An Open Letter To Screenwriters: Please Stop Watching Marvel Movies
If you’re reading this and have a Netflix subscription then odds are that, like myself, you recently had the (debatable) pleasure of watching the Russo brother’s latest directorial outing, “The Gray Man”.
For what it is, the film makes great on all of its most exorbitantly crafted, high-octane “Mission-Impossible” action sequences, most of which are driven by a captivating use of hyper-dynamic cameras and splashy, colorful lighting schema (including one particularly jaw-dropping fisticuffs shot on a firework-launching barge).
Despite its traditionally conceived and executed premise, however, you may have noticed that the film feels distinctly… different, from all the other big-budget spy action thrillers (M:I, Bond, Bourne, etc.). The cinematic ethos it cultivates is, I would argue, somewhat perplexingly not one of the standard gritty spy thriller/shoot-em-up flick, but instead one eerily reminiscent of a Marvel movie.
While (slightly) more grounded than perhaps the majority of Marvel’s superhero tentpole films, “The Gray Man” represents in both form and function a rather transparent attempt by the Russo Brothers to adapt their lessons learned in franchise filmmaking to the world of the modern-day gentleman spy.
You can see this in everything from the plucky, eccentric “villain” who fancies himself a comedian, to the significant unresolved plotlines begging for a sequel, and, most tellingly, in the use (and perhaps over-use) of Marvel’s classic trick: the motif.
My calling the motif Marvel’s trick is more than a bit of a misnomer, given that not only is it nearly ubiquitous among blockbusters, but also it’s well-nigh been the most important stable-horse of Hollywood screenwriters in the classical school for the better part of a century (it’s part of what makes “Casablanca” tick, for crying out loud).
For context, in cinematic terms a motif is any object, line of dialogue, particular camera/lighting arrangement, or sound which recurs several times throughout the film at key moments in an attempt to accentuate emotional and/or narrative beats.
The motif can be used for a nearly limitless number of applications, but most frequently it’s used as a sort of cinematic cheat code in order to easily manipulate an audience’s emotional response. It’s applied most often using a repetition-variation format, in which the motif is introduced in one context early in the film, reinforced in a similar context at a later point, and then re-introduced towards the conclusion in a new (typically bittersweet or tragic) way.
To demonstrate, imagine you’re watching a slasher movie.
In the opening scene we’re shown a family moving into their new house on a bright, sunny day, and as the father and daughter are unloading boxes from the moving van their golden retriever runs in between them and dashes into the house (there’s probably at least one close-up of the dog in there somewhere).
Flash forward a few minutes of screen time: the girl and her little brother are at the table eating breakfast when all of a sudden their lovable, dopey dog jumps up and grabs a slice of toast out of the boy’s hand, wolfing it down in close-up.
Finally, maybe twenty minutes into the film, the tone shifts and we’re given a nighttime interior close up of the golden asleep on a rug by the front door. He looks up groggily and notices that the door is open. Curious, he trots over to investigate when BAM! The killer grabs the dog and strangles it off-camera while you hear yelps followed by a thud.
This is how a motif is employed in its most simple and effective incarnation: introduction, repetition, variation. The filmmaker and screenwriter show you something seemingly unimportant, then proceed to imbue it with narrative importance through repeated emphasis, until finally they somehow alter or break it in an attempt to pull at your heartstrings.
As you can certainly guess, this doesn’t necessarily have to be contrived to make the audience sad–my puppy narrative could just as easily be flipped to tell the story of a dog who’s been routinely beaten finally being rescued, for instance.
This positive version of the motif is commonly used in blockbusters as a sort of social engineering hack to endear the protagonist to audience members (typically in the form of a catchphrase or action) and is more often than not wildly effective.
However, as one might surmise, the effectiveness of a motif is amplified the longer the screenwriter drags out the build-up, “delaying” the variation stage of its implementation. A prolonged cycle of repetition is challenging to achieve in the span of a ninety-minute feature film, and as such simple motifs such as catchphrases or signature actions are much more frequently employed in serial entertainment (traditionally television).
Enter the Russo brothers.
When they were tasked with directing and engineering the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most ambitious endeavors, they (alongside many of the Marvel creative team members) began to construct their movies almost as if they were giant episodes in an ongoing network series: each installment had a micro-narrative which is resolved by the end as well as elements of the macro-narrative which is resolved over the course of several installments (e.g. “The Winter Soldier” is one episode in “The Infinity Saga”).
This narrative re-imagining of the feature came complete with the introduction of a heavy reliance on motif through association to drive audience attachment (e.g. Iron Man and AC/DC, Thor and literalism, etc.).
The more we saw specific characters doing or saying things that were particular/signature to them, the more we came to view them not as fictional characters but as concrete individuals–an effect typically reserved for long-running sitcoms and other serials (similar to how fans of decades-long soaps will often describe characters as part of their family).
Marvel’s Infinity Saga “ran” for roughly a decade and included twenty-three installments, making the MCU older than the vast majority of actual network television shows by the time “Endgame” premiered–more than enough time to enable the most hackneyed forms of motif to function perfectly in their capacity to make us feel.
The problem this creates for the blockbuster landscape, however, is a simple one: an installment in the MCU does not function in any way like a normal feature film.
It’s comparing apples to oranges.
Yet, regardless of this fact, screenwriters in the (non-superhero) blockbuster industry are now looking to Marvel to try and extract some of the secret formula which seems so often to give its movies verified box-office invincibility.
And the most heinous of these adoptions are the more puerile forms of the motif.
I challenge you to walk into a random theater this summer and see any movie on the marquee (barring, of course, actual Marvel films) and walk away without having been subjected to the indignity of at least one cringe-worthy, shoe-horned catchphrase or moment of desperate, unashamed pandering to times-gone by (by my estimation you’d be lucky to come out with only one).
The absolute worst of these belong to the category which seems to telegraph the most blatantly low estimation of its viewers’ intelligence: the flashback motif.
The “flashback motif” is what I’ve chosen to call those instances in which a film takes raw footage from either an earlier installment in its franchise or from earlier in the film itself and simply drops it in the middle of a scene, without alteration.
There was, perhaps, a time when only the campiest of camp movies would utilize such a ham-fisted method to remind you of things you’d previously seen, and that was for good reason.
The true crime of the flashback motif is that it comes across as nothing more than a coddling of or condescension towards the audience–an implicit belief that without this blatant “refresher” we would be completely oblivious to the cinematic parallels the filmmaker is trying to draw.
As such it was rare, if ever, that such a device was used.
Lately, however, examples of it have begun to pop up all over the place, including “Top Gun: Maverick”, “The Matrix: Resurrections”, and–sadly to say–“Nope”.
For example: when in “Nope” OJ looks into his truck’s side view mirror and sees the giant alien eyeball, we as viewers are suddenly thrust into an unexpected and unnecessary flashback to the scene in which a production member holds up a mirror ball to OJ’s horse. I classify this not as a typical flashback but as a flashback motif only because the mirror ball has already made two separate appearances in the film (repetition and variation). All the more reason why this sudden incursion of the past into the present is, above all, completely gratuitous. The audience knows the ball is important, we get that animals can’t be looked in their eyes or can't look into mirrors without going wild, and we can make that connection ourselves with an absolute minimum of effort.
Peele’s use of the flashback motif is, however, tasteful in the extreme when compared to that of “Maverick”.
Early in the film, we find Maverick leaving the military dive bar he’s been ceremoniously thrown out of, when all of a sudden he sees Rooster through an open doorway banging out Jerry Lee Lewis’ perennial “Great Balls of Fire” on the bar piano, with a host of his peers singing along with great alacrity. It’s at this moment that the filmmakers so generously gift us footage of Goose doing precisely the same thing in the original “Top Gun” film with little Rooster sitting on top of the piano.
Disclaimer: this scene is not inherently bad.
I wouldn’t even say it’s bad, period.
In fact, it works quite well, and its conception is fantastic. Its execution, however, is nothing less than insulting.
Let’s break this down piecemeal. First, there’s song selection: there’s no compelling reason (other than the fact that his dad sang it once upon a time) for Rooster to be playing, specifically, “Great Balls of Fire” at this bar. What’s more, the song’s nearly forty years old, and somehow the film expects us to believe that every single twenty-something pilot in Fightertown, U.S.A. knows the lyrics backwards and forwards?
Sure, you can argue that perhaps this is Rooster’s signature act, and that he’s been doing it at this specific bar and with these specific people for years–but every living soul in that room was belting out Jerry Lee Lewis bar for bar, and there’s no way I’m buying that every one of those people had met Rooster before, let alone heard him sing “Balls of Fire”.
As far as I’m concerned the only explanation, diegetic or otherwise, for the sing-along scene as pictured is that the screenwriters and filmmakers wanted to weaponize old-timer “Top Gun” nostalgia.
Second, why include the flashback footage? Who’s going to the theater to see “Maverick” without being at least tangentially aware of the famous “Great Balls of Fire” scene? Perhaps that’s too harsh of a critique–this is a tentpole film after all, meaning it needs to appeal to all audiences, even those who haven’t seen “Top Gun”.
At that point, though, you might as well just slap a “Previously On: Top Gun” segment right after the trailers and call it a day.
Which is, of course, almost exactly what the latest “Matrix” sequel did, but its flashback motif usage was so appalling and extensive that it’s probably best to just leave well enough alone.
As bad as the flashback motifs are, however, they’re not a product of the Marvel Cinematic Universe–though they do make a cameo appearance in “Thor: Love and Thunder”–and we can’t blame the Russo brothers for them.
The plucky catchphrase trend, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.
As previously mentioned, the Russos found incredible success working with screenwriters who prioritized the creation of signature taglines and catchphrases, the most memorable of these being, arguably, Captain America’s “I can do this all day” (I still remember the goosebumps I got watching Evans deliver that line to Thanos in theaters).
What’s important to note about the MCU, though, is that they’ve earned the effectiveness of this tactic. They’ve had twenty three movies worth of character development in which to imbue those words with a meaning beyond their superficial cheesiness.
The problem is that the use of catchphrases (which are themselves a form of motif) is undeniably “cheesy”–a fact which Marvel itself has admitted by lampooning the seriousness of Roger’s catchphrase in a song for his eponymous musical from the “Hawkeye” Disney + series. And when screenwriters for non-Marvel films begin adopting this and other similar motif-driven narrative strategies, they fall flat on their face: bearing nothing but the sad, cheesy tuckus of hack writing.
Nowhere is this more evident (and most obviously attributable to the MCU) than in the Russo brothers’ “Gray Man”.
In one of the film’s most astonishing fight scenes, “Six” subdues a home intruder in pitch darkness, the scene being lit almost exclusively by a flashlight held by Gosling’s character. As the fight concludes, Six is confronted by his employer’s young niece, who (incredibly concerned) asks him if he’s alright, to which he responds, in classic quippy fashion: “Just another Thursday”. Later in the film Six is injured nearly to the point of death, and as he is being carted away reassures his employer’s frantic young ward he’ll be alright by telling her, once again that it’s, “Just another Thursday”.
Now, I’m not saying this is the worst screenwriting ever, or even that it’s necessarily bad. Catchphrases and taglines can even work well within a single film (again, see “Casablanca”), but at the end of the day, if the dialogue doesn't feel natural–if the repetition feels forced–it’s not going to land.
Motifs are a powerful tool in screenwriters tool belts, and when used correctly can deliver the perfect emotional punch that a scene needs. But, as the Russos’ heroes are so want to remind us: “with great power comes great responsibility”.
My advice to anyone setting out to write a blockbuster screenplay, then, would be to take a long, hard look at your script and duly ask yourself: “is this going to sound stupid when my actor says it?”
If the answer is yes, or if you have even the slightest suspicion that it might be, please, for all our sakes, leave the catchphrases for the superheroes.