Is Deadpool & Wolverine a chilling symbol of society's decline?

I don't know, let's find out together

You’ll learn more about the state of society from a movie like Deadpool & Wolverine than from an Oscar bait film about popes or some shit, for the same reason that you’ll learn more about a celebrity by digging through their trash than from reading a New Yorker interview.

So let’s dig into how D&W is a perfect demonstration of why so many people think our culture is dead and that we’re now just picking through the rot. Not that I agree with them, but…

Before we start, if you haven’t picked up a copy of the national bestseller I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available in every format at this link. If you’ve already read it, maybe join the discussion in the fan subreddit.

1. Let me be clear: I am in no way too smart for movies like this

What I’m not going to do here is spend thousands of words complaining that Deadpool & Wolverine is nothing but puerile slapstick and recursive pop culture references interrupted by fight scenes totally devoid of dramatic stakes. Blazing Saddles had all that and it’s regarded as a classic.

Hell, if anything, D&W’s mortal sin is that it thinks it can swerve back into mawkish sentimentality whenever it wants, where Blazing Saddles kept crashing through increasingly ridiculous layers of the fourth wall. The third(?) Deadpool movie literally ends with a teary montage set to that Green Day “Time of Your Life” song, a tribute to other superhero franchises with grainy behind-the-scenes clips of actors in roles they took purely because the paychecks would fund the stuff they really wanted to make.

I don’t even think D&W is a bad movie. Hugh Jackman throws himself into this role and if you don’t like any particular joke, there’ll be another one in four seconds. Or, more likely, the same joke rephrased—look, the point is that I’m not complaining about the filmmaking. I’m saying that if you zoom out, you’ll see that this movie is the culmination of a trend that might—might—portend the collapse of our civilization. 

2. Let’s first acknowledge our collective bloodlust

The plot of Deadpool & Wolverine begins with—

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how action movies work.

The entire genre is predicated on the premise that certain people need to die. Or, at least, have the living shit beat out of them. It triggers something primal in the audience; our nervous systems light up at the sight of a guy slicing and dicing through a pack of bad guys because any ancestors who failed to enjoy that type of thing didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes.

So, Deadpool & Wolverine opens with indestructible mercenary and former Minnesota Vikings QB Wade Wilson slaughtering a group of guys who’ve come to apprehend him. It is not established why exactly these men deserve to die and it’s a running joke that Deadpool himself doesn’t care. These films flaunt the fact that none of this matters and one could even argue that any deep analysis is just a waste of our few precious moments on earth.

But there’s an interesting activity you can try that will change how you think of cinema and also make your friends stop watching movies with you. At the end of this or any action/adventure film, after the heroes have defeated the bad guys, pause the film and ask a simple question: 

“Why did the good guys win?”

The answer should never be, “Because the heroes are stronger,” there would be no drama in that, you’d just be watching a superhuman bully some mortals for two hours. The victory always has to be for some other reason. 

For example, the reason John Wick really wins in his movies is because he is more motivated; the memory of his wife and his desire to redeem his sins lets him persevere against enemies who are simply in it for a paycheck. Harry Potter wins the same way the Jedi do, by rallying support from the outcasts and common folk against an elitist, oppressive regime that rules through fear. The Avengers defeat Thanos because they love their friends more than he loves genocide. All of these can be boiled down to one, usually-unspoken theme: 

“Our side wins because our way of life is superior.”

They may frame it as “love conquers all” or “freedom is better than oppression” or some version of “God is on our side” (see: the light side of the Force in Star Wars, Eywa in Avatar) but those are all just another way of saying the same thing. Those themes are not the result of a coordinated propaganda campaign intended to brainwash audiences into perpetuating the glory of the empire; studios just want to make money and the audience’s favorite story will always be, “Our tribe is right, the other tribe is wrong, and we will win.” 

That’s why these movies always provide unintentional insight into what a culture believes about itself. The United States, which can barely remember the last time it went to war against a wealthier country, loves tales in which hardscrabble farmers rise up against a decadent empire.

Okay, so why do the heroes win in Deadpool & Wolverine? “There is no reason,” you’re probably saying. “They literally turn their ultimate triumph into yet another joke about how much Wade wants to pork Logan.” 

I agree that the movie thinks none of this matters, but a close look at the plot reveals something else entirely… 

3. All stories are propaganda, even (and especially) the ones that aren’t intended to be

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how fiction works. Why does it even exist? If nothing else, you’d have to assume the very first human to tell a “story” was just a lying piece of shit. The actual reason, as I understand it, goes like this:

Imagine you’re a kid at a summer camp, the kind they have in 80s movies. It’s brutally hot and one day you and your friends pass by a beautiful lake with a “NO SWIMMING” sign. If there are no visible dangers or grown-ups around, I’m thinking it’ll be just minutes until somebody suggests going for a swim. Rules are made to be broken and who’s to say why that sign is even there? Maybe some greedy adult wants all the good swimming for himself, or some corrupt bureaucrat has an under-the-table deal with the sign maker.

But what if, instead of a sign, the other campers tell a gruesome tale of a kid who tried swimming there last year, only to emerge shrieking with his skin melting off his body? The lake, they explain, is extremely acidic—just the droplets from the kid’s thrashing limbs blinded three of his friends. It doesn’t take an expert to understand why that story is more effective than a sign at keeping kids out of the water; a rule is abstract, a good story is visceral. You can almost hear that kid’s screams, see the flesh gooping off his body.

So it’s not surprising that many old folk tales boil down to, “a naughty little boy once sneaked off into the woods, where he was captured by a witch” or “a greedy little girl ate some mushrooms she found and suddenly was transformed into a slug.” Keeping kids alive meant instilling a healthy fear of the wilderness and unfamiliar fungi.

“Hold on,” you ask, “wouldn’t that require the listener to actually think the story is true?” You’re not gonna believe this, but no. That’s the thing about humans, we’ll watch a movie about vampires on Mars, but if there’s a scene in which a sexy dude smokes a cigarette while a hot lady swoons, we’ll think, “Ah, cigarettes make women swoon. I shall start smoking this very night.” 

Now, this does take some finesse on the part of the storyteller, usually by conveying the message, not in the plot, but in the unspoken assumptions that make the plot possible. You might watch Jaws and think the message is, “Listen to experts when it comes to public health, and don’t put profit over people!” But the plot only exists under the assumption that sharks are incredibly dangerous and must be stopped with lethal force… and that’s the part audiences felt in their guts. “Are you seriously saying they intended Jaws to be anti-shark propaganda?” No, that was an accident, as most messages conveyed by mass media are (note that the writer of Jaws spent the rest of his life trying to undo the damage).

“Fine,” you say, “then what are the fucking unspoken assumptions this Deadpool movie supposedly brainwashed us with? Because I literally don’t even remember the plot and you forgot to finish summarizing it earlier.” Good point, let’s do that now.

4. This genre requires targets the heroes can mow like grass

Actually, before we get into the plot, let me back up a bit, to the basics of how our species works. Evolution may have instilled in us some pleasure chemicals that get released whenever we imagine winning a battle against the bad guys, but it’s the culture’s job to tell us who the bad guys are, to harness our innate desire for glory the way an operating system commands hardware. 

So one can imagine a bunch of young dudes sitting around a campfire and hearing the thrilling legend of a warrior who bravely sacrificed himself to save the village from the cruel Mountain People. The plot conveys the message, “You must be brave and persistent, even against long odds” but the underlying assumption is, “The Mountain People are both merciless and undeserving of mercy.” If the culture is doing its job, the young men might be dubious about the plot, quietly thinking that it is unlikely one guy could really hold off an entire invading tribe. But it will never occur to them to challenge the underlying assumption about the inhumanity of the Mountain People.

Of course, the intent isn’t just to train warriors to kill, but to instill a willingness for all types of heroic sacrifice and a belief that preserving our way of life is worth it. But that other assumption—that somewhere out there are masses of inhuman savages who must be defeated—is so baked into our culture that we have entire genres of shows/movies/games that can’t function without it. You literally can’t have a first-person shooter video game without enemies you can gleefully mow down by the dozen.

For most of the time pop culture has existed, this has been no problem at all. I’m old enough that when I was a toddler, the toys were still cowboy-themed and we had cap guns we’d use to pretend to shoot “Indians.” When I got a little older, it was the Russians we pretended to kill. I was nine when the movie Red Dawn assured me that the Soviets would parachute in any day now and that it would be up to us, the children, to fight them off. 

But then the Cold War abruptly ended and there was a reckoning in the culture, questioning if any mass of sentient beings really deserve to be wiped out. This triumph of progressive cultural empathy definitely made the world better but also created a huge problem for the entertainment industry, which has spent an entire generation figuring out workarounds.

Thus, we got an incredible Lord of the Rings trilogy that made it clear no Orc deserves to live, but Tolkien only wrote so many books. So we also got lots of media about killing aliens (Independence Day, then several Marvel movies) and zombies (The Walking Dead, tons of video games) and robots (several other Marvel movies, The Matrix). The Star Wars prequels even had to retcon their Stormtroopers into clones, as if the lives of millions of copies of the same sentient dude would have no individual value (I guess it’s because they don’t have moms to be sad for them?).

The low point was probably the Red Dawn remake in 2012, in which the bad guys were the Chinese during filming, but had to be changed to North Koreans at the last minute (even though the idea of a mainland invasion by either nation is laughable).

“Wait, are we even still talking about Deadpool & Wolverine? Because its biggest action set pieces are just a bunch of comic book characters fighting each other.”

Yes, and it’s noteworthy that this is different from how the previous Deadpool films handled the cannon fodder problem. They took place in an alternate universe in which the first world is full of criminal organizations with vast private armies (the John Wick movies do the same thing, to a comical degree—that freak has personally killed 439 people across four films, every single victim understood to be a remorseless professional thug).

To understand D&W, you have to look at the antagonists of other MCU films, where a strange pattern quickly emerges. The villain of every Iron Man film is an executive at an American tech company. The antagonist in The Incredible Hulk is the US military. The villain in Thor is Thor’s own brother, the bad guys in The Avengers are Thor’s brother and, in a twist, an American intelligence agency. The villain in Avengers 2 is a robot of Tony Stark’s own creation. If it kind of sounds like they spend all their time fighting amongst themselves, you’re right. I mean, Captain America does get to kill Nazis for a bit, but in the next film, he’s fighting his former best friend and the third installment is literally about a “Civil War” between two factions of superheroes.

And that has been your dominant pop culture franchise since the Obama era: a group of godlike heroes who mostly protect humanity from the heroes’ own families, colleagues and inventions. That’s weird, right? “Now hold on, didn’t we just have an old-fashioned patriotic ‘Us Against Them’ blockbuster with the 2022 Top Gun sequel?” Sure, now go look up who the bad guys were in that movie. “Hmm, it doesn’t say...” Right, because they literally never named the enemy country, or provided any hints as to who it could be (that the film hides this information in a way that some people never notice is kind of amazing). And note that Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t the top grosser that year, that was the Avatar sequel. You know, the movie in which the mindless cannon fodder enemy is humanity itself. 

“You’re overthinking it, the whole reason they can’t depict a war with Russia or China is because the studios may want distribution in those countries!” Well, yeah. But that’s just a side effect of the fact that the USA has spent a generation as the only superpower in a global economy. That means our culture doesn’t have an enemy to unify against—all opposing nations are potential trade partners—and it’s not just the movie studios who feel lost without one.

I am not saying that things were better back when our Saturday morning cartoons were wall-to-wall hate crimes, I’m saying that, historically, fear and revulsion of a formidable enemy is what binds a society together and watching us try to function without it is like seeing a recovering addict realize they have no tools to manage their anxiety. Hatred of the Other is a cheap and reliable way to strengthen love for your neighbor and in the USA, the jury is out on whether the love can stand on its own.

There is, therefore, a fear among certain people—some of whom are very powerful in society—that we’ve cultivated a population that doesn’t believe in The Cause and that we’ll crumble the moment we run into a population that does believe in theirs, that an army of single-minded zealots will always defeat an opposing army of heavily-medicated, bickering neurotics. They’ll never put it this way, but the truth is that lots of people believe dehumanization of the Other is an empire’s superpower and runaway empathy is its Kryptonite. If you look around, you’ll see that we’re actually having this argument everywhere, but always dressing it up as something else. “Don’t talk to me about nuance, [insert opposition here] must be defeated!”

Which brings us back to Deadpool, whose true superpower is not that he can instantly heal his wounds, but that he can murder a hundred men without hesitation or doubt, giggling and quipping to the camera the whole time, never losing a moment of sleep to the memory of their screams. The main character arc in D&W belongs to an alcoholic Logan who is haunted by his violent past and must learn to remorselessly kill again. He even dons a mask in the finale, to symbolize that he has buried the humanity that was holding him back to become the pure inhuman killing machine the world needs. 

But why does the world need it? What cause is he advancing?

5. And, here comes the existential dread

Actually, before we get into why the answer to that question might be the most alarming thing you’ve ever read, let me back up a bit and summarize this movie’s plot. SPOILERS AHEAD:

The setup of Deadpool & Wolverine is that, because Disney acquired Fox in 2019, many old superhero franchises are destined to be rebooted with new actors, tragically erasing the originals from the canon. In the film, these old characters are jettisoned to a void dimension where they wander a wasteland ruled by a cruel, power-hungry female twin of Professor X. I realize that if you haven’t seen the movie it sounds like I just had a stroke but, yes, the plot literally revolves around Disney’s real-world acquisition of Fox studios. One of the crumbling structures in the void dimension is the old 20th Century Fox logo:

Some of it is presented as thinly veiled symbolism (Deadpool and Wolverine get sent to the void by a corrupt bureaucrat whose job it is to prune universes that aren’t working—you know, like a studio exec coldly deciding which franchises aren’t profitable enough to continue) but usually Reynolds just says it straight to camera. One of the first lines we hear Deadpool say is, “Disney bought Fox, there was a whole boring rights issue...” and the Disney corporation is mentioned four more times over the course of the movie.

In order to escape the void, the heroes have to rally the help of various superheroes from now-dead franchises including Elektra, X-23, Blade and Johnny Storm, plus the character Gambit from a project that (in the real world) was canceled in development. Those characters sacrifice themselves to free the heroes and this is portrayed as a powerful moment in which they are allowed the closure that was cruelly denied to them by the bean counters.

The protagonists then find they’ve been pursued through the portal by an army of alternate universe Deadpools, at which point the actor Ryan Reynolds explains to the camera that multiverse storytelling simply doesn’t work and that Disney should abandon it.

So in order to engage with the emotional throughline of the film, the viewer must be intimately familiar, not just with every superhero film of the last 25 years, but with all the related behind-the-scenes industry drama. An early joke assumes you know who Kevin Feige is—not just the name of the president of Marvel Studios, but his role in the creative decision-making. Other punchlines require the viewer to have followed the studio’s failure to reboot the Blade franchise and to be upset about the Channing Tatum Gambit film never making it out of development hell. 

In other words, it assumes that you care, not necessarily what happens to these characters, but about the place those characters hold in the culture and in the studio’s release schedule. It assumes that the central motivating purpose of your life is the consumption of media and, therefore, that you will be emotionally invested in a piece of media that is only about other pieces of media. Ryan Reynolds knows his audience—he’s a billionaire for a reason—and this assumption made Deadpool & Wolverine the top-grossing film of the year.

This is, after all, an audience that doesn’t just play video games, but watches videos of other people playing video games, then watches videos about the people who make videos of themselves playing video games then goes on reddit to discuss the videos about the people who make videos about themselves playing video games. The real world is a lost cause, they say, so your cause is here, in the Matrix, to help to brick up the sky behind more and more layers of simulation. 

Instead of a tale of heroism told around the campfire to motivate young people to go out and be heroes themselves, these are tales about the heroism of consuming tales, a harrowing parable about how some evil person wants to move the campfire, or change the seating, or to tell the story in a slightly different way than you’d prefer. It kind of seems like we’re watching a culture trying to figure out if that’s enough of a belief system to make a human life worth living.

Then again, it’s just one movie so maybe it’s no big deal. And yes, this is secretly what the new book is about. I give Deadpool & Wolverine 4.5 stars out of 100.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, it’s available in every format at this link. If you’ve already read it, maybe join the discussion in the fan subreddit.

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