I have noticed how much oxygen Martin Scorsese's The Irishman has taken in the room corporate media give to films. I have not done a count of articles and news-entertainment show discussions, but the film must be by far the most talked about film of 2019 and the dawn of 2020. In reflecting on that, it hit me last night how ironic this is, because Scorsese, when he tried to finally articulate his hatred about superhero films, in his infamous NY Times op-ed piece, wound up lamenting how corporate-oligopolistic capitalism has affected the film industry, without ever mentioning capitalism, corporate capitalism or oligopoly in his article, a cowardly move on Scorsese's part, in my not humble opinion.
Worse, Scorsese showed he has no real understanding of the history of the film business. Scorsese wrote at one point in the op-ed:
"In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.
"I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”
"Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive andproprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other."
(Emphasis added)
In this passage, Scorsese reveals his rank ignorance in talking about the "Hollywood studio system" and his own career when, in fact, the system had largely fallen apart at the time Scorsese released his first film, Mean Streets, in 1973.* Scorsese got his break because he had hooked up with a young producer of the independently made Woodstock film, who found Scorsese's Italian mob script (for what was later called Mean Streets) a timely script, as The Godfather had entered American cultural consciousness when Paramount released the film off the hugely successful Mario Puzo book in 1972. The independent Scorsese and independent producer Jonathan Taplin were able to get a desperate Warner Bros. to distribute Scorsese's film, as Warner Bros. wanted to capitalize on The Godfather's success. As an old friend, who was a mega screenwriter in the 1980s and early 1990s, liked to tell me, "Hollywood doesn't know what it wants. It only knows what other people want." That insight is a perfect way to describe the film industry since at least the 1930s, if not earlier----and describes the timing in Scorsese's personal breakthrough into the industry.
Anyway, contrary to Scorsese's own drive-by comment, which unfortunately forms the foundation of his entire op-ed argument, Scorsese, and others such as Spielberg and Coppolla, broke through during a transition period in the film industry, and it was how these often self-proclaimed director-auteurs were able to present their visions to the large film theater screen. The period was the period between the end of the actual studio system and the rise of the financier-banker dominated independent fim companies. But let's unpack the other portions of the quote above. Scorsese's citing twenty years is funny, because his essay appears nineteen years after the first X-Men film was released (2000). X-Men did very well with the public, but did not have the cultural impact that would come later as more films were made and distributed, particularly when the first Iron Man showed up in 2008. But significantly, the first X-Men was independently produced, but needed a big studio, Fox, to distribute. Sound familiar? An irony for the now late Stan Lee is he was ahead of his time in starting Marvel Film studios, and went bankrupt, and was gobbled up partly by Fox and partly by Disney before his comic book company characters could be brought to the screen.
Worse, how does Scorsese miss the whole James Bond, Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Poltergeist, Raiders of the Lost Ark, phenomenon, which lasted from the 1960s through 1980s--theme parks posing as cinema, to quote Scorsese's first remarks against superhero films--four of which films I named became or were already franchises, and effectively crowded out most truly intelligent and compelling films and reduced them to a cult-level status? These were all in Scorsese's Golden Age, in a time of less theater spaces (remember, most theaters used to be one or two films showing at one time, not megaplexes). People know James Bond and the other films. How many know A Thousand Clowns? Well, let's recognize it was all a good time for him. In this respect, Scorsese resembles comedian Garrett Morris' now politically incorrect Chico Esquela. For Scorsese, navel gazing is all he is capable of doing when discussing film history--and I say that as someone who reveres most of his film work, and consider Goodfellas and Casino the best mob films of all time because they exposed the lie behind the nobility and veneer The Godfather films had perhaps inadvertently provided to the mobsters, who were, in reality, mostly dumb, crass, and ultimately self-destructive in their greed and violence. And let's just say two more words that reveal my love for Scorsese's films, Raging Bull. But even worse for Scorsese's ignorant perspective, comic book films had been made for decades, as this Wiki history of just Marvel Films, shows. Why these types of films became as culturally iconic as westerns in film history has to do with the great writing and character development those films brought, starting with the first X-Men film in 2000, when compared to the much more silly fare that preceded them (I have to admit, however, in the last two years or more, the superhero films are reverting to that earlier shallow Star Wars sort of form, sadly, as I wrote about when discussing Aquaman).
I have already gone over, in ad nauseam, how ridiculous Scorsese is to attack the superhero films as an entire genre, due to his lack of understanding of the emotional and socio-economic importance in their scripts and production of the genre in that period of 2000-2016. One reads Scorsese's op-ed and cannot help but realize he has never sat through any of the X-Men series, or Iron Man films, and missed the brilliance of Zack Snyder's DC Universe vision. But I write again because it occurs to me that Scorsese himself is a "franchise"--a word he used eight times in his short op-ed, including when he called Alfred Hitchcock a franchise personified ("our franchise," he cutely intones). And, here comes the irony, Scorsese's ridiculously historically inaccurate film, The Irishman, based upon statements of a known liar, Frank Sheeran, appears to have taken the oxygen out of the room, and indirectly, if not directly, hurt far more powerful and historically accurate films, Dark Waters** and Harriet (see Variety on the two films' power writing). Adding to the irony is these films would never have been made or gotten as far as they did in the old "Hollywood studio system." Scorsese should know better, but his arrogance and ignorance of the actual film industry history betrays him again.
Of course, even that ironic point is simplistic because this crowding out is not even close to being the sole function of Scorsese as a personified franchise. The crowding out occurs primarily because we live in a corporate capitalist oligopoly system, where certain ideas are given wide credence to the extent they don't count (Who the hell cares where Hoffa is buried or who killed him at this point?) while other films, such as those which depict actual corporate greed and lies that kill or cause physical cancers and other harms, or films that depict a strong African-American woman who had a major role in American history, are given at best back-handed compliments, and otherwise relatively ignored in a way that may have been far more difficult had they not been competing with The Irishman.
It is also a socio-economic "fact" that film distributors and theater owners have to get bodies in the seats and want to avoid "controversy" on things that may upset the financiers and what the late Gore Vidal called the American ruling class--though there was a delicious irony in Steve Mnuchin being a backer of Zack Snyder's DC Universe vision. The socio-economic realities, however, are why I remain convinced the superhero filmmakers went out of their way not to explain what they were writing about, whether in Iron Man's attack on the national security state, or the first Kingsman's film's Chomskyesque take on climate change, population control, and who are the real enemies across the board. Look what happened when a guy at Variety figured out Mad Max: Fury Road was a feminist film, which upset lots of people. The Daughter and I saw rushes of Mad Max: Fury Road at Comic-Con the year before it was released, and not once in the panel was there any mention of the socio-economic insights that was the essence of the film. It was all about the bang and boom and special effects, and the story of a dystopia not unlike other films. That insight, however, adversely affected box office receipts, relatively speaking, after a killer opening weekend, and essentially killed the opportunity for another Mad Max film for some time to come. The film was more than a "feminist" film. In fact, it was a film about the relationship and connections between patriarchy, fascism, and organized religion, and the promise of feminist-socialism to save the planet. For Scorsese or others to speak about the 1970s as the last Golden Age where all was supposedly free for film artists is to miss all the previous and subsequent Golden Ages in film history. And, this bears repeating, for Scorsese to speak about the 1970s as if that was the time of the "Hollywood studio system" is self-centered and rank ignorance of the film industry and film history.
It is also a socio-economic "fact" that film distributors and theater owners have to get bodies in the seats and want to avoid "controversy" on things that may upset the financiers and what the late Gore Vidal called the American ruling class--though there was a delicious irony in Steve Mnuchin being a backer of Zack Snyder's DC Universe vision. The socio-economic realities, however, are why I remain convinced the superhero filmmakers went out of their way not to explain what they were writing about, whether in Iron Man's attack on the national security state, or the first Kingsman's film's Chomskyesque take on climate change, population control, and who are the real enemies across the board. Look what happened when a guy at Variety figured out Mad Max: Fury Road was a feminist film, which upset lots of people. The Daughter and I saw rushes of Mad Max: Fury Road at Comic-Con the year before it was released, and not once in the panel was there any mention of the socio-economic insights that was the essence of the film. It was all about the bang and boom and special effects, and the story of a dystopia not unlike other films. That insight, however, adversely affected box office receipts, relatively speaking, after a killer opening weekend, and essentially killed the opportunity for another Mad Max film for some time to come. The film was more than a "feminist" film. In fact, it was a film about the relationship and connections between patriarchy, fascism, and organized religion, and the promise of feminist-socialism to save the planet. For Scorsese or others to speak about the 1970s as the last Golden Age where all was supposedly free for film artists is to miss all the previous and subsequent Golden Ages in film history. And, this bears repeating, for Scorsese to speak about the 1970s as if that was the time of the "Hollywood studio system" is self-centered and rank ignorance of the film industry and film history.
The final irony is Scorsese and the pooh-bahs at the film academy have tragically missed the superhero genre as the most culturally important film genre since the early to mid 20th Century western dominated the art of films and filmmaking. This is a terrible, again tragic, pity because the pooh-bahs missed the chance to speak with young people, respectfully, as to what the youth of America were watching.*** And, on top of that, what did Scorsese just provide the public for all his economic franchise power? He provided a film that amplified a liar's lies about the disappearance and murder of Jimmy Hoffa. Thanks, Martin, for your multi-pronged role in poisoning and undermining American culture, and for your Ok, Boomer style attack on films the young people in the US and around the world found compelling, and which the young people were more right than they knew about why those films are compelling. These young people, however, will grow up, climate-change and Fascist International-fighting willing, and re-watch their childhood films with a more intelligent and learned eye--the way in which we watched Bugs Bunny animated shorts at age 5 and the age of 20. In doing so, they will recognize what Scorsese and so many others missed. I feel lucky to have engaged with the films with my children, though I have long taken credit for turning our family onto the films when I first saw X-Men III on a plane, and was blown away with the disability or gay rights allegory within the film, and its smart, sharp dialogue on top of the amazing special effects and direction.
* The studio company dominance of MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, United Artists, Universal, is a topic in and of itself. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the government brought strong anti-trust pressures against the studios for owning interests in the film theaters as well as the studios. An agreement was reached between the federal government and studios to jettison film theater ownership interests at a time when television had entered American cultural consciousness, and was putting existential pressure on the film studios. Film studios thereafter became more and more desperate in trying to make films that would make money to get people away from their television sets and out of their homes, which Scorsese should have recognized led to a relative dearth of brilliant popular films over the period of the late 1950s through end of the 1960s (not to mention the blacklist against the better screenwriters who were Reds or "fellow travelers" that began in the late 1940s and lasted essentially till the early 1960s). In the early 1950s, Ronald Reagan, then Screen Actors Guild president, gave MCA, a talent agency for whom he was under contract, a waiver that allowed MCA to represent talent and still make television shows and films. It was the only agency granted that waiver. After MCA grew large enough to swallow up Universal Studios, Congressional hearings were held into the corrupt waiver, and Reagan used his self-professed ignorance to get around the obvious corruption, which had led Reagan to transition from films to narrator on the popular television show Death Valley Days, and be under a working contract with General Electric, where he went around the nation talking to workers about the wonders of capitalism and the dangers of socialism, which was essentially the New Deal with the scary Communist menace behind it. Dan Moldea wrote about the corrupt bargain Reagan made, and how he was paid through sweetheart real estate deals in addition to the steady work General Electric gave Reagan. Also, books have been written about the last movie mogul, Lew Wasserman, who came out of MCA--of course--, and how Wasserman played the politics game more and better than any of his predecessors in the industry, buying up both the Democratic and Republican Parties in CA and nationally. Wasserman could not survive alone, however, and by the 1980s, with the rise of cable television, bankers, financiers, and other new players, including a resurgent financier-driven Disney, Wasserman became, as one of the books said, "the last mogul." When Scorsese speaks as he did in the op-ed, he seems oblivious to all of this film industry history, and acts as if Louie B. Mayer had given him a golden spoon.
** I cracked up at the cynical, pathetic DuPont's press release response to the film. See here. Dupont cites to precisely the type of studies the film references, and how corrupt DuPont was in the way in which DuPont exercised influence over governments, from the local government to the State of West Virginia, and to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, how the chemicals in the products they were making were not regulated, when they should have been, and the clear epidemiological findings from the scientists DuPont agreed to with the plaintiff lawyers in reaching the first main settlement with those harmed by the manufacture of its products. One reads Slate's fact v. fiction article about Dark Waters and realizes how incredibly accurate the film was in its dramatic presentation compared to most films over the entire history of filmmaking. This was smart, dramatic filmmaking, even better than the rightly loved All the President's Men, from Scorsese's Golden Age.
*** How rare, in American cultural history of the past 120 years, has it been where something produced for and within mass culture had profound socio-economic import, as the superhero films were generally in the period of 2000-2016? The idea of a dichotomy between high brow and low brow has been with us since the rise of mass communications at the end of the 19th Century, as Lawrence Levine brilliantly explained. In so few instances can intellectuals find a way to communicate about the positive significance of cultural artistic phenomenons. This is why it is so personally frustrating to me how Scorsese and others who should know better utterly failed in their roles as intellectuals and experts in literature and film. We have had no modern equivalent to Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts, where Seldes rescued jazz, comic strips, and film from the critics and elites who scoffed at them.
*** How rare, in American cultural history of the past 120 years, has it been where something produced for and within mass culture had profound socio-economic import, as the superhero films were generally in the period of 2000-2016? The idea of a dichotomy between high brow and low brow has been with us since the rise of mass communications at the end of the 19th Century, as Lawrence Levine brilliantly explained. In so few instances can intellectuals find a way to communicate about the positive significance of cultural artistic phenomenons. This is why it is so personally frustrating to me how Scorsese and others who should know better utterly failed in their roles as intellectuals and experts in literature and film. We have had no modern equivalent to Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts, where Seldes rescued jazz, comic strips, and film from the critics and elites who scoffed at them.
