My Opinion on Superhero Cinema, Part 2
By: Tang Wee-Boon
Tags: Superheroes, Cinema, Storytelling, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Smith

Still a little distracted in my life at the moment to be writing articles on a consistent schedule, but I wanted to talk a little more about Martin Scorsese’s statement and why superhero fiction can become an essential cornerstone of cinema.

For now though, I’ll just let Kevin Smith do the talking. He’s known for his fantastic speeches and podcasts on superhero movies and he’s a huge comic book fan himself too.

“My feeling is, Martin Scorsese never sat in a movie theater with his dad and watched the movies of Steven Spielberg in the early ’80s or George Lucas in the late ’70s. He didn’t feel that sense of magic and wonder. I can still step into one of those comic book movies, divorce myself of that fact that I do this for a living, release, and my dead dad is back for a minute, for two hours. And it’s personal for a lot of the audience. You know, and we’re not arguing whether or not it counts as cinema. I guarantee you there’s something he enjoyed with his parents, like a musical — I bet you some cats would say, ‘A musical is not really cinema,’ but Martin Scorsese grew up on musicals, and I bet they mean a lot to him. These [Marvel] movies come from a core. They come from a happy childhood. And they’re reflections of a happy childhood. He’s not wrong, but at the same time, neither are we for loving those movies. And they are cinema.”

- Kevin Smith

I hate musicals. Even after giving Singin’ in the Rain a chance, I still didn’t enjoy it. I liked La La Land though, but only because it feels like a deconstruction of the peppy naivety of musicals. But then again, many would label these movies where people spontaneous burst into song and dance “cinema.” Likewise, Steven Spielberg and his rose-colored takes on life like E.T., much as they give me diabetes, his films would also be labeled as cinema. So what makes superhero movies or Marvel movies different? Because they’re not gritty and depressing like Joker (produced by Martin Scorsese himself as an anti-cape film by the way)?

Except that superhero movies have been known to touch on realistic and emotionally heart-wrenching issues like depression, poverty, existentialism, or trigger-related issues… like Logan:

“Genre films essentially ask the audience: “Do you still want to believe this?” Popularity is the audience answering, “Yes.” Change in genre occurs when the audience says, “That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.”

- Leo Braudy, The World in a Fame

In case you couldn’t tell, I really like that quote by Leo. Over my next few articles, I’ll hopefully touch on genre fiction as well like science fiction and horror fiction, both genres that have been unfairly dismissed as low-brow and schlocky in spite of their evolution over the decades. After that, maybe I’ll touch a little on anime as well. But the point is that, all these genres and mediums, anime, sci-fi, horror, superhero, whatever, they have all showed excellent examples of respected storytelling that are finely-crafted with finesse, thought-provoking scripts and breathtaking cinematography, yet these genre films are still struggling to earn the respect and attention of the Academy or “high-brow” filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and David Fincher. Fincher himself has done both sci-fi and horror and he couldn’t see the potential of superhero movies. That’s a crying shame.

I always like to return to Netflix’s Daredevil as a fine example of superhero filmmaking, but Logan, The Dark Knight and Watchmen are noteworthy examples too that challenged our perceptions and brought the Greek myth to the modern world. These were pioneers that were crafted by hardworking people accompanied by talented cinematographers and musicians who put together a beautiful fabric of writing, visuals and music, so it feels like an insult and a disrespect to these artists to handwave their hard work and dedication as childish theme parks not worth taking seriously any more than Teletubbies or Power Rangers. Hell, Michael Bay’s movies are more like theme parks than Marvel films, and even his hard work should be commended.

See, my inherent problem isn’t that he’s bashing on movies I like. It’s that I see the kind of vision people like James Mangold and Drew Goddard have imagined in their head and gave birth to in their films, and I see the kind of passion and visual artistry and life experiences portrayed on-screen by people who deeply believe in what they do, not just selling a product or a theme park, so this contradiction in Martin’s statement still doesn’t sit well with me today even a year later. It’s what I see in superhero movies and what I’m hearing from Martin and his supporters and superhero detractors. It’s not that I’m not able to accept someone else’s opinion, but I’m strongly disagreeing with an inherently misinformed opinion that failed to address the influence and artistry these movies have and will continue to have in the coming decades.

And I think what Kevin Smith has said above sums up pretty well what I tried to express during my last article acknowledging Martin’s statement. We grew up in these very different circumstances and childhood where our perspective of cinema has changed very radically. We see that potential of the wonderment these films could bring us and the life experiences they could exchange with us, whereas Martin grew up in an older time where cinema meant something drastically different.

What I’ll hopefully do in the near future before digressing from the point I’m trying to make (as always, like with this post) is to closer examine films like Watchmen and V For Vendetta and decipher what they say about our society more than what they said about superheroes. A lot of people remember Watchmen as a commentary on superhero fiction, and while it might have been partially written out of that intent, it was also written during what was still a very tumultuous time in America, 1986. Former president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev had just put an end to the Cold War by halting the testing of missiles and Ronald Reagan, while a more popular presidential candidate than Donald Trump, certainly contributed to that Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Watchmen reflected a darker reflection of what would’ve been a far more depressing version of America had Richard Nixon not stepped down as president. The picture was not pretty, and Americans in the book were far more paranoid and unhinged from the fear of the Doomsday Clock, the day when the end of the world would happen via nuclear genocide. That, people, that is the kind of theme park Martin Scorsese is basing his entire argument on. Does such a ponderous and reflective piece of writing that challenges the rose-colored view of ’80s America we bear today with our nostalgia culture look like a theme park to you?

I’ve said my piece. Until next time.