In this essay I explore Martin Scorsese' claim that Marvel films and other big budget franchise pictures are something different than classical cinema.

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Martin Scorsese on Working with De Niro, Pacino & Pesci on The Irishman — Martin talks about finally working with Al Pacino for the first time, making The Irishman, and he reveals how he and Robert De Niro got Joe Pesci to do the film.

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

(13) Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century - YouTube — John Higgs - author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century - talks to Alan Moore about how the 20th Century has been portrayed in his work - in particular From Hell, Providence and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century.

Alan Moore has described Stranger Than We Can Imagine as, "An illuminating work of massive insight... I cannot recommend this magnificent work too highly."