Martin Scorsese: A cautionary tale about authorial intent

By Cap Stewart, Op-ed Contributor Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Not all audiences walk away from a film having appropriately interpreted its themes and messages. Sometimes that’s the fault of the filmmakers, other times the fault of the moviegoers. In reference to the latter, film critic Jeffrey Overstreet writes the following:

People misinterpret and twist great art all the time. Many believe Satan is the “hero” of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” It’s possible to read The Great Gatsby and come away seeing Gatsby as a role model. Just look at all of the ugly ways in which people have misinterpreted the Scriptures and used them to advance their own self-interest.

These are salient points worth considering. Still, there are occasions in which filmmakers have inadvertently communicated messages other than what was intended. And it’s not just a mistake made by rookie artisans.

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Screen Junkies recently summed up Martin Scorsese’s film “Killers of the Flower Moon” like this: “Legendary director Martin Scorsese atones for the historical injustice of making criminals look cool or competent in his previous films.” The implicit point behind this humorous jab is that Scorsese has a habit of portraying antiheroes as glamorous and appealing.

No director — not even living legends — should be above legitimate criticism. As such, let’s evaluate three samples from Scorsese’s filmography, comparing his original intent with the functional result.

“Taxi Driver”(1976)

In writing about “Taxi Driver,” Scorsese shares how “I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence.” He had intended the brutality to “create a violent catharsis … like some strange California therapy session.” Instead, moviegoers yelled and screamed with evident approval. “When I made it,” writes Scorsese, “I didn’t intend to have the audience react with that feeling” (Roger Ebert’s Book of Film, p. 534). Audiences responded to his stylistic choices in a way that he did not intend — indeed, in a way opposed to his intentions.

As mentioned earlier, sometimes this discordance between filmmaker and audience is due to the immaturity of the former, not the latter. With Scorsese and “Taxi Driver,” however, the situation is different:

Scorsese’s example illustrates how a director’s intention does not exist in a vacuum. It would be intellectually dishonest to believe artistic intent automatically nullifies any potential misuses of style or technique. And explicit depictions of violence … are susceptible to unintended messages.

Cultural commentator Samuel D. James addresses the violence of Scorsese’s works:

It seems to me that the idea that you can elicit moral revulsion merely by depicting evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visual can be manipulated to bypass titillation and proceed straight to condemnation. Second, it assumes an audience who possess a moral imagination that would both motivate and equip them to do this. The first assumption could be false. The second assumption absolutely is.

Indeed, there is much more at play in a film than just filmmaker intent.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)

Scorsese explains how he was “very moved” by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (1964), a film recognized by the Vatican as one of “many worthwhile productions during the first hundred years of [cinema’s] existence.” And for years, Scorsese wanted to make a film about Jesus.

In the end, with “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Scorsese attempted to explore the dual nature of Christ’s divinity and humanity, with an emphasis on the latter. The idea was that, if we could witness God incarnate facing temptations like we do, we could see that he “cares about us more … because he really knows what we go through.” Scorsese’s intent was not “to shake anybody’s faith.” Such a result, he said, would be “the last thing in the world I’d want to do.”

However, Catholic critic Steven D. Greydanus provides a measured and reasonable assessment of the film:

A Jesus who commits sins — who even thinks He commits sins, who talks a great deal about needing “forgiveness” and paying with His life for His own sins; a Jesus who himself speaks blasphemy and idolatry, calling fear his “god” and talking about being motivated more by fear than by love; who has an ambivalent at best relationship with the Father, even trying to merit divine hatred so that God will leave Him alone — all of this is utterly antithetical to Christian belief and sentiment. This is not merely focusing on Jesus’ humanity, this is effectively contradicting His divinity.”

Even Roger Ebert, who initially “defended the film against charges of heresy,” eventually changed his mind: “The film is indeed technically blasphemous,” he wrote. “I have been persuaded of this by a thoughtful essay by Steven D. Greydanus of the National Catholic Register, a mainstream writer who simply and concisely explains why.”

That Scorsese did not craft the film with ill intent is ultimately beside the point. Blasphemy is blasphemy, no matter how sincere.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)

Scorsese explicitly portrayed the debauched lifestyle of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his associates in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but he did so with specific and purposeful intentions. In an interview with Deadline, he explained that he didn’t want audience members to see themselves as mere observers of Belfort’s avarice. He wanted them to be “slapped into recognizing that this behavior has been encouraged in this country,” and that it affects both the business world and how we live our own lives.

To once again quote Overstreet, “the filmmakers’ intentions were to zoom in and expose evil …  the way doctors enlarge X-rays to expose cancer … so that we will be shocked by the reality of it, live in greater awareness about it, avoid it, and avoid contributing to the conditions that make it possible.”

These intentions are good — laudable, even. But the methods Scorsese chose to tell his story ended up promoting some of what he wished to condemn, especially when it came to the sexual debasement of women. The way actors Margot Robbie and Maria Di Angelis were cast; the way in which the screenplay itself dehumanized Naomi Lapaglia (Robbie’s character); the way certain actors were aroused by the sexually degrading acts being filmed; Robbie’s “nerve-wracking” experiences filming scenes of sexualized nudity — all these objectifying methods proved, by and large, to thrill and titillate (rather than horrify) both audiences and critics.

I am not the only one to make such claims:

• IGN calls the movie “an exhilarating valentine to decadence despite its cautionary tale trappings,” and that the weakest element of the film is its handling of the female characters: “there’s not much to the women of this story besides being eye candy or outright whores.”
• Business Insider says, “There’s gratuitous t&a” with “so many orgy scenes” and “so much nudity and sex,” and that “Women are few and far between unless they’re naked.”
• Flickering Myth asks, “Gratuitous? Hell yes … almost like Game of Thrones which never misses an opportunity to show a woman’s breast.”
• Den of Geek references the film’s three-hour runtime of “gratuitous use of nudity and sex.”
• SF Weekly says, “Glorification [of vice] may not be an intention but may be a consequence” of the movie.

It should be noted that the excerpts above are taken from positive, and sometimes even euphoric, reviews of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” That Scorsese overplayed his hand — by about 312 cards — is evidenced even by those who loved the movie.

The deceitfulness of (portrayals of) sin

There are a lot of things you can intend to do well or rightly but come up short. For example, you can intend to make a delicious meal, but if you inadvertently botch the recipe, it will disappoint you. Your palate can’t taste “good intentions.” In a sense, that is a key component of being a human: falling short of the mark to which we should aspire (see Rom. 3:23).

As Scorsese himself succinctly puts it, “Sin is fun.” Its allure comes through its deceptive power (Heb. 3:13). Thus, there are inherent risks in vivid portrayals of sin in the visual arts. There isn’t always a clear line between shocking and sensational, between explicit and exhibitionist, or between unvarnished and gratuitous. It is, at the very least, possible to take things too far. And in an age where practically nothing onscreen is off-limits, the current danger for filmmakers is to lean too far into salacious storytelling rather than sanitized storytelling.

Martin Scorsese is widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time. That such a renowned filmmaker could, at times, misjudge the effects of his artistic choices — and to such a great degree — should be a sobering reminder to us. We would do well to engage the movies we watch with discernment, refusing to isolate filmmaker intent as the only factor in our evaluation. We would do well to critically engage with our own actions and artistic creations as well.

As the saying goes, “Hell is full of good meanings, but Heaven is full of good works.” Paving the path before us with good intentions isn’t enough; the wrong thing for the right reason is still the wrong thing.