Why Does Martin Scorsese Make Everyone Lose Their Minds?

Across his grand filmography, Martin Scorsese has weighed up the deadly sins that make us all too human. Greed, wrath, envy, pride — name the flaw, he’s made it visceral on the screen. That he’s 80 years old and bringing out the epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on the chilling true story of the systematic murder of Osage citizens in the 1920s for their oil-rich Oklahoma land, shows how age has made him even more fearless in confronting American evil. The tale is a long, harsh, moral nightmare.

Alas, the public conversations we might have enjoyed about this powerful work of art are routinely derailed or stunted, or just pushed aside for some immature subject. This past weekend, it was excessive outrage over some theaters inserting a short intermission in the middle of Flower Moon (which, at a runtime of nearly three and a half hours, tests even the sturdiest of bladders). After a sign at a Colorado theater advertising their eight-minute interval went viral, producer Apple, distributor Paramount, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker took the necessary steps to halt such modifications, on the grounds that Scorsese intended no such break.

More from Rolling Stone

• TikTok Warned You About Panera Charged Lemonade. Then Someone Died

• Elon Musk, Who Bought Twitter for $44 Billion, Now Values It at $19 Billion

• Twisted Anti-Vaxxers Rush to Blame Matthew Perry's Death on Covid Vaccine

That could’ve been the end of it, but because Film Twitter (or, uh, Film X) loves the chance to dunk on the kind of normies who see nothing wrong with splitting up a Marty movie (people were “big fans of it,” one theater employee told The Hollywood Reporter), dueling takes on the rogue intermissions dominated discussion of the film for days. While the purists agreed that this betrayed Scorsese’s vision and an otherwise immersive experience, pragmatists argued that there was no call for an endurance test. “Let people pee!” tweeted one culture critic and podcaster. Some argued that intermissions used to be the norm, offered better accessibility, and should have a comeback. Then came memes mocking the entire controversy.

You’d be right to say that social media is designed for this kind of no-stakes but fiercely waged argument. On the other hand, it’s trivial in the context of a story about how the genocide of Indigenous Americans continued into the 20th century. It’s also something in which you don’t have a say: theater audiences are at the mercy of the conditions under which a picture is shown. Why act like a general consensus or disagreement on this issue will change moviegoing one way or another? Perhaps it’s because Scorsese casts the shadow he does — as a protector and godfather of cinema — that we imagine his work setting the terms of the industry. We habitually lose sight of the fact that he’s just one guy, doing his thing.

Call it the Marty Effect: Here’s a filmmaker deep in emotional inquiry, testing the very possibilities of visual narrative, who ends up triggering debates on virtually anything else that happens to be tangentially related. The poor guy can’t give an interview without the reporter asking him to once again expound on his distaste for the Marvel franchise, since that will provoke a massive fandom into attacking him, which in turn leads to Criterion collectors denouncing the current blockbuster monoculture. He and Marvel have nothing to do with each other but are now inseparable, autocompleted Google Search terms thanks to the reliable engagement of mutual contempt.

Occasionally, this is a matter of Marty supporters stumbling across Marvel fanboys who claim that Scorsese movies are “like going to the DMV,” then blowing that clip up for their peers to get mad at. Elsewhere, it’s Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo stoking the feud himself, stitching a TikTok with one from Scorsese’s daughter Francesca in which the director collaborates with his new “muse” — the family dog, Oscar. In his video, Russo reveals his own dog (a Schnauzer, the same breed as Oscar) and lovingly calls it “Box Office.” While he may have intended only a ribbing, the joke of preferring profit to acclaim struck Scorsese fans as symptomatic of Hollywood’s present problems and set off a predictable wave of backlash. For what?

Even viewers trying to directly engage with Killers of the Flower Moon wind up falling prey to a cliché that has pursued Scorsese throughout his career. Known for his intimate portrayals of sociopaths and murderers, from the mobsters of Goodfellas and Casino to the white-collar conmen of The Wolf of Wall Street, he is routinely accused of somehow sympathizing with or glamorizing their wicked behavior despite taking pains to lay bare its destructive, dehumanizing outcomes. The most infamous misreader of Scorsese, John Hinckley Jr., sought to impress Jodie Foster by imitating Travis Bickle, the unstable misanthrope played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and, to that end, shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Scorsese didn’t take the connection lightly, and reportedly considered quitting filmmaking after he learned of it. Instead, he went on to develop his craft and expand his range, though when he made a film about someone as theoretically unimpeachable as Jesus Christ, it prompted protests and violent threats from religious groups who denounced it as blasphemous, and some theaters refused to screen it. In truth, The Last Temptation of Christ is as spiritually reverent as you could ask for, regardless of the liberties it takes with the gospel. The condemnation did not remotely square with the divine questioning the film strives to represent.

Decades later, can it be any surprise that similarly bad-faith, shallow analyses of Flower Moon seems to be rampant? The basic confusion hasn’t changed since the 1970s, though now we have Letterboxd to preserve it: If there’s a protagonist, and he’s played by a movie star like Leonardo DiCaprio, it must be that we are asked to identify with the character. No matter that he’s played as a bumbling, deluded, spineless, abusive, two-faced thief conspiring to kill his wife and her whole family. How depressing that this interpretation cuts off the opportunity to recognize grave historical meaning.

The ambiguities of Scorsese’s cinematic world, discomfiting and at times accusatory (the end of the movie does indict the true crime genre of which it is a part, after all) cannot be collapsed into the simple categories of zero-sum internet discourse. They’re also what make so many of his movies enduring masterpieces. As long as there is an insistence on dismissing his approach or style as “problematic,” comparing it to comic book fare, assuming his villains are supposed to be heroes, and complaining that there wasn’t an obvious cue to get up and use the bathroom, we are denied the pleasure of together meditating on important, competing, simultaneous truths. Nothing in forceful art is either/or — it’s always both and more.

Best of Rolling Stone

• 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century

• Risky Business: Every Tom Cruise Film, Ranked – Updated

• 70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time

Click here to read the full article.