankets they wear to signify their tribal standing. It doesn’t matter how human the Osage are, how rich and interconnected their lives, because the people preying on them are as simple as bed bugs clinging to fabric, waiting for flesh to come close enough to bite.

One can’t mistake Scorsese’s directness and force for a lack of complexity, though. He isn’t giving white audiences a feel-bad story to jerk off to. He isn’t valorizing himself as the great defender of the Osage people, as William Hale does time and time again. (De Niro, incidentally is so good in this, so putrid in his avuncular down-home folksiness. Watching him rant about how he’s been “imbued” in the middle of a Masonic temple that looks like something out of Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge as he paddles his nephew for fucking up an assassinaton is a thing of beauty). What he does is tell a story as well and as fully as he can before stepping aside to admit the shortcomings inherent to his perspective, the limits of the medium in which he’s working. The film’s closing sequence is a staggering narrative gamble, a signature and an invitation to take what Killers of the Flower Moon has to say out into the wider world, to make amends for the gravest wrongs imaginable, to move beyond educating ourselves and into action and community. I hope I’m a tenth the artist he is when I reach his age.