Scorsese's Settler Gaze?
'Killers of the Flower Moon' and the Theological Limits of Colonial Identification
About the author: Maxine King is an enthusiastic lay person and cantor in the Episcopal Church. She is currently a student of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary.
I was eagerly anticipating Killers of the Flower Moon—three hours of Scorsese is always a treat, and one of my favorite actors, Lily Gladstone,1 had been cast as one of its leads. For those who have not seen it, its subject matter is the series of organized murders of more than 20 Osage people in and around Fairfax, Oklahoma in the 1920s—in schemes to steal Indigenous headrights that had become exceedingly valuable due to the discovery of oil on their land. A central conspirator in (at least) one of these plots, William King Hale (who insists on being called by his middle name), has his nephew Ernest marry Mollie, an Osage woman, in order to bring her family’s headrights into their settler family eventually. While Ernest slowly murders Mollie by adding an unspecified drug to her medication, Ernest, his brother, and his uncle organize the murders of Mollie’s family to ensure her sole possession of her family’s headrights, which would fall to Ernest and his family upon her eventual death.
It is a horrifying story; and for those of us living in the ongoing aftermath of North American settler colonialism, it is our horrifying story.
After seeing the movie, I was left with decidedly mixed feelings, as were many critics. Gladstone’s performance is stunning and easily the strongest of the movie, but her character is decidedly sidelined for a focus on the inner turmoil of her white husband, a fact noted by many including Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant who worked on the film. Its concentrated focus on Ernest and his uncle also seems to lead to a diminished reflection on the explicitly political and structural problem of the U.S. government’s headrights system, as Robert Warrior points out. What is enabled by this individualizing focus on Ernest, however, is what Joel Robinson describes in his review: the film “turns the camera both inward and onto the [non-Osage] audience simultaneously” in giving the inner life of Ernest and his betrayal of Mollie center stage.
Though neither Ernest nor his uncle are particularly pious Christians, their dialogue is full of theological appeals when King is encouraging his nephew to stay the course of his murderous plot. After Ernest fails in securing the murder of Mollie’s sister, at his uncle’s demand he kneels before an altar in their masonic lodge, and after King removes the Bible that was placed upon it, he beats Ernest. Returning the Bible to its place, he asks:
“Ernest, what do you think’s going to happen to Mollie and all of them? I love them, but in the turning of the earth, they’re going to go. Their time is over. That’s it, gone. Ernest, there will be no lightning strike and it stops happening. It will happen.”
This naturalized movement of history becomes divinized, as it so often and so easily does. King explains to Ernest later when providing him with the unnamed drug to add to her insulin:
“The truth is, she’s going to pass on. You know that. There’s nothing we can do about that. It is in God’s hands, and he’s waiting on her now.”
What is clear is that this “God” to whom King refers is none other than himself, projecting himself onto divinity and “providentially” presiding over this conspiracy of murder and theft. To borrow from our friend Barth, when one’s conception of providence becomes unable to account for God’s ability to judge and contrast human activity, “The godhead or divinity to which it refers can only be a plurality of demons, or a single arch-demon.”2
But even if Killers of the Flower Moon succeeds in presenting the intimate theological horrors of a settler’s conscience, tortured by participating in a demonic providence, it does not give such intimacy to its exploration of Mollie and her subjectivity. In some ways, it feels like a conscious decision to acknowledge the limitations of the film as a settler production: How could a settler ever truly enter into, know, and represent its colonized other?
Scorsese’s cameo in the final scene as a narrator in an FBI-sponsored radio show seems an obvious admission of his inability to transcend his positionality. Still, it shows itself elsewhere in the film, too. After the murder of another one of Mollie’s sisters in an explosion down the street from Ernest and Mollie, Scorsese’s camera gives the viewer Ernest’s perspective as he returns to his home, scanning each room as the camera/Ernest/we-the-viewers look for Mollie and their children. The camera pans down the stairwell to a dimly-lit basement as Ernest sees Mollie and shakes his head, and Mollie lets out a guttural scream at yet another one of her family being murdered. But the camera is content to allow Mollie to turn away from Ernest and the viewer, and instead to turn away from Mollie on Ernest’s reaction to the pain he has caused Mollie. Ernest and the film’s camera refuse to descend to the depths of Mollie’s life and pain.
But even if these limits are understandable and even perhaps necessary for this particular film, they cannot and should not have the last word in any theological consideration of settler colonialism. For the God we know in Jesus Christ is not something like the man and camera who looks down into the basement analyzing another’s suffering, deliberating what to do next, weighing options, making calculations, deciding whether to empathize or identify with this other. No; God’s eternal decision is to make the life of the wretched of the earth God’s very own, without leaving any “God behind God” safely at the top of the stairwell. God’s solidarity with the oppressed in Jesus Christ is beyond all colonial limits of identification that are on display in the content and form of Killers of the Flower Moon. Any truly theological perspective—in film, theology, or otherwise—will instead begin with God and God’s radical solidarity with Mollie, the Osage, and all the disinherited of the world, thus, with the alternative ways of being and living that this incarnate tradition of the oppressed teaches.
To indulge myself in giving a bonus recommendation: Gladstone plays the main character in what might be my favorite ~40 minutes of film ever in the final vignette of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016). She was even planning to leave acting entirely when she received the fateful email from Scorsese!
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation, Vol. III/3, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 111.