Martin Scorsese and the Ghosts of “New Hollywood”

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese, one of the few cinematic directors from his generation still making lucrative movies, garnered attention this weekend when he publicly dumped on Marvel Studios. Extending upon previous comments, he referred to comic book-based action movies as “not cinema” and said, “We shouldn’t be invaded by it.” Street-level commentators and bloggers like me have dogpiled on Scorsese for his comments. But on further consideration, I have my doubts.

I cannot help focusing on his phrase “not cinema.” After fifty-one years directing movies, surely this fellow understands what “cinema” means. Scorsese is among the final survivors of “New Hollywood,” an auteur-driven movement in filmmaking when studios, feeling unable to compete with television, handed unaccountable stacks of cash to ambitious directors and granted permission to go crazy. But does that give him permission to define cinema for everybody else?

New Hollywood began, critics largely agree, with Warren Beatty’s notorious over-the-top craptacular, Bonnie and Clyde. It was ultimately done in by one of its staunchest adherents, George Lucas… though we’ll return to that. During its generation, observers writing New Hollywood’s obituary actually blamed Michael Cimino, whose bloated ego vehicle Heaven’s Gate lost so much money, it killed United Artists. I contend, though, New Hollywood could’ve survived that debacle.

Undoubtedly, New Hollywood had serial flaws: as studios increasingly trusted auteurs, movies became longer and slower, prone to sententiously lecturing the audience and following protagonists on somber internal journeys. Not surprisingly, these protagonists were played by performers who also wrote and directed their own stories. Many such films are rightly regarded as classics now, but in the moment, they became massively repetitive, and audiences wanted something more.

The problem is, after fifteen years of unchallenged box-office supremacy, these auteurs thought they owned the concept of “cinema.” Influenced by movies emerging from postwar Europe and Japan, where pacing and visual effects were limited by the hobbled economy, these auteurs thought “real art” happened in the moments of contemplation where mostly male heroes lived inside their own heads. Relationships, action, and women characters were subordinate to that introspection.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I enjoy several New Hollywood classics. Robert Altman’s MASH, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales are among the best movies ever made. But taken together, the movement’s trajectory becomes overwhelmingly identical; these movies are enjoyable today because we can dip into earlier and later historical periods as necessary. Imagine how oppressive this uniformity must’ve felt in the moment.

George Lucas

Into this milieu came George Lucas. Though his first two features, THX1138 and American Graffiti, are firmly New Hollywood, both films, the latter especially, radiate stylistic nostalgia for the less self-conscious cinema that happened between the World Wars. Raised in an agrarian community with television as his lifeline, Lucas understood the world through more retro content broadcast on Saturday afternoons. This became the spine of his runaway breakout, Star Wars.

Here, not in comic books, is where the “invasion” Scorsese abhors began. Star Wars commenced the era of tentpole franchises. Its massive box office receipts also subsidized the technological innovations that made today’s intensely realistic screen graphics not only possible, but affordable. Perhaps most importantly, his characters acted rather than ruminating; even Yoda’s famously sententious homilies are made possible by the physical nature of his training regimen.

Long before Marvel, Hollywood discovered the lucrative nature of franchises like James Bond, Harry Potter, and Star Trek. Even films conceived as one-off enterprises, like Die Hard and Rocky, couldn’t withstand the demand for sequels to capitalize on existing momentum. The surfeit of sequels and series films, which critics have lamented throughout my lifetime, begins in 1977, when Hollywood realized Star Wars could bankroll their more esoteric projects.

Though it’s tempting to cite Scorsese’s age against his criticisms (he’s currently 76 years old), fuddy-duddiness doesn’t explain it, for one reason: his movies continue making money. Though his last wide-release film, the 2016 religious drama Silence, thudded on arrival, his recent CV includes such successes as The Wolf of Wall Street, Shutter Island, and The Departed. Clearly, unlike many of his contemporaries, Scorsese’s best work isn’t finished yet.

But when I heard his anticipated upcoming film, The Irishman, is three hours and nineteen minutes long, I cringed. No wonder he can’t handle Marvel films. Like Heaven’s Gate, which ran 3:39, Scorsese is directing for an audience that wants to sit for a really long time, an audience I’m not sure really exists anywhere. He’s continuing to write for New Hollywood. Which, sadly, is old news.

To Be Continued