Last month in an interview with Empire magazine, Martin Scorsese was asked about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he said he’d tried to watch a couple of the movies. “But that’s not cinema,” he said. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks... It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” In November, he doubled down on these remarks in an impassioned op-ed for the New York Times. “What’s not there [in superhero movies] is revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger,” he wrote. “Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”

Feige characterized the things Scorsese said as “unfortunate” and Disney president Bob Iger called them “puzzling.” MCU-affiliated talent like James Gunn and Mark Ruffalo also pushed back diplomatically, and director Adam McKay suggested that the director of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull might change his tune about what is and isn’t cinema if he’d just watch Thor: Ragnarok. (Which, to be fair, is better than a lot of these movies.) I have no way of knowing this for sure but I’m assuming a smart person like Mark Ruffalo accepts the job of playing Bruce Banner and his mo-capped green alter ego with open eyes, and understands exactly what kind of movies he is and isn’t signing up to make. I’d also assume that when Marvel mounts a Best Picture “For Your Consideration” campaign around a movie like Endgame it’s meant to be taken seriously but not literally, and that in general everybody from the Marvel U family who objected to what Scorsese said was actually objecting to his having said it out loud.

The response that emblematized the whole controversy for me was the guy on Twitter who posted, as a rebuttal, a multi-Tweet thread (addressed to “@MartinScorsese” who is not on Twitter) of screen grabs from Marvel movies in which the characters looked sad or angry or happy or were about to kiss or maybe die or were otherwise in some way visibly reacting to stimuli, which would have been a fairly devastating dunk on Scorsese if the director had accused the Marvel movies of not including any medium close-ups of characters displaying emotion:

Things got more ridiculous from there; it being 2019, the language of social justice was eventually deployed against Scorsese, who fans accused him of being an old white man speaking from a place of prejudice against the diverse MCU, which rolled out its first films with a nonwhite lead (Black Panther) and a female lead and female co-director (Captain Marvel) in 2018 and 2019 after years of films starring white men named Chris, and appears to be diversifying at a rate consistent with the rest of 21st century popular entertainment as a whole. But what was striking and a little disturbing about Marvel fandom’s response to Scorsese was the specific hill those fans chose to die on. They were arguing that Marvel movies were too cinema and did too contain all the things Scorsese said they didn’t. Obviously this is the behavior of aggrieved fans, but it also felt like a seismic shift in the way pop-genre entertainment’s partisans talk about it.

There have always been people who will tell you that arty things are stupid, that liking them is pretentious, and that preferring arty things to mass-market entertainment is a symptom of elitism. The thing that’s new about MCU Twitter’s reaction to Scorsese’s statement is that the people making these arguments against the supposed privileging of a certain type of arty thing are doing it without rejecting the notion that movies should aspire to fulfill an audience’s need for profundity. They’re just arguing that we can and should look to corporate superhero movies to provide it.

If you could somehow — using a Time Gem or whatever the fuck — bring forward a person of sufficiently reactionary philistine tendencies from, let’s say 1985, and gave them Scorsese’s op-ed to read, they would undoubtedly dismiss Scorsese as an egghead whose tastes were hopelessly effete and out of touch with what real people liked. They would take issue with Scorsese’s assertion that “aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual revelation” should be the goal of cinema. What our hypothetical 1980s anti-snob would probably not try to argue is that we could find more than enough aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual revelation in Rambo: First Blood Part II or A View to a Kill.

There have always been people who will tell you that arty things are stupid, that liking them is pretentious, and that preferring arty things to mass-market entertainment is a symptom of elitism.

It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between 1985 and 2019; the fifth- and seventh-highest grossing movies of ’85 were Mask and The Killing Fields, both of which would probably be straight-to-Netflix prestige loss-leaders today. But as far back as I can remember there was an understanding that Rambo and The Killing Fields, while both technically Hollywood movies, were playing in different leagues and maybe even in different sports. Unless you were a true snob or a true vulgarian you tried to experience the best of what both these categories had to offer; the mark of a thinking person was the ability to evaluate these very different things by different criteria, to weigh a movie’s achievement in the context of its genre and its specific aspirations. The argument against Scorsese is that the same blockbuster movies that dominate what’s historically been the Rambo category should also be part of the conversation about art; that they should be taken seriously by the critical and awards-distributing infrastructure whose de facto function is to honor the best of the Killing Fields category; that the presence of certain signifiers of middlebrow classiness (Tilda Swinton in a supporting role, a glancing evocation of Three Days of the Condor) means that movie is somehow “about” something other than advancing the Mighty Marvel Metanarrative; and that the failure of that establishment to bend the knee before Thor and Captain America is proof of snobbery or even corruption.

But the need for certain areas of film culture to hold the line about what is and is not cinema (and therefore worthy of critical lionization and Oscar gold) is no longer about maintaining an abstract set of aesthetic prejudices and qualitative standards. It’s about protecting every other kind of moviemaking from the existential threat of the blockbuster. Now more than ever, the existence of a reward structure for certain kinds of prestige cinema — the fact that critics’ year-end top-10 lists and the stakes of awards season give the culture a reason to spend a few months out of every year talking about acting and directing and foreign films — is just about the only thing that keeps non-blockbusters from being completely drowned out of the public consciousness by the next phase of Marvel, the next Star Wars trilogy, or the newest and most twisted take on a Batman villain. This isn’t about what is or isn’t cinema. It’s about whether the corporations that already dominate so much of the cultural landscape through pure market share should also be allowed to set the parameters of what we can ask for from art. It’s not about whether superhero movies are capable of making us feel things, but about the need for movies that show us dimensions of human feeling more complex than Bruce Wayne’s childhood trauma or the raccoon that talks to the tree.