I’m getting caught up in perfection, which was not the point of this. So for no one else’s benefit but mine, I’m giving myself a new category to work under - First (draft) Impressions. It’s for any unpolished thing I want to talk about. Here’s the first one.
I agree with Martin Scorsese. Comic book movies are no good. Though perhaps for different reasons. Perhaps not. Scorsese seems to think they’re taking over the theatrical movie going experience and that they’re a threat to original storytelling. I think they oversimplify good vs evil. Both liberals and conservatives root for Batman. Liberals because they support sticking up for victims. And conservatives because they’d like to make enough money to buy a nice car and run poor people over with it. Comic book movies delineate between good and evil clearly. Even in a movie like Captain America: Civil War, where the good guys fight against each other, they do it on an abandoned airport so that no civilians get hurt and they put aside their differences when an alien comes to earth. So, the whole MCU or DCEU persistently perpetuates the idea that good and evil are easy to distinguish. But the truth is they are not. People who see themselves as good do bad things, and as for bad guys, well like Agatha Christie said, “every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” Bad deeds don’t just come from bad people and good people don’t just do good things. It’s never that simple and Killers of the Flower Moon is Scorsese telling us that.
There will be some spoiling of the movie here, so don’t read on if you don’t want it spoiled.
The movie, which centers on a real dumb white guy, is about the mass killing of the Osage people during the 1920s when oil was discovered on their land. It’s about who committed the crimes and America’s total lack of concern for the atrocities. It’s a terribly sad movie and a reminder that our country’s entire existence is from its colonization to at this very moment, soaked in the blood spilled over greed, fear, and hate. One of the moral questions the movie asks is if it’s possible to love someone while also intentionally hurting them. The dumb white guy, Earnest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, among other horrors, gives his wife insulin cut with poison over the course of what seems like years. There is no doubt that the movie’s intent is to say that Earnest is both culpable of this hate crime and also loves his wife. One remark of the movie presented by the language consultant, Christopher Cote, an Osage, is that one cannot have love and carry out violence towards the same person. Cote said Burkhart doesn’t have a conscience. That “when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that's not love. That's not love, that's just beyond abuse." I agree. However, I do think it is possible to convince oneself that their love outweighs or is more powerful than the harm caused. It’s a falsity to be sure, but it’s something nearly all people do. That’s the point the movie is making. Not to create sympathy for a greedy, criminal murderer but to remind us that evil does not exist in the hearts of evil men. It exists in the actions of all of us. The Joker and Thanos are fictitious embodiments of evil with various motives made to be compelling. But they do not exist. But people who offer medicine, who give help, who care deeply, are also the people who are serving up harm. They do exist. We are those people.
Every one of us has our insulin and our poison and they’re often packaged in the same syringe. Watching Killers of the Flower Moon, you’re meant to be disgusted with the men’s actions as you should be. And if you’re like me you guffawed at their words and crimes and went, “I can’t believe people were ever capable of such violent horrors.” You hate Earnest, and you wonder if he could have really loved his wife while at the same time slowly and deliberately making her sick and killing her. And then you remember that this is an Apple film, a corporation that makes billions off the cheap labor of poor people in other countries and contributes to our environmental devastation. Or you think about how you donate to humanitarian aid and claim it on your taxes as you send the federal government more money to build bombs. Or you reflect about how you marched in the streets for marginalized people on ground that is the graveyard of marginalized people. You share your support for fair compensation during the writers and actor’s strike on social media where you’re creating content for Facebook for free. You educate yourself on male toxicity from listening to a podcast hosted on a streaming platform that pays Joe Rogan millions from ad revenue generated by your cat food subscription. You buy books on amazon about anti-capitalism. Or at least I do.
That was my takeaway from Killers of the Flower Moon. Not the only one. I went in expecting violent atrocities committed by colonizers on indigenous people (a part of our history I’ve only recently been more exposed to through Reservation Dogs, a show on a network founded by racists and sold to a company founded by an antisemite), and still I was horrified by what I learned. I expected to be disgusted by white people, by my ancestors, and still my stomach turned. What I didn’t expect was that I would loathe DiCaprio’s character and yet have reflected back a mindset that was not unfamiliar. Now nothing I’ve done compares even remotely to the genocidal actions of despicable men 100 years ago. But I have in the same motion been motivated by love and knowingly caused harm.
That’s what evil is. It’s not diabolical. It’s subtle and easy to downplay as insignificant. Evil is not a pillar of antagonism set on causing pain and inadvertently uniting us. It’s in all of us and giving in to it takes no effort at all and resisting it takes an enormous amount of intrinsic willpower and a fearlessness for the consequences. Make no mistake. Ernest is one of the lowliest piece of shit humans to walk the earth. But he was somebody’s good friend. And that guy was probably a piece of shit too who was loved by someone for doing a decent thing.
If Scorsese had made them evil with evil intent, then they’re not real. They’re comic book villains. He doesn’t want to glorify them or make them sympathetic or even pathetic. He had to make what they did unequivocally evil and also give them something recognizably human. And what’s more human than denial?
The movie fucked me up. After seeing it, I watched Last Week Tonight, and the main story was on business consultant firms and the damage they cause.
They focused on McKinsey & Company something which claims its aim is to make the world a better place. But for every humanitarian aid business they’ve helped, there’s a blistering fact about them working with tobacco companies as recent as 2021, or making Rikers Island prison more violent, or helping big pharma “turbocharge” oxy sales to children or help Saudi Arabia leadership locate dissenters. And the segment ends with John Oliver asking how many of those are worth a humanitarian aid drop? It’s poison-laced insulin.
Then I heard that a certain establishment I’ve made my home for fourteen years was purchased by a Venture Capitalist firm that may have received financial backing from a hedge fund that invests heavily in Lockheed Martin. If true, there’s certainly more poison in that cocktail than insulin.
Was it poison in the movie? It might have been heroin. I’m going to worry I got it wrong and that my whole point will be undermined. More than that, I’m worried that I’m going to be seen as sympathetic or relating to Earnest. Which I’m not. I’m just don’t think the movie is making the argument that you can both love someone and hurt them. I think it’s saying that you can convince yourself you love someone you’re hurting. It’s not acceptable, but it’s remarkable accessible. It’s tasteless, odorless, colorless evil. Chewable. Undetectable. And it’s in fucking everything. Just like PFAS and PFOS, the chemical poison in every human being even unborn babies. And how did it get there? Because someone who probably thought they were decent, invented Teflon. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-waters-pfas-ticking-chemical-time-bomb-in-your-blood
Sorry this was so bleak. See the movie. It’s worth it. Then go do something nice for someone. It’ll make you feel better.