Mini-Cast #13 - The Re-Arrival - Part I

Martin Scorsese said that Marvel movies are not cinema and how the fuck are people still talking about this a month later? In any other era, this controversy would have lasted two days - thirty years ago, a journalist might ask Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini about superhero movies, gotten a fifteen-minute rant, and everybody would move on because before the internet, there was a finite boundary between comic book nerds and the general public. Nobody gave a shit who Bergman and Fellini were who weren't cinephiles to begin with. But whereas the cinephile generations used to hang out at the movie theater or even video stores, nerds generally hang out on the internet now, where everybody can instantly learn what everybody else has said and thought, and re-generate each other's outrage in perpetuity; so by an old-fashioned guy stirring a nest of sexually frustrated hornets, the internet has now assumed battle stations, and in Scorsese's defense, Marvel got even more vitriolic excoriation from Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach, and Pedro Almodovar. It's like the 2016 election for movies, seemingly almost demarcated by generation, with the outrage of one side further feeding the other's outrage.

Is Marvel cinema? Who gives a shit?! Why should Marvel fans care whether the work they love is the equal of work that 99% of them couldn't care less about? The Marvel movies are not just movies, they're part of an enormous franchise that includes comic books, novelizations, video games. I frankly think it's a disservice to both cinema and Marvel movies to call them cinema, because if Marvel movies are cinema, and let's hold out a possibility that they are, but if they are, then cinema is not powerful enough to stand as its own justification. Comic book movies are just an arm of comic book franchises and not necessarily the most powerful arm either. So in that regard, they are almost uniquely porous in the movie world, and to describe a comic book franchise in a single term requires its own definition which I don't know how to provide.

But it's one thing to exclude Marvel from the pantheon. Marvel movies are generally not shit, but they're not exactly earnest attempts to capture elusive poetic truths about the universe either. It's not a scandal to allege that Marvel movies are much more entertainment than art. It is, however, a scandal to say that the most artistically ambitious works of speculative and conceptual fiction - be it science fiction, fantasy, or counterfactual history, is anything but cinema or art. It's one thing to dismiss sensational, violent superhero movies where everything is solved by an explosion caused by people in plastic costumes, but are we really going to dismiss to dismiss The Day the Earth Stood Still, La Jetee, Dark City, Forbidden Planet, Grave of the Fireflies, Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Princess Mononoke, Brazil, Stalker, Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Ugetsu Monogatori, Children of Men, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Pan's Labyrinth, ET and Close Encounters, Toy Story and WALL-E, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, Pinocchio and Bambi, The Wizard of Oz?!? Dismissing all that as something less than the great cinema among great cinema is impossible.

Werner Herzog, the visionary German filmmaker, declared that we are an age starved of new images. It's difficult to imagine what he means in this culture where our minds are so bombarded by the pictures we see on screens. But go onto Google Art sometime, look at the religious images of Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Albrecht Durer, Andrei Rublev, Cristobal del Vilalpando, and all their greatest peers. Or look at the great cathedrals and the great mosques of the Islamic world. Imagine for a moment being a peasant who would never be able to conceive of such images until they saw them with their own eyes - the infinite is revealed to them. They have experienced a moment of the sublime. And for people in such positions, every difficulty of their lives may become bearable from the humility inspired by that moment.

So how are so many of us, fraught with constant worry about planetary doom, but with no religious belief to console us, supposed to feel that humility before creation that could be the difference for some of us between life being bearable and life only being worth ending? We need that sublimity, but we know too much now, religion can no longer provide it for us. In the centuries following the enlightenment, many millions, particularly Americans, have thought personal liberty and freedom of choice the avenue to provide it, for surely no one knows better how to be the cause of our own happiness than ourselves. But a narrow majority of the world is now more or less free from dictatorship, and even if not free even by the standards of 20 years ago, they are still vastly freer by any standard than they even were in 1960. So the frontier of freedom has basically been crossed, yet billions still find living a basically miserable experience. One in four people experiences depression, one in five live in poverty. It would seem by some statistics that just in 2017, 970 million people experienced a mental disorder, and just one in twenty people live with no physical ailment at all! What point is there in freedom of choice if freedom has come this far, only for us still to have so little idea how to use that choice to better people's lives? Still other people think that equality and justice is the worthiest goal and will get us most of the rest of the way to providing that sense of relief from life's agony. For the moment, all I can say to that is that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all thought the same thing. Clearly, the world has such wildly divergent definitions of what constitutes justice and equality, what peace can there be between people if we can't arrive at basically agreed upon definitions of these most essential concepts to human well-being?

Our new frontier is no more social justice than it once was social class. Our new frontier is science. the objectives of social justice and liberty, however disagreed upon, are limited by the crude matter of reality. At the end of their roads, there is no revelation, no transcendence. Perhaps these goals are all the more worthy because they place humans at the center of human's own endeavors - as I suppose we all should. But whether from the coding of our brains or because our intuition about of the nature of existence is genuinely right, the vast majority of us are compelled to believe that there is a world beyond the mere things we see, and therefore, however much some of us believe in liberty and/or equality, half or more of humanity seems programmed leave mundane objectives like a good life by wayside when they perceive something far beyond this life. Just as monotheism held us in sway for thousands of years, so then will science. The universe, or multiverse, or whatever is out there, is still so incredibly unexplored that however material-based science seems now, we can't help but see within it possibilities of transcendence and infinity.