Killers of the Osage, Barbuda, & Belize: Will Caribbean People See De Niro and DiCaprio Play Themselves in Scorsese’s Latest Film?
Yuh talking to me? Yes, we are talking to Barbuda, Belize, and the Caribbean. Everyday people in the Greater Caribbean and their land defenders should demand that the Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon be shown widely and free of cost across the region. The sweeping epic film tells the story of the so-called “Osage Murders” in which settler financiers conspired against, and killed, Osage persons to claim lucrative headrights and oil licenses in early 20th Century Oklahoma. Adapted from David Grann’s popular nonfiction text, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the film has been applauded for its authenticity and earnest partnerships with the contemporary Osage Nation elders, actors, and language instructors.
But what is the importance of being earnest if servile life will be sustained as love under new management? What do critiques of privilege and regret for past crimes really mean if hierarchy and domination are not abolished but continue to be pursued? Do inclusion and overcoming disparities in the relations of state and capital bring an end to brutality and toil?
Robert De Niro, who plays the principal antagonist and crime boss William “King” Hale, may have finally found a fitting role to crown the end of his most distinguished acting career. His star has graced masterpieces of cinema including Taxi Driver, Godfather II, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and A Bronx Tale. Now, in his tenth collaboration with director Martin Scorsese, he finally has distinguished himself as an elder actor. Few will recognize that in Killers of the Flower Moon De Niro is playing himself. Astonishingly, so too does Leonardo DiCaprio.
However, those who intimately pay attention to the empire of capital and its relationship to the Caribbean will find his performance disturbingly familiar in another fashion. What might it mean that Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, the famed progressive actors, actually play themselves as closeted criminals and imperialists?
In recent years De Niro has been more concerned about banking as many films as he could, without particular concern for the quality of the finished product. Before and after the turn of the millennium, he supplemented his acting résumé with his ambitions for a real estate empire, weaponizing the arts to elevate the property values of certain districts in New York City.
Heading South
Due south, De Niro expanded his land speculation to another island of Barbuda. Unlike the densely populated island of Manhattan that packs more than 1.5 million residents into less than 25 square miles, Barbuda is a former British plantation colony leased to the Codrington slaveholding family that boasts a population of less than two thousand in an area nearly three times the size of its metropolitan counterpart. Since emancipation in 1834, land in Barbuda has been held in common by its community of smallholders, cultivators, and fisherfolk.
Barbuda, the smaller of the two major islands in the archipelagic nation-state of Antigua and Barbuda, was devastated by the Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017. After evacuating Barbuda’s residents to Antigua, Prime Minister Gaston Browne and his cronies in St. John’s seized the opportunity to uproot the communal land tenure system in Barbuda by repealing the terms of the 2007 Barbuda Land Act that declares all land to be “owned in common by the people of Barbuda.” Antiguan government officials prevented the resettlement of Barbudans on their rightful lands and began to aggressively pursue the development of an international airport to facilitate unsanctioned tourist development of Barbuda’s picturesque beaches.
The principal beneficiaries of this land grab include the American billionaires Steve Anderson and Jean-Paul DeJoria’s “Peace, Love, and Happiness” resort development and the Nobu Barbuda restaurant financed by none other than De Niro himself. With an assist from Browne, De Niro’s plans for Barbuda include an expanded Nobu Beach Inn complex replete with resort and spa facilities and private residences for wealthy investors.
De Niro is among the global capitalists who have collaborated with the Government of Antigua to terrorize and degrade the Barbudan people and their environment. Browne, in partnership with foreign capital, has authorized the construction of a golf course, airport, and luxury hotels and properties without the consent of the Barbudan people who overwhelmingly reside in Codrington. In doing so, he makes Barbuda more vulnerable to future hurricanes where the destruction of the environment undermines resistance to natural disasters. Since Hurricane Irma, Barbudan activists such as John Mussington, Jacklyn Frank, and Devon Warner have stood at the forefront of the fight to rebuild their island’s sovereignty and infrastructure. From the larger island of Antigua, Browne cuts his eye toward Barbuda as an economically unviable, child-like trustee in need of dispossession and development. This is exactly, how Oklahoma’s legal and economic system saw the Osage in the historical era this film is depicting. Has Browne learned something about the relationship between land grabbing and peculiar marital relations and calls this development?
The Empire State of Mind and Welfare State of Mind
When actors depict evil characters, they are understood to be transferring aspects of human experience, into a dramatic performance so the audience might be entertained or learn from it. De Niro’s character, “King” Hale, is a leader of a white racist gang clearly distinct from the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. Hale’s instead bears peculiar progressive and multicultural attributes. Many in his circle intermarry into the Osage community, learn their language, and attend their ritual gatherings. Hale has a paternalistic relationship to the Osage, and apparently is concerned about their welfare, health, development, and culture. But he is also interested in how to manipulate the Osage out of their land that is oil-rich. The imperialist mind and welfare state of mind are not in conflict.
Can white racists like Hale be progressive and support multiculturalism? At its best, the film confirms this. The Osage are depicted with the contradictions of a colonized people. The Osage desire to enjoy the fruitful spoils of their abundant oil reserves as the wealthiest per capita community of their day. But the lesson, as in the case of the Tulsa Race Riot and “Black Wall Street,” is not the tragedy of wealth lost by Black or Native capitalists. It is that the promise of property, mineral wealth, and personal accumulation continue to circulate as an avenue for freedoms denied to Black and Indigenous peoples alike. It is a circulated story where grassroots resistance is sanitized, visions of arranging society differently are discarded, and Black and Red Power is defined narrowly to serve the interests of professional and propertied people of color who collaborate with Empire.
From Barbuda to Belize to Oklahoma: Expressing Great Feelings of Love
All Hollywood versions of history organize great political conflicts around interpersonal relationships and tragic love stories. The film is organized around the real historical relationship of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone).
DiCaprio’s filmography is a veritable catalog of mainstream social justice oriented historical dramas and satires, including Blood Diamond, Django Unchained, Wolf of Wall Street, Gangs of New York, and Don’t Look Up. At the same time that he condemned climate change in his public statements and filmic performances, however, DiCaprio purchased Blackadore Caye, a luxury island that is part of Belize. Belize (formerly British Honduras), geographically part of Central America, is historically part of the Caribbean as a result of its colonial past, cultural commonalities, and political ties.
DiCaprio’s economic plans for Blackadore Caye include eco-tourism, protection of endangered species, and a renewable energy grid to power the entire resort. As one of the fraudulent Hollywood activists for empire, he speaks about human rights and ecological sustainability in United Nations forums. He turned up at COP26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow. DiCaprio makes a big show, not in this film, but in real life of wishing to elevate the voices of Indigenous people.
His advertised vision for Belize is a millionaire’s guilt free, carbon neutral paradise. But whose labor will be policed, and whose lives will be degraded, as other species besides the human will apparently be preserved so snorkelers and wealthy vacationers can delight? Ecological minded Barbudans will relate to critics of this project in Belize. How can DiCaprio’s endeavor be ecologically sustainable if guests fly there in commercial airplanes and private jets? Ecological defense without class struggle amounts to tending the Empire’s garden.
A movement, Defend Blackadore Caye, joins Barbudan land defenders to find environmental law openly manipulated and discarded by state and capital, despite progressive claims by developers associated with DiCaprio. Overwater structures like piers and docks continue to be built in effect privatizing waters threatening fishers and flora. Ecological minded Barbudans will relate to critics of this project in Belize. Nearly two thousand people have petitioned against DiCaprio’s development project.
DiCaprio, as progressive imperialist with his elder mentor De Niro, reveals the other side of the real life role he has been playing, in this movie about the Osage Nation of Oklahoma.
Learning to Steal Big
Ernest (played by DiCaprio) is not so bright. He is cautioned by Hale against getting involved in petty crime. If one is to steal, Hale insists one should steal big.
And yet Ernest, a veteran of World War I, appears to fall in love with Mollie while conspiring in small and increasingly larger crimes against her family. He begins as her chauffer, as many of the Osage own luxury automobiles. Later he assumes the role of a masked mugger to steal jewelry and petty cash. But also in conspiracies to kill her two sisters and her first husband in a plot to secure familiar headrights. Hale not only plots a pattern of intermarriage as subterfuge between the Osage and his gang, but also takes out insurance policies against those he supposedly cares for before having them killed.
The marriage of Ernest and Mollie is tragic both because they appear — via Scorsese — to genuinely love each other (initially, at least) before Ernest conspires, in the name of caring for Mollie’s diabetic condition, to poison her to the brink of death. This is part of Hale’s plot, presenting himself as a guardian of health and development, while he kills off Mollie’s family to grab their wealth and lands for himself.
In Killers, the director’s intent is made clear at the conclusion of the film, when Scorsese delivers a monologue that implicates the entertainment industry for transforming genocidal trauma of settler colonialism into sources of intrigue and delight. Yet this breaking of the fourth wall does little to meditate on the projects of dispossession that persist in the present. Whether a big Hollywood production, or a non-profit foundation funded documentary, those in the business of film making rarely hit the nail on the head of contemporary implications for struggle.
The final frames gesture toward a hopeful resolution in which footage of a contemporary Osage I’n-Lon-Schka ceremony suggests that Indigenous people can and will endure. Yet, this suggests that Scorsese, De Niro, and DiCaprio have overcome their indulgence of settler spectacle toward a project of liberal reconciliation with the peoples it has long mocked, maligned, and misrepresented.
Indeed, the film tellingly depicts a nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation as the savior of the Osage Nation against the criminal underworld of Hale and his oil baron compatriots. Certainly, if the origins of the modern FBI can be traced to the Osage Murders case, this is not a cause for celebration but an omen of the monstrous institution that would suppress dissent in the name of state and capital for a century to come.
In Killers a meeting is organized to discuss the Osage plight. They are aware of a series of murders and string of peculiar illnesses. As Osage leaders commiserate, they are clear that they cannot trust the city or state government. At the same time, they maintain a relationship with the US Federal Government under the Bureau of Indian Affairs. De Niro’s character Hale and his progressives imperialists who are for health and development are in the meeting with Osage community leaders — the camera work makes this a shock of recognition, for it appears to be an anti-colonial even nationalist meeting. Hale offers money leading to the arrest of those attacking the community; while his gang puts hits out on some hired to investigate.
The Osage National leaders in the meeting suggest their own capacity for armed self-defense or autonomy since their previous coerced migrations to Oklahoma have declined. But also it is clear in this meeting that despite having certain social, ecological, and cultural traditions, their ideas about the law, politics, and economics overlap with their oppressors. This is what makes them vulnerable.
This film is in no way meant to be an objective documentary or rooted oral history of the Osage Nation, the different cultures and classes within, their vision of governing themselves, or their relation to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Killers more humbly chronicles a series of murders of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the same time period as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 that massacred African Americans. Close observers will recognize a kindred spirit in the plight of both. But will they overcome an uncritical disposition to their propertied ambitions as embodying oppressed communities as a whole? This postscript, the one the Osage truly deserve, never graces the screen. The bloody hands of the killers are wiped clean again by short prison sentences and melodrama of a great epic.
Cinematic Foundations for Their Own Demise?
As with all corporate mass-oriented cultural productions, it matters whether the multitudes of ordinary people decide the film has profound meaning for themselves. What would the people of Barbuda, Belize, and the Caribbean make of Killers of the Flower Moon as they resist the predatory land grabs and development of the film’s magisterial actors?
We know that on Barbuda and Blackadore Caye (in Belize) armed police and security are restricting the movement of ordinary Caribbean people on what were once communally held lands. This means whether the land defender and ecological movements in the Caribbean have open criticism of the state and capital, like in the film about the Osage hits are being placed on their lives.
Even if it remains absent from the film itself, this telling contemporary omission that capitalists like De Niro and Di Caprio are responsible, can be the basis for unprecedented solidarities from Barbuda to Belize, and across Barbuda to Osage, Bonaire and Standing Rock, Union Island and Nunavut, Belize and Immokalee.
Maybe De Niro and DiCaprio have laid the cinematic foundation of their own demise and the foundation of an international solidarity movement in defense of Barbuda, Belize, and all capitalist enclosures of commons. Perhaps the people of the Caribbean will find an unanticipated use for this film.
This requires that we understand more than cinema as a politically conflicted medium. Finally we cannot be mere film critics but insurgent organizers who expect that when we share laws with aristocrats and progressives who pursue property they will not finally protect us.
Consulting with the post-colonial state and imperialists on development (they prefer to ignore us when they can) may not be enough though it promises us health, ecology, and respect for our cultures as we are placed in strategy meetings with our aspiring killers. We know they lie but Caribbean people, especially the formally educated, like to dialogue with and have exchanges in meetings with the imperialists anyway.
Surely, from Osage to the Caribbean, the toilers, unemployed, barefoot, market women, peasant farmers, and fishers who don’t own their own boats, can organize their own strategy meetings without predatory capital and the state present. Many useful direct actions can be carried out discarding dialogue with the aspiring “kings” of the world — like “King” Hale — whether whites or people of color talking “crown lands” from Barbuda to Belize.
Whether we agree that Killers of the Flower Moon provide a sincere critique of settler violence on the Oklahoma prairies or not, it masks the land grabs and capitalist ambitions of its principal actors (from Barbuda to Belize) under the guise of progressivism and ecological benevolence. This means nothing if they don’t have people of color as partners for plunder and our movements to defend the land and ecology do not have impending confrontations with those who look like us. The Scorsese film doesn’t depict a clash among the Osage. Whether this is the truth of real Osage history or not, it must become the truth of the post-colonial Caribbean history we create.
