“Killers” and the Rehabilitation of Government

This year, there’s a fair chance that the USA will fall into the oubliette of “great” democracies that eventually failed. We might follow the ancient Greek city-states, ancient Rome, and the once-great British Empire. If that happens, Hollywood will bear a hefty but as-yet-unrecognized share of blame.

Its mavens of course will disclaim blame vociferously. They will say that their “art” only “tells stories” of human nature as it is.

But the award-winning movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” tells a different story. It’s one of very few movies in the last two generations that shows government in a favorable light. It protrays J. Edgar Hoover’s government crime-fighting agents, or “G-men,” as vindicators of the right and good. (Spoiler Alert: if you haven’t seen the movie and want to, do that first; reading this post first may spoil it for you.)

I first noticed Hollywood’s malign influence over eight years ago, when I saw that year’s stunning award-winning movie, “The Martian.” It told the story of an American astronaut stranded on Mars. The whole world, including China, cooperated to bring him home. Not only was the movie a good cliff-hanger. For Hollywood, it also got the science and technology mostly right.

But what motivated me to write a whole blog post about “The Martian” wasn’t its quality as entertainment or its relative scientific accuracy. It was the first movie I had seen in a long time in which “government” did anything right. It was the first movie in my then-recent memory to highlight the evolutionary advantages that have given our species total dominance over our small blue planet: empathy, cooperation, and that vague, abstract thing called “morality.” (We wouldn’t have gotten very far in our evolutionary competition if, like hamsters, we ate our young.)

For two generations before “The Martian,” the heroes and plots of big-budget, “blockbuster” movies had been dismally predictable. The villains were politicians, government soldiers or government agents. The hero or heroes were all private actors, devoid of legal authority.

Entirely gratuitously, the heroes took on the evil government actors, eventually besting them, often killing them in gruesome ways. The male heroes were slightly better-educated and better-spoken versions of “Rambo.” The females were attractive and svelte, submerging their sexuality and nurturing instincts in a dystopian display of egalitarian but mindless violence.

Let’s leave aside for a moment whether this mindless screen violence was and is a virtual reprise of a key symptom of the onset of ancient Rome’s decay: the real violence of gladiatorial fights to the death, “mock” battles with real blood and gore, and throwing early Christians to the lions. In today’s over-the-top screeen violence, the heroes’ only perceptible motivation was often pure ego—a form of selfishness—and the drive to survive. Here Bruce Willis’ series of “Die Hard” movies was paradigmatic, although sometimes he had a veneer of legal authority as a rogue cop.

This dramatic paradigm became so common that many plot outlines of blockbuster movies practically wrote themselves. It didn’t matter whether the presumed “subject” was white-collar crime, politics, environmental pollution, or space aliens. Self-willed and supremely violent rogue cops or private actors always prevailed over government villains of some kind. Even the famed (and vastly successful!) Star Wars series featured an Evil (government) Empire, personified by a cartoon-villain Emperor, eventually bested (with supreme planet-killing violence!) by a ragtag force of rebels and a “traitor” within the Empire.

That Star Wars series debuted almost half a century ago. Do you think maybe a half-century drumbeat of “macho private rogue beats evil government actor” helped our people accept the current Republican myth that government is an evil, bumbling, predatory force, that regulation of private business is always excessive, and that all good comes from private business and low taxes?

Some time ago, a deranged right-wing geezer screamed,“Get your government hands off my Medicare!” Surely Reagan’s insistence that government “is the problem” contributed to his derangement, as did Fox’ incessant anti-government propaganda. But could decades of movies portraying an evil government thwarted by rogue heroes’ private acts of courage and over-the-top violence also have contributed?

Perhaps I have an unusual perspective. I’m the son of a Hollywood screenwriter, Jay Dratler, who died early of a heart attack in 1968. So I grew up watching “old” movies from the forties, some of which my father wrote.

The Hollywood zeitgeist of that era was as different from the last half-century’s as day from night. Most of Hollywood, and the major studios, were then run and staffed by Jewish refugees from Nazism and fascism in Europe. Their love of this country—and their relief at its sparing them from the Holocaust!—were palpable. That love and veneration appeared in almost every movie of the time.

Perhaps the best examples came from the series of George M. Cohan/James Cagney movies celebrating our nation and its victory in World War II, epitomized by the hit tune “I’m a Yankee-Doodle Dandy.” (Even today, it’s worth a listen, if only to contrast its upbeat, patriotic tone with the dismal zeitgeist of our own time.)

But I digress. The moral message of “Killers of the Flower Moon” differed from that of “The Martian” in a key way. In “The Martian,” the “evil” against which a cooperative mankind struggled was an accident: a freak sandstorm on Mars that kept the hapless hero from getting home. In “Killers” the evil lay in the hearts of men, specifically two well-developed anti-heroes. Leonardo DiCaprio played the weak-as-dishwater main character, who does incredible evil, even to the wife he loves, simply because his uncle tells him to. The evil uncle, played by Robert De Niro, hatches fatal plot after fatal plot from a seemingly inexhaustible store of evil.

The movie’s substance need not detain us long. Apparently it reflected real historical events in Oklahoma from the 1920s and 1930s. Having been driven by white man’s “Manifest Destiny” from several other states, the remnants of the Osage Tribe of Native Americans had settled in a dismally barren part of Oklahoma. Oil fortuitously discovered on its Reservation made the seemingly small tribe rich. Then poor, mean white men flocked to the Reservation, some for work, some to marry into the Tribe’s riches, and some, by marriage and murder, to take possession of the easy money that oil brought.

That apparently historical reality is the basis for the movie. Its two main characters contrive to murder, or to have murdered, over thirty Osage Tribe members, male and female, by methods including poisoning, shooting from the back, and dynamiting a whole house with a target married couple inside. The Osage wife of the weak nephew, Molly, goes to Washington to beg help from President Cleveland, and J. Edgar’s G-men arrive. Eventually, the perpetrators end up in prison, where they belong, and Molly moves on from the nephew to a less weakly predatory husband. The movie’s finale is a reprise of a mid-twentieth century radio show on the story, which apparently is also actual history.

The heart of the movie’s moral “message” is the supreme evil that De Niro brilliantly portrays. His character has a single, solitary goal: to end up the last human standing at the head of a big “allotment” of “Indian” oil land. His method of achieving his goal is simple. He aims to kill anyone and everyone, especially “Indians,” who stands in his way of reaching his goal through family connections and the laws of inheritance.

What makes the De Niro character interesting is that he’s also a benefactor of the Osage, the sheriff of his small town, a highly influential “elder statesman” and (albeit duplicitously) a “friend” of everyone around. When his nephew announces that his Osage wife Molly is pregnant, a small cloud passes over the uncle’s face; then he announces piously “Blessings on this house!” You can almost see him thinking, “Another rival heir to kill off.”

This character is about as pure evil as you ever see in movies today. Yet he somehow has achieved the pinnacle of success, power, influence, and fame (albeit not yet secure wealth) in his small Oklahoma town. Whenever his plotting harms his fellow townspeople, he smiles, snake-like, and commiserates with them about the arbitrariness and pain of “God’s will.”

By sheer coincidence, mere days before seeing this movie online I had read Robert Draper’s brilliant exposé of Mark Meadows. Meadows was Donald J. Trump’s Chief of Staff. Now he’s a suspect and possible witness in the federal insurrection trial. As Draper portrays him, Meadows could be the evil uncle in “Killers” come to life. From hard-scrabble, dirt-poor beginnings in a small, rural Southern town, Meadows rose to become the former president’s right-hand man.

As Draper’s reporting portrays him, Meadows rose to wealth, influence and fame by (apart from murder) much the same means as the evil uncle in “Killers.” He practiced being many faced until it became a high art. He reportedly told everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. He seems to have had the spine of a jellyfish, with no discernible character, principles, or morality. His personality could have been an AI programmed for temporary, situational advantage, in every situation from informal conversations to the Situation Room in a hypothetical nuclear attack.

In other words, Meadows as reported is the perfect match for Donald J. Trump as President. Whether he will testify for or against Trump is anyone’s guess. Only one thing is certain: he will do what he thinks is best for Mark Meadows, no more, no less.

So “Killers” is an important movie, if only because it gives us deep insight into what we are dealing with in this agonizing political time. Its direction is much too slow, suggesting that Matin Scorsese, who made his reputation by romanticizing flagrant, gruesome violence, often in slow-motion, is slowing down with age. But its message is absolutely right—and vitally necessary—for our times.

Eventually, the movie’s G-men solve the many Osage murders and send De Niro’s avuncular wolf and his rotten, cowardly nephew off to prison. But the movie’s portrayal of them is strangely anodyne. They are professional and polite, but firm. There is no hint of triumph in their eventual “victory” over the evil pair and their minor genocide. They are just doing their jobs, punishing law breakers so that order and justice can prevail. You can almost feel a sense of sadness in the director and producer that the plot gets resolved, and evil is vanquished, without the spectacular, gruesome violence that has become Martin Scorsese’s trademark.

What the movie doesn’t show is how its innocent, anodyne portrayal of the G-men marks the end of an era and recalls an earlier, more innocent one.

J. Edgar Hoover got his start, and began his climb to fame and power, by applying good organization, scientific methods, and better weaponry to battling crime. Apart from spectacular minor gangsters like rural bank robber John Dillinger, Hoover fought the American Mafia and other organized gangs that arose in the aftermath of our First Gilded Age, Prohibition and its failure, and the lawlessness of the interwar era.

Back then, Hoover was a “good guy.” He did what he had to do keep America’s cities and small towns safe, tranquil and honest. As Hoover performed that near-mythical task, he and his “G-men” became public heroes. The FBI that he invented and developed became a global paradigm for professional, efficient, effective and relatively restrained crime-fighting.

Then he went beyond crime and started messing in politics. He tried to root out and destroy the Communist Party in America. He ultimately spied on and oppressed leaders as great as MLK, on mere suspicion of having “Communist” leanings. He was suspected of keeping secret dossiers on the love lives and foibles of major politicians, including presidents. And he became one of the most sinister forces opposing our nascent civil-rights movement.

Perhaps for this reason, even some left-wingers began to buy into the great myth of “government as evil.” As a physics grad student in the late 1960s, I often ended political discussions on the telephone, opposing our tragic Vietnam War, with the phrase “F— you, J. Edgar!” Partly from youthful paranoia, and partly from strange crackles on the line, I imagined that Hoover’s minions were listening in on my private antiwar telephone conversations.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how anti-government paranoia, whether coming from the right or the left, serves the interests of the oligarchs and billionaires. After all, government is the only institution with the reach and power to curtail their selfish caprice and unbridled lust for money and power. And government is supposed to be the only institution in which every citizen has a say. The less government, the more “freedom” the wealthy and powerful have to oppress us all privately, and the less power we all have to insure that law prevails.

The “gospel” of government-as-evil is what Ronald Reagan first preached in earnest. Today, two generations later, we can see its fruits. Airplanes, or at least their doors, are falling out of the sky. Phthalates, PFASs, BPAs and other ubiquitous plasticizers are poisoning us, disrupting our endocrine systems, and appearing in our rivers, seas, food, drinking water and bloodstreams.  Pollution-sparked planetary heating is running amok and could become self-sustaining. Private media control what we hear, see and think, vastly outdoing the long-dead governmental propaganda organs of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. And big-tech’s private versions of artificial intelligence are busy creating convincing, artificial material to make that propaganda indistinguishable from fact.

So the former “arsenal of democracy,” which once helped protect “Mother Russia” against the most brutal invasion in human history, is now standing idly by while Soviet Russia’s own nuclear-armed and lawless descendant pillages a democratic neighbor. Why do we stand by? Because our Republican “leaders” are concerned, like the evil uncle in “Killers,” only with their own personal advancement in the world. In this way, “Killers” is a brilliant metaphor for the banal forces of personal evil that threaten to push us down the path of ancient Rome.

If “Killers” can teach us that self-love on the part of the powerful is the road to perdition, that principled government can help us, and that having a well-funded, professional, science-based force fighting crime and collecting lawful taxes is a good thing, we might just muddle through this dismal era. We just might begin to see how, in every sector of society—our government, our military, our police, our politics, our business, our medicine, and even now our sports (the Super Bowl in Las Vegas!)—love of self, money and fame is replacing love of country, principle, fairness, equality, good science, a “fair shake” for labor, and even common sense.

Today we are terribly short of institutions to teach us human morality: the evolutionary advantages of empathy, compassion, cooperation and love of others, and the gentle restraint of shame. Organized religion, which once served that function, is now hopelessly corrupt, complicit in an apocalyptic battle of tribes, and therefore on the ropes. Perhaps politics and even government can help us, if not to love each other as Scripture recommends, at least to realize a modicum of cooperation, goodness and truth. Perhaps it can help the Western Enlightenment survive this season of gloomy promotion of the self above all.

“Killers” conveys that message, if only subliminally. It shows how bad things can get when love of self prevails over all else. And it shows how bland government—as boring, anodyne, and lacking in flair as it may seem—might help at least eliminate the worst self-loving evildoers. It’s a lesson we must learn quickly, lest we follow the list of fallen democracies down the garbage chute of history.


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