“I could be real”: What Martin Scorsese says about himself and the world with Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese has never been shy about inserting himself into his films.
From Mean Streets, through Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, Hugo and The Wolf of Wall Street, the celebrated director has enjoyed cameos of various sizes in several of his own works and thereby put himself into the canon of great American cinema (not just as the author behind the camera, but a presence in front of it too).
These cameos come to a startling, brilliant climax at the end of his latest work, Killers of the Flower Moon.
The coda to Killers serves as a thematic coup de grace, not just for the picture but also the director’s entire body of work, which has seen Scorsese (Marty, to his friends) reach the zenith of filmmaking, often, but not exclusively, by putting violence on the screen and making the world of criminality seem sexy or alluring (but no less brutal, it must be said).
Quick recap
Killers tells the story of Ernest Burkhart and his marriage to the oil-rich Osage Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) appears to have genuine love for his wife while at the same time conspiring with his uncle ‘King’ Bill Hale (Robert De Niro) to have her family systematically killed off so the headrights for the oil come to him.
It is a true story, adapted from David Grann’s celebrated non-fiction book of the same title.
Precise details of Ernest and Mollie’s marriage — what actually happened behind closed doors — are largely up to artistic interpretation; in this case Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth’s (albeit via Grann, an assiduous journalist).
A filmmaker may choose to take Ernest’s word but, as the film frequently demonstrates, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
(In 1959, at a parole hearing, Ernest was still denying his importance to the murder spree, saying: “All I did was deliver a message. Other than that I’m as innocent as you. I delivered a message from my uncle to John Ramsey and that’s all I did.” This denial is not included in the film, it does not need to be.)
A clear reading of the film would be to take the three main characters, indeed the main storyline, as an allegory for white crimes against Native Americans as a whole.
Hale is the representation of sheer capitalistic greed (cloaked under the guise of friendship), Ernest the general population, easily manipulated and cajoled, persuaded that he is in the right (and maybe in his heart of hearts still thinks that).
Mollie is the wronged, righteous Native American. Too trusting, grief-stricken, with agency only as far as the authorities allow.
When she’s near-death and hallucinating Hale visits her bedroom, the architect of all her misery, dressed up as a smooth-talking friend of the Osage.
“Are you real?” she asks.
“I could be real”, he replies. Killers makes clear, Hale is very real, always has been and always will be.
In an interview with the BFI the director said: “ We’re all the killers. The European white comes in, Western civilisation comes in. We are the killers, and we have to understand that. We have to confront it in ourselves.”
The end
The final narrative scene Scorsese presents us with is a recovered but heartbroken Mollie confronting her husband after his admissions in court.
She sits down opposite Ernest, with DiCaprio contorting his face into a kind of confused hang-dog expression of regret and anger.
“Have you told all the truths?” she asks.
“Yes I have”, he lies. “My soul is clean now Mollie, it’s a relief for me to get out from under this. I wasn’t going to let anyone get near you or the children.”
“What did you give me?”, she asks.
Ernest, who has been systematically poisoning her, can barely look at her, much less acknowledge the truth.
“What was in the shots?” she asks again, her eyes filled with a mournful, regretful sympathy (Gladstone is an awesome force in this scene). He doesn’t answer.
“My medicine you gave me, what was in it šǫ́mįhkase?” she presses, using the Osage word for coyote which had once been a term of affection between them.
Somehow DiCaprio finds a way to contort Ernest’s face even more.
“Insulin,” he lies again. She stands and walks out, leaving Ernest there, to wallow in the fact he still cannot be honest about himself. The camera stays on him and does not follow Mollie out of the room.
The frame then lingers on lawman Tom White (Jesse Plemmons), who had been standing over Ernest throughout.
Coda
In normal circumstances such a film would end with some exposition cards explaining what happened next.
Scorsese is no normal director.
At eighty he is still at the top of his game, perhaps even delivering on a higher artistic level than ever before, adding in a healthy dose of self-reflection on his own role in shaping American culture and recent ‘Western’ (that is, Anglo-American) history.
In one of the greatest cuts in modern cinema, we are transported to an all-white audience of a radioplay recording, dramatising the murders and the ‘heroic’ story of the FBI lawmen who solved the case.
We find out that Ernest’s brother Byron avoided conviction, and the murderous Bill Hale, after serving time in prison, ended up returning to the Osage Hills and died age 87.
(Ernest lived to 94 and died in 1986).
Pointedly the Lucky Strike radioplay (“got a light for my Lucky Strike?”) has all the trappings of the 1930s but includes information that goes to 1962, Scorsese using the storytelling tool to demonstrate the timelessness of society’s fascination with ‘true crime’, something that has become even more pointed in the podcast and ‘content’ age.
But it’s not just a remark on true crime, Scorsese is hunting bigger fish. It’s a remark on the flaws of storytelling as a form of history.
Speaking on his documentary, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, the director said:
“The American filmmaker has always been more interested in creating fiction than revealing reality.
“For better or for worse the Hollywood director is an entertainer, he’s in the business of telling stories.
“He is therefore saddled with conventions and stereotypes, formulas and cliches and all these limitations were codified in specific genres.”
Marty, American storyteller-in-chief, cast himself to deliver Mollie’s obituary. Killers may be based on a true story but it is, ultimately, a fiction.
Sharply dressed and not hidden behind make-up or a dodgy moustache, there can be no mistaking this is the film’s director delivering the final message to the watching audience.
He reads:
“Mrs Mollie Cobb, 50 years of age, passed away at 11 o’clock Wednesday night at her home, she was a full-blood Osage, she was buried in the old cemetery in Gray Horse, beside her father, her mother, her sisters and her daughter.”
His eyes flitter between looking at the audience of the radioplay, and just off-centre of the camera, almost directly at the audience sitting in the cinema.
He adds: “There was no mention of the murders.”
Scorsese knows he is a storyteller and here he is, in front of us, essentially acknowledging the futility of telling stories but also knowing that that’s all he can do.
When she died the crimes wrought upon Mollie Cobb (née Burkhart) and her family were not even acknowledged and it’s all Scorsese can do now 100 years later, in his own small way, to dramatise them and present them to the public.
But, at it’s heart, it is a futile endeavour, history remains unchanging.
Further reading:
Author’s note: Before writing this I have seen Killers of the Flower Moon twice and read David Grann’s book twice
