Martin’s Super Heroes

Martin Scorsese’s latest film delivers a kind of trauma you can only delight in

Martin Scorsese recently likened Marvel movies to theme parks. He explained that franchise films are “perfect products” for easy consumption where the creative role of the director to introduce something novel to actors and the audience is irrelevant. Rather than cinema, franchise films are ‘audio visual entertainment’. This sounds a bit old-fashioned and, frankly, old. Also, how can Scorsese talk down franchise when The Irishman (releasing on Netflix, November 27) brings back familiar tropes? The film features an aging narrator (Robert De Niro as the hitman Frank Sheeran) recounting his divided loyalty between the gangster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and the famous union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Haven’t we seen De Niro and Pesci before in Goodfellas and Casino doing their hypermasculineloyalty-violent gangster thing? Is directing Pacino for the first time and basing the film on real-life events enough? Sheeran was in Korea; the war desensitised him to violence. But this is not the case for the viewer. We are able to feel the visceral nature of a gunshot and take note whenever he kills. In Goodfellas, Pesci shoots a young bartender for talking back to him in front of his friends. When I first watched this, I was jolted. Some lives are cheap and sudden death a reality. In the Avengers movies, villains are killed all the time. There is accompanying witty banter, light and sound. It’s alright for children to be gently entertained by the slaughter of hordes of aliens by a small group of (sometimes black, sometimes female) saviours because the algorithm says so. To make the movies literally linger, they have sequences after the end credits. Once the three-and-a-half-hour Irishman finishes, you walk out with emotional trauma—from pain and loss suffered and inflicted by its stars. A large portion of The Irishman’s budget was spent on digital de-aging where you could see De Niro, Pacino and Pesci age and de-age. Marvel Studios does wonders with computer-generated imagery (CGI) : comic book flights of fancy come to life. For Scorsese, the purpose of CGI is to spend more time with the three actors. There’s nothing oldfashioned about that. In Avengers: Endgame, there’s a scene where all the female characters come together to heroic light and sound and kill. You know this is fake: an algorithm trying to sell itself by co-opting some lazy idea of gender. In contrast, when The Irishman talks about politics—perhaps Labour leaders and mobsters conspired to kill JFK or trade unions are corrupt and not an alternative to capitalism, maybe it’s all about tribal bloodline—you listen. This is despite the blurring of fact and fiction. Sheeran is a dying, possibly senile, unreliable narrator. He matter-offactly states that America’s failure to overthrow Castro was resented because mobsters could not secure cheap Cuban land to set up casinos. The book the film is based on—written around Sheeran’s confessions—has been discredited. A crucial real-life murder described in the book captured with breathless poetry in the film has now been proven false. Could it be that Scorsese did not know that he was naturalising a probably false account? Unlikely. The truth is, it does not matter. You are trapped in the story, and no matter what it says about politics, you desperately want its characters to live forever.

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