Movie of the Year
Martin Scorsese, the most critically acclaimed American film director of the past fifty years, has released his latest Oscar-baiting three-hour epic of slow-motion violence and depravity, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is supposed to represent — as all of his movies are supposed to do — the horrible truth about America that no one (read everyone) has the courage to face. I have not seen the movie, and will not see it. If you want to know why not, read my short 2022 essay, “Martin Scorsese.”
The real horrible truth about America is far more disturbing than anything a repetitive, superficial craftsman of the capitalistic and predictable anti-capitalism crowd is ever likely to find or reveal, no matter how many times (and for how many hours each time) he tries. My mind just keeps returning to its mercifully-fading memories of Gangs of New York, the last Scorsese film I tried to sit all the way through. Could the man who made that cartoon of slow-motion grotesqueries, and who to my knowledge has never publicly apologized or expressed extreme embarrassment for it, be considered an artist in any world in which the word “art” denoted anything rational at all? The horrible truth about America may be indicated, rather than found or revealed, by Scorsese, or more precisely by his reputation as a leading artist.
