Septugenearian filmmaker Martin Scorsese has done the one thing our culture will not allow: produce a work of mainstream art with a modicum of ambiguity. And people, unsurprisingly, are furious about it.

Scorsese and his film The Wolf of Wall Street are under attack on multiple fronts. The daughter of an associate of Jordan Belfort (the titular “Wolf” played by Leonardo DiCaprio) says that Scorsese himself has been conned. Some critics say the movie glorifies and celebrates an immoral, depraved and extremely misogynistic lifestyle . (Please let's refer to these accusations henceforth as the “bro-mides.”)

And in response, many wags on “movie Twitter” are agog that anyone could take the 'lude-rich, helicopter-smashing picture as some sort of epistle from Long Island's North Shore, and seem close to a mass suicide pact just to end the conversation. Then there's the common filmgoer, with reports of walkouts due to the high raunch content. (We've grown accustomed to watching this sort of thing on our tablets once spouses have gone to bed.)

How could a major Hollywood studio put out such a thing? Many seem shocked, shocked that the nice silverhaired man who yaps about black and white films on TCM would inflict this on an unsuspecting public. His last movie was about a saucer-eyed French ragamuffin that lives inside a magical clock! We say to these people, “whaddya, some kinda mook?” Martin Scorsese has always deliberately ridden the waves of controversy, and he has always come out the other side unscathed.

Taxi Driver (1976). Scorsese's masterpiece of urban loneliness may have won Cannes' Palme D'Or, but the MPAA demanded he desaturate the color in the final vigilante shootout to ensure an R rating. Taxi Driver's violence was more startling because it wasn't a B-movie splatterfest – it had the horror of a sympathetic perpetrator. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Taxi Driver's lack of a disclaimer could lead some literal-minded viewers to interpret it as advocacy for antisocial behavior. We get inside the head of a guy who eventually charges into violence and, in a still debated punchline, is then hailed as a hero. (It's the same twist ending, albeit far less bloody, as 1983's The King of Comedy.)

Ironically enough, early television airings of Taxi Driver did include a disclaimer. It read “TO OUR TELEVISION AUDIENCE: In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. TAXI DRIVER suggests that tragic errors can be made. The Filmmakers.” This addition was understandable, given that John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan was triggered by Hinckley's obsession with actress Jodie Foster. (If your memory is fuzzy, Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle first toys with assassinating a presidential candidate, possibly because he's trying to impress one of his workers, then decides instead to liberate the teen prostitute played by Foster.)

This filmmakers' statement in fact existed prior to the Hinckley shooting of March 30, 1981. It is mentioned in a newspaper clipping from January of 1979. Did television networks already feel queasy about a perceived lack of clear, moral pronouncement at the end of the film? We doubt Scorsese was the one who tacked it on, especially prior to the Hinckley incident.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This one created nothing less than an international uproar. The adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1953 novel is, most would agree, an affirmation of the values and struggles of history's most famous Jewish carpenter. But the image of the Son of Mam behaving in a lustful manor—even in a dream sequence—was too much for some religious groups.There were calls for protests, Scorsese went on Nightline to reiterate his Catholic upbringing (and how he considered becoming a priest) and an extremist group in France threw Molotov cocktails at a theater, severely injuring four people. (A man in Ithaca, New York also rammed a bus into a theater showing the film, but it was empty at the time) The protests kept the film out of many theater chains and Blockbuster Video. Naturally this meant the picture made a killing in Godless New York – but few other places, with an eventual box office total of $8.3 million. To be fair, it was always a bit arty for mainstream success, but now that the dust has settled most cineastes and eggheads agree it is an essential entry in Bible cinema.