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The Hot Take: Is Marvel Cinema?
Ben Faulkner takes a look back at this year’s cinema hot takes.
Batten down the hatches, because we are talking about film opinions that you’re meant to care about. With our ever interconnected modern world, we can enjoy the pleasure of getting riled up in ‘discourse’ after ‘discourse’ as we vehemently scroll through Twitter’s intoxicating abyss. But for every half-baked twitter take we can comfortably dismiss, there’s a piping hot barrel of controversy that we can’t help but stick our noses into.
I’m not sure it was clear to anyone just how earth-shattering it would be to ask Martin Scorsese what he thinks of Marvel films. Scorsese remarked that Marvel films are “not cinema’,” and more closely resemble ‘theme parks’ than the pure attempt to “convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being”. And – under what I can only assume was some sort of mass hypnosis – an endless stream of fans came to the defence of Marvel’s, like, four different film formulas.
So yeah, evidently I think there’s some decent basis to Scorsese’s claim. If the nine upcoming films and eight announced television series are absolutely anything to go by, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a horrifyingly relentless franchise that runs defiantly on its own ridiculous profitability. On one end, these films are the embodiment of commercial, capitalist filmmaking: every strain of their filmmaking restructured and restrung to align to its purely financial model.
The decision to vouch for this commentary on racism in a year where BlackKklansman and Sorry to Bother You came out was a scalding hot take for all of the wrong reasons.
Yet, at the same time, I was really excited for Infinity War. Like, really excited. I went into the cinema with the utmost preparedness to hurl a child down to Row Nothing if they so much as uttered a breath of excitement. I wanted to enjoy it in pure silence. Is Scorsese just an old dog refusing to let the industry move on? (No.) But, is there at least some ounce of ‘cinema’ in these films, if they can create a cinema experience that is clearly so immersive for so many.
And, it begs the question, if Marvel isn’t ‘cinema’, then what is?
Is it Todd Phillips’ noisy, divisive, how-on-earth-have-we-not-stopped-talking-about-it menace of a film, Joker? The hype was there as soon as we saw pictures of Joaquin Phoenix waltzing around on set – the hope was that he’d be building on Ledger’s fine work, not taking dishevelled leaves out of Jared Leto’s strange book. But the first real hot take came from the Venice Film Festival, who shocked the industry by awarding it the Golden Lion back in September. Since then, every man and his dog (read: every man and his other white, male friend), have declared it a ‘masterpiece’ and one of the finest works they’ve ever seen. But that wasn’t the biggest hot take thrown down by an award ceremony.
Remember – and I’m really sorry for making you – back in February when the Academy declared Green Book the ‘Best Picture’ of the previous year. Ah, Green Book, what on earth were you? As we watched what felt like literally one hundred old, white males go up to receive the highest acclaim for a film that attempted to explain 1960s race relations, it was clear the Academy had out-Acadamied themselves.
The decision to vouch for this commentary on racism in a year where BlackKklansman and Sorry to Bother You came out was a scalding hot take for all of the wrong reasons.
But, I guess we could ask – why on earth do we care? By the year, fewer and fewer people treat the Academy as a voice of authority (for clearly good reason). Scorsese might be right, but many people will never think he is, and Marvel will keep gladly receiving the cheques for my monthly purchase of to-scale Infinity Gauntlets.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t in the take, nor how hot it is – the problem is the painstaking temptation we all have to get involved. Agree with the hot takes or not, in the end, they burn us all.
