[HEAR ME OUT] I Don’t Think I Like the Film Adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon

(Buy the book here. It’s better than the movie.)

If you haven’t read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, you should. It’s an excellent work of non-fiction that illustrates one of many examples of how America’s present wealth and power were created by systematically disenfranchising and murdering Black and Indigenous people who assumed the system was actually fair and built wealth for themselves. It’s a history of the Osage Indian Murders hiding in a historical police procedural, and even though crime drama is usually not my genre, the book had me hooked from the first. The film, on the other hand, disappoints me.

Before we get any further into this, I’m going to point out something both obvious and necessary. While I, like many Americans, have Indigenous ancestry, my connection to Indigenous cultures and communities (even my own) is mostly as a guest and I am definitely not Osage. I did spend a lot of time reading, watching, and listening to Osage thinkers on this film after writing this, and I link to some of them throughout and at the end of this blog. If you’re impatient like me, go ahead and get started by watching Native Media Theory’s insights on the film. (I don’t think he’s read the book yet.)

Also, it goes without saying but spoilers, duh.

What Is Killers of the Flower Moon About?

In the early 1920’s the Osage were the richest people in the world, due to massive oil deposits found on the reservation lands in Oklahoma that they had been forcibly removed to in the 1870s.

Let’s put that in perspective. In 1923, the Osage nation collectively earned 30 million dollars from oil. In NINETEEN-TWENTY-THREE, when the average yearly income of an American was around $1300, the Osage were a nation of millionaires. They lived in mansions, drove fancy cars, and had all the latest innovations and infrastructure. Osage people studied and traveled abroad. They had (white) house servants and chauffeurs. The Osage reservation in Oklahoma, meant to be a place of shame, marginalization, and isolation, became a place of power and presence thanks to the unexpected bounty of oil money.

In response, the local white settlers conspired to control, then murder dozens of people between 1921 and 1926. (If you’re keeping track, 1921 is the same year that the Tulsa Massacre happened.) The headrights to oil money could only be inherited, never bought, so a wave of betrayal swept through the community as white people plotted to kill their Osage friends, lovers, and spouses and inherit their wealth.

It was years before an investigation was opened, and what federal agents eventually found was devastating. Killers of the Flower Moon is essentially about these murders, the investigations and how all of this led to the creation of the FBI. (Ironic, through a certain lens.)

So What’s Wrong With the Movie?

As I said, I enjoyed the book a lot. David Grann uses lots of meticulously gathered details to paint a broad portrait of life in Osage County before he focuses on individuals. He certainly gives the (mostly) white investigators their flowers, but he spends most of his page time with Osage people. Grann also worked meticulously with living Osage, including the descendants of the deceased, to accurately portray the culture, what was stolen, and what was lost through this genocide.

When I first heard of the film adaptation I was concerned that Grann’s wonderful work would be made into another bog-standard Hollywood Oscar-bait trauma film about a bunch of tortured white dudes with a token Native wife character. I was also worried that Osage people wouldn’t be the main characters of their own story and that they would be sidelined in favor of creating screen time for the star-studded white dude cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons, and Robert DeNiro. Initial reports confirmed my fears, but then veteran director Martin Scorsese seemed to discover his act-right and the film was going to break convention and do history justice, for a change.

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened. It’s easiest to explain what did happen by comparing the stories that the book and the movie tell.

In the Book:

Mollie Burkhart is born in a lodge to recently displaced Osage parents, survives residential school, and is suddenly surprised with enormous wealth and good fortune along with all other remaining Osage people when oil is discovered on reservation land. That is, until people begin to die. One by one her friends, neighbors, former lovers, mother, and all of her sisters are murdered. The crimes are ignored or chalked up to cultural indigence while the community grows more fearful. Pleas are made to the government, from the town sheriff all the way up to Washington, D.C., but still nothing gets done. Even the white friends she presses into aiding her are murdered in horrible ways.

Eventually, an experienced, honest white investigator named Tom White is handpicked by a young J. Edgar Hoover to take over the Oklahoma office of federal investigations and figure out what’s going on in Osage County. Working with a fascinating undercover team that includes Texas rangers, an insurance salesman, and a former spy from the Ute nation, he slowly makes a horrifying discovery–many of these brutal murders were carried out by Mollie’s white husband at the behest of his uncle, who had been integrated into the Osage nation as a guest and friend for many years. Even worse, Mollie’s next on their list.

Although the murderers were convicted, justice was not served. History tried to paper over the crimes, but the stain left in the culture of the USA was indelible, and the descendants of Mollie and her would-be-killer husband reckon with their ancestry and what their story means in the greater scheme of American relationships with indigenous people.

In the Movie:

Some bad white people victimize the rich, lazy, yet very culturally detailed Indians. Isn’t murder sad? But also kind of entertaining, because look at all these grimy white cowboys with recognizable faces doing grimy white cowboy things! Isn’t it wonderfully awful to look at them killing their own friends and wives and children like dogs? What an awful thrill! Look how sad it is that they murdered so many people, even though they got rich later and while that’s not fair and we’re not redistributing any of that wealth, the director certainly feels bad enough about it to make a guilty little cameo in the painfully clever and self-aware ending.

Oh, and there’s like thirty minutes of the investigators. These characters have no development, but we know they’re heroes because they’re white! (Except for one guy who makes up for it by being very, very handsome). There’s slightly more time spent in the Osage community, nearly always in the presence of a white person, often in unsubtitled Osage language, usually being victimized or disrespected in some way. They never really talk to each other about anything but death and white people. But pay no attention to that, look over here! More evil white people doing murder! Maybe one of them really loves his wife!

What’s Wrong With That?

I am tired of seeing stories about Black, Brown, and Indigenous people that center white feelings. I don’t care if those feelings are guilt. I don’t need any more nuanced portrayals of the villainy of evil white people of history. I need nuanced portrayals of the people they tried to destroy.

Look. The performances are great, which is to be expected. Glorified portrayals of gritty violence and conspiratorial murderers are kind of Scorsese’s thing and this is good filmmaking. This is also both the biggest budget and the most time Osage culture has had on screen, ever. The portrayals of the culture and the people put an enormous amount of effort into authenticity. This film is important. I get it.

But I don’t like it.

One of the uglier things about American culture is an unstated belief that acknowledging something is the same as atoning for it. Our present cultural climate is one of trying desperately hard to acknowledge that white supremacy has damaged us all while continuing to make white people the focal point of every story ever told about America. Mollie Burkhart was a badass. John Wren, the Ute federal agent who went undercover to help solve these murders, was a badass. Anna Brown and Lizzie Q, Mollie’s sister and mother–also badasses. Henry Roan, who is portrayed as a shrill, childish alcoholic in this film, may have actually been all of those things. But he was also a husband, father, a friend to many despite suffering from depression. He, and every other Osage person portrayed in this film, deserved to have this be their story.

Ernest Burkhart, on the other hand, was a bit player in the book and from all accounts, in the real-life murders as well, which were the brainchild of his uncle William Hale. In the film, however, Ernest is the only character given a full emotional life and arc. We spend almost all of our time staring at him and living inside of his head. I don’t care that he’s portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m sure there’s an Indigenous actor who is just as good or better who deserves the chance at a nuanced, show-stopping Oscar-worthy performance too. Why, in a film touted as an act of just and restorative storytelling, are the best opportunities for such given to the white actors?

I’m sure there’s someone out there putting on their “well, actually” pants in order to share very basic facts about the film industry and how unadventurous the average film-goer is and how you have to have a big box office draw with a “relatable” story and so on. If this is you, first please know that I find you an annoying pimple on the face of the arts. Go away. Then, consider the following; if anybody has the power to make a movie that truly flouts convention, makes new choices, highlights new faces, and still sets box office records and wins awards, it’s Martin Scorsese. In fact, he’s done it before.

There’s also the argument that this film wasn’t made for Osage people but for others, who need the shift in focus to be able to empathize and understand what really happened. To that I cry: BULLSHIT. If somebody made a movie about Jack the Ripper’s victims that for some reason was told from the focal point of an African dude who showed up that day just to judge the Brits for being British, I–

—

Well, okay, I’d watch that. I’d watch that twice. But my point is that it’s disingenuous to pretend that a movie about Osage people can’t be entirely about Osage people without somehow driving away non-Osage moviegoers. I know some of y’all are racist and even more of y’all are intellectually lazy and unempathetic, but too bad. Get over it and learn to enjoy things that aren’t about you.

I think the only thing I really like about this film, in the end, is that it’s hopefully opened the door for much better films by, for and about Indigenous people to be made in the future.

What Should I Read About the Osage Indian Murders?

At the beginning of this blog, I promised you a list of resources from Osage and other Indigenous people about this chapter of history. Without further ado;

• Start with this list of articles at the Osage News, an independent news organization based within the Osage Nation which has been faithfully reporting on events surrounding the film and the history since it was first announced.
• The first book published about the murders is the 1934 novel Sundown by John Joseph Mathews. Mathews was an Osage writer who was born on the reservation just before oil was discovered there, studied at Oxford and the University of Geneva as a young man, lived through the murders, served on the Osage Tribal Council and the Oklahoma State Board of Education, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and somehow had time to write a dozen novels, a four-volume autobiography, and countless short stories in between. I kinda want a movie about him now, but for now we have to settle for books like Sundown, which follows a young man dealing with the emotional and social aftermath of living through the Osage murders.
• Osage writer Joel Robinson wrote a beautiful piece for Slate entitled Killers of the Flower Moon Is Not the Movie an Osage Would Have Made. You Should Still See It. That says it all, really.
• YouTuber Alachia Queen has made a great video explaining why so many Osage women would marry white men to begin with. I found this helpful simply because I found this a headscratcher in both the book and the film. As a bonus, look in the comments–the great-grandson of Henry Roan, who I mentioned earlier, drops into the comment section with a few interesting bits of info too.
• Christopher Cote, the Osage linguist who coached the actors in this film on how to speak his language, gave a great interview to the Hollywood Reporter about his mixed feelings about the film.
• More generally: if you haven’t read a lot of Indigenous writers and need help getting started, I’ve made a booklist of writers from various nations that may be helpful. Full disclosure: if you make a purchase from any link in this post, I’ll earn a commission which I’ll probably use to buy more books. Speaking of which, you also might like some of the reviews I’ve written about books by Indigenous writers.

If you’ve seen this film or have additional resources to share, please drop them in the comments here. As for me, I’m going to go binge Reservation Dogs for a while. Peace!