Is Cinema Made For Enjoyment or Art?
Jesuits in Japan, mobsters, madmen, musicians and predators. Martin Scorsese has amounted a vast and varied catalogue of protagonists over the course of his 60-year career in film, and it shows. Boasting 20 Academy Awards, 23 BAFTAs and 11 Golden Globes, his legacy as an auteur is one that will be revered for years to come. Then, one day, he threw shade at Marvel and brought into the spotlight a conversation that has rattled around cinephile circles for years: is cinema made for enjoyment or art?
It’s a valid question. With cinema’s rich history of classics like Shawshank, Apocalypse Now and Casablanca, how is it that we reached a point where, from 2014-2019, you could safely bet on there being 3-6 big budget superhero movies a year, all roughly following the same cookie-cutter formula. The obvious answer? Money. Lots of money. But we all know this. It’s easy to market superhero beat-em-ups to the youth with their bright lights and loud sounds. How exactly does one go about marketing mobsters knifing one another to children? Stockbrokers snorting metric tonnes of the devil’s dandruff will likely never replace the combat poses of Ironman and Black Widow on lunchboxes. That would just be crass…
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that I am not a film snob. As a long-time DC fan, I know how it feels to have your big screen dreams trampled on. In the right hands, a DC cinematic universe could be a beautiful thing, but so far, they have fallen short. Marvel, on the other hand, has fine-tuned their cinematic formula, resulting in their crowning acquisition of the highest grossing film of all time in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. To wrap up an 11-year cinematic saga whilst paying homage to the series highlights, laying the foundations for the chapters to follow, and to do so in a satisfying and resolute manner is quite the accomplishment; some features of which Scorsese recognises.
In an opinion piece posted on the New York Times, Scorsese clarified his inflammatory remarks. ‘Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. […] Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. […] 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.’
In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark/Iron Man sees a recorded message from his father, Howard, telling him, ‘I am limited by the technology of my time’. Much the same is true for the filmmakers of yesteryear. As long as a writer can imagine a world in which their story takes place, they need only provide the blueprints, allowing the readers to sculpt their own depiction of it in their mind’s eye. Filmmakers have never had this luxury and, as one might expect, to design these other-worldly locations requires money. While many regard Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the birth of modern sci-fi cinema, one could argue quite succinctly that the course of sci-fi cinema was charted in stone ever since the stratospheric success of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). The highest grossing film of its time, it paved the way for prequel and sequel trilogies, another smash hit trilogy for Lucasfilm in Indiana Jones, and provided a template for Disney to capitalise on following their $4bn acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009.
To draw yet another comparison, as Howard Stark was limited in his pursuit of science, so too was the film industry in its capacity to most efficiently monopolise cinema entertainment. I’m partial to a good meme and the one of Mickey collecting companies as Thanos does Infinity Stones is quite the apt comparison. To return to Scorsese’s clarification, he reiterates, ‘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. […] That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, riveted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.’
The irrefutable truth is that cinema has changed forever. Netflix’s move to produce its own content in its flagship House of Cards (2013) was the start and it has birthed a wave of ubiquitous streaming services, all seeking to achieve the same; perhaps none more prevalent a rival than Disney+, if only for its sheer catalogue of franchise films and upcoming shows. Pumping high production value film and television straight into the living room is proving to be a very lucrative market and Scorsese himself accredits Netflix, stating, ‘it, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to’.
So, doesn’t that go to show that streaming and the new mode of film distribution will continue to support art films as it has done for Scorsese? Whether it’s Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2019), Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018) or Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea (2016), to name just a few, the answer appear to be yes. While I’m sure studios are not quite so liberal with the allocation of funds to upcoming directorial talent as they are with world renown directors, it seems clear that, despite Scorsese’s somewhat melodramatic outlook that arthouse films are being hounded out of mainstream cinema and that we may be living in a post-arts world come Christmas, interest in artistic cinema is very much still alive.
Every now and then it is possible for the realms of entertainment and art to merge, a recent example being Todd Phillip’s Joker (2019). With past iterations from icons such as Mark Hammill, Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson, the role had some comically large shoes to fill, yet Joaquin Phoenix excelled in his portrayal of the clown prince of crime. With clear influences from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1982), downtrodden and forgotten, Arthur Fleck comes to the delusional conclusion that the meaningless violence and tragedy that has plagued him is part of some larger, putrid joke. With no other means to explain his sadness, he adopts a new, dissociative world view. Either you laugh or you cry.
With stellar acting and art direction, Joker is ripe with the ‘revelation, mystery [and] genuine emotional danger’ that Scorsese says constitute the art form of filmmaking as he knows it. Some may try to undermine the film’s success, saying it was a cheap move to take such heavy inspiration from Scorsese’s previous works, but I believe, in all my subjectivity, the film stands on its own merit. By taking a long and leering look at the funding of and attitudes towards mental health, and to do so through the comic book genre, undoubtedly the most popular genre of film of the last decade, Joker addressed issues that many audience members may not have expected. Similarly, by pitching such a story to such an audience, Joker most likely introduced a number of viewers to a higher quality of traditional cinematic storytelling.
So, is cinema made for enjoyment or art? The obvious answer is that it is made for both. The question is a nonissue, and a paradox at that. Can I not enjoy art? Are there no artful flourishes found in ‘enjoyment’ cinema? Marvel have taken the foundations of the standard action flick and elevated them; bringing together millions, each release is nothing short of a global phenomenon. Every film needn’t be an artistic masterpiece, nor an earthshattering blockbuster. Variety is what maintains a mass interest in storytelling interesting, and yes, there are innumerable popcorn flicks, but it is the deft handling of craft that makes true standout blockbusters and visionary arthouse films so spellbinding.
Finally, with the entertainment industry held hostage by rolling R rates and the fact that America is still in a complete state of disarray, big-budget cinema is delayed indefinitely. Before the advent of streaming, this would have left cinephiles in a state of despair. As of right now, there’s a strong possibility that it may become the main method of distribution, at least until we reach the promised land of a post-covid world. In this land of milk and honey, we may see a resurgence of low budget, intimate, character driven stories. Independent cinemas may rise from the depths to provide an authentic cinema experience if studios and streamers find a way to make distribution work long term. It’s too early to have any concrete idea as to how cinema will look in a year or two but with the inherent creative passion the industry inspires, and a splash of economic ingenuity, I am confident that the film industry will rise again like a big, beautiful phoenix.
Written by Martin O'Malley
Martin is a London based English graduate, currently working as a tutor. His claim to fame is that he won the Daily Mail Harry Potter lookalike competition in 2001, a feat he is yet to top. In his down time, if he’s not losing the battle against his ever-growing watchlist, he’ll be reading one King book or another.