Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro,
Lilly Gladstone, and Jesse Plemons. It follows the Osage nation in the 1920s,
a people who were the richest in the world per capita thanks to oil being founded under their
land. Suddenly, this supposed barren land became a destination to make one’s fortune,
people arriving on trains and whatnot to be a part of this wealthy nation. One such way was murder.
Ernest Burkhart returns from war to his uncle William Hale, who poses as a friendly
benefactor of the Osage people – Hale speaks their language fluently, he bestows them with gifts,
he donates to schools, but secretly he plots to murder them and take their oil headrights. Hale
gives Ernest the idea of wooing local Osage Mollie Kyle, marrying her, and then subsequently sets a
plan into motion of bumping off Mollie’s family one my one until the head rights land with her,
and thus, if she is out of the way, the rights will go to Ernest and his children.
The desperate Osage, losing count of how many deaths their community have faced, with a local
law enforcement either inept or complicit in the killings, turn to the federal government,
with a sick Mollie traveling to Washington to beseech the government. They are uninterested,
but the Bureau of Investigation, eager to make a name for themselves, send Tom White to investigate
the Osage killings, and it’s almost immediately obvious who is behind the plot, it’s only a matter
of finding someone with enough of a reason to testify against the powerful William Hale.
Hale begins to start taking out his own men to protect himself, but Ernest is arrested
by White and pressured into a confession and testimony against Hale for legal protection.
There isn’t really a big dramatic climax to the film. We never see Hale being sentenced,
we don’t see the Osage community’s reaction to learning Hale was behind the murders. I
suppose Ernest’s confession is something of a climax, and then of course there’s the scene
where Molly walks out on him after they meet for the last time. But really, the movie doesn’t give
you that fist pump moment, because none such moment existed in the real life story. In fact,
after doing some time, it is alleged Hale bribed his way out of prison and was paroled,
eventually dying in a nursing home in the 60s. Instead, we get a very curious and interesting
epilogue which ends the film – the details as to what happened to the characters and where
they ended up is relegated to a hokey looking radio broadcast, presented to a white audience
and a white cast playing both the whites and the Osage, with funky sound effects,
with it all having an entertaining, light and informative atmosphere. As it reveals, Molly
remarried after the events of the film but died at the age of 50, Ernest was pardoned and lived out
his days in a trailer park with his brother, and Hale died at 87. And then who shows up, but Martin
Scorsese himself – who tells the audience that Mollie was buried next to the rest of her family,
and her obituary made no mention of the murders. We then are given a shot of a modern day Osage
gathering, with them celebrating their culture. The lack of reference to the events in the film
from the obituary speaks to Molly’s strengths, her refusal to let tragedy define her life,
but it also points to a larger issue – that of how quickly these shocking events were forgotten
about. About how, as we know after seeing the film, there was so much more to this woman’s life.
Scorsese refuses to give us easy answers as to what his bizarre ending means, but there’s much
to takaway, aside from it being a more creative way of wrapping things up than giving us a few
title screens. Although please bare with me if my reading of the scene is more on the simple side,
as I’ve only seen the film once so far. The Osage people were misrepresented,
and the history of the events were distorted, so much so that David Grann’s novel which the film
is based on actually shone a light on atrocities, and said book was released almost 100 years after
the events of the film. And that misrepresentation is present in the radio show. The voices of the
tribe members are done by white men, Tom White and the FBI come out looking like the heros. And
it feels like a piece of entertainment, it lacks the voice of the Osage, it doesn’t speak to their
pain or suffering. And we as the audience are able to recognise that – why? Because
we just spent over 3 hours with the Osage, with their pain, their suffering, and for the events
to be recorded in history the way they were in the radio show comes off as a farce, a parody,
a sick caricature where people are playing dress up, a piece of entertainment to consume
and forget, a failure of the historical record. And yet if we didn’t spend that 3 hours with them,
if we didn’t see the human element, the suffering, the realness, we, like the audience listening
to the show, may have been pretty curious at the story, and once its over, we turn to the
person next to us and say “well that was pretty interesting, wasn’t it?” and then we move on with
our lives. It almost feels like a damnation of the very nature of true crime podcasts.
Remember what William Hale said a few scenes previous – “there might be a public outcry,
for a while, But then you know what happens? People forget. They don't remember,
they don't care. They just don't care. It's just going to be another everyday common tragedy”
It's actually one of the reasons I prefer to talk about fictional crime movies and TV shows on the
channel, rather than real ones. The real life historical figures are of course interesting,
more interesting than movie characters by sheer virtue of being real people,
but these gangsters and crooks murdered and plundered real innocent people,
people who really lived on this earth and their lives were cut short. And there is an element
where talking about that, glorifying it, making money from it, feels a bit wrong, and I think this
is what the ending of Killers is tapping into. This radio programme actually happened – as
Grann explains in his book, the FBI began working with radio program “The Lucky Strike
Hour” to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the Osage Nation murders.
J. Edgar Hoover requested one of his agents write fictional scenes that were shared with
the radio show’s producers, and this is how the Osage murders news spread throughout the
US – giving us an inside look at why such a radio show would be hugely frustrating
to anyone familiar with the story. Osage native Brandy Lemon, who served
as a consultant for the movie, has said: “That was an actual radio show that occurred over 100
years ago. They recreated it. And they talked about us like we didn't matter. Like just in
passing, ‘Oh, by the way up in Osage Nation reservation, the Burkharts are going to jail
and it was over,’ and that was hard to take.” She said she understands if Scorsese’s ending
catches people off guard, adding ““When you visit with people about it, they’re like, ‘Why would he
do that?” Because that’s how we were treated and that’s true depiction of what happened.”
David Grann has spoken about the film’s ending, saying “I think he wanted to show how history
gets told or mistold, how it kind of radiates out into culture and then ... can be warped. It was a
point I tried to really make in the book, as well in mentioning that radio play — is how the Bureau,
but also how those in power, can manipulate the way history is told and use history for
their own purposes, and leave out or distort what really happened.”
“One of the things I tried to underscore in the book was how this history was distorted. And
one of the things the bureau did was, they tried to turn this into this big success,
and Hoover tried to turn this into a big success, after they had apprehended a few
of the killers. But there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the bureau never exposed”
The audience of the radio show, gasping and applauding, are no doubt also an intentional
choice – in them, we see ourselves, us watching this presentation of Scorsese, and the audience
too watching the actual Scorsese’s presentation. He is putting us in their shoes, utilizing
a similar ending to The Wolf of Wall Street, turning the camera around to show Jordan Belford’s
audience, as if to say, you think he’s bad? There’s hundreds out there wanting to be like him.
A different intention here of course, perhaps Scorsese is telling us we’re at fault too – why
are you here? Why are you watching this film? Ultimately its escapism, isn’t it?
Its entertainment. I had a couple next to be in my screening who were reacting to the film in
the same way the radio show’s audience were. But there’s something else the film does,
something quite brilliant – this is a radio show, people action, people playing dress up,
sound effects added in for dramatic events, and the whole thing being a b*stardised recreation of
the historic events. Well, that’s exactly what the film itself is! That’s what Killers of the
Flower Moon is – after all the trauma, drama and turmoil, Scorsese is making an admission that his
own movie, good as it is, is ultimately what this radio drama is, actors playing dress up, acting
out a distorted version of what really happened 100 years ago. Flower Moon is no different from
the radio play, it’s just got a bigger budget. The play had SFX, and Scorsese did too, building an
entire town, period cars, costumes. Swap the Lucky Strike sponsorship out with the Apple TV logo,
and what your left with is something of a parody of Killers of the Flower Moon.
It’s a frank, powerful and very meta way to end the film, self-reflective in its
nature. If Scorsese was deconstructing the gangster film with The Irishman,
de-glorifying it from the days of Goodfellas and Casino, here he goes 10 steps further and
practically critiques the very art form itself. Its like he took the Catholic guilt present in so
many of his films and expended it into what we might call white guilt, the guilt at the
opportunity to even make this film in the first place, to tell this story which, as an outsider,
isn’t his to tell. He is doing the same thing the radio show is doing, taking these Osage peoples’
stories and making his own thing with it, and he directly implicates himself, he acknowledges this,
by inserting himself at the climax of this scene. It’s not pretentious – anything but - without
Scorsese in this, it could come off as a hypocritical indictment of the kind of media that
finds success in telling these kind of stories. But Scorsese is saying “It isn’t just them;
its me too”. Its him reckoning with his role as a filmmaker and artist. Perhaps he’s saying – I
tried to do as much justice as I could, but if this story was told with true justice, it wouldn’t
be me telling it. And once he says what he needs to say, he steps away, and allows the film’s
final shot to end with the Osage celebrating their culture their own way in the present day.
I don’t know if this is intentional, but it’s a valid interpretation to suggest that maybe
even the casting of Jack White as part of the radio team. He has built a successful career
on blue’s inspired rock – the blues being a genre of music whose origins are linked
to oppressed black folk in the South, and White has been able to take and mold that
art and become successful and influential in his own right. And even his name is White!
It's not even about Scorsese being white – even if an Osage director made the film they could
easily be just as guilty of the same faults, he would still be telling his story, not say,
Molly’s. And so this goes back to the movie’s ending being a critique of the very medium itself,
and the limitations that come with it. His vision as an outsider is limited,
as symbolised with him taking a moment to put his glasses on before reading his speech.
Even the fact that the radio show is sponsored by a cigarette brand is significant – Tobacco,
cultivated by native Americans, was smoked for cultural and religious purposes – think
back to the movie’s opening scene with the pipe. When the Europeans came in,
they took the tobacco and monetized it, got rich from it, and perverted it, by propagating
the cigarette and all of its unhealthy affects. Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant for
the film, spoke about it, saying Scorsese did a great job of representing the Osage people,
but “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family
experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that. [it] isn't made for an Osage audience,
it was made for everybody who is not Osage" Perhaps this was on Scorsese’s mind,
which maybe caused him to go back for re-shoots and shoot the epilogue.
There’s been a lot of Scorsese movie ending sthat have been memorable and thought provoking,
and a lot of it relates to memory and legacy. In Gangs of New York, the weeds cover the graves of
the characters we saw in the film, forgotten in time. Frank Sheeran isn’t even gone yet at the end
of The Irishman, and he and the world he was part of is forgotten, the nurse he speaks to not even
recognising the photo of Jimmy Hoffa. And when we remember the story of Molly Burkhart and the Osage
nation, will we remember it right, or in another 100 years will Killers of the Flower Moon seem as
hokey and bias as this radio show? There’s more than can be said,
but I think we’ll leave it there for today. What did you think of Killers of the Flower
Moon’s ending? Let me know in the comment section below, and thanks for watching