Page to screen: Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s vision transforms David Grann’s book into a robust dialogue about stories and who gets to tell them
Corporate interests triumphed over indigenous rights, not for the first time or the last, when the Dakota Access Pipeline went into operation in 2017. Built by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the near-1,200-mile-long pipeline can transport up to 750,000 barrels of crude oil across states to Illinois. But a year before its commissioning, one Missouri River crossing had become the focal point of a high-stakes conflict. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe contended that the pipeline’s proximity to Lake Oahe would endanger their water supply and disturb sacred sites. Thereupon, an indigenous-led coalition mobilised against a billion-dollar oil company in clear violation of tribal sovereignty. Eco-activists moved in, protesting against the pipeline’s construction without an adequate environmental impact review. In response, private security unleashed attack dogs on peaceful demonstrators. Law enforcement officials deployed pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons in freezing temperatures to crush dissent.
The approval of the project, via an executive order signed by the then US President Donald Trump, marked another chapter in an unbroken American history of capitalist expansion overpowering indigenous obstacles with the ruthless hand of the law. This was not an anomaly. This was not an isolated case of a tribe struggling to protect their land, their resources, and their way of life against an outsider threat. For those who remember, this was the cry of a forgotten past echoing into the present. This was a fresh reminder of the tragedy that befell when oil flowed under the indigenous lands of Oklahoma in the early 20th century.
For years in the 1920s, a network of white settlers had murdered members of the oil-rich Osage nation in order to steal their wealth. This chilling history of serial killings was documented by journalist David Grann in his 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Grann had drawn on five years of research, poring over dusty archives to audit the depth and breadth of the conspiracy. The story reads like an alternately shocking and spellbinding true-crime mystery. As its subtitle states, Grann explores how the conspiracy came to be uncovered by a team of field agents led by former Texas Ranger Tom White, all of whom worked for the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) under a young and ambitious J Edgar Hoover. The corruption and incompetence of the local law enforcement in Oklahoma at the time allowed Hoover to make a case for a centralised bureau in the form of the FBI.
White and his team of agents don’t make an appearance until well beyond the two-hour mark of Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour film adaptation. In a radical inversion of the book, the director and his co-writer Eric Roth approach a sweeping conspiracy by way of a domestic saga of love and betrayal, greed and complicity. The focus shifts from federal law enforcement to the Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and white WWI veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a choice made on close consultation with the Osage. Scorsese zooms in on Mollie and Ernest’s doomed romance, from their first encounter through the early years of their marriage to its poisoning by treachery. Where Grann takes his time to expose the ringleader of the insidious operation, Scorsese wastes none. Right from the start, the film makes clear Ernest is a consenting pawn in the cruel game of his uncle: the master manipulator William “King” Hale (Robert de Niro). With the sheriff, lawyers and doctors at his beck and call, this proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing orchestrated a plot for him and his fellow white opportunists to inherit the headrights and cash in the life insurance policies of Osage members. In fact, these conspirators are exposed in the very first trailer, in which DiCaprio reading a line from a children’s book — “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” — is used as a damning refrain.
Reframing an investigation of a murder mystery as an interrogation of motive allows Scorsese to spotlight a hauntingly intimate story of an invasion from the inside out, as opposed to a colonial history of invasions from the outside in. White men like Ernest and Bill are malignant in the same way that a cancer is malignant. They will slowly kill you, while feeding on you to thrive. Love, trust and goodwill are nothing but weapons in their arsenal. When Osage elders come together to discuss how to handle the string of murders within the community, Bill sits in on the meeting. Ernest looks Mollie in the eye, says he loves her, while he injects her with tainted insulin. Greed has let his morality (and his teeth) fall into such decay he doesn’t think he is doing anything wrong by following his uncle’s instructions. To capture the insidiousness of this deceit, Grann turns to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.”
The very first time Mollie and Ernie meet, she knows he is a “coyote” after her money. Nevertheless, she falls for him. The two end up marrying. Once her sisters are picked off one by one, she misplaces her trust in a man whose whiteness she hopes will insulate her from suffering a similar fate. Grann does his best to give a voice to a historically silenced community. But he didn’t have a lot to work with to give Mollie one, so he could make readers understand the hows and whys of her not being able to see through Ernest’s deception. Scorsese probes a little deeper without overstepping. Gladstone bridges the gap between what is known and what is unknowable about Mollie by harnessing her own pain and resilience as an actor of Siksikaitsitapi and NiMíiPuu heritage. If silence speaks louder than words, hers delivers a clamour. Her unflinching face reflects anger, fear, strength and all gradations in between.
Predatory capitalism not only assumes the symbols of wolves and coyotes in the film, but also takes the form of owls. Twice in the film, Osage women approaching death’s door see through their delirious eyes the arrival of an owl into their home. Mollie’s mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) envisions the bird flying in through the window and staring into her eyes. When she blinks, the bird is gone but her home is swarming with white interlopers. When Mollie herself, poisoned by her husband, clings to her life, the bird makes a second appearance. Both visions tap into the ghostly recesses of subjectivity to privilege Osage interiority.
Scorsese’s vision transforms Grann’s book into a robust dialogue about stories and who gets to tell them. As a white filmmaker, Scorsese is mindful of how he honours the memories of those lost to history. If he has been allowed to share the Osage’s story, it’s also his responsibility to return it to them. It’s why the film begins and ends with a tribal ceremony. The opening scene positions us as eavesdroppers snooping in on community elders burying a ceremonial pipe. The final scene is an overhead shot of the present-day tribe dancing in an unbroken circle — a symbol of the community’s resilience. To quote Osage historian Louis F Burns, as Grann does in his book, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
Come May in the prairies of Oklahoma, April’s tinier blooming flowers are snuffed out by the taller plants who end up stealing all the water and light. Hence, the Osage describe the month as “the time of the flower-killing moon.” Grann uses this natural phenomenon as a parallel to a more unnatural one that began in May 1921, when 34-year-old Anna Brown (Mollie’s sister) was found dead at the bottom of a ravine. Soon, more and more Osage were killed. The evocative title hints at how the tribe had their wealth stolen, their lives dehumanised, and their history erased by white settlers.
The American myth of noble colonists vs savage Indians flies in the face of the sobering truth about the bloody foundations the country and its economy was built on. Once the West had been “won”, white settlers drove the indigenous tribes from their ancestral lands to arid terrains. The Osage had been uprooted from their home not for the first time when they purchased a swath of northeast Oklahoma. Little did they know that their pocket-sized corner of the rocky territory was perched atop some of the largest oil deposits in the US. The resulting oil boom brought millions of dollars into the Osage community. Grann paints a portrait of Native Americans not as obstacles, but as participants who helped shape the national economy. “In 1923 alone,” he writes, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.” As the film too shows, in an early sequence of intertitles, tribe members bought big houses, luxury cars, fancy clothes and jewellery. They were even able to hire white chauffeurs and servants. But the presence of white settlers in these images casts a disconcerting shadow.
Oil may have been the lubricant of rapid industrialisation, the fuel of American economy, and the driving force of the Osage’s material prosperity. But it would also turn out to be the source of the tribe’s despair with a terrible conspiracy in the pipeline. For the promises of American capitalism left them vulnerable to its abuses. Wealth bought them all kinds of luxuries, but not the privileges of being white. As a matter of fact, it made them easy prey to a system of white interlopers who have never ever needed an invitation to exploit and call it their “manifest destiny.” The federal government itself was the key enabler of the misappropriation of the Osage’s newfound wealth and assets. Not convinced the tribe members were capable of managing their own finances, the government appointed white guardians to “oversee” their spending.
This is where people like Bill Hale came in. DeNiro creates a wholly realised figure with a hole where his heart should be. The man he pretends to be in public vs the man he is in private is a cautionary lesson on how white allyship can be used as a smokescreen. As the law stated headrights could not be bought or sold, only inherited, Hale put together a crew with similar ambitions ready to do whatever it takes to get rich. Their central scheme involved white people marrying into the tribe and causing their spouses to die. Seeing his family as an extension of himself, BIll brought his nephews into the fold. When the Osage began to die under suspicious circumstances, the deaths were falsely attributed to “wasting illnesses” or “causes unknown.” Such a corrupt system ensured the perpetrators were neither found nor punished. Scorsese casts these cutthroat capitalists as mobsters — like those from one of his crime sagas — facilitated by greedy officials within the system all looking to line their pockets with stolen wealth. “This was a culture of complicity,” Grann said in an interview to NPR, “and it was allowed to go on for so long because so many people were part of the plot. You had lawmen, you had prosecutors, you had the reporters who wouldn’t cover it. You had oilmen who wouldn’t speak out. You had morticians who would cover up the murders when they buried the body. You had doctors who helped give poison to people.”
Given this “reign of terror” catalysed the formation of FBI to launch its own reign of terror in the coming years adds another complicated dimension to the story. Grann doesn’t see Hoover taking on the Osage case as a decision rooted in concern for the tribe, but one rooted in a desire for control. Convicting Hale for his crime was a means to an end: to reform the BOI into a more professional outfit. “An ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism,” Grann writes. “Many Progressives — who tended to be middle-class white Protestants — held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures. This part of Progressivism mirrored Hoover’s darkest impulses.”
In the third part of his book, Grann found that the web of crimes stretched well beyond Hale and Burkhart. Contrary to what the FBI believed, the “reign of terror” didn’t last for only five years, but began well before 1921 and continued into the early 1930s. Hoover had wrapped up the investigation before the much deeper conspiracy could be exposed. On journeying to Oklahoma, speaking to descendants and digging into old archives, Grann suspected dozens to hundreds more of tribe members may have been murdered. Meaning their killers were never prosecuted, their families never got justice, and their stories were forgotten. “History can often provide at least some final accounting,” writes Grann. “History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”
As to what happened after Ernest and Hale’s conviction, Scorsese presents the postscript as an old-time radio drama, sponsored by the FBI and Lucky Strip Cigarettes, reminiscent of a similar program endorsed by Hoover in the 1930s. An all-white cast finish performing the very story we have been watching with props and corny sound effects to an all-white audience. Florid theatricality is prized over the painful reality. We learn: the doctors who helped poison Mollie were never prosecuted; Bill was sentenced to life but released early for “good behaviour”; Ernest was sentenced to life but pardoned as well. Scorsese himself takes the stage to read Mollie’s obituary. There is a solemn remorse in his voice when he reveals the obituary made no mention of the Osage murders. The cameo allows Scorsese to address the limits of his own perspective as a white filmmaker. Both the film and the book are a partial chapter of a dark history. Each can only approximate the pain and trauma of the Osage people.
Through his film and the radio drama that bookends it, Scorsese dares to engage with a legacy of racial violence every white American has inherited. One treatment may dramatize the Osage murders more sensationally than the other, but both are ultimately capitalising on a story that isn’t theirs. Recognising that good intentions don’t counterbalance white complicity is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition to challenge the erasure of indigenous history. For many viewers, Killers of the Flower Moon may inspire outrage. For many who have been historically marginalised, it may inspire only exhaustion because of how tragically familiar all the violence is. There must be room for both kinds of reactions. Scorsese has not made a film with built-in insulation from criticism. If truth be told, its legacy may grow stronger in time for weathering the storm. For if Grann’s book was an act of revelation, Scorsese’s film is an act of reckoning.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.