Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023) When I think through all the movies that I watched in the past year, it’s not an image, per se, that jumps out at me, but rather a cessation of images. As the credits roll on Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, and the chanting of Osage dancers—seen whirling in circles in the film’s final, hawk’s-eye-view shot—fades out, we’re left with what sounded to me like a field recording of a prairie in the evening: crickets trilling, birds chirping, and above all, wind rushing through tall grasses. After the film’s orchestral flood of images, ideas, historical investigations, and full-bore acting, this withdrawal into contemplative and ambient sound ruptures any possibility of narrative closure. In his book PrairyErth: (a Deep Map), a strange blend of memoir, geographical study, and natural history, William Least Heat-Moon describes the Kansas prairie: “The protection and sureties of the vertical woodland, walled like a home and enclosed like a refuge, are gone, and now the land, although more filled with cellulose than ever, is a world of air, space, apparent emptiness, near nothingness, where once the first travelers could walk for twelve hours and believe they had taken only a dozen steps.” In its final moments, all the sureties of Scorsese’s movie—its star power, cinematic contrivances, and fine-grained historical recreations—give way to a blissful near-nothingness. This experience—of the gentle dissipation of narrative, and the inevitable jolt back into the rushing stream of history—is one thing I’ll carry with me into the new year.