last awardsseason,
“Black Panther” became
the first comic-book mov-
ie to receive an Oscar nomination
for best picture. Since then,
“Avengers: Endgame” has become
the highest-grossing film of all
time and one of the best-re-
viewed movies of 2019. Todd
Phillips’ recently released “Joker”
won the Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival and broke its
share of box office records. Have
comic-book movies finally ar-
rived on the red carpet?
More like the rug’s being
pulled from under them again.
And Martin Scorsese has fibers
under his fingernails.
Despite consistently sporting
sterling scores on review aggre-
gator Rotten Tomatoes, Marvel
Cinematic Universe movies
rarely appear on critics’ top 10
lists and have never received
Oscar nominations for direction,
acting or writing. They remain
outside that golden embrace,
despite the exquisitely detailed
filmmaking of, say, Ryan
Coogler’s “Black Panther” or the
taut, ’70s paranoia of “Captain
America: The Winter Soldier.”
Millions and millions around the
world are emotionally connected
to these movies, yet film titan
Scorsese calls them “not cinema”
— even those he hasn’t yet seen.
Is it the tights?
Scorsese, in his comments to
Empire, summed up the in-
grained bias when he said, “I
don’t see them. I tried, you
know? But that’s not cinema. ... It
isn’t the cinema of human beings
trying to convey emotional,
psychological experiences to
another human being.” He
doubled down at a London Film
Festival press conference: “It’s
not cinema, it’s something else,
we shouldn’t be invaded by it, so
that is a big issue and we need the
theater owners to step up to allow
theaters to show films that are
narrative films.”
Resentment at studios’ tent-
pole strategies, increasingly
leaving adult dramas to indies
and streaming services, may be in
part responsible for the refusal to
include massive-grossing comic-
book movies in awards conversa-
tions. But “Avengers: Infinity
War” didn’t prevent “The Fare-
well” or “Jojo Rabbit” or even
Scorsese’s “The Irishman” from
being made. In fact, Taika Waiti-
ti’s success with MCU entry
“Thor: Ragnarok” likely helped
his Oscar-contending “Jojo” get
the green light.
Scorsese’s ire may be due in
part to major exhibitors such as
AMC and Regal refusing to show
his 3^1 ⁄ 2 -hour Netflix-backed
“Irishman,” but that isn’t because
MCU films have elbowed it out;
it’s part of the ongoing dispute
between theater owners and
streaming services over windows
of exclusivity.
But he’s not alone in his dis-
missal of the genre. Contempo-
rary Francis Ford Coppola, after
receiving the Prix Lumière in
Lyon, France, told journalists he
thought Scorsese was “right
because we expect to learn some-
thing from cinema, we expect to
gain something, some enlighten-
ment, some knowledge, some
inspiration.”
The director of “The Godfa-
ther” and “Captain EO” added:
“Martin was kind when he said
it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s
despicable, which I just say it is.”
‘A WAY TO PRACTICE’
Andrea Letamendi, associate
director of mental health train-
ing, intervention and response at
UCLA, sees more in the best of
these films than these giants of
cinema do.
“Superhero films are giving us
a way to practice and explore
really important emotional proc-
esses that we may not be able to
examine in our everyday lives. In
‘Endgame,’ the more fantastical,
the better, because that gives us
the supportive safety net to be
open and vulnerable and curious
about these things,” she says.
“Not to pat ourselves on the
back,” says Christopher Markus,
co-writer (with Stephen Mc-
Feely) of six MCU movies includ-
ing “Endgame,” “but we snuck an
hourlong movie about loss and
grief into the [start of the] biggest
movie of all time. That’s a lot of
people who sat with that issue in
their heads for an hour.”
He says of villain Thanos’
cataclysmic action, “We wanted
the Snap to be as profound as we
could make it. The way to do that
was to have all the characters sit
with the impact, the unfixability
of it, rather than scrambling
around. We were interested in
seeing what happens to these
people whose sole purpose in life
is solving problems, faced with a
problem they did not solve.”
Markus and McFeely point
out their slug lines don’t read,
“Iron Man” or “Captain America”;
they’re “Tony” or “Steve.” Even
when the characters are wearing
nanotech armor or wrapped in a
flag, the writers are thinking
from the point of view of the
human beings within.
“We didn’t sit down and say,
‘It’s the five stages of grief,’ but
they sort of do go through it.
Thor is really depressed. Cap has
accepted it. Clint’s anger is off
the rails. ... We give people real
arcs, hopefully,” McFeely says.
Anthony Mackie plays the
Falcon in many MCU entries. He
says whenever he has a movie
come out, he sneaks into theaters
to experience them with audienc-
es, which he has done three times
for “Endgame.”
“When Iron Man died, people
were weeping. If that’s not a
human, emotional experience, I
don’t know what is,” he said.
“There’s a connection to these
characters. People invest 100%.”
Clinical psychologist Leta-
mendi agrees. ”It’s a truly sophis-
ticated portrayal. ... How differ-
ent characters cope with that loss
really matters in terms of how we
relate to them and how we might
relate to our own losses.
“The term for that is ‘paraso-
cial relationships’ — nondelu-
sional emotional connections
with fictional characters,” she
continued. “I know Tony Stark
isn’t real but I’ve formed a long-
lasting relationship with his
character, so when we see him go
through these difficult changes:
the adversity, his self-doubt and,
ultimately, his death, this is, in
our world, difficult to deal with.
The grief, the confusion, some-
times the anger — those feelings
are real. I think there’s some
value to that.
“If we can work through some
of those emotions, it makes us
more emotionally intelligent. A
movie like ‘Endgame’ has such an
important place in our social/
emotional learning because we’re
practicing important, and deeply
felt, responses.”
“ ‘Iron Man 3’ is one of the
more groundbreaking comic-
book films in its direct portrayal
of alcoholism and post-traumatic
stress disorder. Showing this
superhero have a decline in
functioning, isolate himself,
reject relationships — that’s a
very relatable experience.”
Letamendi likens the time-
travel McGuffin in “Endgame” to
the psychotherapeutic technique
of narrative reconstruction.
“Sometimes it’s important to look
back to the thread that winds up
our history and what parts of that
difficult and traumatic experi-
ence could be revisited, and even
reinterpreted, so it fits with our
sense of self. To see Thor go back,
who has completely lost his way
and detached from his sense of
self, if he restores a part of his
essential relationships — espe-
cially ones that remind him of
what his core values are and what
his purpose is — that’s extraordi-
narily healing.”
EVERYTHING’S LABELED
Scoffing at films based on
genre ignores that labels can be
applied to most any film. Is “The
Silence of the Lambs” just a serial
killer movie? “Annie Hall” merely
a romantic comedy? The pres-
ence of tights shouldn’t dis-
qualify Olivier’s “Hamlet.” There
are plenty of gods and monsters
in the classics.
If genre scares you, “You can’t
watch ‘The Godfather.’ That’s
‘just a mob movie.’ ... Genres are
just delivery devices,” McFeely
notes.
Writer-director-painter Wait-
iti agrees. “It’s kind of a form of
ignorance to say comic-books
and graphic novels aren’t art.
They have life-changing stories
and are full of emotion. They’re
cinematic. [Filmmakers] steal
frames, splash pages, from comic
books all the time because those
are real artists.”
No one is comparing “Ant-
Man” to “Citizen Kane.” Howev-
er, as “Dr. Strange” director Scott
Derrickson tweeted, “Nobody
should dismiss movies they
haven’t seen.” And he was just
one of the filmmakers taking
umbrage to Scorsese’s remarks.
After all, who couldn’t find five
or 10 in their personal list of
questionable best-picture win-
ners that aren’t better than “Black
Panther” or “Endgame?”
“To prejudice yourself against
genre is to shutter yourself
against a wide variety of things,”
Markus says. “Genre, in a way,
softens you up to receive human
stories.”
Martin Scorsese
said superhero
movies in the
Marvel Cinematic
Universedon’t
convey ‘emotional,
psychological
experiences.’ Not
everyone agrees.
BY MICHAEL
ORDOÑA
S29
THE ENVELOPE LOS ANGELES TIMES THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2019
»
Wo r t h
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