Was it about this time last year that Martin Scorsese made his infamous comments that “Marvel movies are not cinema”? That was exhausting wasn’t it. Marvel fans and Scorsese fans alike became extremely obnoxious for months over what is and isn’t “cinema”. All from just one esteemed elderly filmmaker explaining why he doesn’t much care for one brand of movie when asked a dumb question on the press tour for The Irishman. So many think-pieces came out of it, so many opinions from every side of the issue and it got me thinking too.
Not about “what is cinema”. As far as my opinion on that “debate” goes, to quote Kyle Kallgren, “if it’s a moving image with accompanying sound, it’s cinema.” What took me though was the style of the commentaries on both sides of the question. Many weren’t interested at all in the question at hand, but more in scoring points against what they perceived to be lesser art. Whether it was “Scorsese fans” jumping at the opportunity to denigrate the current most popular thing in entertainment for daring to be popular, or Marvel fans striking back at perceived pretentious assholes trying to de-legitimize a thing that they love, it was way more about which movie taste is ‘correct’ than anything else. Though that “controversy” has died down, in the year since I’ve still seen that attitude from both sides. And I started thinking about movie snobbery.
We all know movie snobbery, or at least we think we do. We can all picture a smug pseudo-intellectual of privilege disgustedly looking down their nose at 95% of Hollywood output for not being Bresson. But there’s more nuance to modern movie snobbery, and more forms it takes. For one thing, that image is no longer correct, as funny as it may be. The type of movie fans who like to make a point of hating modern blockbusters in favour of more “important” films tend to be younger, and of a film school brat persuasion -I.e. viewers who’ve seen a series of acclaimed arthouse movies and are proud of that fact to the point of boastfulness. There seems to often be a superiority complex attached in the suggestion that they are better lovers of cinema because they’ve seen every movie by Truffault or Tarkovsky and have no interest in the superhero genre. And yeah, it’s with these kinds of movie fans that autuer theory remains popular and legitimate.
Yet this is still relatively traditional snobbery, the kind that wouldn’t be out of place in the character of Jay Sherman or some other out-of-touch caricature. These movie fans however have a far more obnoxious cousin that recent cinema discourse has come to call the “movie bro”. Movie bros are generally as dismissive of modern studio blockbusters as cliché snobs, with a few noteworthy exceptions (films by Zack Snyder or Christopher Nolan, grimdark action/thriller movies, anything released against a blockbuster with a female lead). They prefer smaller, older films, but not too small or too old (indeed they’re far less well-versed in classic, indie, and world cinema than that earlier class of snob), just ones that employ particular structural, narrative, or filmmaking techniques that make them feel smart. Their small pantheon of favourite filmmakers usually includes Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Nolan (they additionally have a poster from at least one of these directors’ movies), and they have a Letterboxd account that they actually use as social media (I don’t, but feel free to follow mine anyways). And despite openly disliking most modern blockbusters, they watch them all anyway so they can explain to others in depth why their opinion of them is wrong. Many tend to have little critical comprehension beyond what they’ve absorbed from bad internet commentators like CinemaSins, Red Letter Media, or (if they’re of a particular age) Ain’t It Cool News, and are resistant to movies that legitimately challenge their view of the world. The fact that they’re usually somewhere along the conservative end of the political spectrum should thus come as no surprise.
Or at least this is the impression that most often comes across in their presence in the movie spheres of social media and online culture. Some movie bros can be relatively harmless and have a genuine if limited love and interest in the form. They can comfortably ignore the movies that don’t fit their exclusive standards and continue to fawn over Terry Gilliam or Paul Thomas Anderson or Edgar Wright (it shouldn’t need to be explained that most of the filmmakers I’m listing here are very good and important -they just happen to fall within the parameters of movie bro reverence). Others clearly don’t know movies all that much, don’t see many movies that don’t already gravitate towards their own predetermined tastes, and hone in on particular films to either praise excessively or trash far more excessively. Anyone who believes Joker is one of the best movies ever, or that The Last Jedi is the worst has clearly not seen enough movies (the same would be true in reverse obviously). In the world of YouTube, you see these idiots a lot in hours-long take-downs of specific films (none is worth that much effort to hate), or in paragraph-spanning reactionary comments under videos espousing generally positive opinions. These are the movie bros linked with troll culture and with harassment campaigns, who clearly don’t like movies nearly as much as they like the easy attention (and money) they can get from exploiting a culture of negativity and nitpickiness. They are the movie fans that make being a movie fan something one feels obliged to qualify.
Most of the time though they’re just boring. Boring tastes, boring arguments, and boring attitudes. Their sense of superiority is laughable; despite what they may think, disliking something popular is not a subversive opinion or a decent substitute for a personality. It doesn’t make them smarter liking a certain set of movies over the mainstream -some of which I question if they’ve actually watched, and it betrays a kind of toxic masculinity; it’s no coincidence they tend to like films with heavy masculine overtones and never seem to care much for movies by or about women, people of colour, or the LGBTQ community. These are the movie fans who’ve elevated films like Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, Fight Club, without actually understanding them -they don’t seem interested in critically thinking about their favourite movies, and take offence at affronts against them. Recently of course they got upset over a critique of Stanley Kubrick -for the record, one of my favourite directors and a noted dictatorial asshole- just because it suggested he might not have been so great. It’s important to question the media we consume, but that goes for all media -the movies you like and treasure as well as the ones you don’t.
It can be awfully tedious engaging with these kind of movie snobs (though fun to rant about them), but it can be equally tiresome confronting their direct opposites. The internet age has given rise to a kind of reactionary movie snob, though one that’s always been there, who does love and appreciate modern popular movie culture, but to the point of disavowing everything around it. These are the movie fans whose movie literacy consists of mostly mainstream Hollywood blockbusters of the last forty years, and who are generally hesitant or resistant to step outside that cultural bubble. This of course represents most moviegoers, and it’s a bit of shame, but that’s a different issue. What’s annoying are the ones who do consider themselves movie fans yet aren’t willing to open up to more cinema. They’ll see every superhero movie in a year, each big action series installment, each nostalgia reboot, maybe one high-profile horror movie, the one or two Disney-produced animated films, and maybe a couple end-of-year awards contenders to not completely look like “shills” (a meaningless term, let’s stop using it) -and consider that sufficient enough to talk like authorities on film. This is apparent in a lot of the movie media on the internet and youtube, where there is an endless supply of content devoted to Star Wars or Marvel movies that is extremely tiresome and even more extremely cynical given how popularly profitable such topics are. As stated, the more trollish movie bros make up a chunk of this with their hours-long Captain Marvel monstrosities, but a lot of the complimentary material is awful as well, dissecting rumours and trailers and speculations with such devotion it would seem one intellectual property is all that matters.
The Scorsese “debate” brought to a head not only this but a kind of resentment towards the perceived superiority of, not the defenders of more classically acclaimed films, but the films themselves. And I’ve been more attuned to it since: a frank dismissal towards any movie that strives for something more than mere escapism, an active disinterest in the cinematic landscape outside of Hollywood, and a very palpable (perhaps proud) ignorance of cinema history, of classic and arthouse films. During the Scorsese issue, there was a comical argument from the pro-Marvel fans that he was a director who only made gangster movies, unaware that Scorsese’s filmography includes movies like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Hugo, and Silence in addition to Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and The Irishman. Others just claimed he was racist or sexist (in spite of a long history of proving otherwise), or that he was never that good a director after all; and I still notice a tendency among this type of snob to downplay the work of acclaimed or “pretentious” filmmakers and films for essentially the same reason movie bros do with popular films. As many people as there are blindly leaping to Kubrick’s defence over that article, there are just as many calling him a bad filmmaker and his work grossly overrated to look morally superior (Kubrick being abusive has been known for years, the whole discourse is stupid). there’s nuance that they refuse to see. And while both sides of that Scorsese eruption were obnoxious, it was the Disney defendants who more often humiliated themselves with ignorance and bad arguments under scrutiny (though the insinuation that Scorsese dislikes Marvel but likes DC is comparatively ludicrous).
There is some truth too in the classical snob/film bro attitude that mainstream movies are now more than ever mere products, and that we should be frequently critical of Disney especially, regardless of how you feel about their movies, because of what they’re doing to the industry. And while there is plenty of good cinema that comes out of this environment still, there is also a homogeneity to it. Most major blockbusters kind of look the same, with a few exceptions they’re not interested in challenging material (anyone who thinks Infinity War was has some ethical issues they need to address), and as far as they confront things like systemic inequities and representation in front of and behind the camera, they do so from an enormously cynical place. And just speaking personally, while I like a lot of the Marvel movies and a few other big Hollywood endeavors, it’s not often that one really surpasses expectations to become a truly great film. Endgame did, and it still wasn’t one of my ten favourites of last year.
As always an equilibrium is necessary, and obviously not every movie fan falls into one of these camps. You can like arthouse classics and modern superhero films -I do. I love F For Fake and Into the Spider-Verse. I hate Joker and the Disney live-action remakes, but also I don’t particularly care for Godard’s Breathless or Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. Honestly, the voices in the online movie sphere to look to to avoid either form of snobbery are critics. Not YouTube movie reviewers, but professionals who demonstrate a much greater love of film, a real interest in engaging with it, and a wider, smarter array of movie tastes, both in print and on social media. Folks like Matt Zoller-Seitz, Emily VanDerWerff, Stephanie Zacharek, Monica Castillo, Mark Harris, Odie Henderson, and Siddhant Adlakha; or in video form, essayists like Lindsay Ellis, Patrick Willems, Mikey Neumann, Maggie Mae Fish, Be Kind Rewind, and Kyle Kallgren.
Movie snobbery isn’t going away anytime soon, whether its’ targeting contemporary popular media or classically approved “art” cinema. But I think it all comes down to an unwillingness to give certain kinds of films the benefit of the doubt. Anyone can appreciate any movie if they’re willing to give it a chance. There is artistic merit in modern superhero films just as there is entertainment value in the cinema beyond the mainstream. The former is not too frivolous and the latter is not too dense if you’re willing to open your mind a little and put aside your prejudices. Both can coexist amicably, as is the state of the art.
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