Counter-Currents
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Martin Scorsese, who turns 81 today, is a master of the gangster movie: Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, The Irishman, and now Killers of the Flower Moon. Killers is the true story of a series of murders that took place in the 1920s on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma.
When oil was discovered under their reservation, the Osage nation became, in effect, the first oil sheikdom. The Osage cashed in their oil revenues for fancy houses, cars, clothes, and bling. Alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes ran rampant. To prevent the Osage from ruining themselves, the government appointed guardians to dole out their money. Such paternalism is necessary with people who have lower than average IQs and are in a hurry to enjoy themselves without thinking about the long run.
But oil money attracted more than just merchants. It also attracted criminals and gold-diggers. I have never been comfortable with whites who marry outside our race. But I despise the sort of white who would do that for money. Still, there’s something even lower. I don’t have the moral categories to describe a white man who marries a non-white for her money, fathers children with her, then bumps off his in-laws one by one to increase his wife’s estate. Then he starts working on the wife and children.
The leader of the gang is a liberal sociopath in the Clinton, Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Gavin Newsom mold. He poses as a great friend and champion of the Osage. He speaks their language and bestows gifts upon them. He is an opponent of race prejudice and the Ku Klux Klan. But all the while, he cold-bloodedly kills and robs the people he befriends. But you could never accuse him of “racism.”
Altogether, the gang probably killed 20-odd people, including some of their own accomplices. It is hard to be sure, since some of the Indians may have died of genuine illnesses, accidents, and suicides. Beyond that, murders they had no hand in may have been pinned on them just to wrap up open cases. There’s a lot of room for doubt, because American Indians are prone to violence, alcoholism, diabetes, and suicide, and few Osage made it into their 50s, anyway.
The killers’ most fascinating trait is their combination of retail shrewdness and wholesale madness. Some of the murders were cleverly plotted, but when murders, suicides, and mysterious fatal illnesses started adding up — as did the number of accomplices — it should have been obvious that this could not go on forever. But this gang would have murdered the whole state of Oklahoma if nobody had stopped them. It never seemed to occur to them to quit while they were ahead.
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Is Killers an anti-white movie? Not really. It isn’t preachy about race. It doesn’t blackwash all whites or whitewash the Osage. If anything, it can be read as a cautionary tale against race-mixing, materialism, and liberal democracy.
The Indian elders are portrayed with great dignity. But they have been thoroughly corrupted by their wealth. They used to be warriors, but none of the whites who prey upon them and their daughters find them threatening anymore. They run the tribe as a liberal democracy. They see that race-mixing is claiming their people’s future, but they cannot say no to their own daughters who are marrying out. They know that whites are killing them, but they won’t exclude whites from their own families and councils. The villains, moreover, are not “bad” whites who look down on them, but “good” whites who have married into their tribe. (Virtually none of these murders would have happened without race-mixing.) Instead of going on the warpath, the Osage send a white who has married an Indian woman to Washington, DC to petition the federal government for help. They remind me of the older generation of mainstream conservatives, complaining about genuine problems but prevented from solving them by their own principles and their self-indulgent lifestyles.
The Osage may be pathetic, but the whites who prey on such people are utterly despicable. Yet none of them are “racists.” Racists would not sully themselves with such crimes. Beyond that, the heroes who finally brought the killings to an end were white, from President Coolidge to J. Edgar Hoover to the agents they dispatched to Oklahoma. Thus as a white man, I left the theater feeling no “white guilt,” but a good deal of healthy shame for the scum that committed these crimes and some healthy pride that decency finally triumphed.
I also felt admiration for Martin Scorsese and everyone involved in this movie. There is a vast cast, but not a weak performance in the bunch. Leading men Leonardo di Caprio and Robert De Niro are particularly outstanding. The only flaw of this movie is its slightly more than three hour running time. Surely this story could have been told more economically. Although, in all fairness, I was so captivated that I never once checked the time.
If you like character studies and crime dramas that do not insult your intelligence or taste, I highly recommend Killers of the Flower Moon. It is not Scorsese’s best film, but I enjoyed it much more than his last outing, The Irishman, and it is head and shoulders above anything else in the theaters today.
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19 comments
The book on which this film was based was interesting. At least I personally liked it very much.
Thanks for the positive review. I’m a Scorsese fan and I was going to shrug this movie off thinking it was just anti white baloney. It’s definitely worth a look.
I assumed this movie would be anti white cheese, but I may watch it now. I bet this episode is where the plot of People of Darkness by Tony Hilkerman comes from. In that the villain similarly tries to kill off a particular tribe for mineral rights or something similar. The Indians wear their totems in their underwear or shorts, or whatever, by their pelvis. So he gives them totems laced with uranium, radioactive, so they all develop prostate or ovarian cancer in a number of years! The people of darkness are so-called because their totem is the mole.
I think a good movie from a number of years ago for someone perceptive to analyze would be Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler. Don’t laugh, it’s got some deep ethnic and racial coding in it. It’s also interesting in the context of the movies that were released that year, late 2019. I could write an essay.
Check out Spencer Quinn’s take on Uncut Gems: https://counter-currents.com/2020/01/uncut-gems/
I second this review. For whatever reason, I hardly noticed the lengthy running time go by – a sign of a good filmmaker. OTOH, I can’t say I found the film especially memorable, either. I only saw it a few weeks ago, but prior to this review, had already forgotten it. Perhaps that was because it was, as the reviewer notes, neither especially pro- nor anti-white. And the story was weird, even if basically factual.
This is a movie to see at home. There isn’t much dazzling cinematography, or special action effects, to warrant seeing it on the big screen.
I agree. This is a film you can see on the small screen, and you can break up the viewing if the run time seems too long.
The Indian elders are portrayed with great dignity. But they have been thoroughly corrupted by their wealth. They used to be warriors, but none of the whites who prey upon them and their daughters find them threatening anymore. They run the tribe as a liberal democracy. They see that race-mixing is claiming their people’s future, but they cannot say no to their own daughters who are marrying out. They know that whites are killing them, but they won’t exclude whites from their own families and councils. The villains, moreover, are not “bad” whites who look down on them, but “good” whites who have married into their tribe.
Replace the word Indian with North Caucasian, and you’ll get our sad North Caucasian story.
“I don’t have the moral categories to describe a white man who marries a non-white for her money, fathers children with her, then bumps off his in-laws one by one to increase his wife’s estate. Then he starts working on the wife and children.”
I suppose that would be like being both Nicole Brown Simpson and OJ all rolled in one. Maybe not an exact analogy, but yanno…
I’ve seen it now. I understand that the plot is pretty accurate with regard to actual events, which probably accounts for the long runtime. Racial angle aside, the gold diggers had all the money they needed to live very comfortably, yet they started whacking lots of people who didn’t deserve it, all so that they could – wait for it – get more money. That by itself is all kinds of despicable. Anyway, since the local law enforcement wasn’t doing squat, I’m a bit surprised that the Osages didn’t draw some conclusions about who was up to that and make an example of someone.
I thought it was a great movie, a movie that portrays the consequences of sin like almost none other I’ve seen. Unlike some fanciful horror movie antagonist, or a Bond villain, here is deep evil as it really is, incomprehensibly stupid and sometimes a product of schizoid split personalities. Late Scorsese has been truly great, in Silence and The Irishman. Sadly this film may actually lose money because it cost 200 million! This is because the liberal white snakes hate to see themselves get a cinematic vivisection!
It is a fascinating character study of evil.
Such paternalism is necessary with people who have lower than average IQs and are in a hurry to enjoy themselves without thinking about the long run.
David Grann in his book, on which the film was based, wrote, that some of these guardians were big swindlers and stole Indians’ money.
I am sure that happened.
Technically that’s embezzlement. They should have been prosecuted.
I still feel sympathy and even solidarity with American Indians. For me they are my distant cousins. Of course, they went East much earlier than my ancestors went West, but they still have one and the same homeland, Altay mountains and Steppe around them. Moreover, some scholars found some parallels in Türkic languages and in languages of some Amerindian tribes.
Thanks for the good review of the film. I want to go to the cinema to see this film. I like Martin Scorsese movies.
One look at the preview (seen live on the campustown with another preview which – like a prior “RGB”-biopic – was apparently trying to pass off Golda Meir as substantially less Yiddish than she was) and you know that this tale is about as credible as that told in “Easy Rider” – and without Jack Nicholson or any decent tunes on the soundtrack.
This movie is a complete mediocrity.
“The leader of the gang is a liberal sociopath in the Clinton, Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Gavin Newsom mold. He poses as a great friend and champion of the Osage. He speaks their language and bestows gifts upon them. He is an opponent of race prejudice and the Ku Klux Klan. But all the while, he cold-bloodedly kills and robs the people he befriends. But you could never accuse him of “racism.””
Perhaps. But that is not how the film is constructed nor is it the takeaway for most people. DiCaprio and DeNiro are big Hollywood do-gooder White liberals whose reputations as such must be preserved. We don’t have any scenes of them actually killing any poc’s, do we? Burkhart attempts the murder of his wife, but it’s through an abstracted method that doesn’t succeed. It’s only against another White man that we see him commit unmistakable aggression. The killings and attempted killings are carried by lesser and marginal people, who also happen to be more authentic representations of the region. And all well disconnected from appearances by the principals.
DiCaprio and DeNiro are not very good. But we nonetheless have them on screen in front of us, engaged in some tete à tete, for what seems an interminable third of the movie. They don’t really play the characters, who would be natives of the region. They play themselves as “types”. All of this works to insulate them from the villainy; most particularly any charge of racism as expressed through killing a poc. That must be why they are so frequently seen cocooned together, to such a degree they constitute a movie within the movie. They are their own little Planet Hollywood.
I understand your critique Theodora, and I suppose it is possible that people superficially viewing the movie might still come away with ‘White Oklahoma racists bad’ but we are not those people reading this website. Our male leads in the film are quite obviously extremely villainous. De Niro is the mastermind, and when he threatens DiCaprio’s children in jail, he literally has the bars of the cell frame his face in an inverted crucifix shadow in a heavy-handed ‘he’s pure evil guys’ moment. And DiCaprio is the catalyst for setting in motion many deaths in the movie! And again, these are characters who were real people who, except for the murdering part, were in every way racial liberals of the time! I’ve never seen a more damning movie that says ‘It’s possible to be a perfectly politically correct Goodwhite, and still be a profoundly immoral and corrupted person’ ever. And also even if you found it objectionable politically, it doesn’t make it mediocre.
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