But the need for certain areas of film culture to hold the line about what is and is not cinema (and therefore worthy of critical lionization and Oscar gold) is no longer about maintaining an abstract set of aesthetic prejudices and qualitative standards. It’s about protecting every other kind of moviemaking from the existential threat of the blockbuster. Now more than ever, the existence of a reward structure for certain kinds of prestige cinema — the fact that critics’ year-end top-10 lists and the stakes of awards season give the culture a reason to spend a few months out of every year talking about acting and directing and foreign films — is just about the only thing that keeps non-blockbusters from being completely drowned out of the public consciousness by the next phase of Marvel, the next Star Wars trilogy, or the newest and most twisted take on a Batman villain. This isn’t about what is or isn’t cinema. It’s about whether the corporations that already dominate so much of the cultural landscape through pure market share should also be allowed to set the parameters of what we can ask for from art. It’s not about whether superhero movies are capable of making us feel things, but about the need for movies that show us dimensions of human feeling more complex than Bruce Wayne’s childhood trauma or the raccoon that talks to the tree.
The reason all this should worry you, even if you have zero investment in superhero movies or their relative position vis-a-vis film culture as a whole, is that the response to Scorsese is a populist groundswell in service of the status quo, of corporations, and of power. In the case of Marvel Stans vs. Marty it’s the expression of a vestigial inferiority complex and hypersensitivity to gatekeeping left over from the days when the culture at large couldn’t look at anything comics-related that wasn’t Maus or Watchmen without making jokes about Adam West’s tights, but functionally it’s a mass movement rising up to defend a Goliath against the impertinence of a David.
It’s unlikely that superhero movies will ever drive adult dramas and foreign-language films and independent movies out of multiplexes entirely, but it’s impossible to imagine the opposite happening. There is no way what Scorsese says about superhero movies imperils their existence and a million ways in which the omnipresence of those films in the marketplace creates barriers preventing the next Scorsese from making her Mean Streets.
We’re now in a historical moment where anyone can claim to be a victim of bullying, irrespective of the relative power relationship between the accused bully and the party ostensibly being bullied. Before it became a catch-all banner uniting misogynists of all stripes, Gamergate was about defending the $43.4 billion video game industry and the fans of its most popular products against the perceived threat of independently produced text-based role-playing games about depression. What superhero movies and violent video games aimed at 16-year-old boys and YA fiction novels for teenagers have in common is that they were once looked down upon by the culture at large and have since become market forces so supermassive that no individual’s objection to them means anything at all. Yet their adherents will tolerate no dissent, rushing to the barricades at the drop of a mean tweet.