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To watch Killers is to observe the slow progression of what Mollie calls a “wasting illness” (in literal and metaphorical terms) that surrounds her family. It’s the creeping, insidious, nature of sin devastating a community in real time, like an invasive weed gradually suffocating the life out of a thriving garden. //
The film ends with a brilliant, unexpected coda, set several years after the movie’s main action. It’s a scene of a true crime radio program recording that dramatizes the story in auditory form. We catch the end of the broadcast, as radio actors and sound-effects artists narrate the “what happened to” fates of the key players in the Osage Murders case.
The scene is brilliant narratively for how it informs the audience about where Hale, Ernest, and Mollie end up. But it’s also brilliant thematically, as a commentary on the importance of how stories get told in different forms, across generations. We’re watching a live radio program, filmed for a movie, adapted from a book, about a true story.
Most meta of all, Scorsese himself appears in a cameo, as a radio performer who reads the newspaper obituary printed after Mollie Burkhart’s 1937 death. After reading the obit, Scorsese’s character notes, as he looks soberly into the audience, that “There was no mention of the murders.”
It’s the last line of the film. It speaks to the ways we’re prone, in our fallenness, to whitewash history and edit out the uncomfortable episodes and the sins of our ancestors, even as (like Ernest and others in Killers) we’re prone to concealing rather than confessing our present sins. Our instinct to hide sin is as old as Eden. //
When future observers look back on our generation’s telling of the Christian story, may it never be said that “There was no mention of _____ [insert unpopular or difficult biblical teaching].” Let’s tell the whole truth, even if it means the audience dwindles. And let’s rejoice that the whole truth includes not only the guilt of our sins in the past but also the grace of Christ in the present and an unfailing hope for the future.
