OCCULT AUTEUR: Martin Scorsese & The Unspeakable
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ & The Freemasons
“You can’t force salvation on people, Jim. It doesn’t work.” — Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate
“You expecting a miracle to make all this go away? You know they don't happen anymore.” — Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon
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From the moment I first saw the trailers for Martin Scorsese’s verrrrrrry loooooooong period crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, I was thinking “Marty’s trying to out-do Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate,” the hugely ambitious big budget bomb intended to be an elegy for America and kinda was, just not in the way Cimino intended.
The two films have a lot in common: Both are epics based on real-life events. Both feature deeply evil wealthy white men conniving mass murder (ethnic cleansing?) to take land away from the minorities and the dispossessed: Eastern European immigrants (Jews?) in Cimino’s (anti?) Western; Native Americans who strike black gold in Osage, Oklahoma, lucrative oil country, in Scorsese’s latest Oscar bait. Both boast pinpoint perfect period costuming and set direction, and include hectic sequences in bustling towns of the time, as well as majestic scenes featuring large steam locomotives. Both are three-and-a-half extremely long hours.
Most of all, however, the films are tied by their theme of White Establishment Greed presuming and asserting its superior manifest destiny to crush the little guy (literally, for one poor immigrant during Heaven’s Gate’s horrific soul-crushing extended battle climax). White Man Bad! Except in these non-fiction tales, as a white guy I must lament, White Man Bad genuinely was the case.
Also like Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, the movie’s not bad. But it’s not great either. If America’s still around in a couple decades, Killers of the Flower Moon will surely be placed in the lower echelons of Scorsese’s impressive oeuvre, probably bottom five (Shutter Island! Last Temptation of Christ? Kundun? Color of Money?), which is also to say five movies that are still better than 99% of all Hollywood product (except maybe Shutter Island).
Killers of the Flower Moon is mostly misfocused and miscast, though the acting is so good you probably won’t notice. It’s just all the subtext that doesn’t work. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a brave anti-Movie Star performance as the local crime overlord’s nephew flunky, an increasingly irritating dummy who is overweight, got bad teeth and greasy hair, and ultimately devolves into the worst husband and father imaginable.
But the fact remains that no matter how hard he tries, DiCaprio is still a Movie Star as much as he is a serious actor, and that blessing/curse comes with baggage. I appreciated his performance, but didn’t much enjoy it — it’s such a slog when your primary protagonist is the spineless scum of the earth yet you still can’t fully hate him because he’s Leonardo fucking DiCaprio, which creates escalating cognitive dissonance the longer the movie goes on (and on and on) before I pretty much checked out at around the 150-minute mark when he starts slow-poisoning his devoted wife — and weak box office suggests many of his fans didn’t enjoy it either.
Robert De Niro is likewise a transcendently good actor, and his role works better as long as you don’t know the true history, because he’s soooo much older than the age of the actual man he portrays, William King Hale, who was three decades younger than De Niro during the period when the film takes place. The age discrepancy brings an entirely different vibe from an elderly entrenched patriarch who’s been around forever compared to a 40-something viper in his prime. That’s not to say De Niro isn’t diabolical and magnetic in his devilish two-faced charm and betrayals of the Osage People; he is, and his performance is better suited to the film than Leo’s. But it still feels a bit like stunt casting, Marty going back to the well. A younger and more physically vibrant man would have likely allowed us to lose ourself in the character and not see, well, Robert fucking De Niro.
Lily Gladstone, who plays DiCaprio’s tragic Native American wife, is far better suited and self-contained in her role, yet she is still not exactly the actress the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate criminal clown media tells us she is — yes, Ms. Gladstone proudly claims Native American heritage and was raised on the Blackfeet Nation reservation…but she is also connected by bloodline to four-term(!) British Prime Minister William Gladstone and carries his name, so take that as you will. Her performance is also quite good, far more subtle than DiCaprio or de Niro’s, and she’ll probably get the Oscar because I’m not sure there’s ever been a more politically correct choice exoteric-ally and she’s got the British bloodline elitism esoterically.
Speaking of esoterically…There’s been passing mention in mainstream media to the film’s sequences relating to Freemasonry, the “society with secrets, not a secret society,” but never going too deep. Corporate news coverage has superficially mentioned that both Leo & De Niro’s characters are Freemasons but not much more than that.
If you’re paying attention, however, you’ll note the town building that is the town’s Masonic Lodge in Killers of the Flower Moon also houses the coroners and a key local attorney. While we are not directly told these men are Freemasons, it's easy to discern subtext that they are. They help cover up every Native American murder. They downplay any talk of conspiracy. At first they help convince broader law enforcement it doesn’t need to investigate, then when the Feds finally roll in they stonewall the investigation.
We also see a humiliating ritual punishment in the Freemasons’ checkerboard temple. Town people who don't trust the Freemasons twice call them "Jews." Or is it “Gews”?
I say “Gews,” because — not rule of three so take this with a more dubious eye than usual — twice in the past four decades or so of my life, I had someone who seemed/claimed to know a lot about Freemasonry say that at one stage of your ascension through the degrees of Freemasonry, you are told that the “G” at the center of much Masonic symbolism stands for “Gew,” pronounced “Jew” (at various other degrees, Freemasons are told the “G” stands for “God” and later “Gnosis”).
Is there any truth to that dual claim? I’m not a Freemason so I dunno, but I do feel it’s worth mentioning because nobody else has, and twice in Scorsese’s film somebody derogatorily refers to the Freemasons as “Jews.” Unless it’s “Gews.”
It was also interesting timing last week to read the first-ever statement from the current Pope condemning Freemasonry for Catholics, saying it “is forbidden because of the irreconcilability between Catholic doctrine and Freemasonry.” The Vatican and the Freemasons are long-time enemies, perhaps stretching all the way back to the society’s ties to the Knights Templar, and perhaps also because the Vatican knows the god of Freemasonry is Lucifer. Allegedly. Not that I’ve got any clue who-all they’re worshiping in the Vatican nowadays. Maybe they just don’t like the competition.
Still, Martin Scorsese’s a Catholic boy. Conflicted one, perhaps, but Catholic all the same. He recently pledged to the Pope that he’s going to strive to make a third Jesus Christ movie, after Last Temptation of Christ and Silence. In the meantime, Killers of the Flower Moon makes the Freemasons look awful. No one would want to join the Freemasons after seeing that movie. Perhaps that’s what earned Marty an audience with Papa Frank.
But while we’re deconstructing, I would be remiss to not dig deeper on the subtextual conspiracy theorizing, because Leo’s Freemason character is killing his Native American wife slowly under orders from the town's top Freemason, the most powerful man in 100 miles, played by De Niro. How’s Leo’s character doing it? By regularly injecting her with bad vaxx, adding poison to his wife’s insulin shots. His adoring spouse trusts him completely, yet he's killing her softly via bad vaxx. Sound familiar? A silent weapon in a quiet war, one might say.
One might also say that the bad vaxx thing is just a coincidence. I won’t claim to know if Martin Scorsese is trying to make a sly but otherwise unspeakable statement about contemporary American society’s naive and overly trusting submission to a fiendish flawed-vaccination scheme to slow-kill the country. Or the even more unspeakable proposition that the Freemasons are behind it.
I’m not saying he is, never, never, or that they are, never, never, never. But if Marty’s an Occult Auteur working on behalf of the Catholic Church…then he probably is saying it. That still doesn’t mean that the Freemasons are, of course, trying to cull the human herd. Everybody in this Culture War that’s Civil War 2.0 but actually WW3 yet above all else a Spiritual War has got an angle, and they’re all going to be deflecting towards other secret society scapegoats as more and more people die. You’ve seen how Pfizer execs got a different jab than everybody else, right? Trust no one! (Not even me!)
