Killers of the Flower Moon gears up for the masses
The awards-favorite film lands on Apple+ customers on Friday. Here are some things to think about if you watch.
the true crime that's worth your time
I spent a lot of my fall thinking about Killers of the Flower Moon and wishing I could talk about it with you all. I’d been assigned a story on the link between Ree Drummond — aka blogger turned Food Network star The Pioneer Woman — and the crimes portrayed in the Martin Scorsese film. I spent some of the unseasonably hottest days of the year rereading David Grann’s book on which the film is based, then buried myself in research and documents on some of the Osage folks killed in the Reign of Terror. I listened to the voices of their descendants through Rachel Adams’-Heard’s fascinating podcast, In Trust. Eventually, I talked to those descendants, myself.
So I was already marinating in the troubling details of how so many white Oklahomans built their generational wealth when I sat down in an empty Indianapolis theater atop a basically deserted mall, for a screening of the film. All that setup primed me to be an incredibly receptive audience member for the three-hour, 26-minute film, and it also set me up to be a terrible critic. My heart was so deeply into the facts behind the story by the time I sat down all by my lonesome, a rumpled and far more facially mobile Nicole Kidman. I was in the tank for KotFM, and there I remain.
I continue to believe that anyone interested in the film should strongly consider seeing it in a theater, but for many of us that’s not practical. Between ongoing pandemic concerns (it ain’t over, folks), the general inconvenience of going to the movies, and the costs of a night out, the streaming watershed that came in 2020 has been a real boon, enabling us to see movies as part of a nominal streaming subscription while they’re still part of the conversation. With KotFM moving from VOD to regular old streaming on January 12, we’ll arguably see one of the biggest true crime examples of this so far.
I say this not just because we’re in the middle of awards season, where star Lily Gladstone is likely to make a number of acceptance speeches, but because that buzz plus its sudden accessibility is likely to do what the best true crime does: it will cast a new light on the folks who experienced these crimes, and will see people rallying for change.
Everett Waller, an Osage Nation member who appears in the film, told me that he believes that as more people see the film, more people will work to learn more about the Reign of Terror, “which can only help our people.” Waller’s also the chair of the Nation’s mineral rights council, and he’s dedicated his life to undoing the legacy of the real people Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro play in the film. They, among many, many other white folks — including the Drummond family — ended up with (I wishy-washily write to avoid litigation) land, money, and rights that were rightfully Osage. Waller’s hope is that if people see this played out onscreen, they’ll want to know what they can do to help fix things.
Waller has spent his life lobbying and arguing for his Nation, including in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, so he arguably has a specific set of interests when it comes to the public reception of the film. But by no means is the movie’s reception homogenous among Indigenous folks. Actress Devery Jacobs is one of the most prominent voices critical of the movie, saying via X (what we used to call Twitter) that “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire. Imagine the worst atrocities committed against [your] ancestors, then having to sit [through] a movie explicitly filled with them, with the only respite being 30 minute long scenes of murderous white guys talking about/planning the killings.”
“It must be noted that Lily Gladstone is an absolute legend and carried Mollie with tremendous grace,” Jacobs, who is a Canadian member of the Mohawk tribe, wrote. “All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film. Give Lily her goddamn Oscar. But while all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
“I don’t feel that these very real [Indigenous] people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths,“ Jacobs wrote. “Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.”
Jacobs, who starred in FX’s Reservation Dogs, argued that part of the problem is who tells what story. “This is the issue when non-Native directors are given the liberty to tell our stories; they center the white perspective and focus on Native people’s pain,” she wrote. “I would prefer to see a $200 million movie from an Osage filmmaker telling this history, any day of the week. I’m sorry, but Scorsese choosing to end on a shot of Ilonshka dances and drumming? It doesn’t absolve the film from painting Native folks as helpless victims without agency.”
The arguments that Jacobs presents made me think a lot about The Wire. Another prestige quality project with what I believe to be a desire to educate while providing audiences with entertainment — and another project that probably wouldn’t have been made with the same reach, distribution, or budget were the folks heading up the project members of the historically and systemically marginalized community it depicts.
True, The Wire is whole-cloth fiction (though inspired, as creator David Simon admits, by folks he met as a Baltimore reporter; see Donnie Little, etc.). But, still, if you’ve never met someone whose sole knowledge of drug dealing or Baltimore seems to come from that show, you must not know many white people. It also makes me think about HBO series Watchmen, which is how many folks — not all white — learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Watchmen, too, was fiction, and is less based in reality than The Wire. But still, I wonder how many people felt a flash of shock or indignation when faced with the genuine true crime element of that sci-fi series, then left it at that. Or, worse, they became armchair experts based on that series’s brief depiction of the crime, ala the more obnoxious Wire fans’ Baltimore expertise.
My hope is that once available to anyone with an Apple+ subscription, viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon resist the urge to be as superficial an “expert,” I also hope that — unlike in The Wire or Watchmen — we’re talking about real people, many with direct relatives walking around today. I’m also thinking about those folks, and how unsettling it must be to have your great grandparents up on screen, either experiencing or committing dreadful crimes. Until now, it was just VOD buyers and theater-goers who had their eyes on these ancestors, but on Friday, it’s basically the whole world. — EB
Thursday on Best Evidence: Sticking with the KotFM theme, it’s time for Leonardo DiCaprio’s BET-CRP!
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