Martin Scorsese is urging filmmakers to save cinema, by doubling down on his call to fight comic book movie culture.
The storied filmmaker is revisiting the topic of comic book movies in a new profile for GQ. Despite facing intense blowback from filmmakers, actors and the public for the 2019 comments he made slamming the Marvel Cinematic Universe films — he called them theme parks rather than actual cinema — Scorsese isn’t shying away from the topic.
“The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” he told GQ. “Because there are going to be generations now that think … that’s what movies are.”
GQ’s Zach Baron posited that what Scorsese was saying might already be true, and the “Killers of the Flower Moon” filmmaker agreed.
“They already think that. Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves,” Scorsese continued to the outlet. “And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. … Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Scorsese referred to movies inspired by comic books as “manufactured content” rather than cinema.
“It’s almost like AI making a film,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you?”
His forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” had been on Scorsese’s wish list for several years; it’s based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name. He called the story “a sober look at who we are as a culture.”
The film tells the true story of the murders of Osage Nation members by white settlers in the 1920s. DiCaprio originally was attached to play FBI investigator Tom White, who was sent to the Osage Nation within Oklahoma to probe the killings. The script, however, underwent a significant rewrite.
“After a certain point,” the filmmaker told Time, “I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys.”
The dramatic focus shifted from White’s investigation to the Osage and the circumstances that led to them being systematically killed with no consequences.
The character of White now is played by Jesse Plemons in a supporting role. DiCaprio stars as the husband of a Native American woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an oil-rich Osage woman, and member of a conspiracy to kill her loved ones in an effort to steal her family fortune.
Scorsese worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office from the beginning of production, consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time. On the first day of shooting, the Oscar-winning filmmaker had an elder of the nation come to set to say a prayer for the cast and crew.
They do, but no, I’m not.
There’s a difference between using Christian mythos as mythos and making a spiritual point. You pick what to pull and why, and things have meaning.
Ironically, in this context if they had made this more of an explicit heaven it’d have been less of a conscious choice (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). The framing of the afterlife, who states the existence of a divine plan, paired with the role that scene plays in the movie are all important context cues.
Again, people worked really hard to not trivialize that scene as a fantasy setup and instead charge it with meaning and a point. It’d be a shame to purposefully ignore it, whether you agree with the implied philosophical take or not.
By that logic the Thor movies are pushing a Nordic mythological agenda. Should I be concerned?
No, that’s the opposite of that logic. As… I explicitly say above.
See, people think meaning is a puzzle. “What is actually happening in such and such movie?”, but that’s not it.
Meaning is communication, it’s put together from a lot of shared cues. It’s not Picross, it’s more like a coloring book. Like I said above, Thor movies, if anything, make an explicit point of explaining how humans confused a race of aliens for gods. They were so worried about that distinction that at some point in Avengers they make Cap say “There is only one God and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that”.
Which is also a very Christian statement but not an honest statement of belief because of the way it’s presented, when it’s presented, who says it and the history of Marvel being very afraid to call Thor a “god” in media. Context cues!
In the Thor movies they explain that Hel and Valhalla are real as well. I don’t see it as any different.
The Thor movies have three different directors and a bunch of writers, they don’t “say” the same things. And I just walked through why and how they are different.
The Taika Waititi movies, which I presume are the ones you’re referring to, actively mock the gods they depict. Hel is actively a place where Odin is hiding, figuratively, the shame of his colonial past. In the sequel, Valhalla is in fact presented as a physical afterlife, but honestly it’s, like the “there is onkly one God”, more of a metatextual statement to limit the bummer of an ending. See my post above about why Valhalla being Valhalla and Jane going there physically is the opposite of what Guardians 3 is doing.
But hey, ultimately the TLDR is: nobody involved in Love & Thunder thinks there’s a Valhalla, and you can tell. Somebody in Guardians thinks there is a version of the nondescript, nondenominational heavenly afterlife they depict, and you can tell.
I disagree, but I’m enjoying reading how you’re waaaaayyyyy overthinking it.
I’m not overthinking it, I’m overexplaining it after a bunch of people got really antsy about the concept of movies saying things.
The thinking took like ten minutes after I left the movies. It went “huh, hadn’t clocked that Gunn is a spiritual/catholic guy before, It’s weird how much of a direct response to the very strongly atheist videogame plot this turned out to be. I like the game’s take better”.
And that was literally it until I mentioned it in passing here and a bunch of people went “wait whaaaa?” and got really agitated.
People are like, “whaaaaaat?” because you’re overthinking it.
They really aren’t. I’m not calling out anything that isn’t in there on purpose. Like, obviously on purpose.
There’s an argument to be had about to what extent criticism can adequately push a read that the author doesn’t intend or disagrees with, but on Guardians I’m literally just repeating what the movie says. I’m not even interpreting anything here.