AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.