Regarding the Pain of Others, Bearing Witness, and “Killers of the Flower Moon”

How Susan Sontag and a 9-hour documentary help explain Scorsese's masterpiece

When I was younger, I’d often cry at movies. (I think my subconscious welcomed the opportunity to be sad, in public, ostensibly without anyone’s noticing). But for most of my adult life, I’ve gotten weepy more often than I’ve wept. Recently, though, I saw Killers of the Flower Moon, which was noteworthy for two reasons. First, the final image of the film caused me to cry; second, and more important, I was crying, for the first time I can remember, out of joy.

To adequately explain why, however, I need to first discuss the central problem that deeply compromises almost every other piece of popular art I have ever seen, before Killers of the Flower Moon, that attempted to tell a morally and philosophically serious story about genocide, one that would not turn the real-life people on whom it is based into mere fodder for an entertainment industrial complex. That central problem has a name: “regarding the pain of others.”

Regarding the Pain of Others is an incisive, passionate essay-length book that Susan Sontag published in 2004, just before she died. The “problem,” in short, is what occurs when, to combine Sontag quotes, news “has been converted into entertainment” to such a degree that “consumers” of “spectacles” allow themselves a “kind of innocence . . . superficiality . . . ignorance, or amnesia” about the reality of other people’s suffering.

Morality and Aesthetics

Once this happens — and in any wealthy society, it is always happening — merely showing or recreating atrocities, no matter how “real” the depiction is, becomes, well, literally problematic. Turning a real-life person’s unfathomable pain into pure entertainment, not understanding or empathy or concern but entertainment, is simply wrong, full stop. Unlike most cases in art, in other words, there is a wrong way to do this — and the error is not aesthetic but moral.

Think of it this way. There is a line that separates two kinds of people who are, inevitably, both involved in something as big, expensive, ambitious, and complicated as making a film or TV series or album or videogame. On one side of the line are those who see the immense power of popular art and feel a sincere, intense desire to use this power — their power — to tell stories that, they hope, will make human beings at least a little less inclined to commit unforgivable acts against one another.

On the other side of the line, though, are the people for whom producing culture, creating popular entertainment — even the kind that aspires to be popular art — is an industrial activity from which they gain financial and/or social and/or narcissistic benefit. They may prefer to tell stories that increase the chances that humanity will resist its seemingly natural inclination to divide itself into endless Us/Them dichotomies — which always obscure the shared humanity that is, at heart, the real truth. But what they want, or perhaps what they need, is for the piece of entertainment of which they’re a part to be an economic and/or social success.

Making all of this even more fraught and mind-fucking is that, sometimes, people move from one side of that line to another; sometimes, people straddle that line for so long that by the time they choose, everyone is locked-in, including those who would now very much like out; sometimes, people themselves don’t realize what side of the line they’re on before it's too late.

And perhaps worst of all: sometimes, people genuinely mean well and stay on the right side of that line from start to finish — but they simply make a mistake. It’s worth remembering that the kind of bureaucratic, industrial killing we’re talking about when we discuss films about political atrocities is relatively new. That means our understanding of how to process these atrocities — how to responsibly integrate whatever we think we’ve learned from these horrors into our culture and our politics — is also new.¹

A Question of Position

Schindler’s List, for example, is a remarkable film. It’s deeply affecting, unsparing, and wracked with the kind of bleeding-heart earnestness that Spielberg’s haters deride and that most normal people admire. Growing up, I watched it often (too often, I now believe, in retrospect) and it made a profound impact on me. I have no doubt that Steven Spielberg and his team created it with the utmost sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and sense of moral responsibility.

Yet if we’re judging Schindler’s List by its ability to accurately show its audience how and why human beings engage in collective acts of evil like the Holocaust, Spielberg and Steve Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay, get some very important things wrong. Its villain, played with a kind of chilling-yet-vulnerable pathos by the sinister Ralph Fiennes, is both one of the greatest film villains of all time and a woefully inaccurate depiction of the kind of men who operated the Nazis’ death-economy.

Similarly, the ending of Schindler’s List, despite the immense emotional power of its depiction of Jewish endurance and remembrance, is far less ambitious than the ending of Killers of the Flower Moon. That is not because Spielberg is any less intelligent or serious than Scorsese, but rather because their goals — and, crucially, their positions — are different.

Spielberg’s ending is intended to have a clear, straightforward, immediate, and political message: “Holocaust denial was on the rise again,” he would later tell a British newspaper, “that was the entire reason I made the movie in 1993. That ending was a way to verify that everything in the movie was true.” Spielberg was a Jewish filmmaker who was trying to confront rising antisemitism. His ending is a reminder that the Holocaust wasn’t simply a crime against Jews, but a crime against humanity itself.

The focus of the ending is on us, the viewers. Schindler’s List ends by asking us, the viewers, to believe what we have seen, to internalize the implications of such horror, and to live and act in such a way that nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again. It celebrates Jews for their resilience, yes; but it implores Gentiles to believe, and to care, that all of the sorrow and evil they saw was once, to millions, unbearably real.

But Scorsese is not a member of the Osage Nation. He cannot speak on their behalf; as Sontag wrote of those of us privileged enough to “consume” news of political atrocities elsewhere, Scorsese cannot “know … first hand” about what happened to the Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 20th century; he can only imagine what Sontag calls “massive injustice and terror.”

As a writer-director, then, Scorsese is put into the seemingly impossible position of having to show the unshowable, explain the inexplicable, and empathize with the other; and he has to do all of this while creating a film that most people — who, by definition, will not be Osage and will thus share Scorsese’s limitations and potential sense of culpability — will actually want to watch. As Osage language consultant Christopher Cote has noted, “[T]his film isn’t made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody, not Osage.”

Scorsese has to please people on both sides of that aforementioned line. Even more difficult, but also more morally important: He has to do right by the people who will never see the film, the people whose stories he is telling because, in part, they were not allowed in their own lives to tell their own stories themselves. Even an Osage filmmaker working today would carry that burden with her; but for Scorsese — and for any viewer who wants to be sure they’re not engaging in a spectacle — the obligation is, morally, absolute.

Bearing Witness and Shoah

Before Killers of the Flower Moon, there was only one film I had ever seen that, I believed, successfully avoided the problem regarding the pain of others. And, not incidentally, it’s a film unlike any other: Shoah, the 9-hour-plus long documentary film by Claude Lanzmann released in 1985. Rather than try to recreate or depict the horrors of the Holocaust, Lanzmann does something radical: He confronts survivors and asks them to tell their stories to him while a mostly fixed camera is trained on their faces. There are no actors, no animations, no maps, no respite. There are very few talking heads.

There are only the survivors (and one perpetrator)² and their stories, in their own words. And for more than 9 hours, and often while looking at the very scene of the crime — or what remains of the scene, since the Nazis were so careful to destroy the death camps as they fled the approaching Red Army — we hear these stories. We do what the Nazis, who hid their prey’s suffering behind the walls of ghettos and death-camps, tried to make impossible: we bear witness to the real human beings who suffered, we silently listen as they recount the real truth of their suffering. We recognize their dignity.

Aside from the content of these stories — and these are the worst stories you can imagine, stories of mass graves in Treblinka, the walking cadavers of children in Warsaw; the lines of naked women, knowingly waiting in line to be crammed into gas chambers as if they were at their local pharmacy — it can be difficult to watch these people remember what they’ve spent their whole lives trying to forget.

Even though Lanzmann is often off-screen, the interactions between him and the film’s subjects can be painful.

It is clear that Lanzmann believes time is running out; the survivors of the Shoah were dying. The perpetrators as well. The only people with the ultimate authority to speak the truth about what they experienced would soon be gone. The final opportunity to know what ex-Nazis really think about everything they did, that too was fading into nothingness. Lanzmann is, consequently, unrelenting: he pushes the survivors to go on, he urges them to continue, he pleads with them to say more, even when they’ve begged him to let them stop.

From the standpoint of someone familiar with what are the current best practices for helping traumatized people tell their stories, Lanzmann is often a nightmare. Some of the people interviewed are clearly being traumatized yet again. I cannot endorse his methods. But there is no doubt that Lanzmann feels that he is acting for the greater good — not just for the future of humanity, but for the survivors themselves. This kind of paternalism, however humanitarian its intentions, is no excuse; but it is, I believe, a reflection of the utter sincerity, and the sense of awesome responsibility, that permeates the film.

Whose Story?

Before seeing Killers of the Flower Moon, I was skeptical that a work of fiction could resolve the problem inherent in regarding the pain of others. I was certain, meanwhile, that it could not be done if the creator and the intended audience were people for whom the story would always be just that — a story about something that happened to them; not me, not us — rather than one of the indispensable threads constituting the fabric of their lives.

[Last warning about spoilers...]

You’ve probably heard by now that the coda of Killers is surprising, and that it represents something new for Scorsese. Both assertions are true. Before concluding the final of its many minutes Killers drops the audience into an entirely different time and place, full of people we do not recognize. It’s strange and exciting, and it raises the stakes for whatever is about to come next. How could such a deliberate and disorienting break not have a greater purpose? How could whatever it is that’s about to come not influence our interpretation of the 200+ minutes we’ve seen already?

Soon enough, we realize that we are viewing the live performance of a 1930s-era radio-play about what happened to the people of the Osage Nation — paid for by our friends at Lucky Strike. But something is off. The all-white actors are telling the story to their all-white audience as if it were a farce. They’re relying on dinky sound effects and broad stereotypes—and they’re playing the whole thing for laughs.

It’s now that we realize what we are watching. In part, we are seeing one of the ways that a nation built on white supremacy and capitalist exploitation can turn its greatest crimes into stories it can use to accrue further profits, this time via the advertising dollars that are the lifeblood of the entertainment industry. What we are also seeing, however, is the problem with “regarding the pain of others” exaggerated to a grotesque extreme.

Even here, we see, white people have made a story about the Osage Nation into a story about themselves. For some white people, it’s a story about the fundamental goodness and necessity of the kind of white people who arrested the Osage’s murderers. For other white people, meanwhile, it’s a story about how those white people — the bad ones, the racist ones — must be defeated by good, antiracist white people like themselves. Either way, white people remain the focus.

If this were how Killers of the Flower Moon ended, I would have been disappointed but not surprised. It certainly would have been better than suggesting that the progenitors of the FBI saved the day when they finally, belatedly, and clumsily arrested the murderers.

Still, though, ending the film with an appeal to the outraged conscience of the viewer, as Spielberg does in Schindler’s List, would not work, because the outraged conscience of the white viewer — an outrage that only reaffirms their conviction that they’re one of the good white people — is not what matters.

What Really Matters

Thankfully, that is not how the film ends. After the last line of both the radio-play and the film is delivered (notably, by Scorsese himself) there is more. It’s a final scene — or perhaps it’s better to say it is a final shot: an overhead view of members of the Osage Nation, who are joyously engaged in what seems to be a celebratory ritual. We are given no sense of place or time, nothing to clearly signal to us that what we are seeing is from the past or the future. The moment just is.

All we see and hear and feel in front of us are the Osage themselves, with each other, engaging in a communal activity that the vast majority of the film’s white audience will not understand.

But that, of course, is the point. What matters here is not edifying or informing the non-Osage audience, because this story does not belong to the non-Osage audience. It is, ultimately, not our story, even if we tell it as well as we possibly can, even if we have a genius of Scorsese’s caliber telling it with the utmost conviction. It is the Osage’s story. This is what happened to them.

And this is when, to return to the beginning of this essay, I began to cry. Not out of pity or guilt, but out of a sense of joy, even awe.

After an epic film in which one character after another justifies the unjustifiable with arguments about the historically inevitable extinction — the manifest destiny — of the Osage Nation, we see that they are still here. They are not victims in a black-and-white photo. They are right in front of us, dressed in bright colors and moving, beautifully, across lush green grass that ripples in the wind.

The Osage Nation is not surviving; they are living.

They know that they know the truth of what happened to them. They know that they don’t need any outsider to validate their experience, or to honor their suffering, through an expression of sympathy or confession of vicarious guilt.

They are the Osage Nation, and they are still here. They endure. And that’s more than enough.

1. Depending on where you want to “start,” of course; I was taught that the Imperial Germany’s systematic murder of the Herero people of Southern Africa in 1904 was the first modern genocide, but others look at the U.S. policy toward Native Americans in the 19th century, or the British Empire’s policies in Oceania in the 18th century, etc.

2. Most controversially, Lanzmann features an interview with a former S.S. officer — someone responsible, on the most intimate level, with keeping the machinery of murder moving — who he lied to and surreptitiously recorded.