Now watched both of these twice; let’s see what comes of that.

The Old Oak

An earnest and often moving account of how white working-class people react to the moving in of refugee families from Syria. After initially rejecting the new people (a powerful and cleverly orchestrated title scene whereby camera stills are revealed as an integral part of the narrative), Ken Loach, through the friendship between the local publican and a Syrian photographer, shows the two communities coming together. Triggered by the news of the photographer’s father’s death at the hands of the Assad regime, this movement towards solidarity ends the film with a combined English/Arabic banner being paraded at the Durham Miners’ Gala. Durham Cathedral is Loach’s central image of working-class solidarity – ‘Look what working people can do when they do things together’, or wtte.

Killers of the Flower Moon

An earnest and often moving account of how white people systematically mistreat indigenous people whose land they have taken. After initially rejecting the indigenous people – giving them the worst land – they then, after the Osage become rich on account of the oil discovered there, work on getting the oil rights for themselves, through a policy of marrying into Osage oil families, and murder. Or at least some of them do: de Niro’s character ‘King’ Hale, and his sidekicks, including di Caprio’s dumbly amoral Ernest.

Part of Scorsese’s genius is that in his choice of one historical episode he can address 1) the US’s relationship with oil and 2) white America’s treatment of people of colour. He makes this explicit: the townsfolk of Fairfax watch a newsreel about Tulsa, and Molly later says, when the murders of Osage are at their height, ‘This is like Tulsa.’

How they are related

Both films are moral tales about the evils inflicted on the vulnerable by the powerful. Ken Loach’s evil is more sociological, an inevitable consequence of imbalanced power relations; Scorsese focuses more on individual evil, and how greed can drive into the commission of murder two different types of men – the dominant, alpha, ‘king’, and the naturally subordinate underling. Where does blame lie?

Both films revolve around a vulnerable female, a possible victim of male violence. And in both she is saved, in Flower Moon by her own efforts and initiative in summoning the FBI, in Oak by the friendship she builds with the pub landlord.

Lastly, both films have, as the mainspring of the oppression and evil which they explore, the ramifications of the fossil-fuel industry. The Osage have become rich on oil, and it is these riches which makes them vulnerable; the Geordie working class have lost their coal and are falling back in their poverty, and in the destruction of their culture, to xenophobia.

Yet the worlds of both films turn out OK. Molly lives, King Hale is caught; Yara’s family survive in the pit village, and the indigenous people eventually accept her.