Why Martin Scorsese Is Wrong About Marvel Movies
Known as one of the most important and influential directors of all time, Martin Scorcese has clearly made his mark on Hollywood. With iconic films like Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo, and Goodfellas, there’s no doubt that he’s made some masterful movies. However, he recently made comments on the genre that sparked quite a bit of controversy among a particular community in film pop culture. In reference to films in increasing popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, he said, “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema...honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
When it comes to film, Martin Scorsese is undeniably well-versed in that field, but I truly believe that there’s more to Marvel films than he may think. When you truly look at Marvel films, his description of what makes a movie cinema is exactly what Marvel movies are: films about characters conveying emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
Since these comments swarmed the media and internet, they’ve gained a handful of responses from fans and directors alike, including those directly involved in making these Marvel Films. That criticism caused Scorsese to craft an op-ed discussing his opinion in further detail, continuing to defend his stance.
He begins by recapping his interview, stating that he tried Marvel films and that “they’re not for me...the fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself.”
Then he begins to break down his argument, here’s a brief summary of his arguments:
“cinema [is] about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.”
“many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
“They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
“When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.”
I agree with everything Scorsese says about cinema. That’s part of the reason I love movies: the complexity of characters and their decisions which emotionally affect the viewer, the feeling of suspense you feel due to the uncertainty of your characters’ fates, and the experience of something refreshing and wonderful everytime you step into a theater. However, ironically, this is exactly what Marvel films are. It might be a bit flashier at times or be more action/adventure heavy at times, but that doesn’t diminish from the core of it all. In my opinion, Marvel films have something special to them that most certainly increases their value as cinema, and it’s what makes them most unique: the shared universe that allows characters to return. A theme I got from Scorsese’s points was the connection between audience and art, and that it should be meaningful and impactful. What Marvel films allow audiences to do is to build meaningful and powerful connections to the characters on screen for more than one movie. That’s part of what keeps fans coming back, it’s their compassion and interest in seeing what the characters they love will overcome next, not just to see the same thing because it’s a comic book adaptation.
One of Scorsese’s comments is that the movies are “remakes in spirit,” basically saying they’re the same plotlines and stories that are just modified slightly each time. To an extent, he’s right, but not quite. Let’s look at Avengers: Infinity War, one of the most anticipated movies of all time. In this film, we something that’s not typically done in the genre: the heroes lose, big time. Thanos, the big bad of the MCU wins and destroys half of all life in the universe, thus annihilating half of the characters from existence that we’ve grown to love over the past 10 years. That leads us into Avengers: Endgame. If you boil it down, the entire plot of Avengers: Endgame is the remaining heroes (and the rest of humanity) dealing with the shared trauma of losing those you love, and how they deal with that. Even taking away the fact that the movie combines and ties up story arcs and character developments from several different films, at its core as a standalone/sequel to infinity war, it most definitely conveys the “emotional, psychological experiences” that Scorsese comments on. From that point on, the MCU became much more unpredictable, therefore much more interesting and intriguing. If anything, it proves what’s at stake, and that danger and risk are indeed present within these Marvel films.
The comment that started this whole debate revolved around the idea of the movies being like theme parks. After thinking about it, this is one of the most weird yet quite accurate descriptions of my experiences watching Marvel films. There’s a lot of interaction between art and spectator, including cheering and occasionally screams. To me, that doesn’t make it any less cinematic; personally, I think it enriches it. Art is made to say something, and resonance are almost inevitably evoked from any art. A film that provokes such reactions to me are the key reason why Marvel films are cinema; they get audiences to care about the films so much that they vocalize their opinions while watching. That’s powerful, and not any film can do that.
I don’t think that Scorsese is wrong about what cinema is. But Marvel films are exactly what he’s described. I would love to have had Scorsese sit in on a screening of Avengers: Endgame on opening night, to experience what a true “theme park” movie is like; I think he’d realize how powerful these pieces of cinema are, and what he’s missing out on.