Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Marvel vs Scorsese

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?


-G.T. Evans 

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