
Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-marvel.html
======
fredsanford
After reading the comments here, I've started to wonder...

Does elitist mean "Doesn't like the same things I do?"

\---

While I wouldn't phrase it the way Scorcese did, I sort of share his opinion.
Super hero movies bore me to death in most cases. As do most things created
and A/B tested by a committee, i.e. most Disney movies. Despite having all the
time in the world, I do not go to the movies any more. There's very little I
want to see...

When will there be new movies in the same vein as Pulp Fiction, Tombstone,
Donnie Brasco, True Romance, The Godfather, Goodfellas or hell, even the Rocky
movies.

/Old man yells at clouds

~~~
kuroikyu
We already get them: Whiplash, Baby Driver, Inception, Arrival, The Martian...
Those are just a few of my favourites from the last decade or so but the list
goes on!

~~~
theklr
They all had an established director, producers, and/or actors. It’s a safe
risk because studios (from this list fox (rip)) can either bank on the casting
list/director history (baby driver, the Martian, arrival) or have it as their
one “cinema” film for awards season. Theres a lot missing for 10 years of film
that just didn’t take off.

~~~
teh_klev
I agree. Could we imagine Memento being made today?

~~~
anongraddebt
Memento. That one hit me right in the gut on a first viewing. Why don't we
have more movies like this today? It's sad.

~~~
teh_klev
Also Memento was a $9 million dollar movie, even in 2000 that wasn't a lot of
money.

What we're missing these days are what myself and my buddy, who's a film buff
and writer, are the 10-30 million dollar films. Well written, competent
director and director of photography, a reasonable cast of most likely newbies
but they can act, and a decent plot/story....Memento, Donnie Darko, The Hurt
Locker. Jeez the Hurt Locker was just a 15 million dollar movie, but it's
pretty decent (I've watched it five times).

------
equalunique
I've shared the same opinion about Marvel movies for long time. My girlfriend
absolutely loves them, so we do watch them together, but I honestly find them
really boring. They have stories that constantly turn, huge production value,
etc., but none of that really moves me. It's going to sound cliche, but I
prefer movies that make one think.

~~~
mam2
Personally I think all the time at work (AI) and literally the last thing I
want to do in sport / cinema / personal life / any after work activities is
think. No one go to marvel for the storyline, people just like action (and for
me, seeing the adaptation of comics I read).

But this doesn't have to be a fight, you do you and I "do me". To me scorcese
was indeed elitist. It's like saying classical music is better than rap or
metal.. it's not true per se and honestly it doesn't reflect well on him to
say something like that. Indeed more like "old man yelling at crowd"

~~~
me_me_me
> No one go to marvel for the storyline

That's why you have small riots when some detail of a comic was not
incorporated or changed.

The storylines are tangled and boring most of times. But I find them fun when
watch from time to time. I really enjoyed the first Iron Man.

~~~
mam2
Mm yeah. Personally I go also for the storyline since I read the comics too.

What I meant was more "people don't go to see a masterpiece of storyling but a
masterpiece of entertainement / action / CGI". Marvel movies are like cartoons
to me and it's totally respectable.

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GlenTheMachine
Scorsese probably has a point. Marvel films aren’t “art”, in the way he (or
most auteurs) would define the term. The question left unasked here is whether
that’s bad.

I had the good fortune to visit the Prado last year. It’s an amazing place.
Visiting it made me a better person. But when it came time to redecorate my
office this summer, it didn’t make me want to hang Old Masters paintings on my
walls. I hung some pretty pictures of Athens that my daughter took on our
vacation there instead.

Why? Because Old Masters paintings are terrific, they took tremendous talent
and decades of training, and you can see something new in them every time you
look — and that’s not what I want in a space where I have to crank out code.
What I want is something that I can glance at and be removed from where I am —
cranking out said code — and immediately go to my happy place, which is
walking around Greece with my wife and kids. This should not take a lot of
brain power. The fact that it doesn’t does not make me a philistine. It just
makes me a human.

Movies are the same way. Sometimes you want to see a Scorsese film. And
sometimes you want to see Iron Man kick some ass. Why? Maybe you just want to
spend two hours being entertained without having to pull out the genius-level
IQ, because you’ve been using that IQ all day cranking out code and you just
want to give it a rest already. Or maybe you found refuge in comics as a kid,
and watching the films takes you back there. None of those is the “wrong”
reason to watch a film. What would be wrong would be insisting that there can
be only one “real” kind of film, and that anyone who likes the other kinds is
insufficiently discriminating. Just as it would be wrong to insist that
everyone everywhere should take down the pictures of their kids and replace
them with Goya’s black paintings.

~~~
RHSeeger
> Marvel films aren’t “art”, in the way he (or most auteurs) would define the
> term.

Here's the thing, though. He doesn't get to define art. Andy Warhol's Campbell
Soup sold for $11.7 Million. I certainly wouldn't call that art, but someone
does. What is or isn't art is very much subjective, the eye of the beholder
and all that.

~~~
Osmium
> Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million.

Does money define art?

~~~
twopens
So how do you define art? And can you tell it apart from Pornography?

As someone who usually doesn't _get_ art, especially the more traditional
forms, looking in to that box a lot of what I see makes no sense to me and
some of it I couldn't tell apart from an acclaimed artist and a child.

As far as I can tell Art is whatever a large enough group of people decides is
art based on consensus.

~~~
setr
Money is a conflated metric in the arts; it's largely an investment, and
you're really investing in the "cool" factor (the cooler the artist gets, the
better the resale value of his work). By following the money, you're mainly
watching a popularity contest (and Warhol was nothing if not cool).

Art itself is of course nebulous, and has multiple branches of thought, but at
it's most basic is just something that's "thought-provoking and interesting",
which is best defined by contrast to those things we can all generally agree
is mindless (eg marvel, porn).. somehow we'd also like to include technical
skill, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary.

And then you just have to navigate the history, niches and social groups that
exist around it; some work isn't interesting, but an army of pretentious
fucknuggets will swing by and tell you it is (but without explaining shit).
Some work is interesting, but your own pretentions will stop you from seeing
it (often humorous work go right over people's heads, because they're too busy
looking for a "deeper" meaning, or assuming it exists and don't bother
processing any further). And some work is only interesting given a certain
context/history (eg duchamp's famous urinal, which broke down art circles for
decades).

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seibelj
Superhero movies are mostly throwaway pop culture. No one is going to mention
Iron Man 2 and Spiderman Reboot 4 in the same sentence as Goodfellas or Cape
Fear in 30 years, to name a couple excellent Scorsese films. Honestly they
won't even be mentioned at all, in any context.

That being said, I saw my first superhero movie in several years recently when
I saw The Joker. That was a truly excellent film! I believe it was excellent
because it was not throwaway pop culture but a disturbing character study
based on dark source material that happened to be in the comic book universe.
If more superhero movies were like that I would pay to see them.

~~~
Udik
> I saw my first superhero movie in several years recently when I saw The
> Joker

The Joker (whatever its qualities) is definitely _not_ a superhero movie.

~~~
krapp
The Joker is, by definition, a superhero movie because it takes place within
the universe of a DC property. It (re)tells the origin story of one of the
most famous comic book villains of all time.

It may be stretching the boundaries of the genre, but it's still in the genre.

~~~
Udik
We might disagree forever, however this is my argument. What connects the
Joker movie to the Batman universe are essentially three names: the Joker's
himself, Bruce Wayne, and Gotham City. And names are labels: you can stick the
label of a bottle of wine on a bottle of coke, but it remains a bottle of
coke: it's sweet, fizzy, and won't make you drunk.

If you take a Harry Potter novel and rename him as Batman, his enemy Voldemort
as Joker and Hogwarts as Gotham School, it doesn't make it into a DC superhero
story. If you take a fantasy novel and replace kingdoms with planets and
castles and horses with starships, it doesn't make it into a science fiction
story- despite Star Wars being labeled as one.

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emmanueloga_
Similar critique to what some people say about modern first person shooters
being "on rails" [1].

"Like most Call of Duty games, Black Ops 3’s story campaign is a highly
scripted, tightly controlled experience. Go here, stand next to that, shoot
those guys. Sometimes, in fact, you don’t even have to pull the trigger." [2]

1:
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RailShooter](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RailShooter)

2: [https://kotaku.com/it-s-always-fun-to-stop-shooting-and-
let-...](https://kotaku.com/it-s-always-fun-to-stop-shooting-and-let-call-of-
duty-p-1741494503)

------
twopens
Remember when Roger Ebert said that games aren't art?

I think most of the Marvel movies are kind of lame or even actively bad
(Guardians of the Galaxy and it's sequel especially), but this is some real
Old Man Yells At Cloud stuff and it's sad to see someone so prolific in film
(oh wait, CINEMA, excuse me) say something so needlessly elitist. It didn't
even need to be said.

edit: Sorry it was even more obstinate

"VIDEO GAMES CAN NEVER BE ART"

[https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-
ne...](https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art)

~~~
Grue3
Ebert was right, if talking specifically about AAA games, which is what Marvel
flicks are an equivalent of. "Shoot a bunch of guys with more realistic
graphics than ever!" Hard to argue this is art.

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calyth2018
I disagree, at least at the matter of degree.

Scorsese said "[f]or me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my
friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was
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."

The paradoxical nature has been there between Thor and Loki, for example. Or
Thanos and Gamorra.

The most revelatory Marvel movie was Captain America the Winter Soldier.

"Steve Rogers: The Future? How could it know? [Sitwell laughs] Jasper Sitwell:
How could it not? The 21st century is a digital book. Zola taught HYDRA how to
read it. [Steve and Natasha look at him in confusion] Jasper Sitwell: Your
bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your
damn SAT scores. Zola’s algorithm evaluates peoples’ past to predict their
future. Steve Rogers: And what then? Jasper Sitwell: Oh, my God. Pierce is
going to kill me. Steve Rogers: What then?! Jasper Sitwell: Then the Insight
Helicarriers scratch people off the list. A few millions at a time."

Coincidence or intentional, the fact that they kept that plot line after
Snowden, that took balls. IIRC a lot of films around 2001 re-shot in respect
of 9/11, and they could have re-shoot if they wanted to avoid it.

I can agree that these aren't the forefront of most Marvel plots. But I can
think of far more movies that I'd accuse as not-cinema before I'd go after
Marvel.

~~~
arrakeen
so tell me exactly what revelation that scene made you have about yourself or
the human condition? or what complex emotion that you have no words to
describe did it evoke? these are a few things that film-as-art strives for.

it's ok to like these movies, taste is entirely subjective. but just because
you really like something doesn't mean you can declare it to be something that
many, many people have been spent decades determining the criteria by which it
is judged

~~~
krapp
> but just because you really like something doesn't mean you can declare it
> to be something that many, many people have been spent decades determining
> the criteria by which it is judged

Please provide us with the entire canonical list of objective criteria by
which film is determined to be art. I can only assume from this statement and
its confidence that there is such a list, and that it is universally agreed
upon. After all, it's not as if "art" is a broad and deeply subjective
category, even when applied to the medium of film.

Because, of the two criteria you've provided, I could name plenty of films
commonly considered "art" which didn't evoke either a revelation or a complex
emotion which I couldn't describe.

------
chirau
What Scorsese forgot to say was, "And that's OK."

Do they need to be? No. His concern is that they have creeped into the
territory of expression using dollars and suffocated that market, which, to be
fair is a legit concern.

------
plorkyeran
Framing an argument as "X is not Y" is a great way to ensure that everyone
ignores all your points in favor of arguing over the definition of Y. I think
that there's fairly obviously a fundamental difference in nature between a
typical Marvel movie and a typical Hitchcock movie, but framing it as "Marvel
Movies Aren't Cinema" just leads to an argument over definitions rather than
any meaningful discussion.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
What is really bad about MCU is that it displaced other movies from the big
budget sci-fi niche. For every Ad Astra or Gravity we have 5 comic book films.

------
rammy1234
Difference lies in taking risk. Lot of money and lot of people are depended on
a movie business. No one wants to lose this for a individual soulful movie.

All kinds of movie can co-exist only if rules are not same for all kinds of
movie.

If studios figure out , what they are, everyone can live happily ever after.
Great opinion.

------
Frondo
These, and most movies, are business products of the movie industry. He's
talking about something different, works of art, and the movie _industry_
isn't funding those much at all...because it's a business sector for making
money.

~~~
thrower123
And Marvel movies are money printing machines. Aside from the forgettable Ed
Norton Hulk movie, way back at the dawn of the era, they have all more than
doubled up their budgets. It's reached the point where anything associated
with the MCU will make a half billion at the box office, no sweat.

This kind of thing is all you see at the movie theater these days though. When
there's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney movies out
at the same time, that pretty much monopolizes all the screens at my local
AMC. Except for the Oscar bait season that we are rolling into now, you have
to go to Netflix or Amazon to find more adventurous mid-budget movies.

~~~
catalogia
> _When there 's a Marvel movie, a Star Wars movie, and two or three Disney
> movies_

Rephrased: _" four or five Disney movies."_ Both the Star Wars and Marvel
franchises are owned by Disney. 20 years ago I would have told you that Disney
was on it's way to being a has-been. Don't bet against the mouse...

~~~
Porthos9K
There's nothing wrong with Disney or the entertainment industries as a whole
(movies, music, games, books) that can't be fixed with a sustained campaign of
old-school antitrust enforcement in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt.

------
40acres
Art is subjective. I get Scorsese's point and in many ways agree. In regards
to risk -- superhero movies have few. The plot is very structured and a
substantial part of the plot is adapted.

------
jerome-jh
Those blockbusters are so boring that only the sound, which is very loud,
keeps me awake.

That said, the last I saw was Transformers (first one).

~~~
arrakeen
oddly enough, the first transformers movie was one of two films i've fallen
asleep to in the theater

------
Erwin
My own resentment with superhero movies started with "The Avengers" (2012).
Joss Whedon made the excellent space adventure Firefly and the even better
"Dollhouse". Both series were intriguing, leaving you something to think
about.

"Joker" was good however, and "Black Panther" was fun (there may be a few
others I haven't seen).

------
jeffdavis
"the gradual but steady elimination of risk"

This isn't limited to movies. Economic stimulus is ever-present, eliminating
the business cycle and creative destruction. Our modern conception of politics
(at least before Trump was elected) was to be boring and risk-free, moving
along the same paths even if a course correction might make more sense.

And as for personal safety, we are amazingly safe, but terribly frightened (I
assume becasue we lost all calibration for danger).

As for life in general, everyone seems compelled to go to college because it's
the safe life plan.

I'm not suggesting that we give up the gains we've made. But I can't help but
wonder what we've lost in terms of true creativity and freedom.

------
uwagar
superhero movies are generally liked by capitalist types as it tick boxes the
right things. good wins over bad, you work hard you succeed, and when you
succeed you get all the good things. + very poor treatment of death, failure
and loss. revelation and surprise are indeed missing. there are many movies
that i cherish for just one scene eg., the survival scene in dersu uzala,
senate hearing scene in scorsese's aviator when hughes says 'thats what i do'.
these moments make me pause the movie and contemplate and play it back again
etc which is easier to do on the smaller screen at home though ;)

i disagree that all movies are for the big screen. star wars yes, a jane
austen drama? come on. superhero movies work well on the big screen or as he
puts it audio-visual entertainment especially without audience interaction. a
game would work on super small screens but not a movie. although people are
putting up with anything on long commutes.

------
echelon
"We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by Outline"

Does anyone know how this service works? Do they leverage robot accounts that
fetch non-paywalled copies of the articles and then rehost them?

As an aside, I'm really torn.

Yes, I could pay for this content. But it appeared in my social media stream
at the opportunity cost of some other interesting but free content that could
(should?) have taken its place.

Paid content slipped into the stream. In a way, it's a kind of noise.

I'm not going to pay for 10 different news websites, and thus I will pay for
no news websites. It's the same situation I'm about to find myself in for
movie and tv streaming.

~~~
harryh
Psssst. Create a 2nd "Person" in Google Chrome and turn off JavaScript for
that profile.

~~~
austhrow743
I just stop the page from loading after it finishes with the content.

~~~
1996
Best use of the stop button ever.

I also "discovered" that "trick" after some websites had the balls to put some
kind of block IN FRONT of the content AFTER loading it.

We live in a world were pages are larger (stop the down early! hit stop!) to
purposefully remove features.

I feel sad some people think adding such "features" is a good use of their
limited time on this earth.

------
MagnumPIG
I can scarcely believe the level of elitism I'm seeing here.

Guess what: Most art is garbage. Scorsese here is complaining that the movies
we're seeing are the "bad" ones, but if we just went to see his preferred kind
of movies (ie totally new and unexpected), most of it would be infuriatingly
bad.

So yeah, we watch predictable, samey movies because we know they will at least
be watchable. Because we're not artists and it's not on us to move the medium
forward.

~~~
civilian
I disagree, but I think I mainly put the agency on film producers / investors,
and not on viewers. Super hero movies tend to be either sequels or in a
series, and producers have recognized that these are low-risk, pretty decent
guarantees of a good movie. So they've been highly motivated in cashing out
that trend.

In the 00's and 90s we had a lot more variety, but the movies also had more
variance in their investment return.

For the last few years I've only been watching superhero movies when they hit
netflix or when I'm on a plane, and I think there's a growing trend of people
being tired of superhero movies.

And I'd say that there are times when a predictable superhero movie is great.
But the best movies probably won't be marvel ones.

[Hypocrisy disclaimer, one of my top 3 favorite movies is The Dark Knight, and
IDK if that qualifies as a superhero movie.]

~~~
erttyu_erghhg
I would say no — Nolan reinvented the super hero film with his Batman movies.
And it wasn’t to turn them into theme-ride paydays. He may be partly
responsible for the current mono movie that’s been running for years but only
because he breathed new life into comic book cinema.

~~~
catalogia
I'd sooner credit Sam Raimi's _Spider-Man_ with starting the modern big-budget
superhero movie trend. That movie beat Harry Potter's box office record. It
was a big hit and I think it proved the concept.

------
diminoten
Do we benefit from drawing lines between "cinema" and... whatever you might
call a Marvel film? What do we call a Marvel film, if not "cinema"?

Further, why isn't anything at risk? Infinity War got about as close to real
risk as any MCU film has so far, and I think if Mr. Scorsese watched that film
he'd realize it's actually possible to create emotional drama within the
context of a "Marvel Movie".

Also, are we _really_ drawing the line arbitrarily at Marvel specifically?
Where does "Joker" fit? Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Wonderwoman, 300, Scott
Pilgrim, V for Vendetta? What about undeniably "Marvel" films like Logan, and
Into the Spiderverse? Do we dismiss all media sourced from the pages of
comics, or just the MCU specifically?

I ask both to make a rhetorical point, and because I genuinely don't
understand. Mr. Scorsese writes this opinion piece like there's a shared
understanding of what a "Marvel movie" is, but I don't know that there is such
an understanding.

~~~
adimitrov
I do not think you understood his point. It's not about comics. It could as
well be monster flicks or romcoms or what have you. The genre, in fact, the
entire content, is irrelevant to his point. It's about the creative process
that underlies the making of the movie. Let's make a technical analogy.

There's a profound difference in products made by the vision of a single
person or maybe two co-founders, and the kind of products that are design-by-
committee in big enterprises. The first kind takes risks, explores new ideas,
disrupts the industry. The second kind is usually made to fit a predetermined
market niche. It exploits market analysis, and usually leverages some existing
tech in order to quickly deliver RoI.

And that's what Marvel movies are. They're soulless, because no soul has
written or directed them. Every detail has been polished and considered by
several other people. But it's just Marvel, it's all franchise movies. It
didn't even start with Marvel. It's just the most successful and most
prominent example.

~~~
jmcqk6
It's bullshit to say that only individuals can makes things "with soul." Why
is having multiple people polishing and examining details a weakness?

Marvel did disrupt the industry when the MCU came out. Look at how many
cinematic universes have been attempted now. The MCU is the largest and most
successful.

This is just pretension, not insight.

~~~
Bud
The fact that your argument is that Marvel "disrupted the industry" proves
Marty's point better than he ever could have.

