How is it that Martin Scorsese’s declaration, in an early October interview with Empire, that Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema’ contained sufficient kindling to fuel a conversation in which responses were still being reported seven weeks later? The length of this conversation became its most remarkable feature, seeming to entail the logic that permitted its perpetual extension. This essay is not meant to further extend that debate as such, but to wonder at the cultural obsession it models. Because the question of whether a particular object can be accurately described as art tends to be less interesting than our obsession with the question itself. Why does this category’s acceptance or rejection of something we love carry such weight?

This particular crisis, worked through on social media and in various news outlets, was not about one of cinema’s great artists announcing his disdain for one of his medium’s most profitable arms, nor his fear that these films were dominating multiplexes at the expense of other kinds of films. These were secondary concerns. Rather, the conflict rode on Scorsese’s implication—when he said that Marvel movies are theme park rides but not cinema—that these films cannot be properly referred to as art. This is the verdict which people rushed to counter or affirm.