White Guilt and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

It should come as no surprise that Martin Scorsese, who was raised a devout Catholic and at one point considered going into the seminary, returns to themes of guilt in his movies. His breakthrough feature, Mean Streets, tells us, “You don’t make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets.” One of the marks of the violent sociopaths that frequent Scorsese’s pictures is their lack of remorse over their actions. By comparison, his heroes, especially in films about faith—The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence—are marked by their guilt and how their actions or inactions may cause suffering towards others.

But what does guilt look like on a vast scale? The term “white guilt” has been weaponized by those who seek to be free from consequence, similar to how “bleeding heart” is meant to reframe compassion as weakness. But guilt comes when we feel the consequences of our actions; when we have harmed others and must answer for that harm. Killers of the Flower Moon is an exploration of a guilt on both the intimate scale of a marriage as well as a historical and national scale with the murders of the Osage people for their oil-rich land. For Scorsese, he takes David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name, and uses it to address our cultural moment with white supremacists back on the rise and claiming that America is “their land.” And if we take them at their word, then we must examine what their whiteness means for this land.

While the broad story of Killers of the Flower Moon is a matter of investigating who was killing the Osage people in 1920s and 30s Oklahoma, Scorsese focuses on the marriage between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman who is due to inherit valuable headrights to oil lands. Ernest is the nephew of the venerable William Hale (Robert De Niro), an esteemed member of the community who presents himself as a friend and protector of the Osage. Ernest, a clearly slow-witted and venal individual, is happy to follow his uncle’s bidding and reasoning that he should not only get in good with the Osage, but also that the Osage’s “time” is ending to make way for white people. The questions that hang over the film are, “Does Ernest truly love Mollie, and if he does, then how can he participate in such horrible actions towards both her people and her immediate family?” It’s a movie about a deep betrayal and a man who’s either too dumb, too vain, or too selfish to realize the harm he’s causing.

For Scorsese, he knows that whiteness is his way into the story. While the film was done with the participation of the Osage people and a large cast of indigenous actors, some may wonder why Ernest is the focal point of the story rather than Mollie. Looking at the film, I’d argue that for Scrosese, he doesn’t feel fully comfortable speaking on behalf of the Osage, or thinking that he and co-writer Eric Roth can fully grasp the minority perspective. Furthermore, as a white man and a beneficiary of whiteness, Scorsese is turning the camera at his own people rather than trying to be a conduit for indigenous people. This is a story of guilt, and the Osage didn’t murder each other for rights to oil-rich lands. The examination here is about whiteness and the damage it does, which is best represented through Ernest’s actions.

I don’t know if this is my favorite DiCaprio performance (that’s probably still his colorful turns in The Wolf of Wall Street or Django Unchained), but arguably this is the most difficult work of his career. Ernest strips DiCaprio of his two key features—his looks and his charisma. Sporting a pair of grimy teeth and a haircut that makes his head look squat, Ernest has the appearance and demeanor of a toad. It’s the rare film where someone calls a DiCaprio character handsome and we say, “Really? Okay.” But by depriving DiCaprio of verbosity or style, it forces him into a fascinating place where he’s stripped down into a man whose allegiances are so fragile and petty that he can’t help but be a grotesque yet common figure. Calvin Candie of Django Unchained is a monster, but his racism is part of the theatricality inherent in Quentin Tarantino’s features. While Scorsese is no stranger to flash, he’s purposefully stripped Killers of the Flower Moon way down so that all that remains is the human and the frail. What makes Ernest unnerving isn’t his uniqueness; it’s how common he is.

While other criminals in Scorsese movies live extravagant lifestyles that will ultimately come crashing down in a cascade of bloody violence, Ernest and his ilk are far more prosaic in their actions. They love money, but they’re not sharp enough or organized enough to conceive of a racket. Instead, they’re more like parasites, feasting off the host of the Osage and their wealth. Generously, they’re predators, and while you may get one as arguably savvy as William Hale, these are not cunning creatures. They succeed not by virtue of their intelligence, but because they exist within a power structure that gives them numbers and cultural invulnerability.

The reason Killers of the Flower Moon shines is not because Scorsese is telling us what we already know, but because it seeks to delve into a psychology that demands criminality while also craving innocence. That’s Ernest in a nutshell. He knows he’s committing crimes; he knows he’s committing them on behalf of his uncle’s instructions; and yet he needs some kind of excuse that tells him he’s a good person. Hale reasons it out by saying the Osage’s time is coming to a close as if that’s some kind of scientific certainty. For Ernest, he believes he can keep poisoning his wife with what she believes is insulin for her diabetes, but simply assume that it’s the medicine that’s cause her health problems, not him. Gladstone, in a terrific performance, plays a strong woman wasting away in front of her husband, and yet Ernest never considers it his duty to protect Mollie; for Ernest, he looks at a bunch of white guys who are dressed better than he is, and he follows their instructions to hasten Mollie’s decline.

While W.E.B. DuBois coined the term “double consciousness” to explain being examined by a white society while also trying to live as a person of African heritage, Killers of the Flower Moon turns the camera around to look at this dual consciousness with white faces that can’t see themselves. The film asks a white audience (and this white filmmaker) to borrow a line from Ernest, “Can you spot the wolves in this picture?” The characters don’t see themselves as predators, but that’s because they’re choosing not to. Instead, they run to any rationalization they can, and it’s the Osage who suffer. The threat isn’t some virulent racist who declares himself as such; it’s in the genteel white guy who masquerades as your friend and then colludes other white people with under the guise of reasonable and kindly rhetoric. You never get the sense that Ernest or William “hate” the Osage. They just don’t see them as fully human or deserving of what white people receive. Their mentality is love devoid of respect in the same way a rancher may care for his herd, but also wouldn’t think twice about sending them to the slaughterhouse for a profit.

Of course, at three-and-a-half hours, we have to wonder if Scorsese requires so much time to address these ideas, but I believe the film earns its length. Killers of the Flower Moon is not a plot-driven mystery, and when the FBI finally does show up, they exist more as functionaries rather than deep characters or thematically worthwhile individuals. The film is about a marriage as a microcosm of a larger racial relationship. Scorsese takes his time because we have to exist within the contradiction of Ernest loving Mollie while also being willing to obliterate her and her people without a second thought. The easy route there is that Ernest is just a bad guy whose strings are being pulled by a worse guy. But that lets us all off the hook, and Scorsese is examining a cultural and historical question that indicts his protagonist, himself, and large swaths of the audience.

What makes Killers of the Flower Moon work isn’t that it simply says, “White people are bad,” and calls it a day. Instead, it’s asking a tougher question about “How can you do evil and still think that you are good?” It is a look at whiteness and asking, “Where is your guilt?” For other Scorsese criminals, they do evil because it’s fun, lucrative, and society doesn’t ask these men to grow up. While immaturity is a part of Killers of the Flower Moon (at one point Hale literally spanks Ernest), it’s not the core of the characters. The core is the banality of their evil. Other Scorsese criminals know that they’re criminals, but they relish the lifestyle and power that being an outlaw affords. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we see a world where sin has become so common that the sinners can no longer recognize their own guilt.

Killers of the Flower Moon opens in theaters on October 20th.