Old Men Shake Fists at Comic Book Clouds

This week, I don’t really have an actual movie review for you (though I did rewatch Interstellar with my girlfriend who had never seen it, and I feel like the experience taught me a fair bit more about that movie than I previously knew).  Instead, an attempt to watch The Irishman on Netflix (before realizing that this weekend was actually its limited theater release, with the Netflix release coming later this month) coupled with a stew of reactive thoughts to it in my head has stirred me to rant a bit about the recent comments of Martin Scorsese (The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) on Marvel movies and why they apparently suck, or something.  If you haven’t read or heard about the comments, you can get a brief summary here, but suffice it to say neither of them are particularly impressed with what Kevin Feige has accomplished, and the main point that I want to make is I just don’t get that, and a number of people – Bob Iger, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Damon Lindelof among them – are in the same corner as I am.

Before I begin disparaging his remarks, let me just thank Martin Scorsese for giving us one of history’s best meme shots.

Sure, I’ve had my issues with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Don’t get me wrong, overall I’m as big a fan of it as anyone, but even its biggest fans will readily admit that most of its films – especially the solo outings – are formulaic to a fault, and a lot of the time it feels like the motions the films are going through amount to box-checking, unless of course the stakes are at the leviathan levels of Endgame (I talked about these problems a bit here, though I’ve also obviously reviewed a lot of MCU material positively on this blog).  But to call Marvel movies “despicable,” as Coppola does, or to minimize them in ways that include derisively calling them “not cinema” as though cinema isn’t already a nebulous enough term is selling them short in at least one way that I can think of: namely, I’d argue that Marvel movies, even in all of their commercialization and monopolization of the average cineplex (I’d have to imagine this fact may be at the core of these directors’ gripes – more on that later) are fundamentally well-meaning, and better yet, the reason that they’re so successful, not to mention what I think does make them “cinema”, is that they tap into a very relatable desire that many have, even if they don’t admit it to themselves.

If a movie scene gives you chills, I feel like it could be argued that it’s “cinema” in at least some sense.

One of the major themes of any given Marvel movie involves the discovery of a strength that the protagonist may initially not know they possess, and even more so, the movie typically pivots on how said protagonist uses that strength (spoiler: it’s for good).  The Avengers’ climactic moment revolves around our band of heroes putting aside their differences and working together to achieve an end goal.  Doctor Strange involves a man’s critical journey to the surrender of his own ego.  And of course, Peter Parker’s character teaches us that with great power comes great responsibility (sure, maybe this isn’t said in the MCU rendition, but you get my point).  In at least some small way, they all indulge the hope – or maybe the fear – that a lot of us have: that deep within us, there’s some great untapped power waiting to be discovered.  If they’re theme parks, as Scorsese claims they are, they’re more fun than most of the ones that I’ve been to, and they have better interest at heart – and sure, maybe they can’t deal in the hard and criminal truths the way a mafia movie can, but I think that’s more than fine, and they still deal in an understanding of human nature.  Even if they’re repetitive – a knock which definitely has ample evidence – they’re no more so than Scorsese’s works, which while good feel like repetitions of the same thing.  Organized crime, liberal drug use, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joe Pesci, repeat.  Better yet, they’re not as brooding, probably not as psychological, and certainly not as violent, and I get the feeling that Scorsese sees at least a couple of these qualities as necessary for creation of compelling “cinema” – his body of work bears this theory out some.

My favorite scene from Taxi Driver.

To empathize at least briefly with the “side” of this debate that Scorsese is championing, I think one his main concerns is that some quieter movies with far less fanfare that are also quality films – he specifically cites the work of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, and Paul Thomas Anderson in this plight, for whatever reason – are being elbowed out under the premise that there are only so many screens and Marvel is flooding box offices.  While I can sort of understand where he’s coming from here, I’m not sure I agree with his theory that movies like these are in trouble – Gerwig’s recent Lady Bird was without a doubt a well-deserved critical and commercial success, as was PTA’s Phantom Thread.  The markets for these movies certainly aren’t as large as Marvel’s, but even without Marvel’s presence, I’m just not sure how much larger they’d be.  Furthermore, this section of his remarks leads me at least slightly to believe that he feels that this is why The Irishman was shortchanged by various studios until Netflix swooped in to rescue it from development hell, when in fact I think it reached that point because it’s a movie from him that we’ve all already seen before.  Either way, his reference to these directors sets up a snobs-versus-comic-book-nerds battle that isn’t nearly as diametric as it’s framed to be.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank Marty for this gem of a scene.

Because Scorsese and Coppola’s comments – which I should mention they’ve both made attempts to walk back in spite of the fact that a number of other self-proclaimed auteurs have chimed in in support of their main point – signal a coming changing of the Hollywood guard in the same way that Steven Spielberg’s semi-recent eschewing of Netflix does, and it seems like the transition period may be full of bumpy stretches like this one, but all I know is I like Goodfellas, and I like Avengers: Endgame, and I like The Wolf of Wall Street, and I like Captain America: Civil War, and I like The Godfather, and I like The Departed.  To make any claim that there’s no place for either of these kinds of movies (a distinction that’s limiting in and of itself) in the umbrella term “cinema” seems both needless and wrong to me, and while guys like Scorsese and Coppola are of course entitled to their opinions on the state of the art form – they’ve earned that at the very least with their level of success – it’s hard not to see these as misplaced parting shots at an industry that they may feel has betrayed them in favor of larger stacks of money.  Maybe fifty years from now the Russos will be throwing shade at the next big silver-screen fad, or maybe they won’t, but I have a feeling that this sort of thing is cyclical, and we’re just hearing about it now because we tend to hear about just about everything.