On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 04:57 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > Are they the same people who complained that the makers of "Oppenheimer" > completely ignored the Navajo, the first victims of the US atomic bomb?
I wouldn't know about that, but here is Walsh's review of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, about the murder, embezzlement, and other crimes against the Osage who were robbed of the great oil wealth discovered on their land in the 1920s. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/10/27/rlrm-o27.html Walsh has always admired Scorsese’s film artistry and says "Scorsese deserves praise for bringing (the story) to the public’s attention. Moreover, the presence of numerous Native performers, men and women one generally does not see in American films or television, is entirely welcome.” In keeping with the SEP/WSWS anathema towards identity politics, he adds that “it is not correct to argue, as some Native spokespeople have, that only a Native director should have taken on this assignment. Scorsese had every right to create the film." His major concern with the film, however, as with all of Scorsese’s works, is "blaming historical crimes like this on 'all of us' and ‘explaining' events by the rottenness of human nature (which) doesn’t illuminate anything, it only obscures. Nothing is more changeable, more flexible than human psychology...Scorsese, "has all too often let the social order off the hook in this inexcusable manner." Noting that Scorcese "once considered the priesthood as a vocation”, Walsh says he “prefers to see "violence as a part of fallen human nature, which both enthralls and disgusts him. Scorsese has a fixed, frozen view of life and human character that has not evolved or deepened in more than three decades of making films.”” This "generally misanthropic mood pervades Killers of the Flower Moon. While the Native characters are given a certain amount of dignity, the film implies that virtually every white person in Oklahoma at the time was a murderer, a thief or a racist. No doubt there were a good many of those, and the scent of oil money attracted some of the worst” but “if Oklahoma had its share of greedy cutthroats and villains, it also had more than its share of working class and small farmer radicalism,” Walsh says, referring to the mass support once enjoyed by the state's Socialist Party, the multi-racial 1917 Green Corn Rebellion, and the IWW, one of whose leaders was the martyred Frank Little, part-Cherokee and an Oklahoma native. "Unfortunately, this history is a book sealed with seven seals for Scorsese. He has never treated history or society in a serious fashion, preferring to pry individuals out of their actual, concrete social circumstances. The results for decades have been accordingly weak." -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29407): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29407 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104893002/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
