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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’

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.

anongraddebt 7y ago
I think a better way for him to make the argument is that we should all try and push ourselves a little bit. I share your sentiment. I use enough mental energy during the day that often it's hard to choose something that isn't passive. There have been a couple times where I've pushed myself to read a great work of literature. Something within the canon. My preference is to read cheap, dime store crime novels from authors like Kendra Elliot. I decided to tackle War and Peace (had I been less ambitious, I could have chosen an easier and shorter Tolstoy novel, or something from mid-20th century). I hacked away at it for months on end, and I will forever be grateful for that. There are things I learned about myself, descriptions of people and places, and ideas about the world that will stay with me till I die. There is an order-of-magnitude difference between the novels I read to relax and ones like War and Peace. People should absolutely fill their time with the things they find dear and refreshing. This is compatible with the idea that we should try and push ourselves a bit too, if only for our own sake.
catalogia 7y ago
Marvel movies are very low brow, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of my favorite movies are low brow, like Jackass 3D, Idiocracy, and Return of the Living Dead. But there are different sorts of low-brow, obviously. With some sorts of low-brow entertainment, no fans will be upset when somebody like Scorsese says "That's not cinema." Because they know it, and they're okay with it. Everybody knows Jackass 3D is low brow, and as the sort of person who enjoys it, hearing that said would just make me wonder why somebody was bothering to state the obvious. I'm not sure if the problem originates with the MCU itself or the MCU fans, but one way or the other the fans seem to take it very seriously and get very cross when somebody voices their dislike of it. Before Scorsese started catching flak for it, Pewdiepie similarly voiced his dislike of MCU and got a lot of very similar angry backlash. (I think the contrast between Scorsese and Pewdiepie is amusing.) I think maybe part of the problem is the MCU is power fantasy media, where the audience frequently insert themselves into the role of one of the super heroes. Perhaps this involves their ego whenever somebody criticizes that character by way of criticizing the franchise. So perhaps in a way, when somebody insults the MCU they're effectively insulting MCU fans. That's just me spitballing though.
- krapp 7y ago
  The MCU films are based on comic book properties that many people have been fans of for decades, they have a long-term emotional investment in these characters and their storylines. It's got nothing to do with the MCU being "power fantasy" media - you see the exact same phenomenon in fans of Star Wars Star Trek or sports teams. Also, there is the fact that most people who vocally dislike the MCU, superhero films or comic book media in general, tend to do so in a way that derides the intellect or tastes of the fans. When a lot of the criticisms of a genre amount to backhanded insults of the people who like that genre, people can get sensitive about it. I think a lot of people find them particularly childish because of the funny costumes and superpowers and their origin in comic books which a lot of people still don't take seriously.
RHSeeger 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  > Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million. Does money define art?
  - twopens 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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).
baddox 7y ago
I agree with your overall point, but your analogy doesn’t work that well for me. The Marvel movies (particularly the biggest of them) are insanely intricate and detailed and could only be created by both a huge team of talented performers, craftspeople, and technical experts, and a (probably smaller) executive team executing on a vision. I still agree that there’s a difference in genre between, say, Avengers: Infinity War and Goodfellas, and I don’t know how to articulate precisely the difference, but I’m certain that the difference is not that the latter requires more talent or contains more details that reward multiple viewings.
- GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  Fair, but that wasn’t the distinction I was trying to make. The point is, films can have legitimately different purposes, just as things you hang on the wall can. I hesitate to say that one of those purposes is higher than all the others, but that does seem to be the judgment the auteurs are making. The effort that went into them can be (not always — but sometimes) orthogonal to that.
  - baddox 7y ago
    That’s the point I was trying to make: that the difference between Scorsese’s classics and Marvel blockbusters doesn’t seem to be anything remotely objective (or even subjectively quantifiable) like “level of talent required” or “amount of detail.”
jameslk 7y ago
This comment seems to miss the point. It's fine if you like the superhero genre and other highly produced films. The issue he's bringing up is that this has taken over and reduced the incentive for other types of films, director-driven "cinema" instead of studio-driven cash cows, to be shown in theaters.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  He's kinda late to the party decrying these sort of flicks now. You could make the same criticism movies that came out a decade ago, like Armageddon, Independence Day, Transformers, etc.
  - theklr 7y ago
    Independence Day was during the “golden era” of modern film. They’re was a huge range of indie to blockbusters you could see. Transformers (2007) was with the beginnings of the MCU and started this issue. The other side is also Disney leveraging their power over theaters with releases, but sure...

anongraddebt 7y ago

I think a better way for him to make the argument is that we should all try and push ourselves a little bit. I share your sentiment. I use enough mental energy during the day that often it's hard to choose something that isn't passive. There have been a couple times where I've pushed myself to read a great work of literature. Something within the canon. My preference is to read cheap, dime store crime novels from authors like Kendra Elliot. I decided to tackle War and Peace (had I been less ambitious, I could have chosen an easier and shorter Tolstoy novel, or something from mid-20th century). I hacked away at it for months on end, and I will forever be grateful for that. There are things I learned about myself, descriptions of people and places, and ideas about the world that will stay with me till I die. There is an order-of-magnitude difference between the novels I read to relax and ones like War and Peace. People should absolutely fill their time with the things they find dear and refreshing. This is compatible with the idea that we should try and push ourselves a bit too, if only for our own sake.

catalogia 7y ago

Marvel movies are very low brow, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of my favorite movies are low brow, like Jackass 3D, Idiocracy, and Return of the Living Dead. But there are different sorts of low-brow, obviously. With some sorts of low-brow entertainment, no fans will be upset when somebody like Scorsese says "That's not cinema." Because they know it, and they're okay with it. Everybody knows Jackass 3D is low brow, and as the sort of person who enjoys it, hearing that said would just make me wonder why somebody was bothering to state the obvious. I'm not sure if the problem originates with the MCU itself or the MCU fans, but one way or the other the fans seem to take it very seriously and get very cross when somebody voices their dislike of it. Before Scorsese started catching flak for it, Pewdiepie similarly voiced his dislike of MCU and got a lot of very similar angry backlash. (I think the contrast between Scorsese and Pewdiepie is amusing.) I think maybe part of the problem is the MCU is power fantasy media, where the audience frequently insert themselves into the role of one of the super heroes. Perhaps this involves their ego whenever somebody criticizes that character by way of criticizing the franchise. So perhaps in a way, when somebody insults the MCU they're effectively insulting MCU fans. That's just me spitballing though.

krapp 7y ago
The MCU films are based on comic book properties that many people have been fans of for decades, they have a long-term emotional investment in these characters and their storylines. It's got nothing to do with the MCU being "power fantasy" media - you see the exact same phenomenon in fans of Star Wars Star Trek or sports teams. Also, there is the fact that most people who vocally dislike the MCU, superhero films or comic book media in general, tend to do so in a way that derides the intellect or tastes of the fans. When a lot of the criticisms of a genre amount to backhanded insults of the people who like that genre, people can get sensitive about it. I think a lot of people find them particularly childish because of the funny costumes and superpowers and their origin in comic books which a lot of people still don't take seriously.

RHSeeger 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
> Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million. Does money define art?
- twopens 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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).

baddox 7y ago

I agree with your overall point, but your analogy doesn’t work that well for me. The Marvel movies (particularly the biggest of them) are insanely intricate and detailed and could only be created by both a huge team of talented performers, craftspeople, and technical experts, and a (probably smaller) executive team executing on a vision. I still agree that there’s a difference in genre between, say, Avengers: Infinity War and Goodfellas, and I don’t know how to articulate precisely the difference, but I’m certain that the difference is not that the latter requires more talent or contains more details that reward multiple viewings.

GlenTheMachine 7y ago
Fair, but that wasn’t the distinction I was trying to make. The point is, films can have legitimately different purposes, just as things you hang on the wall can. I hesitate to say that one of those purposes is higher than all the others, but that does seem to be the judgment the auteurs are making. The effort that went into them can be (not always — but sometimes) orthogonal to that.
- baddox 7y ago
  That’s the point I was trying to make: that the difference between Scorsese’s classics and Marvel blockbusters doesn’t seem to be anything remotely objective (or even subjectively quantifiable) like “level of talent required” or “amount of detail.”

jameslk 7y ago

This comment seems to miss the point. It's fine if you like the superhero genre and other highly produced films. The issue he's bringing up is that this has taken over and reduced the incentive for other types of films, director-driven "cinema" instead of studio-driven cash cows, to be shown in theaters.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
He's kinda late to the party decrying these sort of flicks now. You could make the same criticism movies that came out a decade ago, like Armageddon, Independence Day, Transformers, etc.
- theklr 7y ago
  Independence Day was during the “golden era” of modern film. They’re was a huge range of indie to blockbusters you could see. Transformers (2007) was with the beginnings of the MCU and started this issue. The other side is also Disney leveraging their power over theaters with releases, but sure...