Write like no one’s reading, Killers of the Flower Moon
There’s a piece of writing advice that is repeated with all the certainty of cliche, “write for yourself” or “write like no one’s reading.” The recently published Deliver Me From Nowhere brings it to mind — it’s an extended discussion of the recording of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
Springsteen recorded Nebraska alone, on an old four-track personal tape recorder, with an acoustic guitar and harmonica, capturing a raw and stripped-down sound in the bedroom of his house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Abandoning the optimistic, high-energy rock style embodied by his work with the E Street Band to date: this time, it was just Springsteen, his acoustic guitar, harmonica and an old four-track recorder. This stark aesthetic matched the grim stories and desolate landscapes that he took as his subjects.
The story goes that he returned to the studio with the E Street Band, intending to remould the songs into a full-band production — something that someone would want to listen to — but he found that the raw, unfiltered essence he captured in those initial sessions remained unrivalled. Recognising the poetic honesty and power in his stripped-down version, he decided to release Nebraska as it was — a testament to the potency of simplified musical expression. Write — he seemed to be saying — like no one’s reading.
Of course, “write like no one’s reading” is a myth. We don’t really ever write for ourselves. Writing — putting words down on paper — itself always presupposes the existence of another. And not just another, but one that is inevitably out of reach, or at least much be reached across a gap, using some technical machinery to do so. Even in our most private writing — for example, when we write our diary — we are presupposing the nature of a reader, even if it is only ourselves in the future. As you press record on your four-track personal tape deck, you’re saying to yourself — this is something that someday will be listened to — otherwise, why press record at all?
Nevertheless, it’s a good gesture to make when we’re writing — to wean ourselves off our audience — even though we know, deep down, that it will most ultimately be an empty one.
Sometimes, however, we could bear to write a little more for our audience. A couple of weekends ago, I saw Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour-long Killers of the Flower Moon — foolishly deciding on an 8.30 pm showing, not thinking what that would mean for my bedtime.
Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it tells the fascinating story of the discovery of oil on Osage Nation land, leading to an inversion of the normal racial dynamics in early twentieth-century America — with the Osage people suddenly finding themselves wealthy. What follows is a horrific string of murders, as the white community reasserts itself, marrying and killing off the Osage for their property rights.
The film was long and with very little right to be, there was nothing here that could not have fit into a normal feature running time but for a good deal of repetition and narrative flabbiness. As well as (and likely because of) the inordinate length, what was an incredible real-life story, full of twists and turns, strangely lacked tension.
The central problem for me was the choice of perspective, which was strange to the level of perversity. This is a story of colonial violence — there’s no doubt that this is how it was being framed by the people who made it — and yet they made the frankly astounding decision to tell it from the point of view of white supremacism.
Leo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro play a nephew and uncle who, marrying their way into a group of Osage Nation women, slowly conspire to bump them off. Focussing far too much on the conspiracy (which, in actuality, is frightfully boring), it missed the opportunity to tell the story from the point of view of the First Nation women who were the victims, direct movers of the story, and seemed far more fascinating characters to boot.
Lily Gladstone, who was very good indeed as Mollie Burkhart, the Osage woman at the centre of the plot, nevertheless was left out on a limb, and found herself, as the events of the film went on, playing a cypher. It wasn’t entirely apparent why Mollie trusted her husband, who was portrayed — to DiCaprio’s credit, because which movie star wants to play this guy — as not only incredibly stupid but a complete moral vacuum.
It’s a problem when your central character doesn’t have an ethics, a philosophy of action (good or bad) because that is what draws the audience to them. After three and a half hours of following him, I left the cinema tired, grumpy, and with no idea why this character, of all the others, should bear this story.