It's pretty interesting to watch the Scorsese debate in my mentions. White men (and some women) say a scene that Scorsese wrote fantasizing about killing a woman and a Black man are unrelated to his oeuvre's lack of developed women x PoC.

Black filmmakers and scholars disagree.

I'm inclined to believe the (trained) Black filmmakers and scholars not b/c they're Black, but b/c these are the voices who've long pointed out that Scorsese's work is brilliant and has problematic turns that tell us something about his version of the world we should unpack.

It also highlights the lack of media and film literacy we have as a society. Film and TV are probably the art forms (when they are) that we engage in the most frequently and most people have no idea how a film is made, much less basic film history or foundational theory.

When I mentioned Scorsese acted in this scene of a movie, people were comparing actors who depict terrible characters -- completely missing the fact that Scorsese was the DIRECTOR of the film and responsible for the vision in a way that an actor never is.

Or that Scorsese, perhaps more than any director of his generation, subscribes wholeheartedly to the auteur method of filmmaking -- which makes her, and mostly her alone, the vision on which the film succeeds or fails and is built upon.

I thought it was interesting when Scorsese made Boardwalk Empire and we saw for the first time a Black character having a supporting role in a work of his. Most of the Black filmmakers that watched the show critically engaged with the Scorseseness of it through that entry point.

I am not sure how I feel about Scorsese's work, but I am interested in unpacking it.
But it seems pretty...unrealistic to not unpack early works and their foreshadowing as it relates to later works problems, like, as some have said, women characters being underdeveloped in 2019.