What an America Last historical epic says about a naïve, craven Hollywood master
In Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese’s political naïveté was on full display. His ambivalent narrator, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), the ill-bred son of a reprobate warrior priest, confessed, “Some of it I remember, the rest I got from dreams.” Set during the Civil War, but pushing “the plague of slavery” to the periphery, Gangs was an extravagantly warped vision of the ethnic infighting and self-loathing that sparks Scorsese’s imagination — richly evoked in his Italian-American movies, mortifying in his Irish-American movies, and utterly confused whenever Scorsese presumes to encompass the range of American history. Gangs, presented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax the same year as Chicago, definitively proved that Scorsese is not a political artist. He’s barely an artist anymore, as the gimcrack historicism of Killers of the Flower Moon reveals. It also reveals the political naïveté that prevents filmgoers from recognizing politics when they see it.
A reader responding to my Killers of the Flower Moon review asked, “Wouldn’t it have been great if Martin Scorsese had made an explicitly political film about the NYC draft riots that addressed all of these [race, sex] issues instead of a paycheck for Diaz and DiCaprio and a one-man show for Daniel Day Lewis?” That question went to the heart of Scorsese’s careerism, though some viewers fell for the movie’s virtue-signaling hype.
Identifying Killers as Scorsese’s first political film stirred up complaints from those who believe the myth of his artistic seriousness. Excited by the film’s premise — a retelling of the murder of members of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe for their oil wealth by rapacious whites during the 1920s — fans seemed unaware of those crimes, even though Killers is not the first film version of that history. Scorsese’s mob showed a bizarre, defensive enthusiasm for the subject, as if celebrating its centennial.
Did Scorsese’s glorification of ethnic violence finally drive him to a point where he saw democide, politicide, genocide, and ethnocide as an American essence? To praise Killers and its 1619 Project–style degradation of America, fans rationalize the movie’s incoherent storytelling. Scorsese has always made political movies, they insist. But political aptitude is not the same thing as Scorsese’s proven talent and his penchant for ethnic antagonism. Scorsese fans have found the America Last movie they’ve been waiting for.
The racial subject matter of Killers satisfies the guilt stoked by social problems of the Biden administration’s own making — as when it demonizes its opponents as extremists, white supremacists, or ethnic traitors (“You ain’t black” if you don’t vote for Biden).
Killers is the first time Scorsese tailored a movie to such a craven political moment rather than exploring the politics sublimated in specific, antisocial characters. Viewers who consider Killers profound don’t seem to realize the extent to which it is progressive-Left propaganda. That puts them at the level of Scorsese, an artist who now fails to examine the complications in his head, issues that entangle his work. In 1986, following the esteem heaped on Raging Bull, venerable critic Robin Wood described Scorsese’s “Catholic Italian immigrant background, his fascination with the Hollywood tradition, and his comparatively open responsiveness to contemporary issues.” Scorsese is “a difficult figure to characterize simply,” he said, and “his future development is not easy to prophesy.”
Wood couldn’t foresee the cult-figure that Scorsese would become after his thug diptych Goodfellas and Casino. Nor could he predict the impact that Obama, George Floyd, and Robert De Niro (a radicalized muse) would have on Scorsese, but Killers is evidence of a definite social awakening or derangement. It’s more topical than it is genuine. Scorsese’s first political movie is also his first patronizing one.
Fact is, since corporate media’s betrayal of the public starting in 2016 (it’s nearly total now), we’ve been in an era when most movies are condescending rather than honest, impartial, or good. No wonder sycophants celebrate Killers; it satisfies their fashionable rejection of America’s legacy.
This is not exactly a culture-wide phenomenon; it’s too limited. In the first week of its release, Killers earned $23 million, thanks to promotional hype. The next week, grosses fell to $7 million, and this week to $2 million. Fewer and fewer moviegoers are fooled by its novelty. But there are some who insist on its political importance — they’re the most ignorant of Scorsese’s ethic, the “open responsiveness to contemporary issues” that made Scorsese’s generation of filmmakers (Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg) fascinating yet only superficially insightful about politics.
Scorsese’s politics — seen in his 1967 short The Big Shave, a.k.a. Viet 67, his tortured allegory of American self-destruction in the Vietnam War era — proved him unable to assimilate Jean-Luc Godard’s expository political influence, as Brian DePalma successfully did in Greetings and Hi, Mom! And now, past his era of youthful discontent, Scorsese parrots political dissent in Killers, yet his personal, imaginative investment is as fatuous as Barbie. (He reserves social commitment for his film-preservation projects.) His movies work best when they’re about personal culpability, not the generational guilt that is so facile in Killers, whether according to old-time campus radicalism, contemporary race-consciousness, or the irrational Trump-hatred channeled into De Niro’s embarrassingly hammy Killers portrayal.
A filmmaker who specializes in brutality (Raging Bull, Casino, Shutter Island), in the suddenness of spontaneous violence (Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver), and in the lingering remorse of manqué (Catholic) religion (Cape Fear, Bringing Out the Dead) may concentrate on ethnicity, but that doesn’t mean politics is his forte. Killers is a desperate attempt at social relevance in which an ambitious filmmaker succumbs to the progressive ideology sold by politicized Hollywood — the “democrat-socialist,” bleeding-heart confusion that contributes to contemporary brainwashing.
Amsterdam Vallon in Gangs of New York personified all Scorsese’s delusions, foreshadowing the ethnic naïveté that makes Killers of the Flower Moon, with its stick-figure victims and villains, an unmitigated failure. It’s not the movie we need right now, especially given the tribal strife being manipulated by the current administration. But it does successfully exemplify a creeping masochism that has entered the culture.