Theme Parks
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between October 2, 2021 and October 23, 2021. It was composed of 1,972 words across 44 tweets.
In an interview published by Empire Magazine on July 11, 2019, great American filmmaker Martin Scorsese described the Marvel Cinematic Universe as "not cinema."
And no one, on the entire Internet, has mentioned Scorsese's name for any other reason ever since!
Those two words, out of context, have come to position Scorsese at odds with superheroes, and therefore the popular tastes of the public. "Not cinema" can be interpreted broadly, and has been.
Is Scorsese an out-of-touch snob? Does he really feel this way about superhero movies?
Before this goes any further, here's the relevant clip from the Empire interview. The complete context of Scorsese's remarks is necessary to give them a fair hearing, and to unpack them fully.
"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."
The first important thing here is, there is no reason to interpret what he means by "cinema." On this point, he clarifies his meaning immediately:
"It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."
Divorcing his use of the word "cinema" from this definition invites anyone, informed or otherwise, to substitute whatever definition they want--typically in order to more easily argue against him. But any argument on this point must engage with Scorsese's definition specifically.
What does invite interpretation (and productively so) is his use of the term "theme parks." It's important to recognize here that he doesn't say theme parks are bad--just that, by his definition, theme parks are more descriptive of the Marvel mode of moviemaking than cinema is.
Theme parks are not designed to be a soulful, emotionally transformative experience. You get a momentary thrill, over as soon as it begins, that primes you to get right back in line for the next one. The park tends to be a closed circle whose rides sprawl out in all directions.
If this sounds anything like the MCU, it should. Each Marvel movie is not a complete composition unto itself. It isn't designed to end; its characters rarely undergo substantial changes. It's designed to keep you in the park as long as possible, always eager for the next ride.
This cannot be emphasized enough: there's nothing wrong with theme parks. There is nothing wrong with anyone who enjoys them. Likening a certain kind of entertainment to a theme park is not the implicit insult that a large chunk of the Marvel fanbase seems to think that it is.
Theme parks are not for everybody, and Scorsese's remarks imply that they're not for him. (As a frail, asthmatic kid who spent much of his childhood in the moviehouse, it isn't difficult to see why he might not have developed a taste for them.) That's, like, his opinion, man.
Our entertainment diet, like any other diet, thrives on moderation. It's unhealthy to subsist on theme parks alone, just as it's unhealthy to eat only candy.
Which brings this topic to the next necessary point: if Marvel movies are theme parks rather than cinema, what is cinema?
It's tempting to trot out the usual list of Great Films--your Citizen Kanes, your Vertigos, your Casablancas. It's even tempting to look at Scorsese's own list of canonized masterpieces. (Goodfellas seems to be the one everyone is familiar with, or at least they think they are.)
Crucially, Empire wasn't asking Scorsese what he thought about superhero movies. They were asking him specifically about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This part came on the heels of Scorsese waxing enthusiastic about everything from Midsommar to Yasujiro Ozu to Fawlty Towers.
I do not know what Scorsese thinks of SUPERMAN. He has spoken favorably about Batman (Burton, 1989) and Spider-Man (Raimi, 2002), so he isn't opposed to superheroes across the board. If he dislikes Marvel movies because they aren't cinema, then these other movies must be.
What's different? Batman and Spider-Man both wear the signature styles of their directors on their sleeves. Their characters go on a journey and are changed by the process. Though both of them certainly invite sequels, they are not expressly built to launch sequels and spinoffs.
By contrast, consider Tony Stark in the first Iron Man (Favreau, 2008). The movie telegraphs that he has come to regret his involvement and lack of accountability in the arms industry, but does he really? By the end of the movie, he's back to where he started, if not worse.
It would be one thing if the movie were a comment on the cyclical nature of self-improvement and failure, but it never really reckons with it. In fact, most Marvel movies follow this pattern. (Compare their Spider-Man to the one Raimi came up with.) This is a feature, not a bug.
This mode of storytelling is purposely unsatisfying--promising important character developments, then withholding them for the next episode, endlessly kicking the can down the road. A series of in-the-moment thrills that culminate in very little in the end. A theme park.
Being spread across several movies also means that one movie may set up its characters for something portentous, only for it to be abruptly cancelled to make room for new business in the next movie. The wandering diaspora at the end of Thor: Ragnarok (Waititi, 2017), for example.
Batman and Spider-Man tell complete stories and have singular identities. They revel in their superhero-ness, their genre trappings. Burton lavishes Batman with an operatic hyperreality, while Raimi injects Spider-Man with his sweetness, dark humor, and kinetic intensity.
Marvel submerges its directors. They're not on hand to provide an artistic stamp--to communicate something singular to those of us in the audience. They're there to take custody for a limited time, then pass it on when they're done. This is often referred to as the "house style."
One thing Marvel gets praised for, which should by all rights be interpreted as a backhanded compliment, is the way it folds in the tropes and cliches of other genres. Captain America: Winter Soldier (Russo and Russo, 2014), for example, is likened to 1970s paranoid thrillers.
Setting aside that this is essentially praising superhero movies for being less like superhero movies, Marvel is getting credit for appropriating surface level elements of rich, challenging movies from yesteryear. For serving up superficially similar versions of better
movies.
It has been argued that perhaps the stylistic pretensions of Marvel movies will whet people's appetite for the real thing--that Winter Soldier will interest them in Three Days of the Condor (Pollack, 1975) or that Shang-Chi (Cretton, 2021) will for Eastern martial arts cinema.
But the World Showcase at Epcot is not designed to get people to visit China or France. A theme park is not designed to do anything other than keep people coming back as often as possible. Theme parks are generally for people who aren't interested in visiting places for real.
This, too, is a feature, not a bug. You can be a traveler--go to real places, interact with the people there, eat the food, feel the air. Or be a tourist, go to a theme park, see the way the theme park imitates those faraway places in a safer, easier-to-consume environment.
What is cinema if not a deeply felt experience, the communication of something singular between filmmakers and their audience? An artistic thumbprint, a journey with a real payoff in the end? Something that the movie has to say for itself, that isn't borrowed from other movies?
In a subsequent editorial for the New York Times, Scorsese deepened his objections:
"In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: [the] elimination of risk."
"Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist... the riskiest factor of all."
That Scorsese was willing to clarify and deepen his remarks shows impressive patience with an online commentariat largely committed to misunderstanding him. But it also highlights the stakes of the argument. The MCU isn't just a series of movies. It's a business model.
In the era of SUPERMAN, big movies like Jaws and Star Wars shared the top spots in the box office with movies of all kinds. Some filmmakers and other industry experts prognosticated a time when blockbusters would crowd out all competitors. Perhaps it felt like they already had.
Fortunately, it's not just a matter of opinion. Those prognostications can be evaluated against real tends. Following the late '70s, there was indeed a dropoff in funding for projects in the vein of The Godfather or The Conversation. But blockbusters can't be blamed entirely.
There are other factors also at fault--the high profile failure of Heaven's Gate (Cimino, 1980), for example--but the bottom line is this: nothing lasts forever. A handful of maverick filmmakers playing with big studio money could not have dominated much longer than it did.
This period of worry and upheaval isn't quite what Scorsese means. The natural transition between industry trends (from The Godfather to, say, SUPERMAN) is a far cry from the concerted effort by a single company to buy out, crowd out, or otherwise eliminate its competitors.
Just as SUPERMAN did in the late '70s, Batman debuted in 1989 alongside a mix of successful movies in other genres. Likewise with Spider-Man in 2002. Neither was part of a coordinated slate of similar movies, and neither deliberately sabotaged the chances of other movies.
But times are changing, and Disney, the parent company of Marvel, has begun clone-stamping "new" products years in advance on the release schedule, preemptively blocking off slots in movie theaters that would have gone to competing movies from other companies and genres.
Disney has also been buying up other studios and intellectual properties, cancelling their projects midway through, and pulling older titles from repertory screenings and distribution on home platforms. This, too, is a tactic to limit the presence of competitors in the market.
A present example of this is The Last Duel (Scott, 2021): a studio bought by Disney, a project in production prior to the acquisition but released after, dead on arrival. Commentators have pitched some guesses as why this movie flopped, but there's one that's factually justified.
The Last Duel, a non-franchise movie for grownups, went into wide release with an exceptionally low number of screenings per theater--in some cases, one per day, often late in the evening. It's difficult to imagine Disney giving it so little muscle without it being deliberate.
What seems to trouble Scorsese isn't just the spate of superhero films that only imitate the kind of humanity that draws him to cinema, but the shrinking range of alternatives, and the cynical business practices that are causing that to happen. It impacts his life and livelihood.
I'd imagine he feels like his contemporaries in the '70s did (Coppola, De Palma, etc.) when Jaws, Star Wars, and SUPERMAN ruled the roost. He's picturing a future in which that's all we have. But at least those were movies, with humanity at their heart. At least they were cinema.
Martin Scorsese's original interview in Empire Magazine (in which the subject of Marvel is, believe it or not, a tangential interlude) can be found here.
His follow-up editorial in the New York Times may be paywalled on your computer, but an archived version (free for all) can be found here.
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Published 3/9/2024
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