Culture Frame: On KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Overview:
Killers of the Flower Moon - Recommended *****
The Zone of Interest - Recommended *****
What I'm Watching: TV January 2024 Edition
Perspectives on Evil: The audacious filmmaking of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE ZONE OF INTEREST
Warning: There are mild spoilers for both of these films in this article, including partial spoilers of how they end. However, I always try not to divulge anything that will ruin your enjoyment of the film. In fact, this article is partially a pitch for why you should see these two films, neither of which is easy to sit through. I have tried to give you the character of these films so that you can make an informed choice to watch or not, and have left crucial details out for your own discovery and enjoyment. But you may also prefer to watch first and read after, if you want the "blank slate" approach.
As richly layered as cinema can be at its best, it is also reductive by nature. A good movie is a story edited down to its most essential elements. A novel can take dozens of hours to read, a season of binge-worthy TV ten hours, but if a movie is over 2 hours we sigh and wonder if we have time for that. Couldn't they have cut that one part? Merged some characters together? Gotten to the good stuff?
When the story is adapted from a book - let alone a historical event - the perils are even greater. Whose story are we telling? We will probably settle on one or two protagonists at most, merging historical events and real people into simplified conglomerates for the sake of story, and it is impossible to satisfy those familiar with the story or the history. Sure, we all "know" that this is just the "movie version", but the movie may become the only version of events people know or remember, so don't the filmmakers have a responsibility to consider their perspective seriously?
Two of the most important films I saw in 2023 grappled with this problem head-on and with a thoughtfulness that I think is unprecedented, making their perspective unmistakably part of the "text" of the film itself.
The book Killers of the Flower Moon, was a massive hit and bestseller of the true crime genre. It tells the incredible story of an investigation by the early FBI, a rash of supposedly accidental deaths in Osage Nation that grew to outrageous numbers; the obvious murders were planned and perpetrated by a conspiracy by white men who were in some cases trusted neighbors and even family members of the deceased. The book's author David Grann incorporated modern perspectives of the Osage people in writing the book, but the investigation is the main thrust of it, the page-turning element of drama which uncovers all of the secrets and many perspectives of the community.
I know that at least some fans of the book were disappointed with the movie. I imagine this is because Martin Scorsese (Cape Fear, Hugo *) sidelines the murder investigation, and doesn't really keep the perpetrators a mystery at all. It's such a bold choice, even more experimental in its structure than we might expect from an 81-year-old director.
(*Since you may not be familiar with my sense of humor, I feel like I should point out that this is my version of a joke on this article's theme of how we "distill" people's stories.)
Ernest Burkhart, the "protagonist" he has chosen for the movie, gets a narrative arc that is so similar to the many gangsters who were the focus of Scorsese's most iconic works, and that is a choice. Because the biggest criticisms of works like Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street, is that for all the "consequences" that these films conclude with, we mostly remember their violent "glory" days. The very act of centering gangsters as protagonists typically glamourizes them, and at least asks us to try to understand or empathize with them.
Fortunately, that's not what Scorsese is after here. With this story, he probably found that reducing the perpetrators to villains reduced the enormity of their crimes, turning its back on the part of the story we most need to see. These were average people. How did they justify this to themselves? The experience of Killers of the Flower Moon is an inexorable horror of how greed inevitably corrupts, and how small breaches of morals - like turning your back on "small" things because you don't want to be ostracized - open the floodgates of evil.
This process of corruption and systematic racialized violence is still a part of our world everywhere and has rarely been depicted with as much impact as it is in Killers of the Flower Moon. To be fair, the violence and corruption was always there in films like Goodfellas; Scorsese has always known how this works and has meant to horrify you with the violence. But with this film, and his recent The Irishman, he has revisited this territory with purpose. The violence is now more personal, more traumatic, and pointedly unglamorous.
While Leonardo DiCaprio's Burkhart is the center of the narrative in this version, Scorsese doesn't stop there but incorporates poetic touches drawn from the Osage people's culture and mythology, foregrounding the beauty of their culture. He even inserts a documentary-like style at times to enumerate all of the murders that are not a part of the narrative, to give a sense of the true scope of the crimes. Scorsese knows that there are so many different movies he could have made here. He could have tried to do a movie that was all about the Osage people and what they suffered, but as an Italian American from Queens he could never truly do justice to this point-of-view. He could have done a story about the unlikely marriage of Ernest and Mollie and what they really meant to each other. He could have done a police procedural, or a courtroom drama.
Scorsese decided to do all of this. Rather than merely follow the gangster/crime template he is known for and has perfected for decades, he blends it all together. He has talked recently about how he feels he is only just now realizing all that movies can be. He has broken free of the restraints of a genre with Killers of the Flower Moon and made something bigger.
It is, perhaps, exhausting. It is a long movie. But the story it tells should be an exhausting experience.
Killers of the Flower Moon ends on its boldest masterstroke, which breaks the fourth wall, and reframes the whole film in a surprisingly self-deprecating light. After the "case" is closed, what happens afterward is told in the genre of a radio show. This is based on a real radio show - discussed in the book - that was produced by the FBI to propagandize their efforts and make them more popular with Americans. It is jarring in the context of the movie, but it's essential to remember that most of our history on this subject comes from the FBI records, and the white journalism of its day, which comes with a certain point-of-view of what they are interested in. The radio drama is incredibly quaint and the sound effects that are imposed are silly, and Scorsese seems to be commenting not only about the primitiveness of our primary sources for our history. I think he is also acknowledging that everything he has done in Killers of the Flower Moon is a production with special effects and drama designed to entertain you.
While cinema has never ventured to tell the story of the Osage tragedy before, it has no shortage of films about the horrors of the Holocaust. More than enough in fact to foreground the perspective of the Jewish victims, by Jewish storytellers. It would be difficult to approach the subject of the Holocaust from a perspective that has not been tried before, but that is what The Zone of Interest has consciously tried to do.
The Zone of Interest is a meticulously researched recreation of daily life in the household of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. On the other side of a barbed wire-topped wall, we can see the roofs and smokestacks of the camp, and hear industrial noises, and occasionally gunfire and screams. But life goes on uninterrupted in the lush garden and household kept by his wife Hedwig with the help of servants, and his five children and dog.
Director Jonathan Glazer (Birth, Under the Skin) developed with his cinematographer Lukasz Zal (Cold War) a unique shooting style for the film to try to achieve maximum authenticity and objectivity. The cameras were hidden inside a recreation of the commandant's house, and the crew absent during filming. Camera angles were chosen not to be aesthetically pleasing, but to capture everything in focus without guiding the viewer's eye.
For all the discussion of this film depicting "the banality of evil", there are plenty of things that occur in the Höss household which I wouldn't call normal. Their ambition, or craving, for rank, and for a perfect environment for their children, is absolute and they lash out viciously at anything that threatens to disturb it. When Höss is called to a different post, Hedwig suggests that she will remain with the kids at Auschwitz, their utopia.
There is certainly a debate to be had about whether a film about Nazis can be complete without showing the atrocities, or Höss' eventual acknowledgement and confession of his crimes. What The Zone of Interest tries to do is present this information to you in a way that does not provoke an artificial emotional response. There is no ambiguity about what is going on in this film. Höss presides over engineering discussions on how to maximize the number of people gassed and incinerated per day, and how to get rid of the remains. The wives pick through confiscated valuables and complain when the spoils of war don't suit their taste. You will feel sick watching this film.
The most impressive thing about Glazer's film is that he doesn't stick dogmatically to the objective style that I have described here; there are several sequences in the film that shake things up. One is a haunting sequence of a young Polish girl sneaking into the fields at night to leave food for the starving Jewish workers. It is shot in a striking way that makes it look alien, perhaps another tactic to distance the viewer for objectivity, but the way it contrasts with the rest of the film gives it a furtive, haunting energy. I think it goes a long way to keeping the film from being a numbing experience.
The final shots of the film are also unexpected - and break the fourth wall - but I will say no more.
Both Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest walk the dangerous line of trying to put a human face on evil. The danger would be to absolve the villains of these stories. Instead, these films are a warning to recognize evil in our own time. When the Höss family lounges in their garden, having carefully planned for the smokestacks to be downwind, it's hard not to think about the walls we construct for ourselves to enjoy our privileged lives while tragedies and atrocities continue to occur in our world, closer to home than we sometimes make them out to be.
'Killers of the Flower Moon' is available on Apple TV now.
'The Zone of Interest' is in theaters in Austin starting on 1/19.
What I'm Watching: TV January 2024 Edition
The Traitors UK Season 2
Peacock
The US version is a pale comparison to one of the most dramatic seasons of reality television we've ever seen. The worst that can be said of the show is that sometimes the "challenges" just feel like something to do between the Round Table sessions when the players try to determine who among them are the traitors they need to vote off the show. It's 'Among Us' in real life, with surprising psychological depth, and with sinister covers of pop classics as the soundtrack. It's great.
True Detective: Night Country
Max
All subsequent seasons of this anthology series have paled in comparison to the iconic, existential dread of Matthew McConaughey monologuing in Season 1. But this new season seeks to bring back the magic, with a fresh story by Issa López, the Mexican writer/director of the unforgettable Tigers Are Not Afraid. The new season stars Jodie Foster, and we hope it brings back the undercurrents of eldritch horror.