At a towering three-and-a-half hours long, Killers Of The Flower Moon is by no means a short film. In fact, it is one of the lengthiest feature films in Martin Scorsese’s long career filled with long movies – it is only a few moments shorter than 2019’s The Irishman, which currently holds the record as his longest, excluding documentary films.
So, with such an ample runtime, why did it end the way it did? After hours of exhaustive storytelling, the film featured a quirky epilogue scene that wrapped up the story in a few mere moments via a true-crime radio show. It quickly went from an intense narrative to quickly summarizing what happened to everyone after the main events – an unnatural hasty way to wrap things up after lingering on every other detail for so long throughout.
Not only did it speed along the ending of the story, but the tone also shifted dramatically as well: after more than three hours of heavy emotion, the movie shifted to jaunty and (dare I say it) lighthearted. It seemed hokey and a jarring shift to near-comic relief after hours of intense sadness.
What gives? When you look at some of Marty’s other crime dramas, he injected elements of fun into them. Goodfellas featured a cast of bad people doing some awful things. But he purposely made it enjoyable. They cracked jokes moments after committing felony after felony. They talked about how great it was to live that life (even if the ultimate message was that the life was ruinous). They wore those suits that I could never pull off but always wished I could. But Killers never meant to invoke the same kind of fun. Why then did we get such an upbeat send-off to this film? Is Scorsese losing his sense of tone?
I say absolutely not. I would go so far as to say his choice to include this ending shows that he is just as sharply aware of his impact now as he ever was. At the risk of expressing an alienating opinion, this ending exists to emphasize one important word: whitewashing.
This movie intended to shed light on a serious crime that occurred a century ago to a Native American population being taken advantage of to the tune of millions of dollars. And when the gradual siphoning of this money through loveless marriage inheritance scams or power-of-attorney type fraud wasn’t fast enough? Murder. Murder after murder. These murders went largely ignored for years. And when the murders got investigated, they were covered up…and then ignored as well.
The reality of what happened to the Osage people finally came to light, but it took paying the government for the burden of sending its investigators to Oklahoma. But even after this, I feel confident in saying that a vast majority of people alive today who are not Native American, who are not from Oklahoma, or who do not research events like this academically did not know about this. I’m not saying nobody heard of it – but this went for 100 years under the radar of most people compared to other events in American History like the date we signed the Declaration of Independence or the name of our Normandy Invasion during World War II. Oftentimes, our more shameful history tends to get emphasized less. It’s no surprise. This happens. It will continue to happen. And that is the point of ending this movie that way.
Radio shows like this actually existed, and according to author David Grann who wrote the book that the movie was based on, this was how most Americans in those immediate years after the Osage murders first learned about it.
The point Scorsese was trying to make with this ending was not only to capture a glimpse into how many average Americans first learned about it in those immediate years afterwards, but he wanted today’s audience to feel discomfort by capturing exactly how a broadcast like this typically went. Something so tragic was recreated by a group of outsiders who only played up the events with dramatic flair and explained in broad strokes meant more to invoke shock and awe instead of treating it with the somber respect it deserved. And instead of providing full context to the poor initial handling of these events by our elected leaders, the story was quickly rushed through – almost as a way to suggest this story is not important enough to linger on.
As with many other problematic periods in our past, it was downplayed rather than focused on. This is the whitewashing of history which occurs all too often when we need to take a good hard look at our faults. The original handling of this subject by those first tasked with explaining it to the world was just one more indignity on top of everything else that occurred in Oklahoma.
Our modern true-crime podcast obsession is not dissimilar. An event like this did not deserve the carefree tone it received, and that is exactly what Scorsese meant by utilizing this method to end the story. We feel the weight of the Osage nation on our shoulders through three hours of showing what they went through, and then we feel what the Osage must have felt when they tuned in to the radio to hear this disrespectful handling of their story. When the show was over, I can’t truly know how they felt, but I can only imagine the range of emotions it generated for them. For the non-Native Americans who tuned in to listen to the broadcast, they probably felt a little more informed, perhaps sad for what the Osage went through, but ultimately, they likely just went about their day afterwards.
Scorcese (even as an outsider) chose to make this film with the dignity and respect those events deserve as a way to highlight the horrific events. And then he chose to end it the way he did to highlight the poor choices made to memorialize them.
He wanted us to walk out of the theater feeling the weight of those events, even the events where others later chose to breeze through it for the sake of cheap entertainment. His choice to have the film reenact that cheap entertainment only added to the lesson of this movie: don’t let tragedy occur, don’t ignore tragedy when it is occurring, and make sure yesterday’s tragedy is given the same respectful treatment it deserves so tomorrow doesn’t become the next tragedy.
We are meant to feel anger at the criminal perpetrators of murder, and we are meant to feel anger at the pathetic perpetrators of poor storytelling. Thankfully, Marty is a master storyteller – his efforts, along with the efforts of David Grann – corrected a huge misstep in informing the world of these events. I commend them both.
