Content vs. Film: An Essay Response to Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese is my favorite living director for numerous reasons, but the most admirable is his mission to bring undervalued films to the forefront of the American zeitgeist. All film students know the famous list A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese, and many more have benefited from his work in curating foreign films that every person should see. Even Tarantino and Wright formed a quarantine movie club using his recommendations. In an age where every film can supposedly be found (to varying degrees of quality) and popular opinion of film is often dictated by amateur critics and the at-home viewer, the question of film quality divides audiences more every day.

    In a recent interview Scorsese is quoted below:

    “Content became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores.” (source)

    This has halved the online film community and caused arguments amongst a fair share of those who love all films regardless of their backstory. There are several schools of thought, but the bottom line is obvious: he’s right and everyone knows it.

    Scorsese was under fire two years ago for saying Marvel movies are not cinema, and I found myself siding with the furor. It was not because I didn’t agree that these films were less important than classic films or that they were changing how movies were made and marketed. The reason I chafed at the idea of outright denying their artistic value is that I felt I was opening the door to a form of pretentious film criticism that I have spent a long timedistancing myself from. I think everyone who loves film values and watches films based on their own limiting beliefs and goals, and when you are pretentious it kills a lot of joy. You value a very specific kind of film, and oftentimes devalue the work of genre films, films made by non-white directors and writers, and lets lesser films conquer awards season (ex. Here, here, and here).

    But of course, I was so very wrong. Like its predecessors (“Star Wars”, “Jaws”, “Transformers”) the MCU has changed the ways in which film is made and marketed, and while there are some great benefits to these changes, for the most part film has become a commodity and is sold more as content than culture. This has become that much more apparent during Covid, with Netflix pushing out countless hours of content to appease us while the world slowly burns. Netflix was once the service I used to procure DVDs of films I was told were culturally significant, films such as “In the Heat of the Night,” “Out of Africa,” and “Pulp Fiction.” When streaming became the norm it was where I watched independent films I had never heard of and wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Now it’s its own factory of production, churning out nothingburger films that get a little bit of buzz and views and then are never mentioned again (“Someone Great,” “The Christmas Prince” trilogy, “Falling Inn Love,” “Dumplin’” etc.)

“Claudine” dir. John Berry, 20th Century Fox

Because of the MCU, mid-tier level films are all but extinct, and can only be found on Netflix and Hulu. I have spent the last year watching films almost exclusively released before 1980 and it has made all the difference. Where now are films like “Oh, God!”, “The Silent Partner” and “Claudine?” Even when we get great gems they are often swept under the rug and forgotten, or get an Independent Spirit Award before popping up on Hulu four years later.

    Now that I have finally joined Letterboxd (I got burned on Flixster years ago and never got over it. Don’t judge me for being this late to the game!) I see a lot of other people are also fatigued by the immense amount of content they’re subjected to. No one wants to miss the boat on a cultural moment, but at the same time a new cultural touchstone arrives every week, and no matter how judicious you are there is no way to be up to date on everything.What real film lovers want is variance in choice. Streaming limits so much of what I see and experience, and instead of being a tool that helps me broaden my need to discover it shows me what it thinks I want to see. 

    Even the film lovers that invest time into watching Marvel movies have to wake up to the fact that their films of choice are stifling the competition. You should not have to be an obsessive compulsive nerd completionist to find films you actually want to see. That’s what Scorsese is trying to say, it’s what we all agree should be the reality, and hopefully there will be a shift in the future to denote that wish. It’s so annoying to say, but studios make and market films based on what people pay for. Because not everyone in America has the financial resources to spend $100 every time they visit the theater, streaming is more popular. Economic equality translates to more people going to the theater, it means a larger variety of films being released, and better films getting made. A film now needs to make millions upon millions of dollars to recoup its budget, but that is not the way the industry should strive to create.

“Sunset Boulevard” dir. Billy Wilder, Paramount Pictures

    As a completionist, I do fall prey to the idea of putting films into their proper place in my mind: make sure you watch foreign films, one from every year, every letter of the alphabet, a good amount from before 1960 etc etc. Film cannot be this categorized, because it isn’t content.. It is a medium that needs to be experienced in the proper environment with the right context 80% of the time. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to sit in the dark with 100 people and watch the good guys win for once, but that’s not all there is. There’s culture, history, beauty, enlightenment, empathy, understanding, and education to think of, things that aren’t always a part of pure entertainment. I hope that when we’re able to live again, truly feel the world around us as beings in it, we are able to see that film is a part of that life lived, and not an escape from it.