Martin Scorsese explains [REDACTED]’s Killers Of The Flower Moon cameo
"I was taken by the impact of the realization that all of this is reduced to a half-hour piece of entertainment"
Aux News Killers Of The Flower Moon![Martin Scorsese explains [REDACTED]’s Killers Of The Flower Moon cameo](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/avuploads/2023/11/14223736/0792049508f162f5e1147bda818f9a45.jpg)
This article discusses the plot and ending of Killers Of The Flower Moon
Martin Scrosese’s new film, The Killers Of The Flower Moon, is appropriately generating conversation and criticism. The treatment of the Osage people, both in the plot and on the set, has become a lightning rod for critique that the film welcomes. Scorsese himself admits his “culpability” in the film’s epilogue. As a cast member of the radio drama version of Killers Of The Flower Moon, the director reads the real Mollie Burkhart’s obituary. “There was no mention of the killings,” Scorsese says. The film’s epilogue remains one of its most powerful moments, with the realization that this type of violence is part of a continuum, a tragedy to true-crime pipeline that continues to this day.
In a recent press conference for the film, Scorsese explained that because these horrors can be “reduced to a half-hour piece of entertainment,” he had to “bring us back to the heart of the picture.” However, he “honestly didn’t know how to direct it.”
“I was taken by the impact of the realization that all of this—generations of suffering and genocide and trauma, betrayals, love, hate—all of this is reduced to a half-hour piece of entertainment,” he explained. “And somehow, I had to find a way to make the transition of something as shocking as the radio show to bring us back to the heart of the picture.”
The finale was shot at Scorsese’s old high school, Cardinal Hayes High School in New York, with his wife, daughters, and granddaughter in attendance. “Something hit home as I was repeating the lines. I felt that—in an odd way—that this is a film, and one could say it’s entertainment,” he continued. “We make the entertainment now, but it’s on people’s lives. It’s on people’s souls. We have to remember that and to keep it in balance.”
Scorsese recognizes that Killers Of The Flower Moon is part of a long line of Westerns that mythologized the cowboy and demonized the indigenous people. Adding to that lineage, Scorsese felt “culpability,” which led him to keep his cameo in the film.
“I felt I should just take on the role. If you say, ‘Oh, Marty, you like the old Westerns, and they were shown this way and the Native Americans are shown as bad.’ Yes, I did like the old Westerns. Yes, I am part of the system. Yes, I am European-American. And yes, I am culpable. So I think I took that on. I couldn’t verbalize that as I was doing it. But when I edited it, when Themla [Schoonmaker] I put it in, we felt it. And so I guess I put it on me.”
Killers Of The Flower Moon is in theaters now.
24 Comments
The ending is by far the most powerful part. The length of that obituary hit me like a truck, partially because I’ve seen similar stories. I’ve researched the Eastland Disaster of 1915 for years and there’s this woman I’ve read about named Helen Repa. Czech nurse, saved hundreds that day. Absolute hero, her obit is two sentences that says died of cancer worked at this hospital. I know you cannot sum up a human life in one obituary but this, like Mollie, isn’t even trying and it honestly hurts. What an ending, one of Scorseses best I gotta say.
The story of the Eastland and other disasters like the Iroquois Theater fire or the General Slocum are heartbreaking and infuriating. It always seems to boil down to corners cut for the sake of saving a few bucks and the people responsible rarely face any consequences.
Oh god those events are all unbearable. Decaying lifeboats, exits that won’t open, a poorly made ship forced to carry more lifeboats. They are stories full of heroes but also great cowardice. All eventually forgotten because when poor people die on mass, nobody cares after a few months.
You get these laughs out of the hokey radio sound effects and then the moment Marty steps up, a hush falls over the screening room. There was no other way to end this movie.
Is it Nick Fury? I bet it’s Nick Fury.
Silly. It was clearly Taylor Swift!
What’s a wift and why does Taylors have one?
Bill the Butcher shows up: “we’re building a team.”
It took me a second to realize you meant Daniel Day-Lewis’s character Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York, and not Karl Urban’s character Billy Butcher from The Boys.But it would be even funnier if it was The Boys.
Marty cameos in almost all of his films, usually in a “capturer in media” type role.I assumed he was going to address *Jack White’s* cameo in the same scene, as it’s a bit distracting.
It’s distracting because he is the whitest man alive doing his silly radio man voice.
This is definitely his most prominent one outside of Taxi Driver. But this one is more crucial to the movie.
I thought it worked very well. It’s a beautiful ending.
And here I thought he was gonna talk about Jack White.
I have a feeling that a lot of the people who didn’t understand the reason for the cameo missed the fact that the radio show is supposed to look buffoonish. People who viewed it as a narcissistic inclusion (some kind of overlong curtain call) probably ignored that the movie is calling attention to how flawed the radio show’s retelling of the story is. They might assume that the silliness is just fun period detail. But, if you clock the radio performers are designed to seem silly and inadequate, you have to ask yourself why the director would choose to include himself amongst them.It’s funny. Scorsese loves his cute punch line endings. However, it seems there’s always people complaining. If he makes the ending simple (The Departed – a literal rat walks in front of the capital), people complain that it’s too obvious and dumb. If he makes it more subtle (The Wolf of Wall Street – the audience of rubes continuing to worship this criminal looks like a movie theater audience), half the viewers misinterpret the work.You can never win with art. Bless him for trying all these decades!
The “criticism” from the Reservation Dog actress is ridiculous, contradictory, and anti-art. Want to portray the brutality against the Osage people? That’s problematic, but if a native did so, great and awesome. Like with like. Only certain people can tell certain stories based on immutable characteristics. Again, this is anti-art. Anyone can tell any story they feel like, and race should NEVER be a factor in deciding that. This is an actress bemoaning the lack of native talent involved while on a hit show made about natives. She’s an imbecile.The film is brutal because what happened was brutal. So sorry the greatest director of his generation portrayed it accurately, and added an amazing coda. You can’t win for trying.
The ending really caught me off guard. That was a way more creative way to summarize what happened after the primary story and really made a powerful impact.
I’m going to go look her up.
Although it’s weird that Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City did the same thing recently (except instead of a radio program it turns out that the movie was really an episode of a highbrow 1950s TV program similar to Playhouse 90.
What Marty DOESN’T know is as the radio booth was being built, it clipped a sprinkler head in the high school auditorium, sending gallons of water streaming onto the stage, leading a half dozen of us scrambling to save the set.
The ending really made an impression, and I’m still thinking about it.
How is the [REDACTED] not Jack White? Honestly surprised.Also, did anyone else feel the coda was very Wes Anderson-y? Especially if you saw Asteroid City this year, which is a play-within a television program-within a movie.
I found the line “there was no mention of the killings” oddly touching. Like on the one hand it’s America burying the story and forgetting about it, but at the same time maybe Mollie’s legacy wasn’t just about a horrible crime committed against her family and her people. She lived a life beyond that.
I have seen so many different readings of the ending. From condemnation of true crime and that so many focus on the criminals and not the victims. The racism of the native woman gets basically no story in her obit, to as you said a more opimistic, she was not defined by trauma and that flows into the last scene as the people live on.I can’t read that positively personally. Your entire family being exterminated for money would never leave my mind to my dying day and it clearly impacted her beyond what mere words can say. It reminds me of when you go to cast section of the Wikipedia page. Ernest and Hale both have individual pages, but Mollie has nothing.