Matthew Mandel

(spoilers below)

There’s a criticism of some of Martin Scorcese’s movies that he makes the behavior he’s trying to condemn look cool.

Scorcese’s Jordan Belfort may be insane scum, but he also oozes charisma. I think there’s a case to be made that Scorcese’s doing a Miltonian thing to show how evil is magnetic but ultimately hollow, but people also definitely left Wolf hyped up to be like Jordan Belfort.

I know for sure that no one left Killers of the Flower Moon aspiring to be like Leonado DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart.

Burkhart is not particularly bright. He responds to someone asking what he likes to read by simply insisting (unconvincingly) that he can in fact read.

Much of the movie follows his alternating acts of violence against his wife’s family and tribe at the behest of his uncle and him, seemingly genuinely, caring for his wife and his growing family with her.

The climax of the movie comes when Burkhart is forced to confront the apparent contradictions in his life. There’s no devious twist where it turns out he never cared for his wife at all or that he was working to undermine his uncle the whole time. And so the audience has to ask themselves if they believe someone could love their wife while actively working to destroy her and her family. Does the character strain credulity? I don’t think so. The answer is that both of those things can be true if you’re just very dumb.

In this telling, evil is not some extraordinarily attractive force that threatens to persuade even the most righteous to err. It’s pathetic and boring. It lacks reflection or forethought. Whereas Scorcese shows us Belfort’s uncanny ability to talk people into buying any piece of crap stock, we’re repeatedly forced to confront how bad Burkhart is at crime. He fails to execute on a series of murders because he gets distracted by the chance to make some side cash in an insurance scam.

The movie fits neatly into Socrates’ contention in Book I of The Republic that the viciousness of thieves makes it impossible for them to successfully work together. Burkhart ultimately embodies Socrates’ unexamined life and his vision of evil as a kind of infirmity.