For quite a few film buffs, Martin Scorsese is the ultimate authority on all things screen, MrTin Scorsese – father of masterpieces from “Taxi Driver” (1976) to “The Good Guys” (1990) and quite a few other brilliants before, between and after them. Scorsese’s influence also spilled over outside the genres he usually dealt with (a lot of gangster films, but not only) – so, for example, Todd Phillips’ Joker from 2019 is a kind of variation on the themes of “Taxi Driver” and ” The King of Comedy” (1982), when from the first he mainly borrows the murky New York atmosphere and from the second really significant storylines (and also Robert De Niro, only this time on the other side of the gun).
However, in recent years, Scorsese has also gained quite a few enemies when he was asked in an interview with the British film magazine Empire “Have you ever seen the Marvel movies?”. His answer was negative, to say the least. “I don’t see them,” said Scorsese, “I tried, but it’s not cinema. Honestly, as well made as they are, with actors doing their best under the circumstances, they remind me more of an amusement park. This is not a cinema of humans trying to convey emotional and psychological experiences to another human being.” Did you hear that? These were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hearts of Marvel- and classic-cinema-lovers alike (and there is quite a bit of overlap between the two) that were broken into pieces.
But why are we returning to this age-old (in Internet-time terms) debate? Because of an anti-Scorsese article in particular, published by Sean Iger on The Critic website in which he reviews the filmography of Martin Scorsese – and provoked no less angry reactions himself. About “Streets of Fury” (1973) Egan said the film was “tastelessly staged”, the classic “Taxi Driver” he called “lacking momentum and message” and “New York, New York” (1977) he gave the title “soap opera”. Egan also says that there is a lot of similarity between the movie “Casino” from 1995 and the movie “The Irishman” from 2019, including the cast of actors (did you see what that is?! Who would have thought that the same director would prefer to work with actors he got along with in the past!) and that in the latter movie he simply “stayed in the same room and moved the furniture.”
Egan is very dedicated to provocation: the only time in the article where he compliments Scorsese, he insults “The Godfather” in the same breath by saying that “The Good Guys” far surpassed him. But after a methodical slaughter of the filmography, he sighs with the argument “Scorsese came out against the Marvel Cinematic Universe, calling it ‘sensational and empty’. In fact, thought and rationalism are the driving force of all these films. In ‘Captain America: Civil War’, the tendency of The idea of taking the law into one’s own hands is under in-depth investigation… Such solipsism shows that the one who was the embodiment of the ‘New Hollywood’ has become old-fashioned and institutionalized.” The article drew quite a few responses, including one from director Guillermo del Toro, who was quick to defend Scorsese’s good name in a long Twitter thread – and along the way also probably brought most of his readers to Egan’s article, but that’s another matter.
But did Scorsese really kill the Marvel movies that much? The answer is complex. His original statement caused an uproar not only among loyal Marvel fans, but also, unusually, Among the stars and directors participating in those films, including Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Holland and James Gunn. It seems that only Kevin Smith, the original representative of the geek culture in the Hollywood underground, was not moved and said that “people should not be surprised that this is his opinion”, of course already a month after that interview with Empire, the celebrated director published a clarification article in the New York Times.
“Some people took my answer as an insult, or as evidence of hostility towards Marvel on my part. If someone chooses to interpret my words that way, there is nothing I can do to prevent it,” he wrote. Scorsese explained in the text that as he matured as a person and as a creator, he developed a certain taste and certain definitions of what cinema is, and these films are simply not to his taste. He adds and says that if he had been younger he probably would have been more connected to this type of film and perhaps even wanted to make one, and even makes a flattering comparison to Hitchcock: “Hitchcock was also a kind of amusement park, each of his films was an event in itself “.
So what more can you ask of him? And besides, Scorsese’s importance as a director doesn’t mean that everything he says is sacred (and Scorsese himself clearly doesn’t think so of himself either), so why should people who enjoy the MCU so much care about the knowledge of a 79-year-old film director? Perhaps because this director himself worked for most of his career in the crime film genre, which was also on the one hand very popular and on the other hand had to fight for its place as “serious cinema”.
The genre has come a long way since the first crime film (“The Black Hand” from 1906), through shaping the rules of the genre in the 1930s and 1940s with films such as “Public Enemy” and “Scarface” (the original, from 1932), where the gangster is presented as talkative, violent and immoral – partly because of strict laws that forbade the portrayal of criminals in a positive way (by the way, at the same time as a severe code that was also applied to comic gangs), canonization as quality cinema in the 70s, with masterpieces such as “The Godfather ” And finally breaking the heavy conventions of those serious crime films to the violent, immersive and fun postmodernism of Quentin Tarantino in “Storage Dogs” and “Cheap Literature”. If today, after completing this round, it can be said that the genre has “stabilized” and uses all the tools it has accumulated throughout its history – thenComic books and superheroes are still far from their final stage.
Only recently, after more than fifty years of failures, Marvel managed to dictate the rules for superhero movies and created an unprecedentedly successful model that everyone tries to emulate. andWhen Egan claims that “Captain America: Civil War” forces the viewer to ask hard questions, he blithely ignores the fact that at the end of that film, everything is revealed to be a plot by one villain who conflicted between the superheroes, making all the hard questions redundant, in retrospect, and establishing again The fundamental law of the genre: good and bad. He probably doesn’t mention a more complex comic book movie like “Joker” – because then he had no choice but to draw a direct genetic line to Scorsese.
In the end both sides are right. Scorsese can dislike superhero movies and say that for him they are an amusement park (which is not a bad thing, but he has the right not to want to go to an amusement park). Egan is also right when he says that there are complex superhero movies, he just doesn’t pick the right examples. And the one who is most right, as usual, is Kevin Smith, who wondered in amazement: “You ask the man who created ‘The Good Guys’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ what he thinks about Spider-Man, what do you think he will answer?”. You already admire the most successful franchise in the world. Why do you need to get permission from Martin Fucking Scorsese as well?