Martin Scorsese politely reminds everyone The Irishman is a movie, not a miniseries
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is an incredible, deeply affecting meditation on aging and impermanence wrapped in the body of a decades-spanning mob thriller. Scroll through Twitter, however, and you’re less likely to stumble upon thoughtful discussion than you are exhausting complaints, be it over Anna Paquin’s lack of lines—a purposeful, thematically resonant choice that the actor herself wishes you would all get over—or the film’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime. So pervasive are the latter whinges that at least one intrepid fan has provided a chart that tells you how to watch it as a satisfying, four-part limited series.
This, of course, didn’t go over well for fans of Scorsese, who, due in part to his recent comments about Marvel films and what constitutes “cinema,” has become a pillar in the ongoing discussion of how we consume content in 2019. In an era where producers capitalize on dwindling attention spans produced by an increasingly online culture by turning seemingly everything into a series, the concept of watching a full movie in one sitting is becoming more and more foreign—even as consumers are still likely to binge multiple episodes of a series over one afternoon. That might be confusing on its face, but it’s the promise of an imminent break—a chance to reorient with phones or socials or emails—that makes binging chunks more appealing than committing to a single story for an extended period of time. This kind of behavior is undoubtedly changing the way content is made, and Scorsese has, time and again, sought to extol the singular, more meditative pleasures of the cinematic experience.