Between lionization and demonization

The 96th annual Academy Awards were held on Sunday, and Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer stole the show, taking home seven of the coveted Oscar awards. Oppenheimer represents an increasingly rare accomplishment these days—a Best Picture winner that people have actually seen (it was No. 5 at the box office in 2023). The top-grossing film of 2023, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, was nominated for eight Oscars (but, controversially, not in the Best Actress category), and only brought home one award. But lost in the shuffle was Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which had more modest box office success and was completely shut out at the Oscars, despite receiving ten nominations.

Killers might be the greatest film from one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, though that opinion will surely be debated since Scorsese’s corpus is filled with so many fan favorites. From one angle, the film is classic Scorsese: It is an epic tale of organized crime, greed, and violence. But this time the canvas is spread wide on the flatlands and open skies of Oklahoma, and the themes are at the heart of the American story. The themes are prosperity and opportunity on the frontier, but with the dark stain of racial injustice coloring nearly every brushstroke. The screenplay is based on David Grann’s account of the systematic stealing of oil “head rights” by settlers in the Indian territories of Oklahoma, and the mysterious murders of the Osage tribe that drew the attention of the emerging Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1920s.

The conflicted love story at the center of the narrative humanizes these sweeping motifs. Leonardo DiCaprio turns in a career performance as the ambitious Ernest Burkhart, but the subtlety of Lily Gladstone’s portrayal of his wife Mollie steals the show. Music lovers will also appreciate that Americana icons Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson have cameos and the late Robbie Robertson turns in a masterful score.

The film’s picturesque cinematography (from director of photography Rodrigo Prieto) and world-class performances convey a story that until the release of the book and film were relatively unknown. Indeed, the theme of untold stories and unmentionable horrors is central to the film’s arc. (Warning: spoilers ahead) The dramatic reading of Mollie Burkhart’s obituary, voiced by Scorsese himself at the end of the film, underscores this theme: “There was no mention of the murders.” As film critic Brett McCracken notes,

It’s the last line of the film. It speaks to the ways we’re prone, in our fallenness, to whitewash history and edit out the uncomfortable episodes and the sins of our ancestors, even as (like Ernest and others in Killers) we’re prone to concealing rather than confessing our present sins. Our instinct to hide sin is as old as Eden.

The question of how we tell our collective histories has erupted into public controversy in recent years, with the 1619 Project serving as a major catalyst. Reactions on the right have been swift and severe, eliciting an alternative 1776 Project. These debates have been hashed out in the media (social, mainstream, and otherwise) and in school boards all across the country.

Historiography, as a theory laden human inquiry, always has a political dimension. But when history becomes coopted by rank partisanship and poisonous ideology, something important is lost, not only in our ability to read history in a clear-eyed fashion but also in our humanity itself. At the risk of being overly simplistic, there are two main tendencies that have emerged in these controversies. On the one hand, there has always been a tendency in American history toward the lionization of our past. We might think here of the stories we tell about the Pilgrims’ feast or of George Washington and the cherry tree. In a certain sense, this kind of collective mythology has its place, as we seek to highlight the virtues of our shared history to successive generations. But the pushback to the 1619 Project and certain accounts of the racial dimensions of our past can result in overcorrection. When history, especially as it is taught to older students, becomes hagiography, other virtues are surrendered, especially honesty and humility about the darker stains on our past and present.

The other tendency that we see—especially on the American left—runs in the opposite direction, namely, demonization. Here, the only real history to be told is one of pervasive injustice and systemic oppression. The toppling of historic monuments and the removal of historic namesakes has become the avatar for this approach. And it’s not only monuments to the Confederacy that are on the chopping block, where a reasonable case could be made for their removal, given the history of their construction and aims during the dark days of Jim Crow. The Founders too and Honest Abe himself are under attack (but see this important reversal). When influential figures from the past are reduced to two-dimensional caricatures, the same virtues of honesty and humility are eclipsed by a prideful and whiggish view of our own place in the unfolding drama of human history.

In a Christian framework, our retelling of history must account for both the goodness of creation and the wickedness of the Fall. Human beings, bearing as they do the divine image as the crown of God’s creation, are capable of heroic acts of wisdom and virtue. This fundamental dignity is, to be sure, defaced by the fall into sin, but it is not obliterated. On the other hand, Christians should be the first to acknowledge that history is complicated by the universal and pervasive effects of sin and our uncanny ability to lie, cover up, and evade responsibility both individually and in communities of corruption. Conservative Christians in America should feel no need to deny the reality of racial injustice. One needn’t be a proponent of Critical Race Theory to want the full story told.

Killers of the Flower Moon has a political message, but it isn’t a simplistic partisan one. The iniquities of the criminals in the story are on full display, but so too is the heroism (and religious faith) of the tribal leaders and of Mollie Burkhart especially. The federal investigators who get to the bottom of the criminal conspiracy are also presented as praiseworthy characters. Even the central villain, Ernest, is portrayed in a conflicted light, though (spoiler alert) his sins eventually find him out. On balance, the story is a needed reminder that despite humanity’s ingenuity and promise, we are also capable of the most base and inhumane acts of moral evil. Only an honest reckoning with this dynamic leaves open the redemptive possibilities that lie at the very heart of the Christian message.