The A.V. Club Actually Goes There

Yesterday, the AV Club’s Ray Greene posted a think piece, titled “Hey kids, get off Marty Scorsese's lawn,” that needs to be read to be believed.

It tackles the tired Scorsese vs Marvel debate. However, this piece should have been printed in 2019, which is when Marvel movies were still relevant. In 2023? The high has faded away, even MCU fans can agree with that.

Green states that, despite numerous box-office “flops,” Scorsese “continues to create and fail”. He calls “The Irishman” a “snorefest” (despite linking to an A- review from his site). Green also trots out the box-office numbers for Scorsese’s 1977 bomb “New York, New York,” as if that has anything to do with the comic book debate.

"Scorcese dreams of an era that never was" is another dubious claim. Green doesn’t seem to comprehend that there actually was a time when movies were being made for adults.

However, the big kicker for me is Green’s conclusion which look at a future where Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” will be more culturally relevant than either “Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull”:

Scorsese is 80 years old, and it galls him to know that the Marvel films through Avengers: Endgame represent a signature cultural event in the cinema of our time. When Marty is gone, and an entire body of work steeped in the belief that toxic masculinity is the organizing principle of the cosmos is reassessed, it will be interesting to see if his highly personal oeuvre can stake the same claim.

When Scorsese started the “Marvel is not cinema” debate in October 2019, it was music to my ears. It was a long time coming. A universally loved and legendary filmmaker like Scorsese finally came out against Marvel and superhero culture, causing a domino effect, as Francis Ford Coppola followed suit, with many more to follow soon after. It took someone of Scorsese’s ilk to finally shake things up.

When all is said and done, and film historians start to look back at the 2010s, many years from now, they will notice that corporate greed manifestly overpowered risk-taking at the movies. This all came at a time when movie audiences chose hibernation at home. And yet, Marvel found a way to create a record-breaking movie formula.

But the monopolization of cinema in recent years also led the media to tell us that superhero epics mattered in ways they should have never been credited for. As Bilge Ebiri so eloquently stated in his excellent think-piece on Scorsese/Marvel:

There is a belief, parroted by fans and filmmakers and corporate honchos alike, that superhero epics and space-war movies and adventure fantasies matter in ways they never quite mattered before.

And so, as our world has become increasingly more complicated and unsettling, audiences are being fed fast food at the movies. The films we consume have become even more infantilized. It took a legendary voice like Scorsese’s to wake people up from their slumbers.

The movement Scorsese sparked ended up bringing filmmakers out of their shells. These last five years, other notable directors have come out against superhero movies. This is just a small sampling: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Fincher, Denis Villeneuve, Bong Joon-ho, Lucrecia Martel, David Cronenberg, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, David Fincher, Paul Verhoeven, Terry Gilliam, James Cameron Ridley Scott, James Gray, Jane Campion, Sean Baker, James Mangold, Martin McDonagh, Luc Besson, William Friedkin, Ken Loach, Oliver Stone and John Woo.