This article discusses the plot and ending of Killers Of The Flower Moon
Martin Scrosese’s new film, The Killers Of The Flower Moon, is appropriately generating conversation and criticism. The treatment of the Osage people, both in the plot and on the set, has become a lightning rod for critique that the film welcomes. Scorsese himself admits his “culpability” in the film’s epilogue. As a cast member of the radio drama version of Killers Of The Flower Moon, the director reads the real Mollie Burkhart’s obituary. “There was no mention of the killings,” Scorsese says. The film’s epilogue remains one of its most powerful moments, with the realization that this type of violence is part of a continuum, a tragedy to true-crime pipeline that continues to this day.
In a recent press conference for the film, Scorsese explained that because these horrors can be “reduced to a half-hour piece of entertainment,” he had to “bring us back to the heart of the picture.” However, he “honestly didn’t know how to direct it.”
“I was taken by the impact of the realization that all of this—generations of suffering and genocide and trauma, betrayals, love, hate—all of this is reduced to a half-hour piece of entertainment,” he explained. “And somehow, I had to find a way to make the transition of something as shocking as the radio show to bring us back to the heart of the picture.”
The finale was shot at Scorsese’s old high school, Cardinal Hayes High School in New York, with his wife, daughters, and granddaughter in attendance. “Something hit home as I was repeating the lines. I felt that—in an odd way—that this is a film, and one could say it’s entertainment,” he continued. “We make the entertainment now, but it’s on people’s lives. It’s on people’s souls. We have to remember that and to keep it in balance.”
Scorsese recognizes that Killers Of The Flower Moon is part of a long line of Westerns that mythologized the cowboy and demonized the indigenous people. Adding to that lineage, Scorsese felt “culpability,” which led him to keep his cameo in the film.
“I felt I should just take on the role. If you say, ‘Oh, Marty, you like the old Westerns, and they were shown this way and the Native Americans are shown as bad.’ Yes, I did like the old Westerns. Yes, I am part of the system. Yes, I am European-American. And yes, I am culpable. So I think I took that on. I couldn’t verbalize that as I was doing it. But when I edited it, when Themla [Schoonmaker] I put it in, we felt it. And so I guess I put it on me.”
Killers Of The Flower Moon is in theaters now.