"When This Money Started Coming, We Should Have Known It Came With Something Else."
A reflection on Killers of the Flower Moon as a part of the "Oil!" film genre.
Hello friends,
There is a scene in the third act of the film Killers of the Flower Moon that may haunt you, as it did me on first viewing. It’s the scene where what I'll call "the forces of darkness" persuade Ernest Burkhart to change his mind about testifying for a federal prosecutor.
The camera focuses one by one on the oil men of the 1920s, who emerge from shadows to introduce themselves by name and by the oil companies they represent. The pale men almost literally step from behind the curtain to show us the terror that white supremacy wields, including over Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Everyone in that scene in William K. Hale's home (played by Robert De Niro) is complicit in the deaths and the misery of the Osage people. Everyone in that room understands that to stand in the way of these men is to disappear. Everyone needs Ernest to do their bidding. Everyone in that room is held in thrall by capitalism and the allure of oil riches. And in that moment, we see directly into the inky abyss of oil's power.
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon last Sunday afternoon, after spending Saturday at the Portland Book Festival. The film is based on the book, by David Grann, about how in 1920s Oklahoma, Osage people were murdered for their headrights, the collectively owned mineral rights belonging to tribal members and their Native and non-Native heirs. These are the rights that, for a time, made the Osage some of the wealthiest people in the world. The book is framed in such a way that it focuses on how the investigation of the Osage murders in Oklahoma led to the rise of the FBI. The film based on the book, directed by Martin Scorsese, rightly centers on the consequences to the family of Mollie Burkhart, played by Lily Gladstone, and the story of the Osage who were murdered, many of them women.
Because I knew I was seeing the film the next day, while at the book fest I deliberately chose to attend two panels that featured Indigenous women writers. One was with Debra Magpie Earling, the author of The Lost Journals of Sacajawea; and the other with the journalist Angela Sterritt, who wrote Unbroken, about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. I’m telling you this because I want to emphasize how important it is to me to curate (and sometimes counter-program) what I read and see, especially as a white writer whose work has brushed against the subjects of oil, dispossession and the privilege of mineral rights in my own family. It was critical to me to foreground the stories and voices of Indigenous women when I viewed Killers of the Flower Moon.
Also: I'd already read Grann's book, twice. Once in print when it was first released, and then again this spring as an audiobook while driving to North Dakota. I even mentioned Killers of the Flower Moon in my book proposal for Windfall as a "comp," an industry term for a title that's similar to the one I wanted publishers to buy from me. (Only mildly ambitious on my part, hah!) So I knew what I was getting into when I went to see the film and was eager to see how it would be interpreted on screen.
Indigenous filmmakers have done an excellent job explaining why many have mixed feelings about Scorsese as the force behind this film. They have emphasized as well why it's important that they be behind and in front of the camera telling their version of the American story. In fact, Earling during her panel at the Portland Book Festival told the audience that she had recently been at a book festival with Grann and had expressed to him onstage and off how inappropriate she thought it was for him to profit so handsomely from telling an Osage story. She fears that after someone as big as Scorsese told the story of the Osage, it left little room for Indigenous voices. I hope she is wrong about that. I think she is wrong about that.
But who told this particular story and how it frames the depravity of a certain legacy of American whiteness are considerations moviegoers should bring to the theater when they watch Killers of the Flower Moon. And you will want to see this film if you haven't already. It is a beautiful, tragic and important story told by a master filmmaker at the height of his artistic prowess.
As most of you know, I know a thing or two about mineral rights in the Great Plains, although admittedly not nearly as much about Osage headrights. I’m also a tiny bit of a subject matter expert on films about the consequences of oil booms and busts—I even made a short one of my own! So in the opening sequences of Killers of the Flower Moon when there's a scene of Osage dancers covered in oil, I gasped knowingly, if that's a thing you can do.
I saw the imagery as symbol and warning of the American story about to be told of riches sought, gained and lost. That scene was James Dean as Jett Rink in Giant, cackling and unsteady as he stumbles oil-covered out of a jalopy, boasting: "My well came in big!" It was Susan Hayward as Cherokee Lansing in Tulsa, marveling greedily with a face and formal gown smeared in oil: "A thousand dollars an hour. $24,000 a day. And we've only started!" It was the exploding oil well in There Will Be Blood and the destruction of Kuwait depicted in Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness.
But you may have noticed, too, that there was joy and hope in the final scene of Killers of the Flower Moon. If you haven't seen the film yet, be sure to look for the scene. It reminded me of images from Dislocation Blues, a short, abstract film by Sky Hopinka about the experience of Lakota and other activists who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016.
Remember, the images say in both films. The inky black abyss of oil riches doesn't hold all of us in thrall. There is light, too.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
How Oklahoma state law could prohibit students from reading Killers of the Flower Moon.
It might be a bit of a stretch to juxtapose the whiteness depicted in Taylor Swift’s concert film to that Killers of the Flower Moon, but I admire the analysis of both, separately, and always find Garrett Bucks’ work so thoughtful.
Abandoned oil wells litter the Osage Nation.
American culture is drive-thru culture. Man, this bums me out. I suspect future generations will view the multi-story Taco Bell drive-thru in that Minneapolis suburb as a perfect artifact of the folly of the Anthropocene and wonder what the hell. And yes, I live in a city that bans new drive-thru windows in the central core of the city because of climate, congestion and pedestrian safety concerns. And yes, those who’ve read Windfall will perhaps remember a moment when I wrote about succumbing to the Starbucks drive-thru. And no, I don’t think drive-thru’s are inherently bad, but they’re terrible when they’re all we have and when we keep super-sizing them.
See also: Americans are walking less and getting hit by cars more. But they’re also making more shared e-bike trips, which is a promising development. Why I like shared e-bikes: 1) they’re fast! Especially uphill! 2) they’re great for one-way trips or to places where it’s unsafe to lock up your own bike, 3) they’re fun.
Every time I see this Wall Street Journal reporter’s byline on a story out of Oregon I cringe, because I know exactly what kind of take it will have. Want to read a more nuanced look at Measure 110 in Oregon? Read my piece for Stateline or any of the links I cite in a previous edition of The Windfall Dispatch.