Martin Scorsese recently created a
great deal of controversy by panning the films made within the Marvel Universe.
According to Scorsese, the films weren’t really ‘cinema’ which was defined by him
as, “human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to
another human being.” Instead, he compared the experience to a “theme park”
with actors. On one hand, Scorsese’s analogy isn’t that far off. It could be
argued that the often-lighthearted romps created by the studio have depended on
a mixture of spectacle and quips. The experience of a Marvel film is remarkably
like a theme park. We go for the rides and soak in the sound and sights. Fans
develop emotional investment in the characters, but the films haven’t been the
psychological investigations that Scorsese seems to associate with the
experience of cinema. On the other hand, hasn’t that kind of spectacle at least
in part defined the cinematic experience from its origins? Silent film featured
melodrama, but it also featured fast-moving trains, planes, and automobiles. Buster
Keaton’s classic, The General, was driven by its stunts as was the work
of Harold Lloyd. Later films such as Around the World in Eighty Days
continued that tradition, as did the much-applauded Gravity. That ‘theme
park’ quality of spectacle may not be Scorsese’s preferred mode of cinema, but
it is cinema. One could even make the argument that the films often fail to
provide the kind of innovative spectacle that defines good or great cinema, but
that is a different conversation.
