22.3.20


“Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can relate.” Reading Walter Benjamin, I thought about the polemic attack launched by Martin Scorsese against the Marvel franchise movies. “What’s not there”, he wrote, “is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk.” According to Benjamin, in the framework of a novel, “the meaning of one’s life can be deduced only from one’s death.” He compares the reading of a novel to a log consumed by fire: “what draws the reader to the novel again and again is its mysterious ability to warm a shivering life with death.” If death is what lends meaning to the stories told in fiction, it is quite appropriate that Scorsese made those remarks right when he had released a movie that is built on death. “The Irishman” is unlike any of his other movies in that violent death is not the end of the story: we are dragged along until every character dies, many of them of natural death, old age, senility. The movie is above all a meditation on the closeness of death, which Scorsese and his cast clearly feel. That’s the revelation, the mystery in this movie: we all die, even those who have made their life killing others (“painting houses”) and have escaped a violent death. Even they die, and they have to go with the burden of what they did, with the guilt that their daughters who are ashamed of them put on their shoulders. “Goodfellas” leaves Ray Liotta living a boring life, under a false name, after he had turned against his band. Not in “The Irishman”: here we get to see everyone die and that’s what lends it meaning. Scorsese has often been accused of aestheticising violence, but death in this movie is absolutely unglamorous, it’s palpably filthy, has a smelly breath. In a Marvel movie, on the contrary, violence is always present, but death does not exist and that’s why “nothing is at risk”. Even if a character dies, the audience knows it can come back if the movie is successful enough, if a spin-off is deemed appropriate by marketing specialists. I think that’s why I find them so boring, a good story requires the shadow of death to draw us in. #walterbenjamin #thestorytelleressays #nyrb #martinscorsese #theirishman #robertdeniro #joepesci #goodfellas #marvelmovies #nothingisatrisk #towarmashiveringlifewithdeath

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