Quote:
Originally Posted by cgpublic
The thing is, if we're looking at a 'warts and all' perspective of history, we must remember the Osage were a feared, war-centric tribe who dominated their region supported by considerable acts of violence against their fellow indigenous tribes, and also that the Osage received some measure of justice from the very same government, and people, which sought to conquer and control their people and resources.
That's the history of humanity right there, conquer or be conquered, and the race, region, ethnicity, country of origin, and every other label one seeks to apply to serve their self-interest, or 'side,' is simply window dressing.
Our capacity to commit acts of violence to serve our self-interest, often extreme, is who we are as humans, and how we know that we are all equals.
It's also true that we are capable of great compassion and a desire to seek the truth, and if possible, do what is right, even for those we may not hold as equals or perhaps enemies, past or present.
These lessons are the centerpiece of the book, Killers Of The Flower Moon by David Grann, and while may have to wait until I see the film for myself to find these lessons, something tells me I may have to look very hard to find it.
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To be fair, the utterly countless portrayals of Native American tribes in general as violent, "war-centric", conquering peoples in Hollywood films alone for the greater part of a century has the image so deeply embedded in the American consciousness, it's pretty well impossible for anyone from the past several generations to forget. The trouble is when the depictions are so relentlessly one-sided and absent of any nuance or complexity--i.e., your trademark Hollywood representation of anything requiring actual study or thought--understanding of history itself is made a complete botch-job. (Even actual American history books took many, many decades to begin scrubbing away the whitewash.) This legacy of willing ignorance has left such a vacuum in our culture, we're only in the past few decades just
beginning to infuse it with the suppressed stories, subcultures, and perspectives that could easily fill another century of cinema.
That this has come during a particularly bad time in the development of popular media, as giant conglomerates are swallowing up independent voices wholesale, profit-hungry shareholders are smothering creative opportunities, and our culture is so inundated with distractions and anxieties about wealth-inequality, has only further complicated and handicapped attempts at addressing this vacuum in ways that do these complex, harrowing subjects the justice they deserve. For a very brief time during the New Hollywood period, when the money men at the top had been forced to temporarily yield control to artists determined to puncture the old comforting lies and produce works for audiences primed to question the status quo, there was hope that American movies could actually become a means of expanding our grasp of the human condition in all its thorny respects. Unfortunately, mindless entertainments on one side and injudicious creatives who'd lost the plot and strayed into nihilism and narcissim on the other, swiftly quashed this promise of a future, more adult Hollywood cinema. In its wake, we have conditions that become less congenial with each passing year for legitimately sophisticated artistic statements of any kind, including those that attempt to recreate history on the screen.
As such, at least as far as Hollywood product goes, "entertainments" like
Killers of the Flower Moon that have elite (still usually white) names attached to them, do occasionally grant us an opportunity to get at something a bit more substantial, edifying, and thought-provoking that what we can typically expect from the corporatized "dream factory"; for all their inevitable shortcomings. Scorsese's filmization was doomed from the start, simply by virtue of the money talents involved and the sources of financing behind it, from ever becoming the cinematic document we
need shedding brilliant, transcendent light on the Osage Indian Murders of the 1920s. What we got in the end is still likely better than the telling we deserve, though, and has earned my (limited, but sincere) plaudits, at any rate.
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If anything, it gets lots of snobs going out of their way to shit on it because it’s so broadly popular.
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