MURDERING A CULTURE:WHY EVERYONE NEEDS TO WATCH KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

By Ahona

There is a guidebook to colonising, if you want to learn. First, you take a culture that welcomes you as a guest. Then you befriend the powerful ones. Then you find yourself a seat at the table where the big decisions are made. Then you smuggle your own interests into those decisions. Gnaw your way in, like a parasite, feed upon another's food, another's land, another's heritage. Then eat away at their history, so that they have no memory of who they were. Do this, and soon you will come to control them. This guidebook is foolproof. We should know. The English did this to us. This is why watching Killers of the Flower Moon as an Indian is a very different experience. In a poignant, expansive and often-grim crime drama, Martin Scorsese traces the way indigenous communities were poisoned into submission. Power slips out of the Osage fists like delicate sand. White boots trample upon tribal carcasses. A deadly silence creeps into the land of ancient gods. Killers of the Flower Moon resists the format of a thriller - this isn't your typical who/why/how-dunnit. It is a drama in the true sense of the word. It is more about the proceeding of the narrative than the unfolding of a mystery. And it is immensely powerful. It is generally accepted that new nations mushroom from the dead remains of older societies. In this story, the older society, the Osage, is alive while it is consumed by a group of White men. At the crux of this story, are Osage women, and their power is both financial and biological. They have inherited the wealth of their families, making them crucial to the power play. They also possess the ability to give birth once again making them crucial to the power play. Not only do they have the money. They can also birth those who will inherit the money. If you read the film carefully, you would see that a gender-oriented reading of it is very much possible. There is a chain of power within the male characters, and a fabric of power in which the women are enmeshed. William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) are perpetually caught in an exchange of power, morality, thought and action. Mollie (Lily Gladstone), her sisters and her mother, are connected by blood and by intuition - you get the sense that they never truly trust the men, not completely. In a scene in the earlier sections of the film, Mollie and her sisters sit together and look at the men on the field, making comments about their appearances and nature. The gaze turns. This is not only the gaze of a woman looking at a man. It is also that of an indigenous identity looking at a White identity. It is also that of a lover looking at their lover. In Scorsese's framing of this story, the romance is as political as the wealth, perhaps even more. The relationship that Ernest will share with Mollie is coded with their positions as man and woman, white and indigenous, lover and lover. In a film that is so heavily reliant on the impact of the narrative on the characters, it is imperative that the actors sink into their roles. And they do. All of them, without exception. Leonardo DiCaprio's portrait of Ernest is earnest and heart-felt, so genuine that you can see the fractures in his being. You can see the constant tussle between the man he is and the man he is being shaped into by his uncle. Lily Gladstone's Mollie is the heart and landscape of this drama. She is the emotional root, the whispering conscience, the site of violence. At one point, when she breaks into a helpless scream, you can almost hear Mollie collapsing into herself. And in each frame, Robert DeNiro is a masterclass on performance. He understands the nerve of Hale so well, that he almost makes an Ernest out of you, gullible to his deceit because he is just that good. It takes a crew of mammoth capacity to combine such forces to produce a film like this. Because this is more than one individual story. It is a film that shows you the blueprint of oppression. As frames shift, you see the erasure of not just indigenous lives but also the indigenous ways of living.

This is why a film like this needs to be seen more widely, because it is always relevant. Of course, I do not have the Osage perspective towards this film. Some indigenous viewers have reported their discomfort while watching the film, because it traces the violence and trauma that these communities have gone through. Others have found it to be a difficult, but necessary watch. The Guardian has reported Elizabeth Rule's statement - "But just because it was challenging to watch doesn't mean that it isn't important to witness and bear witness to these devastating stories. We have to remember that these were depictions of true, brutal premeditated murders of Indigenous people..."I would extend Professor Rule's statement. Because as people who do not belong to these communities but people who want to understand just how torturous this experience was, we must bear witness to the atrocities committed. There is great truth to this. And of course, one film cannot contain all of that truth and pain. But this is a film that recognises the faults, the violences, the human cost. Scorsese's crime drama chooses to remember the blood and the guilt. It doesn't make a romanticised statement about the loss of indigenous life. It shows you what it was. Inhuman. Unjust. Greedy.