Introduction

Throughout his career, Martin Scorsese has traced crime, greed, and corruption across American life. In his new film, he turns his gaze to the violence of whiteness. Set in nineteen-twenties Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” tells the story of a series of murders targeting the people of the Osage Nation, perpetrated by white settlers in pursuit of the community’s oil wealth. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the trajectory of Scorsese’s style, from the “whirling limbs” and “short, sharp cuts” of films like “Goodfellas” to the elegiac restraint of more recent works like “The Irishman.” They’re joined by The New Yorker’s David Grann, the author of the 2017 book that formed the basis for Scorsese’s film, who describes how he first came upon the story and how members of the Osage community became involved in—and responded to—the adaptation. Then the hosts consider the multilayered coda of the film, which raises increasingly pressing questions about representation and ownership. “Killers of the Flower Moon” recounts the atrocities committed against the Osage, but it’s also an indictment of racialized evil writ large. “The trauma of this experience of course belongs most intimately to the Osage people,” Cunningham says. “But the proclivities that gave rise to it, the sensibilities that survive in our culture today—that’s something that every person that has anything to do with the United States needs to engage with.”

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