Director Martin Scorsese has been catching plenty of flak this week for his comments regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But even if he is mostly wrong (and he is), here’s why he still has a point to make about Marvel and superhero movies as a whole.
Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you: there’s no doubt that superheroes are Hollywood’s latest popular craze. Like it or not, since 2008, Marvel Studios has dominated the global box office and built up a massive fan following all over the world.
But if you ask the people who actually live and work in Hollywood, you’ll likely be met with a response that’s not as positive. It’s not difficult to find a line-up of reputable actors and directors with mixed feelings for Marvel’s titanic cinematic universe. Actor Jason Statham, famous for his numerous action movies, has claimed that “any guy can do it”, while director Ridley Scott, famous for Alien and Blade Runner stated that they are a “non-reality” he doesn’t believe in, while opining the state of modern cinema as a whole as being “pretty bad”. Birdman director Alexander Inarritu even went a step further, slamming Hollywood’s infatuation with men in tights as overexposing audiences “to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human” and referring to superhero films as “cultural genocide”.
From that perspective then, Martin Scorsese, the acclaimed director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said before. He’s just the latest in a long line.
Interviewed by Empire for his upcoming film The Irishman, he commented on the MCU: “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.” More recently, he even doubled down by saying during the BFI London Film Festival, that superhero tentpole movies were “something else” that “we shouldn’t be invaded by”. Naturally, given the size of the Marvel fandom, there’s been no shortage of people eager to tell him in no uncertain terms just how wrong his opinion is.
But just how wrong is he? I’d say: not totally. While he might be expressing his sentiments in a poorly worded fashion, there is at least a little grain of truth in what he’s been saying.
Am I a fan of Marvel? Yes. I’m not the most vocal fan, but I’ll still happily go along to my local cinema to see a Marvel movie, even if I’m not dressing up in cosplay and attending a midnight screening: all things I might do for Star Wars for example. I’m less than impressed with its excess: the frequent regular trailers and releases, and the general state of the fandom, given its propensity of continuously drip-feeding directly into the veins of pop culture and practically deifying anybody who’s done more than two of these movies. But all of these things happen, more or less, in any fandom that grows beyond the usual size.
What Scorsese is saying boils down to this: the MCU movies aren’t cinema. Whether that’s true depends on how you define ‘cinema’ in the first place. If you take it as an exclusive club for auteurs and dramatically intelligent art films then he’s certainly not wrong. If, on the other hand, you take it as a club that’s open to anybody with a camera and a few bucks, then of course he’s wrong. I, like most reasonable people, would tend to fall closer to the latter. What he’s doing here, intentionally or not, is denigrating people’s hard work. Contrary to Scott and Statham, a lot of films deal in fantasy and it’s certainly not something everybody can do. Even though Scorsese has said that the actors are doing as “best they can under the circumstances” and that they are “well-made”, it’s hard not to notice the general condescension, intentional or not, and the accompanying sting that the likes of James Gunn, Robert Downey Jr. and most recently Karen Gillan have all spoken out about.
There’s always room for fair criticism; as people who review movies and games, our site and work wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t. And indeed, contrarian perspectives can be useful, as long as you’re not doing it just for the sake of being contrarian. But there’s a vital difference between that, and slagging off something you don’t regard as meeting your standards. Of course, Marvel’s 23 films have certainly made contributions to cinema, and had an impact. I’d argue there wouldn’t have been 23 MCU films made if they didn’t have qualities that people love to see in the movies they watch. These films are cinema, and there is in my mind no real distinction between the two.
However, I think there’s still a point to be made here. Marvel films are cinema, but I don’t think anyone would argue that they’re necessarily that sophisticated, at least not compared to most of Scorsese’s portfolio. Setting aside the derogatory tone of it, I actually think his theme park comparison is fairly apt. For the most part, MCU films are capable of entertaining and causing a wash of emotions; they thrill and a lot of money has gone into elaborately designed special effects designed to wow. And they are excellent, at least within those boundaries, there’s no doubt. All those nominations for the Visual Effects Academy Awards don’t tell lies.
Scorsese’s displeasure is therefore best explained in the context of Inarritu’s earlier quote. MCU films like Black Panther are very good, but let’s call them what they are: outliers. For the most part, they explore characters with some depth: the latest Spider-Man movie for example deals with legacy. But when push comes to shove, they don’t really say very much about life outside the universe they were built in. Some hardcore fans will try and show off meaning where, in reality, the people behind it haven’t intended any, and convince themselves that a shot of Captain America with a hammer amounts to cinematic genius simply because of the sunk cost fallacy. But in the end, they’re fun but not necessarily substantial standalone pieces.
Perhaps what Scorsese is really hitting out at is the lack of real and substantial human experience in these movies, and an apparent scarcity of thought-provoking films. Occasionally, Marvel’s main rival DC will jump back on the scene with their own movies, whether they’re colossal disasters (Suicide Squad, Justice League) or thought-provoking, fairly intelligent pieces (Wonder Woman, and more recently Joker). What I’ve noticed is that when it comes to the last type, I’ve gotten more discussion out of them that I ever would have when it comes to your typical Marvel offering. Wonder Woman had a story about a heroine disillusioned by the discovery that rather than been coerced by a villain, ordinary human beings with free will chose to be violent, and her choice to see and believe in the good in them regardless is pivotal. In contrast, Marvel’s parallel female-empowerment film Captain Marvel was flashy but formulaic.
And some would say: yeah, that’s fine because it was still fun and entertaining. Fair enough. Not every film has to say something about the human experience, even if Scorsese isn’t wrong to point out that Marvel’s box office dominance seems to have caused that scarcity and as Inarritu points out, audiences may suffer long-term from the overexposure. As a Star Wars fan, I can totally understand the impulse to rail against Scorsese. Was I a little annoyed when Quentin Tarantino took a shot at The Force Awakens, a film that I really enjoyed? You bet. But was he wrong for calling for Star Wars to be something different? No, perhaps not. I think it’s still possible to enjoy movies while calling on them to try harder and be better.
That brings me to the point Scorsese is really trying to make: that all films should try to push the boundaries of their genres. That’s an admirable way of looking at things, and whatever kind of movie you’re making, you should strive for excellence. Black Panther is the best MCU film because it dared to try and succeeded. And over the past few years especially, we’ve been lucky to be able to see several excellent superhero movies that dared to do something different: Logan, Into the Spider-Verse and Joker are all brilliant. With more general films like Infinity War and Endgame, it becomes too easy to confuse sheer size for significance. Logan for example cares so little about what comes before or after, embraces another genre entirely and lends its characters a sense of raw humanity that many MCU characters sorely lack. Director James Mangold has described tentpole movies as “bloated exercises in two-hour trailers for another movie they are going to sell you in two years”, claiming that he found the formula “empty”.
I’d agree, and as radical as it might sound, it’s possible to be a Marvel fan and still call for them to take an approach that isn’t always so blandly corporate: a less-is-more approach of releasing fewer films while trying new styles and experimenting, and striving to be properly excellent on your own rather than worrying too much about what’s next-in-line.
Scorsese might be mostly wrong, but on the other hand, I’d say the judgement of Marvel’s most hardcore fans is also similarly askew. Superhero cinema is at a point where being okay is no longer sufficient, and pretending that serviceable films are spectacular does damage in the same way as slagging off people’s work. Expectations need to subverted and tropes need to be skewered. A call for Marvel in particular to try different and be better is definitely something I can get behind.
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