But like a friend of mine has often said regarding the sometimes twisted-beyond-recognizable immoral sexual and cultural notions in the genre of rock/pop music for decades, I want to find the wheat in the weeds. I hesitate to throw the whole project in the waste bin of moral turpitude.
Let's mention first the brilliant explanation done by Mike at the Idea Channel on the phenomenological nature of this brutal and unusual character in the red spandex suit. I agree. This is ultimately a film about bodies folks, and what it means to be a body. Deadpool's character is a typical Gen X character, driven by the zeitgeist of the age toward a meaningless drive towards excess in the form of alcohol and sex. He has the extreme nostalgia and desire to find meaning in cult following typical to his generation (Hello Kitty, anyone?) and the song track of his teen years (I remember swooning at Careless Whispers, hate to admit). The first inkling that he has a deeper soul is exposed in his passionate- though remarkably capricious- relationship to his girlfriend, whose story we won't delve into further, but who also has... body issues. (Spoilers:Vanessa is a mutant)
What is vital to remember here is the phenomenological study that is going on here. 1. This is a man whose entire body becomes riddled with cancer that will kill him 2. This is a man who seeks a cure through technological experimentation and 3. This is a man who cannot die.
Let's take these one at a time. Since the comic book figure is released as title character in 1993, and reveals dozens of times through cultural references in the film alone that he is a product of his generation (the X men character Negasonic Teenage Warhed, a millennial teen, calls him "old" because of his frame of reference), we can assume he has been formed by the latchkey Gen X norm of REM's "Losing my religion"status who later crumbled under failed dot-coms leading to generational angst among the first group of US kids largely affected by high divorce rates, as well as an Internet age that ushered in the normalization of porn (just watch Friends if you doubt me.) Without religion, with disillusionment about family and security, with normalized deviant or at least casual sex, with the isolation of his age, Deadpool is pretty much a Generation X cultural icon. The One and Only Good in his life comes in the form of the woman, Vanessa- the woman who inspires him to rejoice in something; even to consider commitment... His match, his companion, the one who offers him a sense of meaning, and a telos of marriage, of life. And cancer strikes. Out of misguided love he walks away from Vanessa, closes himself back inside his own isolation, chooses to make a decision in the depths of painful solitude, and in rejecting their (even broken) unity, turns to technology as his savior.
2. This narrative is a product long in the making - since the Enlightenment certainly, which in many ways sets up humans to be their own gods. I am inclined to insist that though technology does offer us much goodness (I am painfully aware I am writing, a technology in itself, on a laptop that you can read because of the internet) it, as all things, can be used to manipulate. What the comic addresses is not a moral judgement on technology as much as what I see as an argument for personalism whether you prefer the Kantian version - that humanity must never be a means to an end, but an end in itself or the Wojtyla version - that added to that view is the idea that the only proper response to the person is love. But in this case, the whole purpose of the experimental labs is far from love. It is a way of manipulating those in fear for their lives by promising them something more - a cure (even super-human status). It is a technology that proclaims its practitioners as gods on earth, flexing their chemical knowledge and using people's fear and desperation against them. How indicative this is of our age! Technology qua technology will save my life... Even as we risk isolation to gain it. (Think of all our reproductive technologies and how many of them isolate a single human being from another.) But the film is is NO WAY silent about this use of the person. It is a product of it, but does not make the scenes anything other than the horror they are. In fact, Deadpool leaves that dungeon of chemical and psychological torture like a phoenix rising from the ashes as he burns his way out of the torture of use and manipulation - burning the false promises and false hope to the ground in his wake.
3. I think so much of the character of Deadpool moving forward is the result of a character who is in constant pain (in his whole person, ensoulled body), and cannot die. His only hope, really, to get back to Love. His great despair, really, that his body has been taken from him. His new fear is no longer the cancer disfiguring his insides (that continues, btw, to riddle his body, just being healed at the same rate as it manifests) but the gross disfigurement of his outer flesh. Deadpool is not - not in any way- a spirit inside a machine. He is a body. As a constantly healing body - as a body that cannot die - he experiences an inhuman freedom: a freedom that removes all the rational (and irrational) fears of bodiliness. He is not afraid to fall, to be cut, hit, maimed, even have limbs severed. He has a new, inhuman kind of audacity that rivals stories of the early martyrs. And I will not shy from the comparison - that they, with the assurances of Heaven - could demonstrate the audacity and freedom that comes when we do not fear death. Only Deadpool has been offered on the altar of the age. He is free from fear. But he is alone, and in pain. His sarcasm displays his unease in the world. (Yet also - also his humanity that remains somehow, even though the thugs assured him humor could not prevail against the torture.) He deals with the fact that death is robbed from him - and hence in some great measure, his humanity - the way he knows how: through sex, through violence... through the most visceral attempts to claim his own body.
This film resonated with me. I can hardly help it. It was like seeing a darker humanity, twisted, fallen, broken, precariously mended in all the wrong ways. It used raunch and subversion and deviance and manipulation to deal with the inhumane reality of cancer and the inhumanness of deathlessness. (Without Death, what Hope???) It tapped into a generation - maybe two -in a way that was incisive and didn't shy from the angst and the darkness and the loss and the isolation that is real for so many many people.
But what if we untwisted it. Let's not do the comic violence... it needs to be what it is, but can we not learn from the unsaid? The between-the-lines?
What if in the untwisting, we learn some things, and see where beauty lies? What if we see the beauty that comes from a lover loving the beloved even as he dies, and from the beloved allowing himself to be loved? What if in the untwisting we see the sparks of unity and understand why it is not good for the man to be alone? Why death has no sting? What if in the untwisting, we glimpse the remarkable and awkward and redeemable and gratuitous dignity and majesty that is the body, and the way it is who we are? And the way it reveals our souls? And the way it acts in the world, and senses the world, and co-creates the world around us?
What if in the untwisting, beyond the swear words and low humor and anger and darkness and sexual immorality and drunkenness and pain, we can see what it means to be human? What it means to use vs. love? What freedom is and what it is not?
I think in a very real sense that this character speaks to so many people because he struggles to be a body in the world - a body that doesn't belong, but desperately seeks meaning, seeks love. And, my friends... it seems to me that that isn't more than a couple of steps away from a body that might yet have reason to Hope, to do Good, and to find Love.
***p.s. I know this will bother some people. You are responsible for your own conscience. Please don't see this film if it will lead you down the primrose path.... I just think we need to be patient with contemporary art, test everything, as Thomas said, and cling only to what is good
