Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay.
(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)
Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."
Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:
Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.
The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."
Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.
Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."
Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role."
Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.
I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.
Hi Gene,
ReplyDeleteWhat a coincidence that you should tackle Shang-Chi in your post, as I was planning on watching this next weekend either HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) and LES YEAUX SANS VISAGE (1959), or BLACK WIDOW (2019) and SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (2021).
Although yor post tipped me towards the Marvel movies, I'll be watching Shang-Chi with a lot less gusto after reading these inane remarks by its star pronagonist. It's been some years now that I've been avoiding reading film magazines and sites, as I find most actors (and actresses) and directors and writers of this sad new millennium to be ignorant virtue-signaling idiots with thought processes reduced to sugared cliché-spouting, and don't want that to contaminate the experience of movie-watching.
Now, as to the main theme of your post - form vs content elitisms - I would stand closer to the content than to the form elitists, but I would substitute content for plot as in "you can take pleasure from a bad movie with a great idea, but not so much from am aesthetically perfect movie without any content/plot".
I do believe that Scorsese - one of the greatest directors ever, and one of the few (the others being Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Huston, Spielberg, Cronenberg, Milius, Stone, Siegel, Lynch, and Bava) whose filmography I try to watch and have complete in my shelves, talks about film as a general category, without differentiating genres. Although it is true that all movies (and all books) should be measured by the same set of criteria, it is no less true that specific genres have specific rules that demand we aknowledge when tackling them.
Although a Lawrence Block novel is not expected to reach the heights of a Dostoievski or a Hemingway, it can - within the expected frame of a cop/caper thriller - and DO reach them. Or you consider Ian Fleming, whose books, not being recognised as f great literary value, have however a (deserved) success that make them much more durable and "adaptable" in the popular (un)consciousness than, for instance, Roth or Fowles or D.H. Lawrence or THomas Hardy (which are considered literary giants).
(to be continued)
Obviously, super-hero films (as their template, super-hero comic-books) also have their inherent rules and sets of expectations. And just as you can have a wonderful comic book (say, Wein's SWAMP THING or Moore's WATCHMEN) breed contemptible films (like Craven's SWAMP THING or Snyder's WATCHMEN), you can also have great super-hero films, like Burton's two BATMAN movies, Donner's SUPERMAN, or Raimi SPIDER-MAN trilogy. And awful movies, like any super-hero film by Zack Snyder or the incredibly bad SUPERMAN RETURNS by Brian Singer (whose X-Men movies were, however, quite good), not to mention stupid messes like Josh Trank's FANTASTIC FOUR (or any of the other Fantastic Four film-versions).
ReplyDeleteIn what concerns the MCU, I do understand Scorsese's point. Most of the movies - at least until CAPTAIN MARVEL (2018) have been quite entertaining and technically acomplished (despite the abuse of CGI effects that somehow make the action scenes look unreal - like watching someone playing video-games). However, although I look forward to the next one, and feel immersed on its universe for the duration, I come out of it with my brain on idle shift, just as I've left it when I 'entered' the films world. All the stimulation of the film is sensual, with few peaks of emotional and almost none of intelectual stimulation. In that sense, they do resemble theme park rides - you get the sense of thrill, knowing however that there is no real danger - except if there is an accident. Well, a film that only feels (intelectualy or emotionaly dangerous by accident, is not a good film.
Marvel films (and I will not address DC films, as they have been generaly worse than Marvel's - Nolan's BATMAN trilogy being the great exception) have in their favor their great technical accomplishment, a surprisingly agreeable and sympathetic cast, and some brisk writing. But - and this is my experience, in no way imbued with any extrapolatable value - they are generally forgetable. I confess I cannot remember the plot of most of them and despite Feige's clever cnstruction of a multi-level, multi-movie, story progression, I cannot (without resorting to notes or the IMDB) recall if some specific scene took place on AVENGERS: ENDGAME or in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. And it doesn't seem to matter much, as one feels that in a couple of movies, anything the somehw affected us will be overwhelmed by some new revelation that will make it meaningless or unimportant. I've been watching every Marvel movie in its original order on home-cinema (as I said, I'm now going for BLACK WIDOW) and as it stands now, the last important happening was Tony Stark's death. It was a moving scene, but one we saw countless times before in comic-books, and I know, sooner or later, Tony Stark will come back, so his loss feels fake and contrived (just as I knew half the super-heros that were killed in the previous AVENGERS film would come back somewhen, somehow). I know that it is part of the game, part of the particular joy of super-hero fiction, its similarity to the god-myths of yesteryear. But it makes the emotional investment seem shallow. Tony Stark's death is moving, and touching, and affecting, but it has nothing on the death of Jason Robards at the end of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968), or even the removal of Zack Addy at the end of Season 3 of BONES.
So I tend to agree with Scorsese generally. However, the fact that climbing a stirofoam wall is not the same as climbing the Everest, it has its joys. It just has to be put in context.
What is totally irrelevant to any of this is the race/gender/politics that victimhood-lovers love to throw in any direction like the proverbial (and in this case, almost literal) fan-hitting manure.
Sorry for the long rant.
Cheers.
Long rants are my thing, so feel free whenever the spirit moves you.
ReplyDeleteEven though I fully agree with your estimation of Scorsese, I think he fell victim to "form elitism" for the same reason that a lot of artists can't quite see outside their own priorities. I'm reminded of a Burne Hogarth interview in which he downgraded all the superheroes of comics, but Tarzan was in a special category, because Hogarth thought the ape man had some mysterious gravitas-- which may just come down to the fame he'd gained from his Tarzan association.
Since I'm into the "myth-motif" thing, I'm probably a "content pluralist" along roughly the same lines that I called Gary Groth a "content elitist." Groth allowed some level of quality for the EC stories even though they were melodramas rather than "high art," and I've certainly spent a lot of time looking for mythological patterns in "low art." But I think Groth is/was more particular about what genres he would validate, while my motto is a reverse of an old Goethe saying: "if it can be done well, it's worth doing." Groth's ideology is certainly more demanding that that of the actor Simu Liu, who's merely polishing his own apple. Yet whenever Groth dismissed all superhero works except those of Kirby and Ditko as dumb power-fantasies, I discerned a little kinship in the way Liu dismissed the oeuvre of Scorsese because it didn't feature more people of color. I guess Scorsese's Mean Streets would have been automatically "better" had the director accepted producer Gene Corman's suggestion to make all the characters Black. OTOH, since Liu seems utterly unaware as to how many POC actors Tarantino featured over the years, even a "Black Streets" wouldn't have absolved Scorsese from the good old boys network.
One aspect of creativity that I don't think Scorsese understands-- again, because I don't think he had any interest in it-- is that of bringing creativity to a series with a continuing status quo. This doesn't mean only superheroes, of course: almost all of the Charlie Chan flicks for first to last keep the exact same setup and offer the exact same pleasures. Compared to that series, DC's various iterations of the Justice League allow for more creativity, even though for the most part every adventure must also end with some version of the League again ready to confront the next evil. There have been countless League adventures which would justify the comparison to "theme parks," which one enjoys as you say with your brain on idle. But there are standouts, and because it's not a series in which there can be a lot of dramatic turnabouts, being a crossover of franchise characters, I've found that myth-analysis works best for analyzing that particular form of creativity.
Scorsese's invocation of Hitchcock probably deserves separate consideration. I assume Scorsese brought him up because AH is much more of a "crowd-pleaser" than many of the other luminaries Scorsese champions. Maybe this line of thought will lead me to some new thoughts on the current status of big-budget superhero films, since I'm still glad that the genre has come into its own even while not embracing an awful lot of the actual product.
Thanks again for sharing your take on this often frustrating genre.
Hi there, Gene,
ReplyDeleteI'll concede that maybe Scorsese doesn't understand the pleasure that derives from adding something to an ongoing series, from breaking expectations. Umberto Eco was someone who surely understood it - his essay on Fleming's Bond novels shows it - however he was - again, like Scorsese - someone who didn't do it. So, maybe it is a matter of individual creativity. I guess some authors/directors/writers just like to do something and that want to move into something different, while others like to explore a given world/character for all its worth. Dan Simmons, for instance, is someone who did both series - the Endymion books - and a plethora of brilliant individual books, but never tried to keep a series (or expand a book into a series) when he thought he had nothing more of relevance to add to it.
On my part, I revel in low/popular art - as you can tell from my posts, I hope - and I do recognize the wonder of exploring variations on a theme. And I enjoy super-hero comics and films. However, I feel hard-pressed to disagree with Scorsese, not in what one could perceive as a general view, but in what concerns the majority of Marvel's recent films.
There is, I think, a certain shallowness to the experience of watching most Marvel movies. Maybe it is the monotony of their look - they all look the same; they look like sophisticated video-games. The abuse of CGI and motion-capture technology make the characters moves (when fighting superbeings, not in the cool martial arts stunts) look like awkward cartoons, without volume, weight, or physical dimensions. And the stories, once you remove all the narrative props, tend to be the same one. Even their visuals tend to repeat from film to film: how mny times can you watch a scene of a big structure falling from the sky, or cars being thrown this way and that, or the destruction of huge city blocks that almost don't raise any dust, before boredom sets in?
(to be continued)
That's weird: the Google beast let you post once but not twice, but from what I did see, your opinion on BLACK WIDOW will probably be about the same as mine if I can ever get round to a review. Maybe you can tell from this post how jazzed I was by it?
ReplyDeleteYeah, the MCU has fallen a long way from, say, the considerable leap between how good Leterrier Hulk looked, purely in terms of animation, next to Ang Lee Hulk. There's not much question that the MCU effects team has become extremely lazy, in keeping with their idea that they can do no wrong even when one of their films flops or under-performs.
And I agree that Scorsese may indeed have sensed a real sameness regarding MCU films. However, it's very hard to tell because, unlike your post here, he doesn't give any specifics about what films he saw to arrive at his judgment. Did he see ten? Twenty? I wouldn't really trust a generlized review of even a particular company's use of a genre if the pundit had not seen at least ten.
For a really detailed breakdown of many of the MCU films, here's an excellent YouTube podcast I hope to work into a future post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiV-bOulZl8
The guy comes up with a really innovative movie-category comparison that never would have occurred to me, though your comparison to video games is spot on, and particularly consequential when one realizes how much of the young-kid audience deserted funnybooks for games.
The last MCU FX-scene from which I got the old "sense of wonder" was the big airport fight in CIVIL WAR, and yet I have to admit, like Scorsese says, there's no real dramatic impact to the story, either in that movie or in a later follow-up, But there's also no deep drama in an old serial like FLASH GORDON, just a succession of good fights and decent melodrama.