Killers of the Flower Moon’s dominating mood is funereal, and it’s a film that wonders about our relationship to the dead, its chorus of funerals for its forgotten players like prayers to keep the history dramatized in the film etched in memory before the film goes where all films now go, in the great stream of content. Indeed, a question the film is asking has to do with its own usefulness, or the usefulness of any art in an age of algorithmically engineered taste, the primacy of the profit motive and the looming threat to human creativity posed by AI—to say nothing of the charnel house of history where the significance of billions of lives are muted by humankind’s knack for atrocity atop atrocity.
What’s the use of a film? Or a funeral? And what do we care?
For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales. John Marzluff, an ecologist in Seattle, once wore a rubber caveman mask while catching and releasing seven crows on his university campus; eighteen years later, crows that weren’t alive for the original experiment still caw at the mask. “I really didn’t know they were paying that much attention to me,” Marzluff told me recently. His study showed that crows not only retain long-term memories but also learn from their peers and pass behaviors from one generation to the next. Other experiments have shown that members of the corvid family, which includes crows, jays, and magpies, can read one another’s intentions, plan for the future, and solve puzzles using abstract reasoning and tools.
To Jiguet, the ridicule of the crows was a revelation. “I’m just realizing how intelligent they are,” he told me. When birds warn one another about individual humans, biologists understand them to have their own culture—defined as a behavioral tradition that a population maintains not through genetic inheritance but through social learning. That struck Jiguet as a cause for celebration, not culling. Wasn’t there a better way to relate to clever creatures? Or was cleverness precisely what made them pests? “It’s hard to live with animals that are intelligent,” Jiguet said. “They can challenge you, and you have to adapt.”
Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply breathe. Imagine that mucus—thick, copious, dark—had been accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways, but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward, in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This was what it once meant to be born with cystic fibrosis.
Then, in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.
I set myself the task of cooking a simple dinner, every now and then, the only criteria being that I had to be led by my stomach – it had to be something I really wanted to eat or cook. If it was good, I wrote it down in my orange notebook. Slowly, the orange notebook filled up. And slowly, I started to feel the life in my bones and the hunger in my belly. I realised the power this simple act of cooking and eating dinner with my friends and family had in my life.
“Helen Garner doesn’t overexplain” is an understatement. Things happen, as in a Richard Scary book, with great rapidity and often without apparent cause-and-effect. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would probably result in a bewildering mess, but Garner always has her finger on the pulse of the narrative, knowing just when to slow down enough for us to get our bearings.