Old Man Yells At Cloud (Marvel edition)

So Martin Scorsese said that the Marvel movies are “not cinema” and the internet kind of blew up because it is inherently polarizing, and the possibility that Scorsese is both one of our most talented living directors and also wrong about this particular subject is not particularly fun discourse for a lot of people on the internet, which often demands that only one take be right and correct. That said, I am now going to present to you the one take on this particular subject that is right and correct.

What Scorsese here is saying is the old standard of “that’s not art.” He says “cinema” instead of “art,” but that’s what he means. When he likens Marvel movies to theme parks, the point of such a comparison is invariably to dismiss the artistic merit of the works in question. I note that this is essentially the same comparison Roger Ebert made when he famously argued that video games weren’t art, which made Penny Arcade, among others, get all angry and stuff. Ebert was wildly wrong, but that didn’t make him one of the greatest critics in film history, because he was one. Sometimes people who are really good at things get something wrong. Especially this happens when the person who is really good at something is in the twilight of their career and their lived experience can sometimes blind them to possibilities outside of that experience. (Martin Scorsese is 76, incidentally.)

Are the Marvel films art? I go here by the Scott McCloud definition of “art,” wherein any creative expression that isn’t rooted in the survival or mating instincts is by definition “art,” because honestly it’s the only useful definition of “art” that I have ever found. It is possible for creative expression to be sublimated into the survival or mating instinct, of course (most marketing, for example, is creative but it’s also only extant because people need to keep a roof over their head). I don’t think the Marvel movies sink to that level at all, though, simply because of the amount of effort and love that goes into them. Granted, not everybody who works on a Marvel film is dedicated to the ideas in them. (Gwyneth Paltrow in particular has been open about her strictly mercenary reasons for working in the Marvel movies and that she doesn’t give two shits about them, which has led a lot of anti-populist film writers to celebrate somebody whose actual reason for making movies is to enrich herself and stay culturally relevant in order to give her hokum-peddling “wellness” empire more power. Basically my point here is that Gwyneth Paltrow is a bad person and if you find yourself celebrating her reasons for doing anything maybe give it a second think-over.)

But film has always been a commercially defined artistic endeavour. It’s too expensive not to be, outside of the true indie renegades who manage to shoot a 16mm gritty whatever on their spare time and never care about the money (which excludes most well-known “independent” directors who in fact live and die by whatever financial success their movies achieve, since it is only that which allows them to make more movies). There are always going to be people on any set who are just there to do the work and get paid. Martin Scorsese does passion projects; Martin Scorsese’s gaffer is paying down his mortgage by making sure people don’t get electrocuted. C’est la vie.

This is emphasized, I might add, by The Band Wagon, which I mention because it is one of the 85 films Martin Scorsese lists in his must-see films list/”films to see before you die” list/”instant film school” list/(it’s been named a lot of things). Now, I don’t take issue with Scorsese liking The Band Wagon, because it’s a fantastic film, one of the best musicals ever made, and definitely a film you should see if you haven’t. But it is also a celebration of populism. The entire film is about Fred Astaire starring in an artistic play that is unwatchable and saving it by turning it into a popular revue – and all of this in a genre which was explicitly predicated on being popular, unchallenging mass entertainment and frequently produced mediocre dreck as often as not. There’s a reason The Band Wagon and An American in Paris are on the list and, say, Navy Blues or It’s Always Fair Weather aren’t.

All of this is to say that Marvel films are art – but like musicals, there’s good ones and bad ones and a whole lot of mediocre ones. Logan is definitely great art. I’d put the first two Captain America films in the “great art” category as well, along with Black Panther. After that there’s a reasonable number of pretty good ones that do well by their larger themes (both Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thor: Ragnarok, you can guess them easily enough), a couple of really great action blockbusters (and it is worth remembering that Scorsese has never particularly liked action films and has always tended to discount them as critically skillful fare) and a lot of passable entertainments and a few mediocre and bad ones. The best ones do tend to stand alone as individual films more than as chapters of a whole, but that’s a pretty banal observation to make about this genre anyway.

In short: either Scorsese was wrong to assert that the Marvel films aren’t art or he was wrong to imply that they’re uniformly bad art. But he’s still a master filmmaker and anybody claiming the Marvel movies are uniformly great is just being silly. But he’s still wrong.

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