Psycho. #2
Deadpool & Wolverine & Caspar
Hey Caspar, have you seen the trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine? Thoughts?
-Marvel Stuff Will Only Return Disappointment
Hi MS Word (?),
I have - and beyond the outright awfulness, dare I say vulgarity, of what it portends, I find myself quite fascinated by the trailer’s impoverished lexicon, and what that says about where we currently find ourselves on the superhero wheel of fortune.
The film is about an encounter between someone called Deadpool (?) and Wolverine, the one from X-Men. As I understand it, Deadpool is a puckish, roguish, impish rascal, whereas Wolverine’s MO, as with all the X-people, is rather more to do with weltschmerz and the condition of being an outsider.
(Deadpool being a more recent invention, and avowedly pansexual, I’m intrigued by the difference between such a character and the more taciturn figures of the X-Men, who originally stood for the alienation of queers at a time of greater hostility towards LGBTQ people - but I doubt the film will get into that intergenerational difference)
The trailer features the usual bro-y teasing-y banter that has become the cloying stock-in-trade for these movies that owe so much more, structurally, to playfighting with toy figurines than to any wider mythologies, per the claims that are made for them. What is notable is the flip, glib swearing that both characters resort to, which resembles nothing so much as a child’s first foray into swearing, in their early teens, in a bid to demarcate themselves from their infancy: uncertain, overplayed, juvenile.
When I was aged between 11 and 13 or so, friends would come and stay with my family for a week every summer, and to entertain ourselves - we were weird, camp children OK? - we would sometimes play One Word Stories, in which you take it in turns to say a word, constructing sentences that eventually create a narrative. The stories were always rude revisions of The Famous Five, I suppose because we had all read the books when we were younger - and so a typical sentence, devised by us four children, would go: “Aunt… Fanny… had… packed… a… big… hamper… full… of… shit.” Every story would find Julian wanking into a bush or Uncle Quentin muttering “fuck” under his breath, or whatever. The point being that, to amuse our childish minds, we were symbolically ripping up a beloved text of our earlier years, and subjecting it to a revision that cast us as older, wiser, more worldly.
Deadpool & Wolverine is this: it’s still playing with toys, but Hollywood’s writers have now advanced to a stage of grating prepubescence that most well-balanced adults remember with a cringing shudder. We still find ourselves in a depressing stage of arrested development, but perhaps Deadpool & Wolverine signals a slight willingness, a readiness, to step out of the world of childhood, eventually, and confront death, sex, and the psychological ambiguity of our lives on earth.
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