In the early 2000s, HBO produced a remarkable TV Series called The Wire, which I could argue is not only the best TV series ever made, but perhaps the best anything ever made in the medium of film. The first scene of the first episode of the first season is a stand-alone vignette: the Ballad of Snot Boogie.
Snot Boogie is a young black man who has just been murdered. A police detective questions a witness as to how it happened. Well, a group of men played a regular dice game, of which Snot Boogie regularly took part in. Snot Boogie was not good at dice and at some point in most dice games, after he lost most or all of his money, he would scoop up the money in the pot and run off with it. Usually he was caught and given a beat down, until one game he was shot in the back and killed. The detective questions the witness: if Snot Boogie always stole the pot, why did you let him play. The reply: “This is America, man. You gotta let ‘em play.”
Per the audio commentary of David Simon, the point was that American society was so rigged and unfair, that it became absurd that its citizens would take part in the hypocrisy of the American Dream, this notion that anyone could make it. That is, if Snot Boogie was highly likely to never win, wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that he could, to simply not allow him to play anymore? That was The Wire’s America. It is also the America of “Killers of the Flower Moon”, except in this case, Snot Boogie gets super lucky and wins the pot several times over. Then, perhaps, to extend the metaphor, Snot Boogie gets shot anyway and his winnings are stolen.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” is a bizarre story that could not take place anywhere but the USA. The Osage, a Native American tribe, were conquered by the USA in the 1800s and were forcibly relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. It was desolate and unwanted land. That much is a normal occurrence in the annals of human history in all societies. What happened next is extraordinary. Decades later it was discovered that the land had oil under it and the Osage struck it rich. The movie informs us that their nation had the highest per capita wealth in the world in the 1920s. Substantial prejudice exists in the society, the Osage need white guardians to sign off on the disbursal and expenditure of their money and the white tradesman in town charge the Osage exorbitant prices, but even so, they are driving the latest cars, wearing 1920s high fashion, and intermarrying with the white populace (money trumping prejudice). When was the last time a conquered people were allowed to get that far? (To name some modern examples, I doubt we are going to see the Uighers or the Rohingya strike it rich any time soon.) Then, in a case study made famous by J. Edgar Hoover’s upstart F.B.I., many of the Osage start dying, some mysteriously and others not so mysteriously, to an extent that indicates the entire outside society is either involved in the murders or willfully blind to them.
Killers of the Flower Moon was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars, for the first time together in a Scorsese movie, his two main acting avatars Robert De Niro and Leonardo Dicaprio. They play historical figures, Robert De Niro as a man called King Hale an established businessman and philanthropist in the Osage Hills and Leonardo Dicaprio as Earnest Burkhardt, nephew of King Hale, a young man looking for work after his service in the Great War. The third main character is Mollie Burkhardt, played by Lily Gladstone, the Osage woman who marries Ernest Burkhardt and whose family members start and continue to die unnatural deaths. Martin Scorsese has a long and established history of making movies about people not exactly saying what they mean (think of all the Italian gangsters and their way with words) and this comes into play here as well. The characters are inscrutable in a way that perhaps only real people can be.
We can start with Earnest Burkhardt, whose main attribute is his low level of intelligence. If we can say that the natural Leonardo Dicaprio role is one of ambition and charm (say Catch Me if You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street), this character is decidedly against type. Interestingly, Dicaprio doesn’t usually play uninspiring not-that-bright people, but when he does, they are some of his best roles (Revolutionary Road, Shutter Island). The movie takes a seemingly contradictory stand on Earnest Burkhardt both portraying him as the type of man who would rob at gunpoint, graverob, and coordinate murders of Osage but also one who loves his Osage wife. I assume the source materials bear this out because if it didn’t actually happen, you wouldn’t believe it. I am reminded of reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which dealt with the enormous decline of violence in the modern era. In trying to explain the same, Mr. Pinker posited that part of it had to do with a sort of moral retardation in past societies. In parallel to a rise in IQs over time from better education, so there was also a rise in moral intelligence. That is, without the direct influence of a type of education that teaches abstract concepts such as empathy or equality between people, you would by default have someone who operates like Earnest Burkhardt. (Empathy is the ability to understand how something may be seen from another person’s point of view. Mr. Pinker suggests that this is an exercise in abstract thinking that a human needs to be taught in order to perform. This is in contrast to literal thinking which is like: I am white. You are red. We are literally different and so different behavioral rules apply.) The best thing that can be said about Earnest is that his disposition makes him predisposed to manipulation and so, given his nature, he may not be entirely culpable as he seems. In one scene, he is so easily manipulated that he fails to grasp that his uncle might be plotting to kill him too. But that is the best thing you can say about him.
Even more inscrutable than Earnest is his wife Mollie Burkhardt. I expect the creators of this movie found far less in the record about what made Mollie tick then the white people who were at some point interrogated by the authorities and cross-examined in court as to their actions. In various parts of the movie, Lily Gladstone’s facial expressions reminded me of the Mona Lisa. Why does she and her sisters marry white men? Is it a status thing? Is she in love with Earnest? Once all her relatives start dying, why isn’t she more suspicious? At some point, it would seem that she would rather be killed by her husband than consider the possibility that her husband would try to kill her. It feels like Scorsese did a decent job of portraying the Osage and the movie’s marketing materials heavily lean on assuring us of that point. Indeed, some of the best parts of the movie are all Osage. The field of the Flower Moon is poetry. The death owls are spooky. The best scene in the movie takes place in a powwow and concerns a moving speech by the chief of the tribe (played by Yancey Red Corn) about the present events and how they will respond to them.
Sitting in on that powwow is the most inscrutable character of all: King Hale. Here is a guy that has lived in the Osage Hills all his life, understands and speaks the Osage language, has made friends with enough Osage to be allowed in the powwow in the first place and is ultimately the mastermind behind a lot of the killings. If Ernest Burkhardt is morally retarded, King Hale is morally deranged. One is reminded of the villain in Chinatown who,when asked why he is orchestrating a particularly nasty scheme, replies without hesitation “The future Mr. Gittes, the future.” King Hale makes a similar argument about the Osage, which boils down to the following: Since they are all going to die someday, there is nothing wrong with murdering them. Then once he is cornered and the truth let out, he somehow believes that society will forgive him. I am reminded of Sam Bankman-Fried, a pioneer of his self-coined “effective altruism,” who seemed to think it was okay to steal from his clients, and that the world would be okay with it, because he felt he was so much better at spending the money.
Killers of the Flower Moon is 3.5 hours long. But don’t let that stop you from watching it. Indeed, there is a great place in the movie to take a break either for an intermission or even for the day. That would be around the two hour mark when the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation show up. (One thing about being stinking rich is that you can tell your problems directly to the President. It doesn’t appear at first that Mollie’s brief interaction with Calvin Coolidge would have precipitated direct federal action, but then again, Mr. Coolidge was historically circumspect with his words.) The agent in charge is played by Jesse Plemons, an actor who can somehow pull off normcore white guy and dangerous at the same time. The F.B.I does its work in a professional and competent way. Actually, it didn’t seem all that hard to crack the case, only a group of people with authority that cared enough to solve it.
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