Admittedly, this is Martin Scorsese instead of Moore, but....
> It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
I'm in my late 40s, and I teared up when during the death scene in the most recent movie. And again during the scene with his daughter, talking about burgers. If I had been watching it at home alone, I would probably have been outright crying, thinking about how I miss my own father.
Just because the movies don't speak to everyone doesn't mean they don't speak to anyone. I feel like there's an awful lot of people out there that think they're better than everyone else because they're more limited in what they can understand. That seems backwards.
Bad cinema can (and arguably must) stimulate the emotions, but I don't think that is what Scorsese is trying to get across here.
The marvel movies or whatever may stimulate emotions in us, but they do so primarily by dramatizing conditions which are so universal that we can all identify with them. That has limited artistic potential.
The critical phrase in Scorcese's quote, up there, is "to another human being". Literally almost anyone with a dead father misses their father. You aren't learning anything about the human condition by being reminded of the fact that you loved him. Being so reminded isn't bad by any means, or valueless. These movies help us process our emotions and live in the world.
But they aren't necessarily doing the hard artistic work of carrying you into the mind of someone else whose experiences, desires, pains, might be quite different than your own. They definitely aren't doing the artistic work of offering serious critique of the world.
These films are definitely escapists. I don't think Alan Moore is against escapism. I think he is worried by its total domination as a cultural form.
I'm not advocating for any sort of prescriptive definition of art, obviously. There are certainly lots of ways to talk about art, and in many respects the Marvel movies meet the definition.
But just as it would be absurd to be totalitarian about the definition art, it would be absurd to suggest that The Avengers 12 or whatever is identical to, for instance, Cinema Paradiso, and that there isn't something in the latter film that is missing from the former.
From there its not a leap to ask broader questions about what sorts of films dominate popular culture and whether that state of affairs is good or not.
This is a discussion of art, and thus the human condition. We're unlikely to find anything like a concrete conclusion. But its note futile either.
I would argue that universality isn't an artistic quality because it's the exact opposite of individual expression. Art can be universal but something that's intended to be universal is rarely impactful or expressive enough to be art.
Art is meant to stoke and provoke thought and discussion. It's pointless if it only evokes passive agreement.
Edit: To clarify, I disagree that the Marvel films are not art or cinema.
If all important experiences were universal then communication would be superfluous, if not, in some sense, impossible.
We don't need to do much work to explain what we all experience. There is no virtuosity of the obvious. Communicating those things we don't share is the province of skill and a particular kind of value not present in the immediate and universal.
I'm a person within the superhero demo who has seen a couple of Marvel movies recommended to me, and have not connected to them at all.
That being said, they certainly mean a lot to a lot of people, and it elicits a feeling they seek out, which is enough to call it art in my books.
I may not enjoy the films, but I'll always be interested in getting to know why people feel as strongly as they do about it, instead of dismissing it because it isn't mutual.
EDIT: This is more relevant re: the Scorsese quote. Alan Moore obviously hasn't discounted them as art.
Didn't tear up per se, but they are extremely well executed movies. The characters mostly have a distinct character arc (except for Captain Marvel), and their actions follow their character development. Weaving so many movies and so many characters together into a cohesive story line is an impressive feat. Some of the choices seem obvious now, but were really risky. Like a sci-fi movie featuring a talking racoon and a walking tree. (Closest I got to a tearing-up moment was when Starlord's mom gives him the mix tape.)
Ending Infinity War with Thanos triumphant rivals "Luke I am your father" as the emotional twist to a major blockbuster movie. (Even knowing from the comics what was going to happen, it was still a weird emotional state walking out of the theater after that.)
I think the reason the success of the Marvel movies was so universal was because even people not normally interested in comic book stories still recognized they are executed so well.
You are being emotionally manipulated to feel. That's all cinema, really. That doesn't, on its own, make it high or low-brow (and I'm not ascribing a good or bad quality to this emotional manipulation). What makes art Art is conveying a profound aspect of the human condition. A recognition superseding the mundane.
"But I just want a good yarn, there's nothing wrong with that," you protest. OK, fine but at some point, preferably not right at the moment of your death, you ought to challenge the conditioned mind you've been born and raised into because otherwise we find ourselves living out the story that we've been living since the dawn of humanity. It's this story that rapes the earth and covets possession.
Art should challenge. That can happen at any age. These two dimensional superheroes duking it out with transparent villains don't do much more than the manipulating.
What is the Mona Lisa challenging? Michelangelo's David was never challenging, but it's very much art. You're moving the goalpost.
Looking up art: "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."
That right there is what they felt. Some art challenges, some art doesn't, but if it makes you feel or is beautiful it's art.
I fundamentally disagree with this definition of art, "consensus" as it may be. It's OK as an application to the field of "making art" but as an M.F.A. I see artists in this form of purely aesthetic/emotional production all over and it's not in service of what I see as its real weapon: the challenge to the viewer.
I can't say I'm challenged in my corner of art by the Mona Lisa or David so I won't speak to it. How about Ad Reinhardt's "Black Square", an obsessive pursuit of the pure object, the Thingness of the Thing stripped of the heart? Or how about Detroit techno that Jeff Mills described as "architecture" (you mean music can be architecture, can this be real?) and makes immanent that other artist Wagner when Godfrey says to Parsifal, "here my son time turns into space"?
That's the shit right there. That's the stuff that blows open your head and lets the good stuff come rolling in. That's worth fighting for.
Like I said, just because some art challenges, but not all art does. Some of it is just beauty and emotion for beauty or emotions sake. Some it was just art for a paycheque. Just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean you should discount is as not being art. I find "Black Square" neither invoking of emotion, nor of beauty, it doesn't appeal to me nor does it challenge me in the slightest, it feels far more pretentious than artistic, it seems of an intensely low effort and it says nothing at all about the human condition, but I won't discount it just because I don't understand why it speaks to you.
I find the non-romantic relationships to be far more interesting. Romanoff and Captain America, for instance. Male-female friendships on screen are rare, especially when both the man and woman are attractive and the woman fills the "temptress" role outside of the friendship.
He isn't suggesting that the movies don't reliably make people feel things. He's questioning to what end are these feelings being evoked, and the absence of other probings amidst those archetypal evocations.
A hallmark commercial can also evoke loss and make people cry, but that doesn't mean it's more than a commercial or that its only motive isn't broad emotional manipulation employed to sell product.
> It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.
I'm in my late 40s, and I teared up when during the death scene in the most recent movie. And again during the scene with his daughter, talking about burgers. If I had been watching it at home alone, I would probably have been outright crying, thinking about how I miss my own father.
Just because the movies don't speak to everyone doesn't mean they don't speak to anyone. I feel like there's an awful lot of people out there that think they're better than everyone else because they're more limited in what they can understand. That seems backwards.