Sympathy For the White Devil
A consideration of why Killers of the Flower Moon is perpetuating the invisible status of Native American People
It’s we, the people, who have forgotten how to listen.
― Jill Max
Spider Spins a Story: Fourteen Legends from Native America
(Osage Spider Story, an Osage Legend, told by Archie Mason, Jr)
Killers of the Flower Moon is a good film that makes an evil character sympathetic. The troubling thing here is that the forces of good are background characters. We don’t get to know them but as archetypes. They’re killed off, and many are shown to be mourning, angry, and later conspiring against the main characters.
There are some incongruities. How long does it take for the DiCaprio character, Ernest Burkhart — injured from his previous job as an infantry cook and hired by his uncle William Hale to drive Mollie around — to learn the Dhegiha Siouan, the language spoken by the Osage People? In one scene, he meets his future wife, in another, they’re intimates, and he knows Dhegiha Siouan. It’s been a few days or weeks, and he speaks it without misusing words or an unclear accent. It’s a stand-out curiosity.
Another thing is how long it took Lily Gladstone’s Mollie and Burkart took to fall in love. It seems like a few days. Mollie has Burkhart over for dinner, he confesses he loves money, then offers him whiskey. It’s a sly thing for her to do. She’s acknowledging she’s turned on — this is the beginning of their sexual relationship — but his confession doesn’t pique her suspicion of him as a white invader. We don’t see lust between them, we see commitment. And it’s pretty beautiful. Though from her suspicion of white people on Osage land — and knowing that the DiCaprio character is the nephew of the Di Nero character — who has auspiciously insinuated himself into the Osage community — why isn’t she suspicious of Burkhart’s motives after he makes it clear to her that he loves money — something she has a lot of?
The execution of these characters is masterful and the story gets better in its second hour.
White pride — you’re an American
The problem here is that the subject the film is trying to defend is muted by its stars. Every performance in the film captivates — Brendan Fraser and John Lithgow have supporting roles appearing in the last hour — where they’re each used in a couple of scenes — are very good. Jesse Plemons is excellent. Leonardo DiCaprio is outstanding. De Niro very very very good. Lily Gladstone is very very good.
The morally good characters are archetypal.
The Gladstone character is proud. We see that she is good with words, observant, and gets driven around by DiCaprio’s character. She seems to be sly and intelligent. But we don’t know her.
She and the character of Henry — played by William Belleau — are the only non-white characters in the film who have enough screen time we develop empathy for.
We may have empathy for the other Native characters, but it’s conceptual. The empathy we can express for Molly and Henry is closer to authentic because we spend more time with them. Still, our empathy for them is from their uni-dimensional portraiture. Both are pathetic characters for different reasons.
Mollie is pathetic because she has diabetes, and she’s relying on her husband whom she trusts who is feeding her poisoned insulin, so she’s pathetic by physical condition. Her loyalty to her husband eclipses her initial suspicion of his motives. Henry is pathetic because his wife is cuckolding him. He has a substance abuse problem and he’s suicidal. It’s self-inflicted mainly and then circumstantial because his wife doesn’t respect him.
But the story focuses on the antagonists. These antagonists are the protagonists. In Burkhart’s case, otherwise known as antihero. It’s absorbing, even approaches being gripping, but we don’t get to know the Native characters because the camera skips around them. We don’t understand them outside of their communal affliction.
We see an opening prayer then oil spilling out onto the land with the Osages dancing under the spray. Later, we see them in congress inside a tent — some modest shelter. It’s an interesting scene with a sort of call and response from the leaders of the tribe about what they’re going to do against the white invaders. Some interesting ideas and personalities start appearing in these characters, but this is the most we see of them. Later, we see them as categorically angry, part of a mob in DC — mob as a group — not Molotov cocktail-wielding, half-witted terrorists. We see them killed off but don’t develop relationships with them. Mollie is afflicted with diabetes in her bed for most of the film. We didn’t get much time with her in the beginning. Just snippets of her personality.
Burkhart’s driver from the train station when he arrives in Fairfax turns out to be Henry, the cuckold. He’s dignified as the driver, and then we see him again, terrorized by his situation. We don’t get to know this guy. We don’t get to know the leaders inside the tent or anyone else from the tribe. They’re in the background. They’re the other side of the story. The reason it’s happening. If they hadn’t gotten rich, white invaders wouldn’t be there.
Critical Race Theory teaches us that we fit into roles in a societal structure that the sins of white people have poisoned. The leaders of this sin are white men — we all fall into roles generations down the road. In those roles, we are poisoned by the outlook that we have. White people have racist attitudes they might not be aware of. The same might be valid for Black people, but as recipients of hatred, violence, catastrophe, and genocide (debated) first directed at them. The same is true for anyone to some degree. CRT has economic implications and affects the way the world works. So, we understand that these white people are in Fairfax for money. They want to get it legally, but they want to do illegal things, and they are murdering people to get that money legally.
What we are left with is sympathy for the white devil. Not all white people are racist, but white people have racist views because they’ve been embedded into their role. These views can be erased by understanding them. Racism is erased by teaching anti-racist views and generations passing. We may not enjoy a racist-free world, but our children’s children can have a world with a broken racist infrastructure and enjoy more peace than we have.
A capitalist says — what’s the point of racism? We can get more out of our investments if we get them work together equally. We can still under pay them! Brutally cynical, it doesn’t have to go in that direction, but there’s no way to avoid attempts that are being made to use equality for the benefit of capitalism.
The story perpetuates the invisible status of Natives by blocking them from being anything other than archetypes rather than designating space for them to flesh out as human beings in the eyes of their world, as the government has long repressed the image and personalities of Native Americans, incapacitating them so they have not been free in the full sense enjoyed by the majority — to varying degrees to be sure — of those who live in the United States.
Should a Native American have directed Killers of the Flower Moon?
Does it matter if the Native characters in the film were flushed out, and we saw them for as much time on the screen as the evil characters?
Yes, it does. And it matters because if there’s equal time given for character development, understanding of the characters will grow, and this — when taken in on a large scale — contributes to understanding and sympathy for people outside of art. Through the art, viewers understand its subject better.
The trick is to tell the story how it should be said, and in the case of this film, it was a good idea to focus on. In Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s interesting to see the story develop from the point of view of the evil characters. However, this story could be told with much more camera time for the sympathetic characters to be taken in as people rather than archetypes and still benefit from an antihero turning the wheel.
The subtitle is a lyric from the song White Minority by Black Flag. A prescient song from a great band.
