She Likes Her Nice Things: “Squaw Men”, Trophy Wives, and The Deconstruction of Scorsese’s Marital Contracts
At one point in Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Dicaprio) pretends to moan about his wife Mollie’s (Lily Gladstone) affinity for spending. “You know Mollie,” Ernest says with a paternalistic roll of his eyes, “she likes her nice things.” Ernest is attempting to position himself as the breadwinner, the financier, the decider of the money matters in their household. In short, he’s playing the traditional role of husband.
But this line of reasoning does not pass muster for his brother-in-law, Bill (Jason Isbell). Bill knows that Ernest—much like himself—is tied to Mollie and her family because of their lucrative oil headrights as members of the Osage Nation. Bill also knows that Ernest is a greedy man. He would never be able to settle for a life of comfort at the hands of Mollie’s wealth, and so is instead viciously determined to have the money in his own hands at any cost.
When Bill points out that Mollie doesn’t love money nearly as much as Ernest does, Ernest rankles. “It almost sounded to me like you were calling me a squaw man, Bill.”
“Squaw man” is a derogatory term used to describe a man who marries a Native American woman, and, as such, joins their nation or tribe. By the way that Ernest utilizes the phrase here, one senses a flavor of subjugation, submission, and even emasculation. The usage of the term, in Ernest’s mind, stirs up every petulant insecurity of his surrounding having a wife in control of the family’s money. Bill’s dig, in Ernest’s eyes, can only be perceived as being marked as equivalent to that of a “trophy wife”.
“THE KEY TO EVERYTHING THAT’S YOURS”: SCORSESE’S MEN AND THE HYPER-CAPITALISTIC AMERICAN DREAM:
In Martin Scorsese’s most iconic subgenre of film—his debauched twists on the American Dream—Ernest’s quip about his money hungry wife would usually have been a given, accepted, and played along with. Scorsese is notoriously infatuated with stories of men who make it rich through scheming, stealing, and fucking honest people over; who then often seduce women with the decadent luxury of their spoils. Instead, in Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest holds the same ideals and fantasies of vicious greed as the men before him, but with none of their monetary capital. Regardless of the fact that Ernest is married to a wealthy partner who is kind, loving, and doesn’t even subscribe to the traditional American Dream aspirations that many of Scorsese’s protagonists do, Ernest still can only see himself as tied to her by her pursestrings.
Scorsese tells stories about men like Casino’s Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert DeNiro), who ensures the house always wins at the height of Vegas casino corruption, Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), who sells shady penny stocks for sky-high prices to average folks who don’t know any better, and Goodfella’s Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who makes his money through traditional gangster routes— robberies, tributes, and scams—leaving him with vast community connections, favors to collect on, and moments of being totally flush with cash.
And in these worlds where money is all-powerful, marriage is no exception to its addictive and decisive pull, allowing the women pursued to be seduced by fantasy images of an enticing life of total ease. Ace sweeps up the notorious and beautiful casino hustler, Ginger (Sharon Stone), Jordan carelessly discards his first wife in exchange for the young, gorgeous Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), and Henry woos the bright-eyed and tough Karen (Lorraine Bracco) in his early wiseguy days. All these women (plus more than a few mistresses) are compelled by the distinct power these men hold, and by the nontraditional, but seemingly definitive, luxury and comfort they offer.
These men often struggle to detangle their own definitions of love from money. In the opening lines of Casino, Ace defines love as “[giving someone] the key to everything that’s yours”. In the minds of Scorsese's men, having material wealth to share with someone is the only way to prove affection and care. This, in and of itself, is perhaps a sign that these men are incapable of accessing genuine love under the material conditions which they obsessively cling to.
If you’ve got lots of money, as the honeymoon phase of these romance narratives suggest, you don’t need to be kind, interesting, or smart in order to attain the perfectly "performing" spouse; someone who is delighted to be adjacent to the wealth and luxury you provide, to sit quiet and pretty and mind their business while you do what you must to bring them home the wad of cash or the boat or the shiny ring. In many senses, the women themselves are perceived by their spouses as just another of their many material signifiers of wealth. The yachts and homes purchased for the wives can be seen as the glass cases necessary to house their spousal trophies — their golden handcuffs emphasized by the ways the likes of Karen, Ginger, and Naomi often end up trapped, neglected, and stir-crazy within their labyrinth-like mansions as their husbands run off to live freely.
But Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon obliterates these preexisting basic Scorsesian-tenets surrounding breadwinners and spouses. Money does not decide all for Ernest and Mollie, or at least, not in the frameworks we are so used to seeing. Mollie being the wealthy spouse does not suddenly give her endless respect, or an opportunity to hold court to a devoted husband. Her money does not allow for her to transcend racism and misogyny, nor does it keep her from avoiding the systemic subjugation she experiences as a Native American woman. In fact, the notion that she has money places an even larger target on her back. Her husband Ernest’s slow and sure obliteration of Mollie’s family line, with the help of other bloodthirsty white men who have infiltrated the community, emphasizes that it’s really about who has the money, and how they hold it—the ways they perform with and around it—than the money’s objective existence.
“BECAUSE HE LOVES ME SO MUCH”: SCORSESE’S TROPHY WIVES, PERFORMANCE, AND POSSESSION
A racist, sexist, and scheming man like KOTFM’S Ernest has learned none of the traditional sexual and romantic relationship performance that the previous wives of Scorsese’s hustlers and millionaires have had embedded into their very social fabric since birth. The “winners” of the dating game they are playing are usually the women who know how to play into ego, and into accepting their newfound spousal wealth with blind glee (though it’s of note that this marital lottery is always temporary; these rich men and their superficial charisma always give way to narcissism, abuse, and chaos).
In Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort’s first wife, Teresa (Cristin Milioti), responds "incorrectly" when he bestows her a diamond necklace. She blanches instead of shrieks, thinks through the gesture instead of slapping the necklace on. Teresa has questions about this newfound wealth of Jordan’s: Is the way her husband is making all this money ethical? Is he not swindling those that he sells suspect penny stocks to? Teresa brings up these concerns gently, but she may as well be begging to be fired from her job of pretty wife. A perfect partner, in this capitalistic structure, sidesteps ethical concerns, and silently agrees to have her value systems bought out.
Jordan sheds Teresa carelessly not long after this moral handwringing. She is not playing the game that he would like to play now that he is nearing a life of unfathomable wealth. The young, beautiful, and peppy Naomi, on the other hand, knows exactly how the game is supposed to be played.
When Jordan surprises Naomi with a yacht as their wedding present, she squeals in unabashed delight. Naomi is good at seeming both baffled by and deserving of her husband’s seemingly never ending cash flow, and his decision to splash her name along the side of a vessel and embroider her initials on each towel and pillow. How Jordan got these funds, and what it means for her long-term to be financially tied to him so distinctly (and so dependently), matters little in the grand scheme of living largely. She prioritizes the sensation of living with more wealth than she could ever imagine, ignoring the fact that she has a total absence of power in this ongoing game.
Scorsese’s cinematic worlds have a tendency toward the fantastically domestic—the nuclear family, but elevated, either by money, intrigue, debauchery, or all three. We move with these couples through courtships, weddings, bedrooms, and kitchens, and they’re almost like our worlds, but not quite. Money is made in splashier fashions, the fights are bigger, the sex is better. Oftentimes, sex, money, and fighting are all part of the same moment—making love on a bed of money, or a wife straddling you in the morning not to kiss you but to aim a handgun between your eyes. Every emotion, desire, and ambition is dialed up to eleven; even the performance of husband and wife, or of mommy and daddy.
When Goodfellas’ Henry rushes to work one morning, Karen poutingly asks for some money for shopping—not by dollar amount, but by a pinch of her fingers that signals the thickness of the stack of bills needed (“This much?” she estimates as she nods to her fingers)—and then gives him head in their kitchen as thanks. It’s both playful and practiced. There are scripts to be followed, ones that have been likely learned since these women were small. Find someone to care for you, and in turn be beautiful, passive, sexually viable, and, if you’re lucky enough to be welcomed into an elevated social and financial stratum, be accepting of mistresses and drug busts and your husband drunkenly landing a helicopter on your newly shod lawn. Do all of this because you are lucky enough to bask in tangential wealth. Accept funds held in your husband’s name and hands, and allow it to be doled out to you in controlled doses of gold jewelry, pretty clothes, and a big bedroom.
The glitz and glamor is all a distraction from the fact that these gestures and gifts are all fleeting and intangible, leaving the women in a disturbing state of dependency. Casino's Ginger holds her millions of dollars of gold jewelry from Ace at the bank. It appears as excessive and endless wealth, especially when she goes to visit her trophy wife dragon hoard and spread her goods across the private room. She leans over her baby’s stroller and places some of her millions of dollars of gold jewelry on her daughter’s little arm, explaining that Ginger has all of this because her baby’s daddy “loves [her] so much”. But these gifts are all a mirage of wealth and stability, hiding the fact that Ace never lets her access any money tangibly or independently. He holds control over her financially (and thus totally), and when Ginger becomes disillusioned and longs to escape his world, she has no meaningful way of doing so. The same manipulative entanglement occurs for Karen and Naomi.
This notion that Ginger and her counterparts are “loved so much” is evidenced by receiving endless material goods is as much of a fantasy as the idea that these women can sustain comfortably under such dismissive, volatile, and limiting conditions. In fact, oftentimes these women are pushed to their limits when actual love comes into play—most often in the form of their children, who they feel must be removed from their turbulent home lives. Only then do they realize how deeply they have been entrenched in a world where money has turned everything and everyone into a possession — babies and wives are to be owned, same as the nice car and the private jet.
Scorsese’s films are occasionally deeply misinterpreted as “glamorizing” the lives of crooks, gangsters, and vicious capitalists. In actuality, they are almost always tragic sketchings of cruel men gaining luxurious, but hollow, lives and losing it all (plus their soul) in the end. Similarly, the women in these films are often seen as evidence of some inherent sexism (most often bandied about is the catch-all phrase “male gaze”).
This reading is unfathomable to me. The very arcs of these films are often reliant on the slow awakening of these trophy wives to the miserable conditions they have become trapped in through the hollow seduction of luxury. These women are hurting and lost. They often fly into rages, suffer from their own complex failings as mothers and partners, or turn to vices or other powerful and abusive men in desperate attempts to detach or free themselves from their cruel and limited lives.
Their spouses and their cohort may see them as pretty objects, but to suggest that this is unchallenged within the film, or that these women are sketched in with flat, one-dimensional affectation, is to completely misread both their tragic arcs and the deeply compelling performances of the likes of Robbie, Stone, and Bracco.
These women enter these debauched and detached wealthy worlds through an understanding of a complex sexual and gendered performance, in and of itself a limiting and self-policing practice. To be consumed by the men who “win” in these ultra-capitalistic spaces, though, is to be totally possessed. Being beautiful and subservient is not enough. One must be completely under the thumb of the men they are married to, addicted to a nearness to extreme wealth without ever having the opportunity to individually utilize it.
“SLEEP ALL DAY, MAKE A PARTY WHEN IT’S DARK”: ERNEST AS A FAILED TROPHY WIFE:
The key pillar holding up the shaky foundation of these worlds is the constant possibility of possessing more. A capitalistic, cold-hearted misinterpretation of the American Dream, where one decides they were not promised just a piece of the pie, but the whole thing grasped in your singular hands, at the cost of anything emotional, moral, or ethical that gets in your way.
If money reigns supreme regardless of who holds it—even if it is in the hands, as it is for many of the aforementioned couples, of cheats and narcissists and abusers—then Mollie of Killers of the Flower Moon, who is kind, loving, measured, and obscenely wealthy, should be a deity to the newly discharged and jobless Ernest. At the beginning of the film, Ernest is freshly out of a war where he served as a cook until his gut burst—an injury emblematic of a certain scraggly second-rate-ness that pervades his essence throughout the entire film. He’s not smart or suave or brave. His wealthy uncle, William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), quickly begins planting seeds about Ernest’s future for Ernest to pretend they're thoughts of his own. Mainly, King begins suggesting that Ernest should be marrying the beautiful Mollie Kyle; and by proxy, her large fortune. In Scorsese’s legacy of mob and trophy wives, Killers of the Flower Moon finally makes the woman the wealthy party in a Scorsesian coupling.
Ernest may begin flirtations as he drives Mollie to and from the main street to her home repeatedly, but it is Mollie that holds the final say in this relationship in its early stages.
After enough chauffeuring and chit-chat to and from her house, Mollie gifts Ernest a brand new Stetson at her doorstep—much like Naomi receives her endless bouquets of flowers from Jordan, much like Henry stuns Karen with an all-too-perfect night out on their first date, much like Ace gives Ginger $100 just for her walk to the bathroom a few yards away.
Mollie invites Ernest in for a meal. She lets Ernest do the nervous talking (what his uncle says the Osage people call “blackbird talking”—an endless nervous chirping while those around you stay quiet and listen intently). She smiles at him and offers him whiskey, insists he sit in quiet with her and witness the heavy rain. In many ways, their early interactions mirror previous narratives; Mollie gently testing Ernest on his willingness to be wooed, to play by her rules, though they are admittedly more mindful, endearing, and gentle than her predecessors’ parties, dates, and love bombings.
Eventually, Mollie playfully accuses Ernest of flirting with her for her money. Ernest doesn’t deny it. “That money’s real nice,” he smiles. “Especially if you’re lazy like me. I mean, I wanna sleep all day and I wanna make a party when it’s dark.” This admission is perhaps the first show of hand toward all things not being equal in matters of money, as has been suggested time and time before. The fact that Ernest can say, outright, what he would like to do with all this time and money within a marriage is not a luxury afforded to the likes of women like Naomi, Ginger, or Karen.
The trophy wives are almost certainly swept up in the same fantasies as Ernest; fed fairy-tale narratives since childhood that encourage women to search for a man so wealthy they could “sleep all day and make a party when it’s dark” in exchange for looking pretty and staying placid. The difference, though, is the ability to admit this, a difference of gendered socialization surrounding money and marriage.
Naomi, Karen, and Ginger’s responsibility is to stay wide-eyed and delighted at the sight of diamonds and yachts, to act like this is all some dream they never thought of. To say outright that they’re in it for the money, or to be totally deserving of the material affection, is to be degraded in the eyes of these men, to risk being deemed cheap or superficial. And when cracks in the fantasy facade begin to appear, these women are meant to accept them with a brave face. When the women in Ernest’s place are flung past the honeymoon phase into not just bland stasis, but plain-and-simple abuse, they are not able to disentangle as easily as would be desired.
Ernest has no such responsibility, no such cross to bear. In his eyes, to want money, and want it easy, is his birthright as a white American man. In fact, the wool is not pulled over Ernest’s eyes, but Mollie’s. Where Ernest should—if a pattern is to be followed between these films regarding the role of the money-having-spouse and the allowance-receiving-one—be playing the role of trophy wife (or the much less palatable name of “squaw man”, as he introduces) at this juncture, we (alongside Mollie) are quick to discover that there will be no passive, pliant performance on Ernest’s end. Despite being utterly reliant on Mollie and her money, Ernest strongarms his way into the role of brute husband, soon abusing Mollie in a fashion far more aligned with the wealthy husbands than their passive wives.
Mollie doesn’t long for a passive partner like her wealthy male counterparts do. What is most tragic about Mollie and Ernest’s partnership is that Mollie truly does love him. She doesn’t just desire to charm him or possess him, but wants to love and be loved by him. There is no dismissal of him, but deeply founded respect, even when he begins mistreating her. And in the face of immeasurable loss, as Mollie’s family continues to suffer and die, she chooses repeatedly to stay open to love. Mollie and her relationship to money and love as two very different aspects of her life, with the latter valued far more than the former, are threatening to men like Ernest and the capitalist narratives they cling to, because they render the dreams they have been fed and clung to as Americans striving for pulled up bootstraps and Manifest Destiny far less valuable.
When Mollie becomes sick and (rightfully) begins questioning the medication she is being delivered, Ernest screams at her. Ernest sees no risk in losing Mollie’s money by mistreating her. In fact, Ernest feels like he is being consistently denied something by the fact the money is not coming directly to him. Having access to the plentiful money Mollie provides—to the comfortable home they live in and the easy life he’s afforded—is not enough. The land rights absolutely, without question, must be his own. The American Dream, as Ernest sees is, is not one that can be acquired secondarily, even though that is exactly what he’s doing in a grifter-type fashion.
Killers of the Flower Moon shifts how we consume the narrative of money as the great decider of marital power in relation to Scorsese’s other films. What changes when we look at who holds the vast wealth? The fact that Mollie is a Native American woman most certainly affects how her fortune is not treated with the same cautious, passive reverence by her spouse. In fact, her race and gender explicitly deem her undeserving of such wealth by the white people who infiltrate her land and her family. Further, Mollie does not give into narratives of excess and debauchery; in fact, as more and more of her Osage community is obliterated by her husband and his cohorts, her community mourns the fact they began utilizing money in a way similar to white people in the first place.
Perhaps what matters most about money, KOTFM (and, by extension, Scorsese’s previous films that developed “a norm” to be broken) suggests, is who wields it. Ernest’s brutalization of Mollie, both direct in his abuse and dismissal of her concerns, and in his harming of her loved ones (and eventually, her), attests to the notion that the greediest reading of the “American Dream” can only be authentically applied to a certain homogenous, white supremacist, heteronormative vision.
Money is not the great equalizer. Those who create the very rules (and subsequently create the very fantasies and narratives that hold less privileged hostage to a dream they will never achieve) around supreme, individualistic wealth will never allow money into the hands of those who are not like them, who may deconstruct, dismantle, or change how we value money. And those who are meaningfully invested in love, compassion, and community will never fall into the patterns of excess, chaos, and debauchery that keep these twisted fantasies afloat.
Regardless of what Ernest tries to glibly accuse his wife of as he attempts to speak man-to-man with Bill, Mollie stands out among these patterns of wealth and marriage because she doesn’t like her nice things more than she does love, compassion, and her family. She fails to be all-consumed by the roles and rules laid out by capitalistic greed and the gendered, racialized, and limiting norms that are etched into it. Her ability to both hold wealth and not fall head first into its enchanting, addictive call to endlessly possess and accumulate is seen as a devastating threat to those around her.
The panic and need amongst Ernest and his group to obtain what Mollie has, to get it into the “right” hands instead of her “wrong” ones, is a signal of the power that can come with dismantling our ideals around capitalistic fantasies even slightly. The fear that someone like Mollie—a measured woman, open to love first and foremost—stirs up in those that benefit from a maintaining of a greed-oriented status quo emphasizes the capacity for the dollar as an all-powerful being to bleed into and taint our most beautiful, loving human relationships.
Scorsese’s tales of greed notoriously never end well for just about anyone, but Killers of the Flower Moon problematizes the narrative patterns around the inability to both love and possess he has tread many times before—such individualistic desire for material excess makes us incapable of loving or being loved. His bizarre, twisted domestic worlds are not elevated, but in fact deeply degraded versions of a much more peaceful way of living and loving.