‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is Martin Scorsese’s David Lynch Movie

Before Killers of the Flower Moon, I’d never really thought about whether Martin Scorsese ever wondered who killed Laura Palmer. 

Scorsese and David Lynch, who with Mark Frost co-created Laura Palmer and the wider world of Twin Peaks structured around her murder, are my two favorite living filmmakers. They’re on friendly terms, due both to their respective jobs and to their shared commitment to the practice of Transcendental Meditation. They’re both improbably mainstream filmmakers considering their general unwillingness to compromise their visions, though each has sustained their personal projects with (in some cases literal) commercial work. They’re both renowned artists of on-screen violence.

But while there are elements in certain Scorsese films that anticipate what would later become known as Lynchian ideas and aesthetics — the surreal black humor of The King of Comedy and After Hours springs to mind — I don’t recall Lynch emerging in Scorsese’s work before. Now, with Killers of the Flower Moon, the two aging masters are at last broadcasting on the same wavelength. Like Lynch and Frost’s long-delayed third season of Twin Peaks in 2017 (also known as Twin Peaks: The Return), Killers of the Flower Moon is the work of an artist using a variety of techniques to deconstruct their own work even as they’re making it. They’re telling a story that contains its own undoing.

In many cases, the Lynch influences in Killers show up as what might well be overt references. Scorsese depicts a group of gaunt, bearded men colored black from head to toe by oil, reminiscent of the sooty Woodsmen (“Gotta light?”, “This is the water and this is the well,” etc.) from the landmark eighth episode of Twin Peaks Season 3. Owls appear as harbingers of death, an explicit nod to indigenous iconography that shows up in both Peaks and Killers. King physically punishes Ernest for his failures inside a Freemason hall — literally a Lodge — with black and white tile flooring, almost inarguably a shoutout to Lynch’s most famous image, the Red Room of the Black Lodge. 

Then there’s the fourth wall–shattering ending, in which it is revealed we have been watching the equivalent of a 1930s radio play, complete with DIY sound effects and cheery sponsorship by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover himself. This is almost a turducken of Lynchisms. Most obviously, the performance, with its curtained backdrop, its theatricality, its sense of nostalgia for a time long past, and its message that what you have been watching is a work of artifice, are all straight out of the “Silencio” sequence from Mulholland Drive. 

But beyond that, in revealing that the story presented in the film up to that point was sponsored by the infamous spymaster Hoover and his feds, the radio performance stands as a critique of both law enforcement and the stories and films, like this one, that glorify it. This echoes the message of Season 3 of Twin Peaks: Despite his innate decency, the best of intentions, and the backing of the FBI, there’s nothing Agent Dale Cooper can do to truly right what is wrong, both with the murders he’s investigating and with the country at large.

Killers concludes with Martin Scorsese taking the stage as one of the radio performers, reading off the fates of the main characters in the true story upon which all of this is based. As his litany of justice only partially served and important things largely forgotten concluded, I thought of the final lines of the two heroes of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer. “What year is this?” asks a disoriented Cooper, realizing that his journey across realities to save Laura and end the evil that plagues them all has gone horribly wrong. After hearing the ghostly voice of her mother calling her name, Laura, now somehow a grown woman, simply screams. 

The Osage live on, as the gorgeous overhead shot that concludes the film makes clear. But there’s a limit to what recounting their tragedy can actually do, beyond perhaps burnish the undeserved progressive reputation of the FBI, a reactionary force nine times out of ten. Scorsese is aware of this, just as Lynch is aware of the unearned catharsis viewers would experience if he somehow allowed Coop to put the genie back in the bottle, stamp out the Black Lodge, and save Laura from death and limbo. So they both sabotage their own projects. 

It’s incredibly exciting to see Jesse Plemons descend on Fairfax seeking justice, in large part because of the clever casting: Plemons seems every bit as sinister as he does in many of his post–Breaking Bad projects, but this time he’s on the side of the law, so you know our antiheroes are screwed. Similarly, I actually burst into tears of joy when a recovered Coop turned to a friend asking if he should call the FBI and said plainly, “I am the FBI.” But both Scorsese and Lynch yank these pleasures away from us. Neither man is a nihilist; both harbor a deep love of and hope for humanity. This is precisely why they deny us the catharsis of the cops they previously lionized. 

Because in the end, it’s about more than whether or not it’s good to watch heroic G-men get the bad guys: The two filmmakers are ultimately dealing with much more than an isolated series of crimes. In Killers and Twin Peaks, they’re taking on two of America’s blackest sins: the genocide of the indigenous population, and the creation and detonation of the atomic bomb. (Peaks reveals that the supernatural evil haunting its characters sprang from the Trinity test; it of course was already intimately connected by Lynch and Frost with mid-century American suburbia.) 

In so doing, they challenge the idea of the American West as a synecdoche for the entire American project, a place of limitless (re)invention and potential. There’s not just gold or oil or uranium in them thar hills. There’s a mountain of corpses.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies and shows being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.