Member-only story

Killers of the White Woke Bubble: You Can’t Handle the Truth

I don’t always drink white tears, but when I do, I like to drink them from a champagne glass.

Paco Taylor
4 min readMar 19, 2024
Header image featuring Lily Gladstone, Jack Nicholson, and Dos Equis pitchman Jonathan Goldsmith
Image credits: Dos Equis Beer, The Golden Globes, Columbia Pictures

Despite the acclaim and the award nominations that the film has garnered, I haven’t seen Killers of the Flower Moon and feel quite confident at this point that I won’t.

There are a number of things that I’m just over, and the themes explored in this film, as near as I can tell, seem to fall well into that ever-narrowing window.

Still, I was intrigued enough by the title of a recent op/ed piece published to Medium, “Bury My Oscar At Wounded Knee,” to give it a read. Writing from a sincere place, Marc Barham shares his thoughts on why he believed Lily Gladstone, the film’s leading actress, deserved to win the top honor in her category at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Despite Barham’s fairly forward thinking on the matter, though, one deeply problematic notion offered by the writer would give me serious, serious pause.

According to Barham, had Gladstone also won an Oscar for her already multi-award-winning portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in Killers, such an achievement would have been “perfectly placed to help not just the Academy but white America move past its genocidal entanglement with Native…

--

--

Paco Taylor
Paco Taylor

Written by Paco Taylor

Paco writes about Eastern & Western pop culture, history, and art. He has bylines at CBR, G-Fan, Comics Beat, NeoText, and Nextshark | stpaco@gmail

Responses (1)