There’s a difference between There Will be Blood and Marvel movies, yes, but to reduce the later to committee driven kaboom-boom for dummies and five year old’s is absurd. The difference between the artistic movie and a Marvel movie is not the difference between a gourmet meal and a cheeseburger; there’s a difference, but that is precisely not it. It is clear that Scorsese believes that is what the difference is and that is what implies a certain misunderstanding- and it is also pretentious and patronizing, besides just being wrong. Firstly, before I explain what I think the real difference is, I’d just say: do you honestly think a committee of old executives with no other goal than making money would have the creativity to both come up with, and the gall to put into production, something where a main character is a talking raccoon, another’s an anthropomorphic tree, in a story where a giant mutant Grimace tries to blow up the universe with magic stones and a gauntlet he got Tyrion Lannister to make him using the furnace of a dead neutron star? They are,- Marvel movies,- and using the medium of film, exactly what the comics were using the medium of the page, which they are based on: a communal, transcultural experience in a kind of shared mythos. People of vastly different age groups, race, belief, politics, class, etc. can all experience this grand communal logodrama of human archetypes in basically the same way. You really gonna shit on that? Well I think that is what Scorsese did, and I don’t think Scorsese understands that is what they are, and he certainly doesn’t appreciate it. We, as a collective, haven’t really had a shared mythos in a very long time- and I do mean a very a long time. At any rate, having said all this, the real difference between Marvel stuff and a movie like There Will Be Blood, is that the later is a tragic drama that focuses on establishing the opposite of a mythos, of an archetype: like all tragic drama, it traces the human individual as he falls away from the mythic patterns that bind him to the rest of humanity, it traces his failure at individuation, in Jungian terms- his collapse and breakdown; how he, like all individuals reduced to the pitiable margins of the lone Ego, inevitably perishes by his own fatal flaw, an Aristotelian hamartia bringing the audience catharsis as we learn exactly what not to do, to be complete human beings. In that sense, tragedy is the opposite of mythology. I believe both the mythic and tragic art are necessary for society. And the difference between the two is obviously not, if you follow what I’ve said, analogous to the difference between a fine steak and a double cheeseburger. The two are equal, but different. One isn’t just a lower quality version of the other, they’re fundamentally different.
Scorsese’s pallet of human failure and perverse violence is too limited for him to really judge the value of such a broad genre as superhero movies, anyway. He has made some brilliant pictures obviously but these aren’t about characters I can relate to more than I can relate to Spiderman or Ironman. Scorsese’s men are as far removed from me as any superhero is. I could even go so far as to say his figures are cartoons of the human spirit.
Interesting point about the opposition of tragic art and mythology. For my tastes, the best mythology of Hollywood is the Terminator series.
Like most artists, Scorsese is too in love with his own creativity to consider anyone else’s. Marvel is about movies for everyone; no one is excluded. Even with all the success he has had in this world, Scorsese should be humbled. As a result of this overvaluing of his creativity, Scorsese has failed to recognize certain human qualities in others. This can be read as arrogance and prejudice on his part or it could simply be that the movie director isn’t a perfect human being like the rest of us.
It’s just as possible that he is not only biased toward the comic-book genre but that he is a total averse to it. It’s too much for him to absorb into his own film-making.
In tragedies, the audience gets to see how all of us can be reduced to pathetic individuals trapped in the lonely and limited Ego, when we are no more than a series of drives and impulses and an inbuilt tendency to self-deception, which means that, as individuals, we are forever doomed to follow the blind path of our instinctual and id-like urges.
By contrast, in Marvel movies, all characters succeed, in one way or another, though they go through trials and tribulations too. Their mythos is always triumphant. It is what happens to a hero when he overcomes all his limitations, he becomes a god, he overcomes his weaknesses and is finally strong and complete, he becomes a complete individual. He becomes a hero, and a hero is not just a list of qualities, a constant flux: he is far more than that. He is not only a person, he is a representative of something beyond the human. He is the embodiment of a universal truth, a universal idea, a great idea, or even the sum of an entire species, an image of collective humanity and collective human strength.
In Captain America: The First Avenger, he is the hero who fought fascism, the one who was instrumental in liberating the people from that evil. One gets to understand what happens to characters because we are able to see a reflection of ourselves, because we recognize ourselves in the characters. In order to identify with a character, we first have to understand why he acts as he does. This means understanding his flaws and limitations, for it is his weakness that defines who he is. We identify with a character because he is similar to us, but not in all the ways that we are similar to others, so we feel empathy for the weaknesses he has that we share.
That, and we like a good story. A comic book is the kind of story that is not just entertaining, it is also about someone struggling to reach an ideal state, and then trying to achieve it. It is about the struggle between what we know to be right, but is often not the easiest thing to live, and how we try to overcome obstacles and limitations. This is what we seek in a hero, whether he is a man or a woman. This is why we love a hero. They are the living personification of an idea and they represent it so well that we become absorbed by it. To this end, every single Marvel movie embodies a theme, though they all have their individual themes too. Marvel films are about the concept of destiny. They are about self-actualization and the overcoming of one’s limitations and weaknesses. They are about the idea of being complete. They are about how one becomes a hero and the idea of the Hero. And they are about the process by which one becomes a hero. That is why Marvel film characters embody a moral imperative in us, an imperative which we find within our own self: to become whole.
I’m watching “Travelers” a Netflix series that centers on five people who come from the future to occupy 21st century stereotypes. It’s marvel comic serious. To me that means it can be read as a parody of our times. But since our times often seem like a parody of the 20th century, people coming from the future has a fractal quality to it. An iteration of an iteration of an iteration all the way down.
Modern man has become so detached from the ancient mythos, from the primeval source of human imagination, and so entangled in reflective consciousness, that the Jungian shadow and its play of archetypes beneath the veil of the unconscious cannot any longer be seen; the little glimpse people get of it, they interpret as simple themes; believe in yourself, don’t lose hope, etc., and they interpret it in this unfair way because, detached from that source, the only way something can be seen as “deep” is for it to deconstruct the individual in the sense of tragedy I explained here: anything that does the opposite, like Marvel films, anything that reunites the individual to the collective soul, is simple, for children, etc. It’s sad. Thus someone like Scorsese would read something like Iron Man as this simplistic three act structure embedded with simple themes and that really isn’t what it is.
The latest venture into this ‘break the individual down cuz it’s deep’ kind of story telling is hyper-realist fiction a la. GRR Martin and Game of Thrones. Hence my problem with that guy. He’s not going to finish writing his series because he can’t finish writing the series. Technically, it can’t be done. There is no end to Ice and Fire because it’s not really a story, it’s a failed literary experiment on fictive hyper-realism. Multiple people have conducted analyses that reveal, because of plotline desynchronization, the different threads of the story cannot be brought back together into any narrative unity (and thus a conclusion) because multiple characters are all at different points in their own independent arc; there’s no way to resynchronize them at this point. He has allowed his fiction to balloon out of control while following through the kind of immoral logical consequences (that define our real history by their incomprehensible causal branches) exampled in something like the frequent death of characters (consequent to their own poor decisions) other writers would not commit to. (This is a well known quality to his works; any character can die at any time, in keeping with the hyperrealism and the total investment in following through causal chains to their ultimate ends, regardless of how comfortable they are.) This desynchronization has gotten worse and worse over time, which is why each of his books seems to take twice as long as the last one to complete: he has essentially written a story that cannot logically be concluded by anyone because of its own inherent, asynchronous plot structure- and I suppose that is a kind of accomplishment in itself, a story that cannot be finished-- though doubtlessly, not the accomplishment George was aiming at. Anyways, his failure offers as much knowledge to us as any successful experiment would: we have a direct example now of exactly how far fictive hyper-realist narrative can be pushed before it breaks down. If any fans of this type of narrative truly hear what I’m saying, perhaps they can find new regard for a man like Tolkien- regard for narrative forms that bring us closer to the Mythos, instead of spinning us around and around the empty circle of pure Logos.
tragedy=man failing to be what he is
myth= man succeeding to be more than he is
This makes a lot of sense.
Pretty important topic, too.
This is why Netflix, and in general all these shows, depress so much. I had wondered about why that is as the quality is often so high, just in terms of craft. But it’s al this disintegration, all this separateness, inevitability, passivity.
Well put.
But it then just begs the question…
If we do not construe ourselves in the Marvel mode: Good vs. Bad…or in the Scorsese mode: Bad vs. Worse…how ought we to think and to feel about ourselves in the world around us?
What sort of characters do we relate to? Given particular sets of circumstances.
And how did we come to believe that? Given the manner in which I construe the acquisition of an is/ought world identity here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
I know, I know: Let’s not go there.
On or off the silver screen.
Indeed the inevitable question, thought it hadn’t occurred to me. Keeping to the context of cinema, what comes to mind is some work by Jim Jarmush, or contemplative movies like Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. This philosophy of life would more or less fall in the category of Zen; beyond moral judgments, not because there is no point to them, but because there is, in the moment, no cause for them; to simply exist, neither for better or worse. Dasein-an-sich. Is this possible, in real life?
Concerning “a man amidst mankind”; it recently occurred to me that Christianity was created, conceived, born, given, to deal with the increased density of humans. Before, it would have been possible to be alone and just mind ones extra-moral business among the animals, but as Rome’s dominion saturated Europe with humanity, and it was, as Gibbon describes, no longer possible to escape the Caesar wherever one went in the continent, in other words when man simply had no choice but to be among mankind, nature provided an extra natural law that applies specifically to humans in great density’s; the surrendering technique of the Christ and its inevitable results on the environment; non-resistance as the ultimate consequence of morality; there is no point in fighting. The only fight something is to reveal the consequences.
Non-resistance then produces an unparalleled degree of resistance by cohering its members more powerfully than any society had been cohering before, and mankind became a kind of substance. It is arguable that before Christianity there was not yet a “mankind”; it took a slave-revolt, a transformation from the ground up, to include all layers of the human species into one kind.
Through there, back to the effort of using cinema to resolve the question. A movie that starts out with a tragic character and, through a supernatural tool which might be called a teacher of Dasein, ends up representing the nature of mythos as Parodites gives. It features Bill Murray though, who in himself as himself already cheats out of the question. Perhaps it is simply not given to everyone to make a path out of metaphysical bounds.
“Being Bill Murray” then?