One of the things I enjoy on this blog is comparing two disparate movies to discuss their similar themes. I've decided to make this a regular feature, and I should clearly start with the Oscar nominated movies. So we have one movie praised as a the culmination of a legendary director's career, and one by a first (and only) time director with a 31% at Rotten Tomatoes. One movie I felt mediocre on, and one that is my secret fave that no one else has seen. One claims to be a historical retelling, the other is a very far fetched fantasy - though probably both are equally believable.
As always, this review will bare all spoilers. One of which has no spoilers, and the other of which whose entire plot is a spoiler.
What do these two have in common that compels me so?1. Whatever else you think of them, they have astounding levels of craftsmanship.
Martin Scorsese CAN in fact take a 3.5 hour tale of an Oklahoma community and make it a tense thriller that is enjoyable to watch. Leo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are still at the top of their game, and in particular DeNiro has made "kindly grampa who also orchestrates killing" into what will be a beloved trope. But neither of them touch on fucking first timer Lily Gladstone playing a cypher who is a clever, jaded Native American woman but falls into a trap of love anyway, and can always feel the jaws of death slowly clenching around her community. She absolutely deserves that Oscar.
Whereas Antebellum asks Janelle Monae to carry an entire movie on her back, which she absolutely can. And Jena Malone picks up the slack for the villainous side of things. The production design is so rich and luscious, especially in highlighting evil. The scene transitions between the different settings are creative and great. And everyone who watches this movie HAS to make mention of the opening 5 minute shot that takes us through all the parts of a slave planation.
These are both quality films that are fun to watch and demonstrate real beauty.
2. Both wrestle head on with the historical injustices of racism. And did so in a way that got them a ton of controversy.
This is a rough one. It is clear both movies wanted to tell stories they thought were undertold, of how generations past have suffered and how that still resonates to the present day. It goes without saying that the "anti-woke" part of society (ie. people who have never even consumed some media because someone told them it was social justicey) would avoid these movies.
But the "woke" condemn them too for "white people telling other people's stories" and the awkwardness that entails, and for "exploiting pain and violence of a minority" which becomes the only way that minority is seen. Having seen both movies, I understand where these points are coming from. I don't find these problems ring so loud as to ruin the entire work for me.
I honestly think KotFM suffers more for this. But really because I always have this problem from Scorsese that I can't tell what story he is trying to tell. All of Scorsese's criminal epics have this problem: there isn't an arc so much as a flat line.
"A normal white man is not in any way distinct, just wants to get ahead and make money. He drifts without much agency into making some money illegally, and it works fine because no one in authority cares. He has wild success and lives it up outrageously. Then... some people in authority suddenly do care. And because our criminal was a) an untalented idiot and b) didn't think anyone cared, their crimes are very easily untangled and exposed. Then they get sent to jail, but are unrepentant. In fact the psychology of the central character has never changed the entire time: they were a brute who got lucky until they were a brute who got unlucky."
What are we supposed to take from this? Is our criminal a unique specimen, driven to his misdeeds by special circumstance or tragic upbringing? No, no, the director insists he has no excuse. Ah, so is our criminal the everyman, and any of us could be like him if the dice had rolled differently? No, no, he is specially evil and deserves our spit.
In KotFM this applies to the whole town. The Hale family were killing dozens of Osage members because no one (with authority) cared, so they could get away with it. They would walk up to any homeless man on the street they had never met before and ask "Say, will you kill my sister in law for me?" The hired thugs were always cowards and idiots, so they'd be caught the second any real law enforcement turned up, and they'd flip on the people who hired them.
In fact, that becomes the most confusing part of the story. Some white people think the Native American life has no value, and will conspire about killing them and covering it up without a second thought. But other white people think this is a terrible crime, and will be unrelenting in pursuing it. And there is incredibly little difference shown between these people. The hardest part of this movie is keeping track of "is this white man one of the killers, or someone trying to stop the killers?" Who could tell the difference between Ernest's brother (bad) and brother-in-law (good)?
You could say "not being able to tell this is what makes being a person of color so scary" and touche, but this particular telling feels like more of a cop out than that. It wants to present both "white people are so casually evil..." and "... that other white people feel they have to stop them."
(This is made very explicit in the most comedic scene, where one white man is asking a lawyer on the legality of adopting two half-Indian children, becoming their next of kin, and then killing them to get the money. The lawyer is appalled and the criminal can't understand. But the directing bypasses the implication that the lawyer WAS a part of a healthy society that does not approve of the murder of children.)
Neither movie satisfies either the woke or anti-woke, and as such most ideologically-driven people in the ever churning culture wars won't end up watching it. Which really is a pity.
3. They are at heart stories of class envy.
The thing that struck me most about these tales of racism is how much they are about class. Both movies feature rich, or at least respectable and successful, minorities and show how much white people seethe at this wealth as unjust. They are not universalist movies about how "no person deserves oppression, every person has dignity" but are demands to "see that these people are rich and high-status, regardless of the color of their skin.
This is not to say anything in either movie DOES say you should degrade poor people. It's just they find it more important to say "how can you degrade this person? They're rich damnit!" (And all good imperial colonizers know, the way to control a population is to get their leaders more concerned with their own elite status than with solidarity with their own poor.)
My favorite part of Antebellum is dead in the middle, a classic Mike Yanagita scene that leaves you wondering what the point of that was. Janelle Monae, her black lady friend and her white lady friend, go out to a fancy restaurant. At some point a man sends them over a drink, and her black friend sends it back because it is too low class and "we are champagne ladies." Eventually they leave and take separate Ubers. Nothing else of note happens.
For one thing, it is deliciously tense. At this point we know Monae will be kidnapped, and we're waiting to see how. So every moment is filled with a little dread and anticipation as we wonder "is this how they get her?" And all three actresses are quite good at such comedic dialogue. Fun times.
But what really makes the scene fit with the movie is all the class security. They are trying to insist so hard to the world that "we are high status, even if we are Black!" (As part of the scene, the two Black friends comment that the hotel staff is brusque and rude to them. The white friend says she didn't notice anything rude. The two Black friends share A Look. No mention is made of how hotel staff would treat people who can't afford their fancy rooms.)
An editorial note to be clear: these characters are not wrong. Treating someone who is rich (or well educated, or talented) like they aren't just because of the color of their skin IS a form of racism. And if it happened to you, you'd be rightly furious. It's just also true that if we end the day just by treating rich Black people like rich white people, most forms of inequality will persist.
It's impossible to analyze these movies without being pulled to the dread specter of Tulsa. What caused the furious explosion of violence wasn't just racism, but racism mixed with "eat the rich" class envy. "You mean they drive fancy cars while cutting my wages, AND they're Black!!!!" Which is not to say "this is a righteous socialist act", but rather that "it will be very hard for a minority to get a foothold in the American power structure if we burn them down every time they get wealth like cutting tall poppies."
4. Both movies highlight the absurd denialism of a villain's fantasy.
This one is a bit of a stretch, but I could not resist.
One of the biggest controversies of KotFM has been the compartmentalized image of Ernest Burkhart. In the movie (and some historical tellings), he tenderly loved his wife while slaughtering her people. And I guess that sort of character, who learns the Osage language while raising his half-Osage children, but also participates in systemic oppression, could be an interesting contrast for a tragic character.
But for Ernest? Just no. He kills his wife's sisters. He poisons his wife too. Maybe that's a sort of love, but it's a creepy possessive love at the very most. These are not the actions of a tender or caring normal man. Which either means their marriage was pretty unhealthy, OR Ernest was several standard deviations from normality, which cuts against Scorsese's "we all are guilty" message.
Whereas the brokenness of Antebellum's fantasy is its most interesting part.
The secret of the movie's setting is that white supremacist Civil War reenactors are kidnapping "uppity" black people (professors, famous artists) and imprisoning them on a fake plantation, basically to fill out their Antebellum LARP.
... the quick-witted among you will notice that you can't have confederate soldiers AND be "antebellum."
And the movie is full of this. The reenactors are rich and obsessed enough to get all the set design details for their little fantasy, but there are so many ways the fantasy can not be sustained. Soldiers keep their cell phones on them and they ring at inappropriate times. The Black prisoners keep mentioning their real life even though it carries a penalty of death. The slaves are kept at night in wooden sheds with open doors.
... which is very dumb, because any of the kidnapped victims if they run away, know there's towns and news crews just a few miles away if they can just get there. The reason chattel slaves of the 19th century didn't run away, was because there was just nowhere to go. To keep people nowadays, you'd have to build an actual modern day prison. But that would ruin the genteel fantasy.
It's warped to say all these anachronisms are the funniest part in a movie where men watch their wives burned to death. It is often a godawful experience. But the grisly inhumanity of it, that makes no sense even on its face, is kind of the point.
I notice that I am confused about part 2 here, because I was very much _not_ confused when watching the film. It seemed very straightforward to me to square these two supposedly 'conflicting' concepts at the time. Were the Hale family unique, driven by special circumstance or tragic upbringing? No, they seem entirely typical and normal for their times. The film emphasises how easily they fit in with the rest of society. So any member of the audience could find themselves acting like the Hales did, given the right (or, I guess, wrong) circumstances? No, because the film trusts that you are capable of recognising right from wrong, and seeing that Hale and Ernest have come down firmly on the Wrong side by any reasonable standard, in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy trusts that you'll find it funny when Rocket Raccoon replies to a guy who explains that he will be arrested if he takes something that belongs to someone else with "That doesn't follow. No, I want it more, sir. Do you understand?" rather than take it as a serious question worthy of further consideration.
ReplyDeleteKillers of the Flower Moon is interested in understanding how people like Ernest and Hale can come to the point where they are capable of convincing themselves that their actions are justified, and like many Scorsese films part of the explanation it comes up with is "these are people who just ended up less able to see beyond the immediate gratification of their actions than usual", which is why so many of the criminals are so easily caught and/or flipped when the law finally catches up with them, but it does also have scenes like the one in the Masonic Lodge or the scene where Ernest is persuaded not to give evidence which suggest that part of the reason was that the system was internally self-reinforcing - when so much of the white community was read in on these acts, it was much easier to get people to continue to contribute to the horror by just pointing out that by not doing so you would be turning on the rest of the community who was still benefiting from the plan. Fundamentally, however, the difference between the two groups of white people portrayed by the film is that one is capable of seeing the Osage as people with a right not to be murdered, and the other looked at the wealth the Osage found themselves suddenly in possession of and went "but you see I want it more". I don't think either of those are expected to be read as in any way more emblematic of "white people" as a whole, in the same way that I don't think that any of Scorsese's previous films expect to say anything about "white people" as a group.
When Killers of the Flower Moon talks about White People as a whole, it's in moments like how the funerals of the Osage become less and less connected to their ancestral traditions, or how the Osage aren't trusted to handle their own wealth, or in how Lily's obituary is called out as not mentioning the murders. That's how Killers of the Flower Moon wants to talk about Whiteness. The actions of Ernest and Hale aren't meant to be because the two of them are White, any more than how the actions of Tom White are because he's White (while I recognise the irony of the man's name in writing it down now I will point out that that is genuinely the name of the BOI agent who solved the case in real life, so. Truth stranger than fiction, maybe?), but rather all of them behave as they do because of who they are as people.
So thank you, that is a thoughtful reading and I agree with its moral analysis of the world.
ReplyDeleteI do not think it is reflected in the movie. It is not a racially neutral film with a sort of moral anyone can learn from. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it would be hard to be racially neutral about the Osage. Just "I don't think either of those are expected to be read as in any way more emblematic of "white people" as a whole" is not accurate about the movie.
His other movies are not about white people, so much as the rich upper ethically homogenous group (in particular how a member of the ethnically homogenuous WORKING CLASS uses his ethnic solidarity to become upper class in a rapacious way.) I think it is flawed to view these movies (WoWS, Departed, Goodfellas) not as commentary on those specific groups, and what we, as members of those groups, could do better at.
I definitely fully agree that it's not a Racially Neutral film. There's definitely a harsh eye looking at how (capital-W) Whiteness allowed society to reach the point where it could spawn men like Ernest Burkhart and William Hale, and allow them to get away with what they did for so long. It wouldn't have depicted the Christianisation of the Osage funerals the way it did if it didn't have clear opinions on how the two societies interacted, and what that said about the people involved.
DeleteOn the other hand, I don't think you can look at the portrayal of Tom White (again, the irony of the real life man's name!) and come to the conclusion that Scorsese is trying to make an 'as above, so below' statement about white people as a whole, in any direction. I think there is a degree to which this is because Scorsese is, himself, white, and thus has a tendency to make white the "default" state, which is a problem across Hollywood as a whole. When Scorsese has white characters do things, it's not expected that you'll necessarily be thinking "ah, they do this because of some specific idiom of white culture". It's not expected that you'll be thinking of their race at all, unless attention is drawn to it. They're just white because... "What else would they be?"
Ernest and William didn't engage in a campaign of what could be considered genocide because they were White, Specifically - although that is definitely shown to have helped! It was sufficient that they were Not Osage, and Envied what the Osage had.
My point is that you say that you're confused about what lesson you're meant to draw from the film about how white people are, and I think that confusion is easy to quell once you simply... Stop assuming that the film wants to tell you "this is how white people are"? It wants to talk about Whiteness, and how Whiteness can be used in the commission of atrocities, but at no point does it want to say "and therefore this is how you should expect white people to behave". White people are permitted to be individuals, as capable of being a Tom White or a William Burns as they are of being an Ernest Burkhart or a William Hale.
See, now you aren't even referencing anything in the movie. If you think this is a universalist parable and not a racial one, show me some evidence in the text for that. Spots where the movie *could* have said this is about the falliblity/fault of white people specifically, but it refused to.
DeleteI mean I'm not sure the film should be read strictly as a parable _at all_, never mind Universalist vs. Racial. It's a telling of a (dramatised but still broadly) true, to the extent that Hollywood has ever had a positive relationship with the truth, piece of history.
DeleteAs such, it sort of feels like you're asking me to prove a negative, here? Like, I can point to your own confusion about how the film wants you to think about White People as a class, to how it allows white people to be both Villainous (William Hale) and Heroic (Tom White), to how it doesn't (to the best of my recollection, I will admit to having only seen the film once the month it came out in cinemas and then not again since) feature any non-white actors in major roles aside from the specifically Osage characters, meaning that it doesn't have any ability to say "non-Osage People of Colour behave in this way that is distinct from either White People or Osage", which would allow the film to make a meaningful statement about white people having a commonality in this story beyond 'they aren't Osage'. But if you're asking me to point to specific moments where I think the film is about to say something about white people as a group, as opposed to Whiteness as an institution, and then shies away or chooses not to, then I don't think I can, because I don't think there's any part of the film where is approaches an interest in expressing a view on the topic that I noticed!
I think you can see the source of your confusion more clearly if you replace "white people" with "men" in your question. Because there are notable similarities! Both institutional whiteness and institutional masculinity give Ernest and Hale power over Mollie. The people actively engaged in murdering the Osage are all white, and they're also all men. Mollie is condescended to by the white people she talks to, and also by the men she talks to. In general terms, masculinity enables Hale to bring others into his conspiracy in exactly the same way that whiteness does - it's no coincidence that so many scenes where Hale directly instructs Ernest in how to best enable their criminality take places at the male-only institution of the masonic lodge. Meanwhile, Molly's main direct connections to Osage life are her sisters, mother and female friends - all women. Yes, Osage men are killed by the conspiracy - but so is the white detective Molly hires to find out what happened to the Osage they sent to plead for help in Washington, and so is Ernest's white brother-in-law. (I think. Again, memory is fuzzy.) The commonality is that they act against the conspiracy, not (strictly) their race. However, you also can't say that Men, as a group, are the problem - there are Osage men who are as much victims as any of the Osage women, and there are White men who take actionable efforts to halt the conspiracy and punish the criminals involved. Masculinity contributes to the problem, but you can't draw a line from there to "and therefore the movie is against men as a group".
I'd argue that, unless you can point to specific parts of the film that want to say specific coherent messages about Men, as a Group, then it's more reasonable to just say that the film does not have a specific message on that topic, rather than assuming that it's trying to make an obscure and confused point that points in a dozen directions at once before shrugging and going "guess it's complicated."
Ah. I am afraid you are smart, thoughtful person who has not read this blog.
DeleteThe fundamental baseline of this blog, one I repeat over and over, is that review must engage with the text. I won't say there's a required minimum, but that the review is stronger in proportion to how many times you reference a detail in the text. A thaumatrope.
Without that, it's just philosophical bloviating. Which has a place, but that is not movie reviews.
Claiming that the movie is NOT about whiteness is not "proving a negative." There are plenty of types of evidence which could substantiate such a claim. The most common is a token member of another ethnic group participating. Now these pieces might contain other traits which complicate that narrative, but that's reality for you.
I thought I provided evidence to back the claim of "this movie is about whiteness", such as the multiple references to Tulsa, OK, but if you want to claim I don't provide enough evidence to substantiate that, you may. To be honest, I really did not think that was a claim that needed defending.
But no, I am not reading dozens of paragraphs of theory if they do not pull from the movie under discussion.
... you expanded a lot of effort on the "Men" analogy when one can just admit "patriarchal exploitation is also a theme."
I have happily conceded that the film has much to say on the topic of Whiteness as an institution several times already - though I will admit that I had forgotten about the discussion of the Tulsa riots until you mentioned them just now, which is evidence worth considering! My whole and entire argument was that there is a distinction between "The movie has a thesis re. Whiteness - it is Not Positive on the matter" vs. "The movie has multiple conflicting theses re. white people" and that I believed the former was supportable whereas the latter was not. At this stage, however, I believe that between my repeated failure to explain this distinction and my increasing uncertainty that I remember the film as well as I thought I did, I am content to simply leave the matter at "I do not understand the topic well enough to be able to contribute further to the discussion at hand".
DeleteThank you for being willing to engage to the extent that you did.