A Reckoning, but not thee Reckoning”

“It is a reckoning, but maybe not the reckoning I needed or wanted” were the words that came to me what would have been about midway through the movie and persisted until the very end. Sitting in the dark as I heard Lily Gladstone’s primal scream of bereavement and unrequited anger, I felt it beating through my chest and head like a drum. I do not think Scorsese or subsequently his film is afraid to go where he needs to go, say what needs to be said, show what may need to be shown. It's a film indicative of all of Scorcese's powers, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s too for that matter. The issue here is the issue that has ever been, which is that it is being told from the perspective of a white person. In the sense of who's directing it, in the sense of who's starring in it, and in the sense of whose perspective is most being represented. This conundrum haunts and elevates the movie simultaneously. It's inertia, it's profundity all live in the places where it is strong and where it is weak, and where the movie is strong and where the movie is weak lives in its perspectives.

The movie most closely takes on the appearance of a masterpiece (if not outright one) when you examine it from the angle that they (the white folks ) are the wolves. Scorcese’s film in its entirety gave me the feeling of watching one of those movies where they have the graphic for the way a virus begins to eat up cells over time, or even better a pandemic film where they have the electronic map show in elapsed time how rapidly a virus will spread. We start out with the near lack of existence of whites in Osage, and the markers of success and community amongst a native population made rich by the oil under their land, (even while we see in their appearance and spending the tokens and golems of white supremacy) and by the time we are near finished we see DiCaprio's Ernest Buckhart sitting in a room where he previously sat, which then was made up of mostly Osage people, now almost completely White. This imagery bookending either side of the film as well as a rather vast timeline of multiple murders and vicious animus through banal faces is jarring. The beginning of the mysterious rot (wasting disease AKA White People) and extraction of the Osage wealth is already in effect, by the time Burkhart arrives, but his presence will at the very least make it personal for Mollie (A phenomenal Lily Gladstone) an Osage woman whose life becomes a living hell upon meeting Ernest Burkhart. Even the title then, most especially in imagery begins to take shape. Through Ernest’s uncle William King Hale (Robert DeNiro) and his conglomerate of ne’er do wells, ambitious boot lickers, psychopaths, and morons, we see the killers, we see the physical terror, the existential terror, the ecological terror, both malevolent and benign. “Friends” are shot in the head from behind as they commiserate or watch over their baby, and white overseers watch over and control Osage money, Osage spending, even though it's Osage money! No police are ever brought in, we repeatedly hear how “no one cares” about the deaths of Indians” a double scoop of apathy and mockery. The murders are sanctioned both explicitly and implicitly, the apathy comes standard. We watch as white supremacy slowly waves it's collective shadowy hand over the lives of these people and their land darkening everything in their path with blood, greed, cruelty, and more blood. We see clearly how so many of the lies then, connect directly to the systems now, with the lies now transformed into law, tradition, and possession. The first half of Killers of the Flower Moon is the best half of this movie precisely because of the choice to go in from the perspective of the wolves, to let us see what the wolves see. Scorcese's willingness to dive into and portray the animus, the audacity of the mendacity, and frankly the stupidity on display is so sharp and fresh as to take you there in the flesh, and it is frightening especially because the movie isn't afraid to show sternly, truthfully, and without romance the depravity of it. In combination with the fact that even while it is still being told from the perspective of the wolves, it is more multidirectional than the second half of the film, this trapeze act of empathy, and truth, storytelling, and capital is absolutely stunning. It moves in waves from one perspective to another, balancing Osage and White narratives of the seemingly innocuous interactions that doom an entire people. The small things matter here, like the inherent commentary in the words voiced by a self aware, but also still white co conspirator when Leo tries to recruit him into service of a dastardly act “Why you always trying to get someone like me to do your work?”. It is the half of the film I most enjoyed and found to be the most brilliant. We see and hear a lot more from Mollie in the first half or so. Her joys, her reserve, her intelligence. We see the town, more specifically, the portrayal of what the town was before much white involvement, the integrity of it; to show mother's that have favorites, secrets that are kept by good women, alcoholic sisters who are short tempered, and depressed men, searching for reasons to live, even while they are rich, and now themselves a petit bourgeois class amongst their ethnicity is an important counter to victimized cinema that not only paints victimhood as an identity, (which is also caricaturization) but also reinforces the idea that victims have to be perfect, saintly. The portrayal of the decimation of an entire group of people so callous and disturbing it appears as nothing more than the rising of the sun, in juxtaposition with the banality of tactics used to murder, the slow drip of genocidal mania and the consistent re-creation of it with almost no residual effect on those who schemed and plotted it is all too close to home as we witness what is going on with Israel and the US backed decimation of Palestine and Palestinian peoples. Scorsese is as plain as we've ever seen him even while still he maintains his visual audacity. He's quieter here, more restrained. He rarely intervenes, interjects, or distracts us with the watermarks of his signature style, and the movie benefits from that. He's concerned here with letting us see with as few frills as possible, the plain wretchedness and decay inherent in the white supremacist enterprise, and juxtaposes that lovingly with the hearts, humor, pain, philosophy and spirituality of the Osage community. Never once condescending to them, most especially the women. The best representation of the latter, the one I believe is going to stick with me for quite some time; is the death of Mollie's mother (Tantoo Cardinal ) and the tangential pause that Scorsese takes to honor her meeting with the ancestors. The simplicity of it, the unceremonious nature of it, the lack of invasive ego in it. It represents in a microcosm so much of why Scorsese is so beloved in the film community, and the legitimacy of Scorcese's intent and ability in his work and especially in this film.

Its a third of the way through and I am reminded of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” the conclusion of which arrives at the same place as I did at the end of this film. I was left considering all the ways in which the hegemony of power in storytelling as it concerns the medium of film - prevents all but a very privileged few the right to speak to their own pain in the making of this colonial project turned empire. The obstructions present in the film, are present in the reality outside of it, and in the making of it. A white perspective is nonetheless a white perspective, and no matter the level of mastery on display, (and the level here is arguably as high as it could go considering) it is still what historian Michel -Rolph Trouillot calls a silence. A sort of confluence of variables that assist in the obstruction and impediment of the ownership of the narrative from the POV of anyone but those in power, which then leaves a silencing that passes down through history. The second half of this movie - where it begins to turn into more of a police procedural - is an example of this, as the combination of variables like profit needs, the star of the movie, running time, for example, shift the perspective almost completely to that of the white man and men around Mollie and her people, leaving their voices only to be heard in suffering. It is a scale size model of the original trauma and as such is evidence of the cracks, crevices, nooks, and crannies created by the lack of precision, the lack of understanding, inherent in a perspective outside the veil of something one can never fully be immersed in or touch. This is the portion of the movie where if anything it would have benefited strongly from a shift straight into Mollie's perspective. When I say Mollie's perspective I do not mean change the story much, nor that she should have had all the scenes that they gave to Leonardo DiCaprio, it means that all the events that we are seeing should be seen from a perspective that clearly is watching the precedings with an invisible eye from the marginalized position, imagine for example what Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” would look like if a sequel took place right from that ending, fulfilling the promise of its conciets by being written and directed by indigenous people. In Killers, it's hard enough to gauge what it was about Ernest that Mollie fell so in love with in the first place, but by the second or third the procedural aspect will eschew experience for process and beats familiar to true crime. How the Osage and more specifically Mollie feels in all this is a bit obscured. The portions that would feed much of what she can see, observe, and what she can feel, as we saw with Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's earlier release “Oppenheimer” are all but gone. We should still be able to watch all that's going on with DiCaprio, but with a lean toward viewing from her perspective, whether by voiceover, suggestive camera eye, or exposition and language. The Osage people’s decimation is Mollie's. She is a microcosm of their collective pain. Dealt one heavy blow after another, as the people with whom she shared close and intimate communal space with are murdered one by one. The first half (which in actuality might be more like three-quarters) was adept at this. We have voice-overs from Mollie’s perspective, we sometimes see through her eyes as she makes her way through crowds of white faces in the midst of contemptible peering. We get moments spent with her family laughing , gossiping, sharing. The third act appears and we can see the walls closing in on the Ernest and Hale and it is at this point that it becomes most clear in the movie that the fluctuating struggle in the relationship between the movies need for Leonardo DiCaprio and DeNiro to be the star and the importance of the story and it's subjects POV are at cross purposes. DiCaprio's character and his cohorts all but erased the agency and existence of a people who had already been beset by numerous tragedies in their upheaval from their original homes to this place -the need for the procedural aspect to follow the line of criminals to their rightful end overshadows the alternative need to hear from those most affected. I found myself asking what is she thinking, through all this? I realize she is getting sicker and sicker but a few scenes from the perspective of her in that bed, a few scenes about her grief, a few scenes about where and when she can find reprieve to go on, joy to stand, would've increased the power of everything else for me. I wrote “She has to know something is up, but she is also dead in the center of it unknowingly, it puts her in the eye of the storm, ignorant and yet at least unconsciously aware of what is happening and being created as around her” but I had to guess at all of it. I didn't want answers, I just wanted scenes where she was either directly or indirectly was prioritized, or that her perspective of these events was being represented to a degree that would then allow me to make my own conclusions about what is happening. Mollie keeps getting sicker, these strange men keep insisting on strange amendments to her treatment, her husband is growing further and further apart, her forest is becoming a pile of ash, and as her husband makes fun of her culture and her heritage to get her to take the poison that is killing her, she comforts him. It is sickening to watch, not much less to recall, and by the end I left wanting so much more from her, especially in lieu of the revelation of her husband's consistent role in all this. I love the idea of the movie taking place from the eyes of the wolves as it concerns the enterprise and the scourge, but when we got to Ernest and Mollie I wanted that perspective benched. Watching a movie about Tina Turner from Ike's perspective is not appealing to me. Returning to Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” another movie that contends with the massive weight of destruction at the behest of imperial and colonial forces as executed by a useful idiot - we see how all these events crashed and honed in on Oppenheimer, as it assails his role in it. As I wrote before in my piece on that film, there is a visceral anger directed at Robert, one that finds voice in the character of Emily Blunt. Here our anger finds no voice, and Mollie doesn't either. Can the Subaltern Speak? We should have been made to feel her world getting smaller as so many of these murders were of direct family members. Made to live in the amount of grief she had to be going through at that moment at that time, in the same way we are made to live in Oppenheimer’s persecution, shame and guilt, in Ernest’s shame and guilt? It is not that these things are completely erased or non-existent within the film it is that they are from the distanced, retracted, and reductive perspective of an outsider, which cannot be helped for the most part, and what parts can, are part of the inherent flaws of the ask.

In those movies about infections -and as a consequence zombies, - we are engaged in those films from the perspective of those who are besieged. The Mist, The Fog, the blood transfers, they corrode, corrupt, cause decay, destroy and we watch how those left behind cope. I don't see those stories as being much different from this. The effects of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, consumerism are much like what is depicted in those films. It is well documented many of them are commenting thematically on those very subjects. John Carpenter’s “The Fog” is pretty easily framed as one such commentary with its meditations on the costs of genocide, it's insistence on accountability and it's depiction of how the denizens and edifices benefitted both then and now from barbarity in a nearly all white town. It too is from the perspective of the wolves as they are being attacked by the avatars of their ancestral harm and their collective guilt. These stories and this story are similar in their tale of devastation. One day you're at home cuddling with your husband and the next your entire family is dead and so is the entire community from which you lived from which you had formed bonds and connected with folks and we see what the effect of that is on those who are left over, (That is the plot for Dawn of the Dead by the way) my point being, even though the subject matter is similar, these films center the besieged, not the horde, the besieged are understood to be universal, the “other” is the horde. What happens when you depict the horde and the horde is the storyteller? Are they the horde if they are the storytellers? Never mind that the size and proportion of white guilt is an obstruction to their ability to see fully the ways in which they have harmed irreparably the peace and agency of an entire ecosystem and people, there is also the natural obstructions created by history and the lack of on the part of those who have had history imposed upon them. If the idea is to see us, hear us, feel us, as every bit the equal of all peoples - to reiterate our position as both one and “other”, depicting truthfully the savagery of the those who labeled others “savages” is noble, and real, and so too is depicting the history of those who were silenced both before and after and in the between. Depicting the anger, the frustration, the intimate pleasures of our existence apart from the tragedy of our oppression. In that spirit the moral complexity of a man knowingly aiding a genocidal act cannot be so lopsidedly intertwined with the anxieties of the woman who lives with it, and whatever the reasons behind the decision it takes a distant, distant, distant second to my supreme interest in any aspect of what Mollie's inner life must’ve been at these points in her life, especially considering what Lily Gladstone is doing in this movie with her performance. It should not be left to the eyes of Lily Gladstone only, and in fits and starts to give us clues as to her interiority. Mollie is not yet bed ridden, she's not the ghost of herself she eventually becomes, but the sickness has clearly taken effect, and at this point in my mind, I asked “What are her dreams like now?” When she's alone with nothing but her grief, her thoughts, her racing mind, what does she see?…Is it just the owl when it comes for her life?”. “When it crosses her mind that her husband might be apart of this, what does that feel like for her?” “What is she wrestling with” What about her, what about her, what about her, go back to her”. One of the most vivid representations of this happened near the end of the movie when their child dies. We get a few seconds of Molly leaning over her child, but when Ernest finds out we linger, we sit with how deeply this hurts and affects him. It's a gut punch of a scene that DiCaprio acts without a single shred of ego or protection, and it lays bare the fallout of his avarice and deceptions, including ones of the self, but it was all about him, the only place with which Scorcese and DiCaprio could seemingly find success in putting this story together was in the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, so why does it feel like Ernest story, not theirs? Scorcese in a wonderful interview with critic luminary Richard Brody talks about the trouble he had getting into this story, and ultimately it is Leo who finds it in the relationship between Ernest and Mollie, yet that relationship isn't exactly detailed, nor followed intently. Now, the fact that “they were in Love” is something uttered by the descendants of Burkhart to Scorcese in the process of finding the story is instructional as it is, but there is also the fact that the core parts of strictly-on-paper story telling is mostly taking place without the aid of the Osage people of today and those facts obscure and hazy in the first three quarters of the film, become transparent in the final portion. Ernest’s righteousness at the end, his moral wrestling, and his supposed befuddlement and reckoning at the fact that he has played a knowingly active role in eviscerating his life, and the life of the woman whom he claimed to love being accepted as genuine seemingly without question is a perfect representation of why we talk so much about giving these kinds of opportunities to those who have a direct cultural understanding of them. The idea should not be that no one of any identity but the identity being represented should be able to tell these stories, but simply that these stories are BEST told when told by those who share the cultural markers and identity around it, and that the real story is in the spaces and areas in between and outside of rigid concepts like righteousness and morality (the latter of which I'm in no way accusing Scorcese of pandering to). That it's best when we speak, because when it's us we don't have to think about perspective we are it. You're asking people outside of those communities to do something that is foreign to them, especially if those people are part of the fabric of the group that maintains hegemony and power through it. Simply stating that fact should not be controversial, but I have a sense that it will become controversial once this movie starts making its rounds. Especially those for whom it's easy to kick the can down the road to some magical, but unspecified time in the future where we will be able to tell our own stories. It's not Scorsese's fault that white supremacy is so inextricable from our institutions that it makes telling stories about it from the POV of the oppressed feel near impossible, but it nonetheless comes with all the accoutrements that come with being considered in the fabric of whiteness. The fact that he is interested in this story, the fact that he dedicated what had to be considerable time and energy to get it out there, and to make sure that it was told in a way that maintains such overall integrity in its depiction of visceral cruelty in such veracious detail should be commended, and highly, but it should also be consistently and constantly tied to the “why” behind it. The idea that Hollywood thinks or will only allow him to be the one in the first place. If we do not (as a recent article explained by way of data and experience) accept that white leads are vital to a movie selling, then why accept that white directors or white writers are needed? Scorsese who has worked long enough as a white man, who is mastered as a craftsman and trusted as selling point is so as a result of opportunities he received(s) in part because he's an artistic genius and in part because he's white. Who can sell, what can sell, cannot be left to the collective racist feelings of Hollywood executives unchallenged, even when the chosen champion is arguably our greatest living director, and a champion of all perspectives of cinema from his own individual perspective. Hollywood executives insistence that these stories need a white lead, or white storyteller in order to bring people to the theaters is a re-creation of the racist principles that created the incident of the subject matter and the silence of that event that followed. By parroting the talking points of the white supremacist industry that upholds the idea that the story of the “othered” is not something people want to see, we uphold them ourselves, and that is not the job of the critic. As it pertains to Scorcese's “Killers of the flower Moon” we are left with the devastation, with the rot, the audacity, the cruelty, the intransigence of whiteness, white people, colonialism, capitalism, and westward expansion, told with the genius that only Scorcese can bring, the force multiplier in DiCaprio's depraved and pathetic interpretation, and Lily Gladstone’s once in a lifetime ode to the power of the eye. Once again from the perspective of the wolves. It is a reckoning indeed, but not the reckoning I was looking for or needed.