Deadpool and Wolverine Took the Wrong Lesson From the Comics

[[{“value”:”

This article contains spoilers for Deadpool and Wolverine.

Director Shawn Levy makes a number of very weird choices in Deadpool and Wolverine. Maybe the weirdest is the decision to play a reel of what look like extras from the foil-enhanced deluxe edition DVD of Bryan Singer’s X-Men during the credits, reminding everybody that Hugh Jackman, who is now AARP eligible, was 31 when the first film came out. One one level, this makes sense: If you liked the way the first two Deadpool films made a meal out of the title character’s Jim Halpert-style disrespect for his corporate workplace, you may be happy to learn that this quality is basically the entire screenplay—it’s nothing but meta-gags and campy needle drops as far as the eye can see. But the movie is also trying to do something that only the best art—comics, films, prose—can do, and can’t be allowed to happen if Marvel’s cinematic project is to continue: end.

Once you’ve broken the fourth wall, it can’t really be re-erected. There’s no way to keep the Deadpool audience’s mind from wandering just slightly further afield from gags about the production of X-Men and remembering, say, the kind of off-set permission that Singer’s huge success with those first two films bought him, or pondering the jarring absence from this multiverse-hopping film of Kang the Conqueror, the franchise’s main multiverse-hopping villain, played until recently by Jonathan Majors. And it’s perhaps to the movie’s credit that it leans into a strategically chosen few of these questions—Deadpool and Wolverine spend most of the film in a cheap-looking netherworld we first saw in the Disney+ series Loki called the Void, where they meet up with characters from old Marvel movies played by expensive-looking actors. These characters have all been retconned out of existence in order to smooth over the wrinkles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while I’m not sure the filmmakers intend Alioth, the ravening monster in this purgatorial dimension, who devours Wesley Snipes (Blade) and Jennifer Garner (Elektra) and even poor little Dafne Keen (X-23), to work as a metaphor for their own film, which establishes the X-Men and Wolverine films as part of the same multiverse as the Greater MCU, it’s certainly an apt one.

Franchise entertainment doesn’t often try to do this sort of thing—the MCU is a game of ever-heightening stakes, and jokes about Channing Tatum’s never-made Gambit film tend to make those stakes lower and less cosmic-seeming. But if you are going to publish serial fiction over decades, you are going to run into the problem Deadpool and Wolverine is trying to address: Actors get old. People die or leave. Stories need to end, or they aren’t stories.

The funny thing about the way the current crop of Marvel movies flails around trying to find solid footing is that this kind of struggle with the perils of long-term success has simply never troubled Marvel Comics writ large (though there are certainly series, like Uncanny X-Men, where it has come up). But DC Comics did something very similar during the 1980s, when it streamlined away much of the charm from its shared multiverse of characters acquired through decades of messy acquisitions and bankruptcies in order to make the whole thing easier to understand, with a big miniseries called Crisis on Infinite Earths in which all the confusing parallel universes were destroyed. And Grant Morrison, the masterly writer whose work seems to have inspired the most interesting moments in Deadpool and Wolverine, saw that multiverse’s problems and potentials the clearest.

Some of the connections to Morrison’s work are more obvious: Emma Corrin co-stars as Cassandra Nova, one of Morrison’s villains from their run on New X-Men, complete with the nifty hand-through-the-face visual dreamed up by them and their great collaborator Frank Quitely. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In Morrison and artist Chaz Truog’s Animal Man, published in the aftermath of Crisis, our hero, Buddy Baker, finds that he is being given the same kind of treatment that made Batman into the grimdark hero he is today. Buddy’s family is suddenly, brutally murdered, and so he kills everyone responsible for his family’s death, Death Wish-style. This, he finds, brings him little satisfaction, but he knows how to fix things: In an earlier story, Buddy has had a spiritual awakening, looked out of the comics page, and seen the reader. Somebody, he knows, is in charge. Maybe they can fix it.

This is where the story intersects directly with Deadpool and Wolverine: Buddy finds himself in a place called Limbo, where all the unwanted superheroes and -villains live together, waiting to be remembered and put into a story. It’s one of my favorite comics, a little walking tour of characters too ridiculous or old-fashioned for the George H. W. Bush administration, like the Space Canine Patrol Agents and Ma Hunkel, the Red Tornado, and it’s much more similar to the strange wasteland we get in Deadpool and Wolverine than the story from which the Void is supposedly adapted, a barely read Avengers miniseries called The Terminatrix Objective.

Like Deadpool, Buddy enlists some of the denizens of this depressing place to help on his quest for answers, and he finds them: At the end of Limbo, he meets the person responsible for all of his troubles, namely the writer Grant Morrison. “It added drama,” Morrison explains apologetically to Buddy. “All stories need drama and it’s easy to get a cheap emotional shock by killing popular characters.” Their cat had died recently, Morrison explains. She suffered terribly and died just after her third birthday, and there was nothing they could do about it. Eventually, Morrison dismisses Buddy. The book ends with a coda, where Morrison explains that they still miss their cat and wonders whether perhaps they can help themselves deal with the overwhelming sense of helplessness that comes from understanding life’s cruelty. They resolve to spread kindness by being kind to their fictional characters. Thus, Buddy lives happily ever after, his family restored to him and his own fictional trauma erased.

This is almost certainly asking too much of the Walt Disney Company, but I would personally like very much to watch a superhero movie in which the strain of all these intersecting metafictions becomes too much and the ridiculous characters have to confront the reason for their existence—not that they fell into a vat of radioactive goo or survived the destruction of their homeworld of otherwise invincible beings, but that they are the product of a certain kind of cultural necessity. In Deadpool and Wolverine,we’re within sight of something like Marvel’s Tristram Shandy: The Last Avenger or Charlie Kaufman Presents Thor, but we’re not nearly close enough.

Related From Slate

There are, after all, models for this kind of film, just as there are models for a bunch of the other Marvel films. Captain America is styled on the Indiana Jones movies, Iron Man was a sort of ooh-rah riff on James Bond, and so on. When you admit that superheroes and superpowers are kind of silly and nonsensical, as Deadpool does, you call into question the entire reason to have made your movie, and it becomes incumbent upon you to answer that question honestly. The makers of Deadpool and Wolverine, obviously, don’t have it in them to do that, but other filmmakers have. Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and his collaborations with Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, are absolutely devoted to mining the author’s subconscious for the reasons he wanted to make the film in the first place. Fellini’s 8 ½, Orson Welles’s F Is for Fake, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show—there are many, many movies that can give you a model for this kind of thing well. (There are also models for how to do it badly, like Birdman and Last Action Hero, but even those are trying to do something interesting.)

But you can’t make a straightforward movie sequel that does this right. You have to give up at least some of your characters, or your own participation in the high-budget, high-stakes world of blockbuster filmmaking if you’re actually going to address the question of the audience’s need for the kind of entertainment you make. And that’s not something these films will ever do. They should, though.

“}]] Marvel’s latest hit presents itself as a subversive take on the franchise. Here’s what that would actually look like.  Read More