In an interview in Empire, a British film magazine, in October 2019 while promoting his latest film The Irishman, Director Martin Scorsese was asked about Marvel movies, and 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.” Needless to say, Film Twitter lost its mind, with Josh Whedon and Jon Favreau to pundits to Marvel fans chiming in. The crux of the controversy is that Scorsese films and Marvel films speak two very different cinematic languages for two different cinematic experiences, in terms of the genres they represent and how our fragmented, technology-driven, short-attention-span society views movies, considering what constitutes “cinema” now.
What many of those criticizing Scorsese don’t realize is that he’s been around the block a few times, having started his career well before the core Marvel audience was born. He’s made films since the late 1960’s, finally won an Oscar for Best Director for The Departed, and Raging Bull has consistently shown up in Top 10 lists of the best films of all-time; that film changed the way I watch movies because he told a story in a way I had never seen before. But when you think of a Scorsese film, you don’t think of a blockbuster. His films are passionate and about characters’ lives, as are Marvel films. Save for The Wolf of Wall Street, which is his largest-grossing movie, and a handful of others, you’re not going to see the box-office take for the weekend and see a Scorsese film on it.
The noise against Scorsese became so loud that he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times to clarify his original comments. In it, Scorsese indicates that at the core the issue is risk. But this is nothing new. Hollywood has always been about putting butts in seats, and this has gone on for decades. Fifty years ago, after Easy Rider, made on a tiny budget, was released and became a hit, every major studio in town broke the bank trying to make their own biker film (remember C.C. and Company, when the studio tried to cash-in on Joe Namath’s Super Bowl success?).
But there have been two major paradigm shifts for the films themselves and how we watch them. The first happened with The Big Bang of Blockbusters, when in 1975 Steven Spielberg made Jaws and it became a massive hit like nothing the industry had seen before. Then in 1977 George Lucas released Star Wars, creating the first film franchise that echoes to this day, and, hence Marvel movies becoming the cash cow of the current era. But it was after this that the money of movies seeped into the mainstream media, when you would get the box-office results for the weekend on Monday mornings. Director Robert Altman, who battled his own Hollywood demons trying to get his films made, said, “How can I compete with a mechanical shark and two robots?”
The second paradigm shift occurred with the advent and progression of technology changing the way we consume movies. And Scorsese’s quip about theme parks is not a criticism against the Marvel movies themselves, but rather about how we watch movies now. He reveres the “cinematic experience” (as do I) of going into a theater and letting the film happen, and now because of technology, the way most watch movies are pretty fractured. You could be in a café and the person next to you is watching a movie, or you’re on the bus and someone is watching a movie on a smartphone. He’s not wrong.
One would think that with technology and Netflix at our fingertips that we would have better access to the movies, big or small, blockbusters or indies, we want to see, but what Scorsese is trying to point out is that, paradoxically, despite the technology,we still have a lack of access to smaller films. In other words, Marvel movies are sucking the air out of the theater. So Guardians of the Galaxy may be on four screens, and the only way a theater may get a small film such as 12 Years a Slave is to agree to take it as part of the package and play it for a week. So that film may play for a week but only at 9:45.
Scorsese has kvetched about the lava flows of blockbusters flooding the theaters, limiting access and distribution, but he is not immune to his own flows. Early in his career, his films were bloody and gritty, but more recently he became a bit giddy as well with technology. Remember when after he released Hugo, which was filmed in 3D, Scorsese claimed he would make every film thereafter in 3D? Didn’t happen. Could you imagine The Wolf of Wall Street in 3D?
Scorsese’s latest film The Irishman, is being release on Netflix after it plays for a few weeks in theaters to qualify for Oscars. And he’s playing the paradigm game because Netflix funded the film. But he also dipped his toe in the CGI waters because he employs this technology to age the characters throughout the film. The story arc is over several decades, and he claims he wanted to try this technology over extensive makeup to be “purely experimental.” He’s not a luddite, but he wants his stories to remain, at the core, about human connections.
So the cinematic experience as we once knew it is practically gone. It used to be an event, to go see something you’ve not seen before, or to have fun like, well, at a theme park. But I don’t want to pay to see a movie in which folks act like they are in their living rooms or snorting popcorn. In my eyes, there used to be collective experience of seeing a movie, then talking about it afterward. I’ve had many an argument after movies, and I miss that. Sure, we can discuss them, but now films can be downloaded and viewed at anytime, and the main way to have discussion is through social media. Again, fragmented not collective.
And the kicker to the Scorsese controversy? He was going to produce Joker, but when Netflix came through with financing for The Irishman, he had to leave the project. That’s Hollywood!