In his Opinion piece for the New York Times of Nov 4th, Martin Scorsese makes many
good points. The threat to art, or rather to an environment that is conducive
to and sustaining for cinema as art, has already been highly detrimental to our
collective culture. This is a phenomenon which I think besets all artforms, and
always has, but film being such a young medium it is being felt here acutely in
recent decades. I myself as a kid noticed it in the late 90s. In many ways this
began in the late 60s and 70s with a new aesthetic, a new model….but of course
his argument is that art can still be written in book format even if the
publisher has little reach, but getting on the big screen is very difficult.
Movie theatres face many challenges. Real estate of course
is expensive, a problem for other commercial enterprises as well. In order for
a cinema to stay in business it has to count on high-grossing films. Still,
many theatres have multiple cinemas to showcase both the blockbuster hits and a
variety of other films. Perhaps Scorsese is being overly pessimistic about the
industry in general. True, any film needs financial backing to be widely
screened, and that power and marketing reach are concentrated in the hands of a
few studios—which was also the case in the golden years of film, although now
they are owned by multinational corporations that are even more distanced from
the culture of art and driven exclusively by profit motives and publicity.
But what is Scorsese’s animus against comic-book
adaptations? “I don’t think they’re cinema”, he writes. OK—big deal! One man’s
trash…and Hollywood has been churning out trash since before he was born.
Personally, I think Scorsese has a very narrow idea of what constitutes cinema.
“The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands,
and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes”, he writes of
the Marvel films.
I take no issue with his elitism; that’s the point of art to
a certain extent. To define by exclusion. But his focus on a certain criterion
for art dependent upon elements of surprise and novelty betrays a prejudiced
misunderstanding of the role of storytelling that I think is even more endemic
in highbrow literary society than it is among disgruntled filmmakers. The myths
of the Greeks, Hebrews, Germans and Celts were a perpetual fount of creative,
captivating storytelling, both orally and in writing, precisely because the outcome was known, the
characters were stereotyped and static, and the themes perennial. The best of
these tales commanded the attention of audiences from all strata of society and
resonate today. Maybe Scorsese is just jealous more Americans care about the
latest Marvel film than about (does he still make movies?)
And audiences care not only because they are entertained but
because the stories are timeless. Parents who read the comics when they were
young now take their children to see these film adaptations, and in many cases
fans have come of age while this saga played out onscreen. At the conclusion of
the Avengers series I saw teenaged
girls crying, and reflected that they had probably been drawn into this
universe, watching it unfold since childhood.
“What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine
emotional danger”, the old man laments. But what is there is truth, inevitability, and inspiration—elements that
were there in many Hollywood classics as well, but not necessarily some of the
films Scorsese fetishizes in his elegy for what he mistakenly thinks of as the
Golden Age.
Comics, the best
comics, have become a new mythology for many Americans, much as bipedal dragons
and giant robots have in Japan. I loved Marvel comics, and the television
programs and merchandise, when I was a kid myself, but I never really
appreciated at the time Stan Lee’s genius in delving deep into questions of
philosophy and ethics, of personal autonomy versus collective security, of the
interests of exceptional (and potentially dangerous) individuals against
societal norms. It’s all very Nietzschean, very religious, very political: very
American. These are questions that have no answers and therefore, to explore
them amidst dazzling special effects and heroes in skintight bodysuits is far
from the worst way to spend two hours. Granted, some of the films are,
artistically speaking, lesser than others (although this is relative). But at
the theatre, for the best of them, there is absolutely a communal experience
with the audience, and it is far more thrilling than just collective terror or
suspense; it is the sharing, even if vicarious, of our common virtues and the
vindication of our values.
A film like ‘Iron Man’ can probe deep inconsistencies in our
nation’s altruistic stance in the world and the profiteering of arms dealers,
yet portray international tragedy as rightly what it is, the actions of
individuals, and offer a symbolic hero who represents the best in us, in our
country, in the desire to protect the innocent and deal out justice. Other
films in the Avengers universe deal more deeply with the paradoxes in
geopolitics and international law that sometimes, in the name of caution, can
stifle our best hopes for change. And even if one could instead watch a gritty,
pessimistic work of cinéma vérité instead,
does reality bring us any closer to truth? If anything, our culture has become
too obsessed with realism and we need fantasy and myth to inspire us and remind
us that we do not live in a mechanistic, deterministic universe but a living,
breathing world that we are all blessed to be a part of.
I know this may seem excessive praise for the subject
matter. But being inspired and connected to popular culture beyond a television
program or cable news is not trivial. If anything I think this is Scorsese’s
best point, that we are spending less time together sharing that common
experience at the movie theatre and instead everyone is in a separate world
with their own private screen. So if these modern demigods in
less-than-fully-convincing masks can bring audiences together in the theatre,
wasn’t that always the purpose anyway, since the days of Athens?
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