If superhero movies aren't emotional and psychological cinema, why are we crying?

Les films de super-héros sont-ils du « grand » cinéma ?

A la rentrée, Wonder Woman se ré-invite au cinéma : une sortie très attendue, comme le sont beaucoup de productions des franchises Marvel et DC. Si les films de super-héros rassemblent des millions de spectateurs, ils sont bien souvent boudés par la critique. Un paradoxe qu’étudie ici le Los Angeles Times : pourquoi aimons-nous tant ces super-productions si elles ne sont pas du « grand » cinéma ?

Last awards season, Black Panther became the first comic-book movie to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture. Since then, Avengers: Endgame has become the highestgrossing film of all time and one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019. Todd Phillips' recently released "Joker" won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and broke its share of box office records. Have comic-book movies finally arrived on the red carpet?

2. More like the rug's being pulled from under them again. Despite consistently sporting sterling scores on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Marvel Cinematic Universe movies rarely appear on critics' top 10 lists and have never received Oscar nominations for direction, acting or writing. Millions and millions around the world are emotionally connected to these movies, yet film titan Scorsese calls them "not cinema" — even those he hasn't actually seen.

3. Scorsese, in his comments to Empire, summed up the ingrained bias when he said, "I don't see them. I tried, you know? But that's not cinema. … It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being." [Scorcese] is not alone in his dismissal of the genre. Contemporary Francis Ford Coppola, after receiving the Prix Lumière in Lyon, told journalists he thought Scorsese was "right because we expect to learn something from cinema".

ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGISTS...

4. Andrea Letamendi, associate director of mental health training, intervention and response at UCLA, sees more in the best of these films than these giants of cinema do. "Superhero films are giving us a way to practice and explore really important emotional processes that we may not be able to examine in our everyday lives. In 'Endgame,' the more fantastical, the better, because that gives us the supportive safety net to be open and vulnerable and curious about these things," she says.

5. "Not to pat ourselves on the back," says Christopher Markus, co-writer (with Stephen McFeely) of six MCU movies including the three-hour Endgame, "but we snuck an hourlong movie about loss and grief into the [start of the] biggest movie of all time. That's a lot of people who sat with that issue in their heads for an hour."

6. Markus and McFeely point out their slug lines don't read, ''Iron Man" or "Captain America"; they're "Tony" or "Steve." Even when the characters are

wearing nanotech armor or wrapped in a flag, the writers are thinking from the point of view of the human beings within. "We didn't sit down and say, 'It's the five stages of grief,' but they sort of do go through it. Thor is really depressed. Cap has accepted it. Clint's anger is off the rails … we give people real arcs, hopefully," McFeely says.

7. Anthony Mackie plays the Falcon in many MCU entries. He says whenever he has a movie come out, he sneaks into theaters to experience them with audiences, which he has done three times for Endgame. "When Iron Man died, people were weeping. If that's not a human, emotional experience, I don't know what is," he said. "There's a connection to these characters. People invest 100%." Clinical psychologist Letamendi agrees. "It's a truly sophisticated portrayal. … How different characters cope with that loss really matters in terms of how we relate to them and how we might relate to our own losses.

8. "The term for that is 'parasocial relationships' — non-delusional emotional connections with fictional characters. I know Tony Stark isn't real, but I've formed a long-lasting relationship with his character, so when we see him go through these difficult changes: the adversity, his selfdoubt and, ultimately, his death, this is, in our world, difficult to deal with. The grief, the confusion, sometimes the anger — those feelings are real. I think there's some value to that.

9. "If we can work through some of those emotions, it actually makes us more emotionally intelligent. A movie like Endgame has such an important place in our social/emotional learning because we're practicing important, and deeply felt, responses."

10. "Iron Man 3 is one of the more groundbreaking comic-book films in its direct portrayal of alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. Showing this superhero have a decline in functioning, isolate himself, reject relationships — being drawn toward maladaptive coping like drinking and listening to his anger and avoiding the realness of the threat he's facing — I think that's a very relatable experience."

LIFE-CHANGING STORIES?

11. Director, writer and painter [Taika] Waititi agrees. "It's kind of a form of ignorance to say comic-books and graphic novels aren't art. They have life-changing stories and are full of emotion. They're cinematic. [Filmmakers] steal frames, splash pages, from comic books all the time because those are real artists." No one is comparing Ant-Man to Citizen Kane. However, as Dr. Strange director Scott Derrickson recently tweeted, "Nobody should dismiss movies they haven't seen."