EDIT: The relevant quote (although the whole interview is pretty interesting):
"I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."
I have to agree with Scorsese here. I don't remember the last superhero movie I saw where I didn't walk out with a yawn. They're just so predictable. Everyday guy or gal gets bestowed with or discovers powers of some sort and cut to blowing a bunch of stuff up. End credits with some teaser afterwards. And that's just the first of what will inevitably be many more movies culminating in blowing even bigger things up (has any of them gotten to the point of blowing up a whole planet yet?)
If I'm being fair, this predictability problem is pretty rampant in Hollywood. I rewatched Pulp Fiction recently and I remember seeing it for the first time and being blown away. It was anything but predictable. It was hilarious and disturbing at the same time but, most of all, it was creative. To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.
Before I lost interest in Marvel movies altogether, I used to get annoyed at how they would show these little glimmers of creativity, only to then crush them under the boot of The Marvel Formula.
The most interesting parts of the early Marvel movies weren't the super powers or special effects, it was the little notes they gave to their protagonists to humanize them -- Tony Stark as a selfish alcoholic, Thor as a cheerfully oblivious fish out of water, Captain America as earnest but painfully naïve. They seemed to be opening up the possibility of superhero stories that were also human stories, rather than just the kind of juvenile power fantasies Moore is decrying here. But each movie would eventually put that stuff aside and build to yet another Epic Battle as climax, which was disappointing.
In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that the stuff that I found appealing was the result of Marvel, still finding its feet, allowing its filmmakers to doodle in the margins of their studio-approved blueprint a bit. Once the movies took off and the Marvel Formula was proven, they no longer needed to allow space for such divergence from the formula. So we get movies like the Avengers entries, where the entire story is just moving chess pieces around to get them into place for the inevitable Epic Battle.
The Marvel movie I always wanted to see was one that put the Epic Battles aside completely, and focused 100% on telling a character-driven story. Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics, where the point of the story is deepening our understanding of this one character, grounding him in the context of the brownstone he lives in, the ways he interacts with his neighbors, and their common problem of potentially losing their homes to an aggressive developer. Human-scale stories about human beings.
In other words, I didn't want Avengers: Endgame, I wanted My Dinner with Ultron. But once the Marvel juggernaut picked up enough steam, that was exactly the movie I was never going to get.
> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.
It's important to specify in mainstream cinema, if one wants to make this critique.
Although it's a different context, one hears with some frequence the same about videogames, but always omitting the fact that the creative product of modern indepedent studios is evergreen (very simply, due to the considerably lower entry barriers than 20/30 years ago).
I don't see it any differently than the rise of science fiction as a genre. Science fiction can be a platform for storytelling, but it can also be a dumb excuse to use special effects, or to fantasize about the future, or any other amount of vapid justifications. If you blow it off completely due to the few movies you've seen, you're gonna miss out on a lot of excellent storytelling. For example, if you've dismissed The Watchmen or The Dark Knight because you think Iron Man is dumb, you're missing out.
Avengers: End Game is a prime example. Filmmakers have gotten too liberal with using deus ex machinas to push a story along. And even with these lazy devices, these films are still riddled with plot holes and absurdity.
I don't agree with the "it's not cinema" line, but I do agree with "It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."
I've watched almost all Marvel and DC movies, and I quite enjoy them. They're a creative endeavor and they're pretty cool. But I sometimes side with Ian McKellen griping about greenscreens on The Hobbit set. Getting your emotions out to a blank space with no feedback must be quite a challenge.
> Everyday guy or gal gets bestowed with or discovers powers of some sort and cut to blowing a bunch of stuff up.
That comes across the same way as if I said "all romance movies end up with a couple, who don't get along, and there's some obstacle in their romance, and then they discover love, and end with smooching- end credits with some sappy music."
Yes, the elements you pointed out are a predictable part of (many, but not all) super hero movies- but there's plenty of variation if you dig just a little bit deeper. Iron Man 2 has themes of substance abuse and trust, Black Panther questioned the roles of loyalty and honor in running a country... the recent Spiderman had themes of responsibility and whether it's okay to abdicate it...
> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore
And this sounds a lot like the patent office commissioner who said, about a century ago, "we should shut down the patent office, everything that can be invented already has been."
Yes, there's a lot of unoriginality in cinema, and also a lot of originality, and both of those statements have been true for about a century. Maybe you just need to take a break from cinema for a while, you're sounding burned out.
Would you consider the recent Joker movie to be a superhero movie? I do absolutely consider it cinema.
If we define cinema to exclude boring and predictable, then a lot of US cinema stops being so, super hero movie or not. The same goes for most Hollywood comedies and tons and tons of love stories. Guess it is time to switch to French arthouse.
Guess my point is, whether a movie is considered cinema or not has little to do with whether it is a super hero movie.
> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.
Ehh, when I see people who say this (or say they don't make good music anymore), I just assume they don't actually listen/watch anything new anymore.
There are obviously issues in the movie industry between viewer expectations, publisher resource allocation, and competition with streaming services, it's kind of one big crap shoot. But there are plenty of amazing movies coming out every year from both big and small productions. Scorsese himself listed plenty of good examples in his piece (Ari Aster being a personal favorite of mine), but there is plenty of other directors out there doing great work. As a big fan of horror films, I honestly think there has never been a better time for horror movies. Outside of horror, there is plenty of other great stuff too. If you are really looking for creative films, I am a big fan of basically any A24 published movie - they really do a good job of finding and supporting creative teams.
Scorsese misses the point of the genre. Superhero movies, and any sort of movie franchise, are about getting to revisit a world that you like. We care less about whether the story represents a "window into our soul" and more about soaking in the environment that brings us some level of joy.
Scorsese doesn't understand this because he likes mafia movies; not the type of universe you want to live in. Mafia movies are about taking a peak into a grimy sort of world that we all know exists to some degree but don't want to be part of ourselves.
> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century.
Or, you know, sometimes we just like a little escape-ism. It's no different than reading a good sci-fi/fantasy book where the hero(es) win in the end. It's fun. Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.
I have a theory that this obsession with superheros is part of a greater obsession with continuity. Whether it's TV shows or cinematic universes, people crave a sense of continuity in their narrative. Right now there's a lack of continuity, a lack of semantic cohesion within the world. Values have disintegrated. Stuff that would have been otherwise meaningful, whether that be working class life, or the institution of the presidency or the guarantees of a college degree, are now meaningless or less meaningful.
This is a serious mic-drop line that had my jaw hanging open:
> In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.
Super heroes capes and masks as inspired by KKK hoods? I don't think it was probably intentional/conscious in the minds of those who originated it, and I don't think Moore necessarily means it was either... but it's definitely an interesting cultural collective unconsciousness sort of lineage.
In our post-shame, fact-resistant world, maybe we should recalibrate what a superhero is. Perhaps it's someone who values public good over personal profit, and someone who doesn't compromise their principles in the face of trolling and smearing. Children should be looking up to THAT, not being able to punch through walls. The bar is pretty low.
But superheroes provide convenient excuses why we don't do that: they're super. Oh sure, you can argue that some of them don't have magic powers, like Batman and Ironman, but that's ignoring super-wealth (and impossible engineering).
What we need is a superhero who's just a guy with a crappy office job who wants to make the world a better place, and his only tools are his sense of justice and a costume he bought at a garage sale. Someone so utterly unremarkable that they just use their regular name as their superhero name.
That's right, I'm saying we need an Arthur movie.
...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.
>Perhaps it's someone who values public good over personal profit, and someone who doesn't compromise their principles in the face of trolling and smearing. Children should be looking up to THAT, not being able to punch through walls.
So... almost every single super hero then? Have you even watched any of these movies?
CA Civil War is all about authoritarianism and how much freedom we should trade for safety. Dr Strange grapples with a death he caused in self defense and uses his mind to save the day. Captain America represents the pinnacle of self sacrifice, and Iron Man's entire journey is about him eschewing his old ways and becoming selfless. Beyond this, they've done a good job of making less one dimensional villians lately.
And yes, there are fights and super powers. Lots of them. People like action and mysticism, and they always will. That doesn't make them dumb, get over it.
I can't imagine worrying about Alan Moore's (or Scorsese's) narrow opinions when choosing entertainment.
For one thing, I think Moore is clearly wrong about what adults typically get out of superhero movies. I think it's entertainment, and not some kind of deeper emotional experience.
Put it this way: if people generally need movies for meaningful emotional experiences, there are some profound problems in our society that goes far beyond cinema.
It really is OK, and not a sign of some deficiency, that people are making and enjoying well-made, epic action/fantasy films.
Anyway, when I see something like this:
> He says superheroes are written and drawn by people who've never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them - saying they appear "to be largely employed as cowardice compensators".
I think he's really struggling with understanding the perspective of people who don't see the world or think of it the way he does.
There's no timelier follow up to Alan Moore's stance on superhero culture than Damon Lindelof's Watchmen which is currently in the middle of its first (and likely only) season run on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/watchmen
It's not only a high-flying feat of television writing, acting, and directing. It's something Moore will likely never endorse or even see (he's apparently denounced any adaptation/continuation of his work) and yet embodies the spirit of Watchmen better than anything I've ever seen in the genre.
Lindelof and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin records an hourlong podcast (https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/watchmen-listen-to-official-pod...) for HBO talking about the genesis of show, its relationship with the Zach Snyder movie (respect for the form, detachment from the execution and alterations), and the very subject of this BBC piece: people who wear masks to enact vigilante justice are and should be concerning.
The parallels between 1985 and 2019 malaise, worldwide unrest, and that awful feeling that something's not quite right with the way the world is running are incredible well capture by the show.
Whether you've read the graphic novel or not, I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough. Even if you dismiss it as an unworthy heir to Moore and Gibbon's work, you will without a doubt be blown away by the show and how impeccably crafted it is.
For detail-hungry folks, the show's writing staff is release ancillary material that expands on the world (re)building within the show at https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia. Obviously don't read this before you watch each specific episode.
PS: I found the premise of the Amazon's The Boys interesting but beyond some impressive sequences and shocking twists, the show's writing is a bit too cynically shallow for its own good. There's not much commentary beyond the rottenness of (almost) every character in the show and that ends up feeling a little too much of one-note throughout the whole season.
> I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough.
Fair warning though: Damon Lindelof is responsible for Lost and The Leftovers, which had notoriously unsatisfying conclusions. Some of the plot arcs are starting to terminate with actual plot movement, so there is hope that the season might achieve some form of closure. If this show finishes after one season and succeeds in telling a coherent story, I will be surprised.
Well, I suppose I should say thanks that an actual auteur of the genre has finally said this. Should a regular person make the same point (although not as articulately), they'd be shushed by the "let people enjoy things" industrial complex.
I would have no issue with superhero movies if we lived in the pre-Spiderman (2002) world where comic book franchise products co-existed with other types of cinema compared to dwarfing them in terms of budget and release frequency.
That development has sucked all of the oxygen and funding out of other types of films, and has poisoned the well to the extent where studios are too risk-averse to put money behind anything other than a spinoff or reboot of something that already has name recognition.
Admittedly, this is Martin Scorsese instead of Moore, but....
> It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
I'm in my late 40s, and I teared up when during the death scene in the most recent movie. And again during the scene with his daughter, talking about burgers. If I had been watching it at home alone, I would probably have been outright crying, thinking about how I miss my own father.
Just because the movies don't speak to everyone doesn't mean they don't speak to anyone. I feel like there's an awful lot of people out there that think they're better than everyone else because they're more limited in what they can understand. That seems backwards.
Bad cinema can (and arguably must) stimulate the emotions, but I don't think that is what Scorsese is trying to get across here.
The marvel movies or whatever may stimulate emotions in us, but they do so primarily by dramatizing conditions which are so universal that we can all identify with them. That has limited artistic potential.
The critical phrase in Scorcese's quote, up there, is "to another human being". Literally almost anyone with a dead father misses their father. You aren't learning anything about the human condition by being reminded of the fact that you loved him. Being so reminded isn't bad by any means, or valueless. These movies help us process our emotions and live in the world.
But they aren't necessarily doing the hard artistic work of carrying you into the mind of someone else whose experiences, desires, pains, might be quite different than your own. They definitely aren't doing the artistic work of offering serious critique of the world.
These films are definitely escapists. I don't think Alan Moore is against escapism. I think he is worried by its total domination as a cultural form.
I'm a person within the superhero demo who has seen a couple of Marvel movies recommended to me, and have not connected to them at all.
That being said, they certainly mean a lot to a lot of people, and it elicits a feeling they seek out, which is enough to call it art in my books.
I may not enjoy the films, but I'll always be interested in getting to know why people feel as strongly as they do about it, instead of dismissing it because it isn't mutual.
EDIT: This is more relevant re: the Scorsese quote. Alan Moore obviously hasn't discounted them as art.
Didn't tear up per se, but they are extremely well executed movies. The characters mostly have a distinct character arc (except for Captain Marvel), and their actions follow their character development. Weaving so many movies and so many characters together into a cohesive story line is an impressive feat. Some of the choices seem obvious now, but were really risky. Like a sci-fi movie featuring a talking racoon and a walking tree. (Closest I got to a tearing-up moment was when Starlord's mom gives him the mix tape.)
Ending Infinity War with Thanos triumphant rivals "Luke I am your father" as the emotional twist to a major blockbuster movie. (Even knowing from the comics what was going to happen, it was still a weird emotional state walking out of the theater after that.)
I think the reason the success of the Marvel movies was so universal was because even people not normally interested in comic book stories still recognized they are executed so well.
I think this is more the kind of thing Moore is criticizing.
Is "The Boys" really deep and insightful look at human nature, or just continuing to indulge in material meant for kids with more violence and nudity to make you feel more grown up while watching it?
I love comic books by the way. But it's meant as simple escapist pleasure where you know at the end the good guys win. Making them anti-heroes and upping the "transgressive" content while keeping all hte other tropes doesn't automatically make it deep art.
Something that continues to haunt my dreams on the popularity of "anti-heroes" kind of stuff (in particular the Punisher) and some scary cultural implications and resonances is this amazing graphic essay...
It is terrifying. And definitely related to the cultural meanings of the current obsession with superheroes of various sorts that Moore is talking about.
People with powers have their behavior explained, the good guys are far from perfect. The world is a dark place, dead protagonists stay dead (and it's not the worse which can happen) and the cause of the powers is explained. This kind of take on superheroes make the Marvel and DC universes bland.
I enjoyed The Boys too. That being said, part of why I watch super movies/shows is to enjoy the escape, to see people being ... more. I can see people being assholes anywhere, so a story that focuses around that needs to be significantly better than one that doesn't for me to enjoy it.
Something I've noticed in recent superhero movies is the idea that:
* For all the talk about "heart", superheroes are extraordinary by some aspect the rest of us can't expect to get
* Yet supervillains are often just normal people who got too pissed off. The villains in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Spider Man: Far From Home, Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man, etc are just people that got ticked off.
We have to count on others to be superheroes, but we're all one bad day from becoming supervillains.
Co-opting Thor as a superhero was a clear commentary by the writers on how superheros and theism are intertwined. The most popular supers of our cultural imagination are Jehovah, Muhammad, Buddha, et al. So this is no sort of new phenomenon, but a secular reinvention of an ancient one. Apparently there is a deep psychological need for the great Father or Mother, and superheros are a way that modern markets attempt to fulfill it. Or to sedate it.
Moore is spot on here, IMO, but there's another dimension in which our current mass obsession with kid's characters is embarrassing: the comic books that make it to the big screen are far from representative of what's available.
I started collecting comics ironically a few years ago. I was watching "The Big Bang Theory" and had the thought that I should go buy comic books as a kind of joke. I started going to the local comic book store each week after work on new comics day and dropping ~$50 on 10-12 books.
It didn't take me long to realize that comic books today are among the most awesome and mind-blowing stories and art being published in any medium. (I mean, the Internet et. al. has more, but you know what I mean: in physical form the story and art has been reified into something particular and special. A comic book is a physical event. Even the serial nature of the format is part of it. It's just now quite the same to read a graphic novel or a web comic. I don't mean to disparage those formats, I'm just lauding comic books here-and-now.)
They have really become an art form far beyond the stereotypical superhero in tights and a cape. (Which is not to say that there are some comics out there that treat the whole super-beings idea in rich and fascinating ways!)
Comic books are going through a new Golden Age right now. Go to your local comic book store and ask them about it.
I find Moore's criticisms a little odd. Imo part of what has made Moore's work so notable is that it turns the genre sideways, or obviously deals with subjects in a much more mature way than an audience is used to seeing. The subversion doesn't work if there's nothing to undermine.
There's things like The Killing Joke that are sort of things unto themselves, but I feel without the context of 'normal' superhero stuff, you lose quite a bit of the venom in like Watchmen or like The Boys (although it's Ennis, they're in the same realm).
But I can admit some sympathy with what they may be getting at indirectly, perhaps there's a risk it draws in too much talent.
There's the Banksy quote
"The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists."
It feels a bit self-aggrandizing, but instead of just criticizing people and the stuff they make, ask where the talent is going, and is that a good development?
Superheroes are so...conservative. Nothing ever changes. If you want to change the game then you're probably the villain, who is to be stopped by the superheroes, who don't really have a plan themselves.
Batman has huge wealth and advanced technologies and the best way he can come up with to fight crimes is beating the "criminals" up himself, rather than contributing his power to improve the economy (or run for an office to change policies or whatever) to prevent people from having to commit crimes. No wonder there're always more crimes for Batman to fight...
This criticism seems similar to the criticisms that Bill Maher has leveled in the past (of course Moore has much more understanding of the culture).
They both are based on the premise that we must live our entire lives focused on cultural and political issues. That it's somewhat shameful to take a break and rest your mind on something comfortable.
It's the atheist equivalent of many religion's focus on suffering as being a virtue. By visiting pleasant worlds in our mind we are not spending enough time focused on progress.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. People are obsessed with super heroes because they are hopeless and helpless to change the society and move forward due to the large forces in society holding us back that can only be changed with collective action. But no collective action happens because, at least in America, people expect one person to rise up and fix everything, to "save the world," as it would be. This is as impossible in the real world as the concept of "saving the world" itself is stupid, childish, selfish, grandiose, and ultimately beyond delusional.
Why does the world need saving all the time? It's been going on for millions of years (human populated world) or billions of years (the whole universe) without ever needing saving. Maybe instead of waiting for Superman to come fix our healthcare or inequality or climate or insert any other modern problem, we should try to do something about it ourselves together. Unfortunately, these movies standardize the idea that people working together cannot achieve anything and only super heroes alone or in small groups can. That's completely delusional, the opposite of reality. And this mindset has become the cornerstone of our real society feeding the helplessness that leads to hopelessness that leads to hoping to be "saved" by imaginary children's stories.
[+] [-] cmsefton|6 years ago|reply
EDIT: The relevant quote (although the whole interview is pretty interesting):
"I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks."
[+] [-] Zelphyr|6 years ago|reply
If I'm being fair, this predictability problem is pretty rampant in Hollywood. I rewatched Pulp Fiction recently and I remember seeing it for the first time and being blown away. It was anything but predictable. It was hilarious and disturbing at the same time but, most of all, it was creative. To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore.
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
The most interesting parts of the early Marvel movies weren't the super powers or special effects, it was the little notes they gave to their protagonists to humanize them -- Tony Stark as a selfish alcoholic, Thor as a cheerfully oblivious fish out of water, Captain America as earnest but painfully naïve. They seemed to be opening up the possibility of superhero stories that were also human stories, rather than just the kind of juvenile power fantasies Moore is decrying here. But each movie would eventually put that stuff aside and build to yet another Epic Battle as climax, which was disappointing.
In retrospect, it's pretty obvious that the stuff that I found appealing was the result of Marvel, still finding its feet, allowing its filmmakers to doodle in the margins of their studio-approved blueprint a bit. Once the movies took off and the Marvel Formula was proven, they no longer needed to allow space for such divergence from the formula. So we get movies like the Avengers entries, where the entire story is just moving chess pieces around to get them into place for the inevitable Epic Battle.
The Marvel movie I always wanted to see was one that put the Epic Battles aside completely, and focused 100% on telling a character-driven story. Something like the Matt Fraction Hawkeye comics, where the point of the story is deepening our understanding of this one character, grounding him in the context of the brownstone he lives in, the ways he interacts with his neighbors, and their common problem of potentially losing their homes to an aggressive developer. Human-scale stories about human beings.
In other words, I didn't want Avengers: Endgame, I wanted My Dinner with Ultron. But once the Marvel juggernaut picked up enough steam, that was exactly the movie I was never going to get.
[+] [-] pizza234|6 years ago|reply
It's important to specify in mainstream cinema, if one wants to make this critique.
Although it's a different context, one hears with some frequence the same about videogames, but always omitting the fact that the creative product of modern indepedent studios is evergreen (very simply, due to the considerably lower entry barriers than 20/30 years ago).
[+] [-] darksaints|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doc_gunthrop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inerte|6 years ago|reply
I've watched almost all Marvel and DC movies, and I quite enjoy them. They're a creative endeavor and they're pretty cool. But I sometimes side with Ian McKellen griping about greenscreens on The Hobbit set. Getting your emotions out to a blank space with no feedback must be quite a challenge.
[+] [-] knodi123|6 years ago|reply
That comes across the same way as if I said "all romance movies end up with a couple, who don't get along, and there's some obstacle in their romance, and then they discover love, and end with smooching- end credits with some sappy music."
Yes, the elements you pointed out are a predictable part of (many, but not all) super hero movies- but there's plenty of variation if you dig just a little bit deeper. Iron Man 2 has themes of substance abuse and trust, Black Panther questioned the roles of loyalty and honor in running a country... the recent Spiderman had themes of responsibility and whether it's okay to abdicate it...
> To my mind, there's little true creativity to movies anymore
And this sounds a lot like the patent office commissioner who said, about a century ago, "we should shut down the patent office, everything that can be invented already has been."
Yes, there's a lot of unoriginality in cinema, and also a lot of originality, and both of those statements have been true for about a century. Maybe you just need to take a break from cinema for a while, you're sounding burned out.
[+] [-] LeonidasXIV|6 years ago|reply
If we define cinema to exclude boring and predictable, then a lot of US cinema stops being so, super hero movie or not. The same goes for most Hollywood comedies and tons and tons of love stories. Guess it is time to switch to French arthouse.
Guess my point is, whether a movie is considered cinema or not has little to do with whether it is a super hero movie.
[+] [-] Softcadbury|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssully|6 years ago|reply
Ehh, when I see people who say this (or say they don't make good music anymore), I just assume they don't actually listen/watch anything new anymore.
There are obviously issues in the movie industry between viewer expectations, publisher resource allocation, and competition with streaming services, it's kind of one big crap shoot. But there are plenty of amazing movies coming out every year from both big and small productions. Scorsese himself listed plenty of good examples in his piece (Ari Aster being a personal favorite of mine), but there is plenty of other directors out there doing great work. As a big fan of horror films, I honestly think there has never been a better time for horror movies. Outside of horror, there is plenty of other great stuff too. If you are really looking for creative films, I am a big fan of basically any A24 published movie - they really do a good job of finding and supporting creative teams.
[+] [-] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inertiatic|6 years ago|reply
You re-watched a movie which you found again enjoyable despite being a predictable experience now.
There are other metrics on which do judge entertainment or even art.
[+] [-] IOT_Apprentice|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|6 years ago|reply
Scorsese doesn't understand this because he likes mafia movies; not the type of universe you want to live in. Mafia movies are about taking a peak into a grimy sort of world that we all know exists to some degree but don't want to be part of ourselves.
[+] [-] blattimwind|6 years ago|reply
They did that once or twice in a spin-off series.
[+] [-] udkl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RHSeeger|6 years ago|reply
Or, you know, sometimes we just like a little escape-ism. It's no different than reading a good sci-fi/fantasy book where the hero(es) win in the end. It's fun. Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
> In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.
Super heroes capes and masks as inspired by KKK hoods? I don't think it was probably intentional/conscious in the minds of those who originated it, and I don't think Moore necessarily means it was either... but it's definitely an interesting cultural collective unconsciousness sort of lineage.
[+] [-] papito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|6 years ago|reply
What we need is a superhero who's just a guy with a crappy office job who wants to make the world a better place, and his only tools are his sense of justice and a costume he bought at a garage sale. Someone so utterly unremarkable that they just use their regular name as their superhero name.
That's right, I'm saying we need an Arthur movie.
...more realistically, I think we could use more stories about regular people who made a difference just by be being good people.
[+] [-] EpicEng|6 years ago|reply
So... almost every single super hero then? Have you even watched any of these movies?
CA Civil War is all about authoritarianism and how much freedom we should trade for safety. Dr Strange grapples with a death he caused in self defense and uses his mind to save the day. Captain America represents the pinnacle of self sacrifice, and Iron Man's entire journey is about him eschewing his old ways and becoming selfless. Beyond this, they've done a good job of making less one dimensional villians lately.
And yes, there are fights and super powers. Lots of them. People like action and mysticism, and they always will. That doesn't make them dumb, get over it.
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|6 years ago|reply
For one thing, I think Moore is clearly wrong about what adults typically get out of superhero movies. I think it's entertainment, and not some kind of deeper emotional experience.
Put it this way: if people generally need movies for meaningful emotional experiences, there are some profound problems in our society that goes far beyond cinema.
It really is OK, and not a sign of some deficiency, that people are making and enjoying well-made, epic action/fantasy films.
Anyway, when I see something like this:
> He says superheroes are written and drawn by people who've never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them - saying they appear "to be largely employed as cowardice compensators".
I think he's really struggling with understanding the perspective of people who don't see the world or think of it the way he does.
[+] [-] olivierlacan|6 years ago|reply
It's not only a high-flying feat of television writing, acting, and directing. It's something Moore will likely never endorse or even see (he's apparently denounced any adaptation/continuation of his work) and yet embodies the spirit of Watchmen better than anything I've ever seen in the genre.
Lindelof and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin records an hourlong podcast (https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/watchmen-listen-to-official-pod...) for HBO talking about the genesis of show, its relationship with the Zach Snyder movie (respect for the form, detachment from the execution and alterations), and the very subject of this BBC piece: people who wear masks to enact vigilante justice are and should be concerning.
The parallels between 1985 and 2019 malaise, worldwide unrest, and that awful feeling that something's not quite right with the way the world is running are incredible well capture by the show.
Whether you've read the graphic novel or not, I can't recommend watching HBO's Watchmen enough. Even if you dismiss it as an unworthy heir to Moore and Gibbon's work, you will without a doubt be blown away by the show and how impeccably crafted it is.
For detail-hungry folks, the show's writing staff is release ancillary material that expands on the world (re)building within the show at https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia. Obviously don't read this before you watch each specific episode.
PS: I found the premise of the Amazon's The Boys interesting but beyond some impressive sequences and shocking twists, the show's writing is a bit too cynically shallow for its own good. There's not much commentary beyond the rottenness of (almost) every character in the show and that ends up feeling a little too much of one-note throughout the whole season.
[+] [-] beart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deckar01|6 years ago|reply
Fair warning though: Damon Lindelof is responsible for Lost and The Leftovers, which had notoriously unsatisfying conclusions. Some of the plot arcs are starting to terminate with actual plot movement, so there is hope that the season might achieve some form of closure. If this show finishes after one season and succeeds in telling a coherent story, I will be surprised.
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
I would have no issue with superhero movies if we lived in the pre-Spiderman (2002) world where comic book franchise products co-existed with other types of cinema compared to dwarfing them in terms of budget and release frequency.
That development has sucked all of the oxygen and funding out of other types of films, and has poisoned the well to the extent where studios are too risk-averse to put money behind anything other than a spinoff or reboot of something that already has name recognition.
[+] [-] RHSeeger|6 years ago|reply
> It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
I'm in my late 40s, and I teared up when during the death scene in the most recent movie. And again during the scene with his daughter, talking about burgers. If I had been watching it at home alone, I would probably have been outright crying, thinking about how I miss my own father.
Just because the movies don't speak to everyone doesn't mean they don't speak to anyone. I feel like there's an awful lot of people out there that think they're better than everyone else because they're more limited in what they can understand. That seems backwards.
[+] [-] vincent-toups|6 years ago|reply
The marvel movies or whatever may stimulate emotions in us, but they do so primarily by dramatizing conditions which are so universal that we can all identify with them. That has limited artistic potential.
The critical phrase in Scorcese's quote, up there, is "to another human being". Literally almost anyone with a dead father misses their father. You aren't learning anything about the human condition by being reminded of the fact that you loved him. Being so reminded isn't bad by any means, or valueless. These movies help us process our emotions and live in the world.
But they aren't necessarily doing the hard artistic work of carrying you into the mind of someone else whose experiences, desires, pains, might be quite different than your own. They definitely aren't doing the artistic work of offering serious critique of the world.
These films are definitely escapists. I don't think Alan Moore is against escapism. I think he is worried by its total domination as a cultural form.
[+] [-] jszymborski|6 years ago|reply
That being said, they certainly mean a lot to a lot of people, and it elicits a feeling they seek out, which is enough to call it art in my books.
I may not enjoy the films, but I'll always be interested in getting to know why people feel as strongly as they do about it, instead of dismissing it because it isn't mutual.
EDIT: This is more relevant re: the Scorsese quote. Alan Moore obviously hasn't discounted them as art.
[+] [-] jimbokun|6 years ago|reply
Ending Infinity War with Thanos triumphant rivals "Luke I am your father" as the emotional twist to a major blockbuster movie. (Even knowing from the comics what was going to happen, it was still a weird emotional state walking out of the theater after that.)
I think the reason the success of the Marvel movies was so universal was because even people not normally interested in comic book stories still recognized they are executed so well.
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altoidaltoid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|6 years ago|reply
Is "The Boys" really deep and insightful look at human nature, or just continuing to indulge in material meant for kids with more violence and nudity to make you feel more grown up while watching it?
I love comic books by the way. But it's meant as simple escapist pleasure where you know at the end the good guys win. Making them anti-heroes and upping the "transgressive" content while keeping all hte other tropes doesn't automatically make it deep art.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|6 years ago|reply
https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/
It is terrifying. And definitely related to the cultural meanings of the current obsession with superheroes of various sorts that Moore is talking about.
[+] [-] arkh|6 years ago|reply
People with powers have their behavior explained, the good guys are far from perfect. The world is a dark place, dead protagonists stay dead (and it's not the worse which can happen) and the cause of the powers is explained. This kind of take on superheroes make the Marvel and DC universes bland.
[+] [-] RHSeeger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PopeDotNinja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergothus|6 years ago|reply
* For all the talk about "heart", superheroes are extraordinary by some aspect the rest of us can't expect to get
* Yet supervillains are often just normal people who got too pissed off. The villains in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Spider Man: Far From Home, Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man, etc are just people that got ticked off.
We have to count on others to be superheroes, but we're all one bad day from becoming supervillains.
[+] [-] hirundo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
I started collecting comics ironically a few years ago. I was watching "The Big Bang Theory" and had the thought that I should go buy comic books as a kind of joke. I started going to the local comic book store each week after work on new comics day and dropping ~$50 on 10-12 books.
It didn't take me long to realize that comic books today are among the most awesome and mind-blowing stories and art being published in any medium. (I mean, the Internet et. al. has more, but you know what I mean: in physical form the story and art has been reified into something particular and special. A comic book is a physical event. Even the serial nature of the format is part of it. It's just now quite the same to read a graphic novel or a web comic. I don't mean to disparage those formats, I'm just lauding comic books here-and-now.)
They have really become an art form far beyond the stereotypical superhero in tights and a cape. (Which is not to say that there are some comics out there that treat the whole super-beings idea in rich and fascinating ways!)
Comic books are going through a new Golden Age right now. Go to your local comic book store and ask them about it.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gimmeThaBeet|6 years ago|reply
There's things like The Killing Joke that are sort of things unto themselves, but I feel without the context of 'normal' superhero stuff, you lose quite a bit of the venom in like Watchmen or like The Boys (although it's Ennis, they're in the same realm).
But I can admit some sympathy with what they may be getting at indirectly, perhaps there's a risk it draws in too much talent. There's the Banksy quote "The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists."
It feels a bit self-aggrandizing, but instead of just criticizing people and the stuff they make, ask where the talent is going, and is that a good development?
[+] [-] blaesus|6 years ago|reply
Batman has huge wealth and advanced technologies and the best way he can come up with to fight crimes is beating the "criminals" up himself, rather than contributing his power to improve the economy (or run for an office to change policies or whatever) to prevent people from having to commit crimes. No wonder there're always more crimes for Batman to fight...
[+] [-] Touche|6 years ago|reply
They both are based on the premise that we must live our entire lives focused on cultural and political issues. That it's somewhat shameful to take a break and rest your mind on something comfortable.
It's the atheist equivalent of many religion's focus on suffering as being a virtue. By visiting pleasant worlds in our mind we are not spending enough time focused on progress.
[+] [-] mnm1|6 years ago|reply
Why does the world need saving all the time? It's been going on for millions of years (human populated world) or billions of years (the whole universe) without ever needing saving. Maybe instead of waiting for Superman to come fix our healthcare or inequality or climate or insert any other modern problem, we should try to do something about it ourselves together. Unfortunately, these movies standardize the idea that people working together cannot achieve anything and only super heroes alone or in small groups can. That's completely delusional, the opposite of reality. And this mindset has become the cornerstone of our real society feeding the helplessness that leads to hopelessness that leads to hoping to be "saved" by imaginary children's stories.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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