Killers of the Flower Moon: A Consequentialist Movie Review!
In which I take most of the fun out of movie reviewing by using it to make a philosophical point. But it still is a bit of an actual movie review! And it’s also a coda to my first Substack post.
Click on the footnote1 here for a tl;dr summary of the post.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a compelling movie. I cried at the end. It is a Hollywood epic about the killing of Osage Indians in the early part of the 20th century. Robert De Niro is hard to look away from as Bill Hall, the self-proclaimed “King” of Osage country, and Leonardo DiCaprio does an excellent job as the frowny-faced Ernest Burkhart. And Lily Gladstone is spectacular as Mollie Kyle, the Osage woman who marries Burkhart.
From the early going, it is apparent that it is going to turn out that Hall plays a central role in the killings of many of the Osage. The movie eventually becomes about whether justice will be served to Hall and to others involved.
The movie has been heralded for telling an underappreciated story about indigenous people and the harms that racist, opportunist white people put upon them. I am glad that the story has gotten attention - I had never heard of it, and I am grateful for what I learned from it. The cinematography and design were excellent, but I’m going to leave an analysis of the grandeur of the film to the (gushing) professional film critics. And while I think there are a lot of good things about the movie, I’m mostly just going to complain about it.
In my first Substack post, I bemoaned the fact that Bernard Williams’s famous Jim and the Indians case puts more focus on Jim as agent than on the Indians as patients. What I’m about to say is that Killers of the Flower Moon has (nearly exactly) the same problem.
Stephen King objected to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Oh gosh, I now get it! “Torrance” is like “torrents” – of blood coming out of the elevator, of Jack just coming back again and again. Why did I never think of that before?), on the grounds that he is obviously crazy from the outset of the film, whereas in the book, the hotel made him crazy. I feel similar about De Niro being De Niro in this one, just as it is hard for Jack Nicholson to step out of the Jack Nicholson persona. (FWIW, I don’t usually get this feeling with Meryl Streep, and I didn’t get it in this movie with Leo.) I think that this inflexibility is a flaw in De Niro’s acting in the film – even though he is eminently watchable. But it’s also a flaw in the movie as a whole.
While the movie is partly about the Osage, the focus ends up being primarily about Burkhart and Hall. Is there a Bechdel test, but for indigenous people? (It looks like there is something similar.) I’m guessing the movie would pass it – it’s almost three and a half hours long – but not by much.
Others have made similar complaints about the movie focusing more on the white men than on the Osage. Devery Jacobs writes: “Being Native, watching this movie was f---ing hellfire… each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
There is a classic Dylan song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”. Despite its title, the song is not primarily about Carroll. It’s about William Zantzinger, the rich man with a tobacco farm of 600 acres, who killed her. Dylan is explicit that those who “philosophize disgrace” are not supposed to cry when Carroll is killed. Instead, we are supposed to cry only when Zantzinger is not brought to justice. Dylan has a nice a verse describing Carroll, and it’s good that Dylan highlights structural injustices! But let’s still, from the outset, shed some tears for its victims.
Our emotional responses are so deeply triggered by injustice, and that is why it is such a great subject for art. But on the view that I am trying to promote, the primary tragedy is that people are killed, not that the perpetrators often don’t face appropriate jail time. Movies that grab our attention are almost always about agents and the choices they make. But I think that more focus should be on those who have been their victims.
Killers of the Flower Moon is problematic not just because it focuses on white people rather than the Osage, but also because it focuses on the killers rather than the victims. (You may notice that the very title of the movie gives primacy of place to the Killers.) The movie doesn’t do a bad job viewing the world from the perspective of the Osage. But the emotional core (as highlighted in the final scene with Kyle and Burkhart) is whether honesty will prevail, the killers will repent, and justice will be served.
The main philosophical point - or, rather, moral psychological point - I have here is that we very naturally give attention to agents rather than patients. That is why art typically gives so much expression to narratives, which place agents and agency at their core. In fact, it is a central component of narratives that things happen for reasons, and are done by people and their choices, rather than just occur by happenstance.
Consequentialists claim that the fundamental units of moral assessment are states of affairs, rather than the virtuous or vicious characters, actions, or motives of agents. For the consequentialist, it doesn’t make a lot (or any) intrinsic difference whether people are harmed by nature or by evildoers who we are supposed to hate and for whom we demand justice. But that’s not the impression you are encouraged to get from Killers and so many other movies.
I think that this involves an error of attention, albeit a natural, human one. And it is indeed a moral error. And while this post, along with my first post, criticize theories that focus on agency, this post also points towards an error committed by a lot of the philosophical literature on narrativity. But I’ll have to say more about that another time.
As Dylan shows in singing about the flawed prosecution of William Zantzinger, and as Killers also shows, we ought to care about injustices, both individual and structural. But we should not lose sight of the fact - even though it is not natural for us to do so - that our primary ethical attention should be on making things better for (potential) victims (past, present, and future) rather than beginning with a focus of bringing wrongdoers to justice. So, again, I think that we should adopt a more patient-focused perspective in ethics, even if it is not in our nature to do so.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a powerful movie. I cried.
De Niro and DiCaprio are too much of a central focus in the movie.
This is problematic from an indigenous perspective.
It is also problematic from a consequentialist perspective.
We humans are naturally compelled by narratives, which is why great art so often involves them. And narratives are structured around agency.
But this focus is ethically misleading. Ethical analysis should focus on victims rather than perpetrators.
I actually think the main agent in the movie is Mollie, who’s also a victim and tied to all of the other victims. I also think an important, albeit not the sole, ethical dimension of the movie, is that agents get easily corrupted by situations and engage in all sorts of self-deception. That’s an interesting aspect of the movie, and it doesn’t have to be to the detriment of victims. I didn’t get the impression that victims were not centered—in fact, I thought it restored their agency through Mollie—though I understand why one may feel that way. But I’ll say that if someone failed to see Mollie as being the center of the movie, they are the one committing an error of attention.