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.
That’s not how meaning works, though.
Look, I get it, not everybody cares or knows how semiotics work, but it’s always baffling how much people get invested in the notion of “no politics in art” no matter how often this comes up.
Yes, there are politics in Back to the Future, as in any other film where the worldview of the creators becomes the perspective from which the entire film is put together. Things in movies don’t happen by accident, they get carefully written, acted and shot. Everything in a movie is something somebody is saying, and like any other thing you say it has both superficial and subtextual meaning.
So yes, BTTF does spend the entire movie boiling down maturity and success to being financially successful and self-confident. Because it’s an American movie from the 80s and that’s how young Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale saw being self-fulfilled looking like in 1985.
And yes, they poke good intentioned, light fun at Reagan being president. And they acknowledge some form of past racism in the form of Goldie being president, but also holy crap, the way Goldie is characterized also tells you a lot of how the Bobs saw race working and let’s just say that nothing in BTTF2 and Forrest Gump was accidental.
Is it an active piece of propaganda? No, that’s not where the bar is for containing a political or even politicized worldview. But it does present a worldview, and that is… a pretty centrist, eminently materialistic take on what was a fairly conservative world.
I promise that’s not an insult.
Never ever ever said that because it’s untrue as fuck. You lost me completely
You… literally said
It’s right there, I’m looking at it.
I am now more curious to know how you think this works. Like, you think there’s a political take in some art, but not in all art, so there’s a line somewhere between explicit and implicit political stuff, I suppose?
Or is the confusion that you thought I understood you as advocating for no politics in art instead? Because that’s not what I’m saying.
I claimed 3 movies likely aren’t political. You extrapolated that to all art. I’m done here
I think you’re maybe mixing up “being political” with “being propagandistic”. Those aren’t the same thing.
BTTF or Guardians 3 are political in that they have a built-in political view. They’re movies where reality is painted from a specific perspective and lines up with a certain worldview. They’re not selling you on that perspective actively, it’s built into the narrative as a framing, consicously or subsconsciously (it’s probably more subconscious in BTTF, more conscious in G3, I’d say).
Die Hard is a bit of a different beast there. It may not be outright propagandistic or jingoistic, but it sure is flirting with that borderline there.
I absolutely agree that politics can be subtle and unintentional but to classify a movie with the word “political” as a topic unto itself implies an intentionally present political message.
I’d argue it implies a noticeable or identifiable political framing, but I don’t think intentionality is the line.
But hey, at that point we’re debating what we name it. I’d argue that we want to have a name for it, and if you don’t want to call it “political” I’m struggling to think what else to use. It’s not simply thematic, because a theme can be different from an implicit political worldview. A movie can be about, say, coming of age, thematically, but that’s different from its political framing.