I’ve been a fan of Mauler since I discovered him in 2018. I often listen to his videos or clips from the EFAP streams when I’m either trying to sleep, in the gym, or taking care of chores around the house. Today I happened to be listening to their discussion of some remarks that Martin Scorsese had made back in 2019 on the subject of Marvel, ultimately stating that he enjoys them for what they are, but that they aren’t “cinema.” As I listened, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated by the discussion, to the point that I have found myself compelled to defend a man for whom I have little but contempt against a group of guys that I am pretty fond of. 

Now, I have to begin by admitting that I missed the boat on this discourse. Though this clip was published to a clips channel two weeks ago, the original stream went up nearly three years ago. What can I say? I’m not a religious watcher. And I can’t help that even three years later, I find the debate to still be compelling enough to want to throw in my two cents.

It’s completely possible that these guys have changed their stance on this subject, and if that’s true, and my statements here are no longer applicable, then “my bad.” But I just kind of doubt that they have. I have no often seen them accept criticism, though perhaps they do.

Regardless, let’s get to the arguments.

The core of the EFAP argument came down to the claim that it was simply invalid for Scorsese to claim that Marvel wasn’t cinema, but in listening I noticed that there was a kind of shell game being played with three terms: art, movies, and cinema. The form of the argument (though frequently presented out of order) went something like this: 

“Art refers to creative expression. All movies are clearly works of creative expression, and therefore they are all works of art, therefore they are all cinema. You can call them “bad cinema” or “bad art” but you can’t say that they aren’t cinema.” 

There’s this kind of petulant refusal to acknowledge any degree of variation inside of the broadest possible conception of the category. Like sure, if you want to strictly limit the meaning of the word art to its broadest definition–and for the sake of argument we’ll say that this definition states that art is any work of creative expression–then we might say that both the Mona Lisa and the shit smear that a toddler leaves on the wall are both “art.” But any sane person will be able to admit that there’s a pretty significant difference between these two things. Likewise, there’s a pretty significant difference between Looney Toons and Grave of the Fireflies. Just as there’s a difference between Predator and The Godfather or Schindler’s List. If the ability to recognize this difference in artistic merit is elitist, then elitism is a good thing actually. 

I don’t think it’s necessary to appeal to popular support, in fact doing so is an informal fallacy known as the ad populum fallacy, but I’m still going to point out that most people can see the differences between these films, and if they’re honest, they can see that these differences are significant enough that it would not be pointless to have some kind of category that could help us distinguish them. That category is what Scorsese is talking about when he says “cinema.”

If your only response to someone trying to point out this distinction is to double down on the “they’re both art though!” Mantra, then that’s just fucking silly. It is incredibly obvious that Scorsese means something more specific than “moving pictures” when he talks about “cinema,” and as much as I detest this guy, I’m not going to pretend like I can’t understand his point. The entire discussion never seemed to move past this willful category error that was reinforced over and over almost an hour and a half. 

It is unbelievably obvious to me that when Scorsese says that Marvel isn’t cinema, he isn’t saying that they aren’t art or that they aren’t movies. Obviously, he is using “cinema” as a shorthand way of referring to movies that embody the values of fine-art. This is clearly referenced in a quote that they listen to, but never actually engage with, despite complaining endlessly that Scorsese hasn’t defined his category. Here’s the quote in full: 

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.

It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms… 

This statement is never actually addressed. Instead, it’s simply brushed aside with a glib “oh look, he’s being just as dismissive to this medium as other people once were to his,” and then a return to the, by this time, exhausted and inane point that “all art is art.” Then they move on without ever addressing the substance of what has been said, all while gaslighting their own audience when they try to call them out on this fact. 

There’s also this pervasive (sorry, guys) dumbfuckery that appears in the efforts to intentionally confuse and destabilize Scorsese’s notion of cinema. Besides periodically calling it “elitist,” the same trick is employed over and over again: 

Scorsese said that he liked X movie, but that movie has [insert superficial detail] and Marvel movies have that too. 

Scorsese is criticizing Marvel films for being nothing but empty spectacle, but don’t you know that 2001: A Space Odyssey also leaned into spectacle. Scorsese says that Marvel movies are just about flashing lights and explosions and graphic violence, but doesn’t he realize that there is also graphic violence and even explosions in The Godfather? 

This kind of thing goes on for a while. The most asinine example of this occurs when one panelist (should I call them panelists?) mentions that one of Scorsese’s favorite films is Old Boy, and then points out that Old Boy is an adaptation from a manga. “So like, where does he draw the line on that?” The guy asks, like he’s just scored this massive dunk, but it’s just so fucking stupid. Scorsese isn’t saying that manga can’t be a carrier for high art. To my knowledge he has not said anything like this, ever. If he had, I imagine that simply being presented with the evidence that Old Boy was a manga adaptation would be sufficient proof to get him to change his mind. If he DIDN’T then that would be a clear sign of irrational hypocrisy, but that isn’t what has happened. 

Scorsese was arguing for the validity of his medium, which was often disdained in comparison to other more established art forms like literature and painting. But that doesn’t mean that he has to then agree that anything made in that medium is of the same worth. The EFAP guys acknowledge that there are better and worse movies, but continually miss the point that to Scorsese, there is no such thing as bad cinema, because to be cinema means to be in the upper-echelon of what the medium can achieve. It is an oxymoron. You might as well talk about a “bad masterpiece.” 

The whole conversation just flounders at this point, with the EFAP guys agreeing that there are standards of merit, but then pissing the bed again and again and again at Scorsese’s simple declaration of his standard and offering zero convincing arguments in their own favor, just a barely coherent stream of ad homs as well as making arguments that have already been preempted by the very article they say they’ve read. For example, somewhere around the 45 minute mark, they start observing that Hollywood has always been about profit, therefore owned, blissfully unaware that Scorsese admits this fully and still says that the tension between studios and artists was one of the things that lead to great works of cinema: 

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.”

Furthermore the entire angle of trying to dismiss the category of cinema because it often shares common elements with lesser categories of film is wrongheaded because as Scorsese says, the issue isn’t what is present in both, but what is absent from the latter: 

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. 

Look, I genuinely have no love for Scorsese, but the fact is that he’s right. There is a qualitative difference between something like Old Boy and Iron Man. I like Iron Man and I would even call it a great movie, but the former is simply in a different league. Its themes are more complex and mature; its cinematography is more beautiful; its plot is more inventive and original (even if it is an adaptation); and while such things are hard to judge across different languages and cultures, I would say that the acting is better too.  It’s not about the fact that both have action scenes; even though both do. It’s about what those scenes are in service of. 

I suspect the EFAP crowd wouldn’t like this line of argument because it is by its nature subjective, and their thing has, from the beginning, been “objective” art criticism. I am largely in support of this project. Craft is a real and valuable area of discussion in art and it has been ignored for too long in pop culture. However, if objective art criticism is unable to address these qualitative distinctions, then that doesn’t mean the distinctions don’t exist. Instead it points to the limitations of that kind of criticism. And I’m actually not that irritated with the lack of respect shown to this veteran of the film industry, but a little bit of self-awareness would be nice. At least enough to realize that when you are talking about a man who is widely regarded as one of the all-time greats speaking about his area of expertise, and you dismiss him as an idiot, it isn’t Scorsese who is demonstrating arrogance. It’s you.