If anybody can wear the title of “legendary director” without ego, it’s Martin Scorsese. The guy has been turning out stone cold classic movies since the 1970s, from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to Goodfellas to The Wolf of Wall Street and beyond. His latest, The Irishman on Netflix, is getting praised to high heaven. The guy’s solid gold.
He’s influenced too many modern filmmakers to count. This weekend, everybody’s talking about Joker, the gritty origin story of Batman’s most famous nemesis. But Joker wouldn’t exist without Scorsese’s string of movies about disaffected big city dwellers — it takes its cues straight from Taxi Driver, and even has Robert De Niro playing the sort of smarmy talk show host his character railed against in Scorsese’s 1982 drama The King of Comedy. Joker is basically an attempt to show us what a superhero movie directed by Martin Scorsese would look like. Joker director Todd Phillips even tried to get Scorsese to come on board as a producer.
But Scorsese isn’t likely to actually direct a superhero movie himself, cool as it might be. Speaking to Empire, the director made clear he’s not wild about the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken over the movies.
"I don’t see [Marvel movies]. 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. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."
Scorsese comparing actors in the MCU to actors in theme parks? I mean, that’s still noble work, but still…ouch.
It reminds me a little of how Watchmen writer Alan Moore, a legend in the field of superhero comics, looks at the current superhero cinema boom. “ don’t mean what they used to mean,” Moore told The Guardian back in 2013. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently.”
"These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal.This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s."
And again I say ouch.
So are members of the old guard like Scorsese and Moore right? Are Marvel superhero movies — or all superhero movies — just vacuous advertisements masquerading as shallow action blockbusters?
Eh, probably not. I’m not going to say that Thor: Ragnarok is as emotionally, socially and cinematically challenging as Gangs of New York or Casino or whatever, but there’s plenty of room at the movies for good popcorn-popping fun. And Marvel has tried to stretch the formula with movies like Black Panther and even Avengers: Endgame, which is a monument to the power of long-term planning.
And then there’s something like Joker, which is stretching the form even further. Maybe superhero movies will eventually hit their limit and be unable to grow any further, but I don’t think they’ve there yet.
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I could turn this subject over all day, but Joker isn’t going to see itself. What do you all think of this?
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