In Killers of the Flower Moon, true crime reveals the paradoxes of the past
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Tuesday, October 17, 2023
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Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 book of the same name by David Grann that chronicled a true story of Osage Indians being systematically murdered in the 1920s.
Key Points:
- Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 book of the same name by David Grann that chronicled a true story of Osage Indians being systematically murdered in the 1920s.
- This oil brought enormous riches to the Osage people, who legally enjoyed “headrights” to land that could not be bought, only inherited.
New Journalism
- His bestselling book was based around the principles of New Journalism, which developed as a popular literary genre during the 1960s in the hands of writers such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion.
- They typically eschew the more closeted dimensions of experimental fiction to engage openly with the public world.
- The third and final section of the book, titled “The Reporter”, boasts an epigraph from William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom!
The mythology of West
- During the investigation, the Bureau of Investigation – the precursor to the FBI – regarded a rancher named William Hale as the “lone mastermind” of the killings.
- He quotes an Osage tribe member as saying the white community considered murdering an Indian as merely akin to “cruelty to animals”.
- He suggests that such illegal forms of brutality were always embedded at the heart of the mythology of the American West.
- This narrative complexity has interesting repercussions for the debates around the question of “truth-telling” in the fraught conditions of contemporary Australia.
- White’s memoir was rejected by publishers, but many years later it did morph into a fictionalised version by Grove entitled The Years of Fear (2002).
New light
- The director remarked in a recent interview with Deadline that he was more interested in exploring the story’s “mystery” than reproducing “a police procedural”.
- He casts the two men as charismatic villains with one foot in the old Wild West.
- He has explored capitalism’s dangerous proximity to criminal activity in films such as The Aviator (2004), starring DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.
- Its depth of archival research shines new light on a distressing but not entirely anomalous episode in the recent American past.