LOGAN: Wolverine and fighting the Future

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 22, 2016

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real.

The Logan trailer is by far the best trailer of the year so far.  It has masterfully distanced itself from the superhero movies that the film version of Wolverine came from.  This emotional trailer shows a not so distant future where Logan is living with his demons as his body doesn’t regenerate at the rate it once did.  It shows him caring for a sick Professor X in a somewhat dystopian sandy environment.

The Logan trailer looks like it draws visual inspiration from the damn near flawless film Hell or High Water and the equally flawless Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men.  It has hints of Mad Max but the world in the trailer hasn’t got that bad yet.  There was a hint of Se7en in this trailer as well with a very quick little happy moment around the dinner table, that we can tell, like in Se7en, is all the joy we’re going to get, before we dive back into the dreadful reality of not only the end of the mutants but possibly the end of the Wolverine.

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Hugh Jackman’s performance just in the trailer is chillingly brilliant.  His ‘Old Man Logan’ is wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time.  He appears to be in the winter of his discontent, he appears to be slowly dying, and while this realization may overwhelm him, it looks like it equally frightens him.

Professor X in the first X-Men movie helped Logan not only face his current demons at the time, but also he helped him unlock parts of his past.  Logan and Professor X’s relationship in the X-Men movies were arguably the best parts of the whole franchise.  The only other complex and equally interesting relationship was the one that Professor X had with Magneto.

Logan looks like the friendship between Professor X and Logan is going to reach the palpable relationship of a father and son.  The film truly feels like a last chapter in a long journey for a character who probably should have died long ago for some of things he’s done, but in his suffering is the fact that he lives on.

I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie trailer where the music that accompanies the footage was so wonderfully married.  Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover of Hurt couldn’t have been anymore perfect.  The sorrow that permeates that song and the realization that you were responsible for so much pain, and then how much you want to off load it, just to live again, or to live in peace, but you can’t because it’s there, wallpapered on every corner of your mind.  It’s absolute brilliance to play this wonderfully sad painful song while juxtaposing it with the long life of a man that has suffered and that has made others suffer, whether it was utilitarian, vengeance or plain righteousness.

The brilliance of the trailer is it makes us ask more questions rather than a lot of trailers that just provide answers.  Why is Professor X in the state he’s in, why is Logan on the run, who is this young girl and why is he not healing at the rate he use to?  What the trailer did for me and imagine for a lot of other people is made forget that it’s even a superhero movie.  It gave me hope that the superhero genre can elevate well beyond the pages of its original source material.

If I could start again

A million miles away

I will keep myself

I would find a way.

The Shallows: Aloneness and Surviving the Jaws of an Impending Doom

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2016

“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever.”  

- Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

 

There are some minor spoilers so tread lightly, as if in shallow waters, if you haven’t seen the film.  Some of what is said below could bite you, which is not the intentions of this writer.

The Shallows is a survival horror thriller where a young medical student is stranded a couple hundred meters off the shore of a remote beach in Mexico.  The reason for this is because of a massive great white shark that is circling the shallow waters waiting her out.

The film is Jaws meets Alien meets 127 Hours and ends up not being as great as the DNA that birthed it.  That said, The Shallows is a thrilling film that engages its audience while struggling to not follow typical teenage thriller troupes that are themselves…shallow. 

The Shallows wanted to be more then it ended up becoming.  The music video slow motion scenes in the beginning were to entertain and to draw in the short-attention-span crowd of the audience.  The opening twenty minutes of the masterpiece sci-fi horror thriller Alien would never work today with all the media addicted, ‘we want it now’, movie-going audience.  Alien was a slow burner and that was the point, you had to wait patiently for the Alien to become a true threat to the seven ‘truck drivers in space’ before the screams and violence started to happen.

The Shallows attempted to create this claustrophobic place, even in the openness of a beach shore, where a survivor is forced to come to terms with her calamity and either fight or flight.  Flight for her wasn’t really an option so fighting was something she had to accept, that or just dying from the bite she suffered from the shark while surfing.

Nancy is a medical student that travelled to a specific secluded beach where her mother use to surf off the coast of Mexico, when she found out she was pregnant with Nancy many year ago.  Her mother had passed away prior to the events of the film.  Nancy trekked off to this beach to, in a sense, make sense of who her mother was.  Nancy wanted to find some other connection with her mother after her death resulting from some form of cancer.

The problem with the film was a battle with a genuine story of survival and a corporate studio driven thriller that only wanted to shock its audience with a pretentious music video.  The conflict between honest movie making and studio, sponsor friendly, lowest common denominator-type product analyzing, is palpable, certainly in the first half of the film and at the last pay-off of the movie.

The Shallows is about survival which makes this story ancient.  Certainly The Revenant was equally a story of survival.  Was it a better film than The Shallows?  It was in pretty well every way possible but even though The Revenant has thriller aspects throughout it, it’s not the thriller that The Shallows is.  The Revenant aimed far deeper into the human condition and pushed the innate drive to survive far, far more than The Shallows.  The point here is The Shallows is meant to be taken lightly, even within its high stakes of survival. 

The shark in The Shallows is the shark in Jaws, it’s the Xenomorph in Alien, it’s not quite the bear in The Revenant because the bear in that film never becomes an ongoing threat to its survivor.  There have been some criticism regarding The Shallows about logistics, ‘the rock where she’s on is this distance from there, and the whale is this distance but when you look over head it’s different, the shore looks closer sometimes in shots from her point of view then in others’.  The logistical nightmare that Dante’s Inferno would have on the innovation and mathematically, finely tuned, internet savoy, movie going audience would be a nightmare beyond even Dante’s nightmares.

The point of The Shallows, if this needs to sadly be spelt out, is the shark is a metaphor for a traumatic impact Nancy sustained while just recently loosing the woman who gave birth to her.  Psychologically, these events needed to happen, ‘in her mind’, so she could live her life.  This impact and trauma is at least half of the story of philosophy, which is the story of not only what it means to be alive but what it means to survive living while being alive.  The idea of how far Nancy is from the shore, how far the shark is from her at any given moment is not really the point, it’s the thrill, but not the point.

“The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.”  

- Bertrand Russell

The Shallows was about systematically breaking down the control that civilization and language itself holds heavily on each and every one of us.  In the beginning, Nancy had the safety of her cell phone, her technology, her connection to the ‘ordered’ world, but then it all went away.  All she was left with was, certainly one of the great fears that permeates society like the biggest unseen plague, reality, in all its nakedness.

Nancy was no longer safe within the Symbolic Order, language and her sexualized femininity wasn’t going to help her, just as it wouldn’t help a man on that rock while the shark waited to be fed.  The shark, like the Xenomorph in Alien, holds now value on what we call human life, all our dreams of the future and what we think the value of our life means.  It wants to eat, that’s it.  It doesn’t care about who we leave behind if we die because the shark’s brain is instinct driven.  Shopping, what car we own, what status we believe we belong to in society and whatever god, that our particular region of birth worships means nothing outside the structure of language and the natural world.

As human beings, our second greatest fear is anything that could harm us without ever caring who we are.  We are ‘special’, we are singled out, we are often celebrated for our desirability, the fantasy here is we believe we are not food and we also believe we are too important to be killed.  The Shallows effectively exploits this fear, if we didn’t actually have this fear, this film would be meaningless.  Alien, The Revenant and The Shallows wouldn’t work without our narcissism.  Why, because all that would be left is indifference, but it isn’t, we care because we want to survive in our own lives and we fear, which is our first great fear, death, the end of whoever or whatever we think we are.   

The Shallows is exciting in its slow burn to the end, it is a reminder that nature doesn’t give a fuck about you and how many friends you have on Facebook.  Nature doesn’t care about your family and who you say you love, The Shallows is an eye opener, it’s an awakening to the sleep, that Nancy and millions of people like her in first world need.  Sadly, given some of the not-so favorable reviews the film has got, metaphor itself is looking like it needs to be put on the endangered species list.  In the end if we can survive this monster of technological control, this governmental and corporate suffocation we too may survive, because as Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”  

- Charles Darwin

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Civil War and allowing Revenge and Guilt To Consume Us Within

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MAY 13, 2016

Compromise, reassurance, that’s how the world works.

Longing….

“Our very strength incites challenge.  Challenge incites conflict.  And Conflict… breeds catastrophe.”

- Vision

There are some spoilers ahead so be aware.

Captain America: Civil War is a superhero movie with loads of action and spectacle for a wide ranging audience, the addition of Black Panther and Spider-Man couldn’t have been any better.  The film is also an ethical, moral, social and civil study on what a responsible human being ought to do in a seemingly civilized society.  The film is an essay on what’s best for the greater good.  The film is also about fear and control, fear of these superheroes and their powers over average people and the control that the government want to pose on those powers.

Rusted….

After a battle to retrieve a biological weapon stolen by HYDRA, Scarlet Witch, saves Captain America from blowing up by forcing an explosion away that was detonated directly in front of him by Crossbones, inadvertently this causes the upper floors of a building in Lagos, Nigeria to blow up.  This explosion ends up killing a number of relief workers from Wakanda and as a consequence, escalates international distrust of the unchecked actions of the Avengers.  This causes the Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, who was the military force attempting to capture Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, to inform the Avengers that the United Nations in a couple days plan to pass the Sokovia Accords, which essentially pulls back the freedom the Avengers had to battle with their enemies.  This resulted in the destruction of a couple of cities and the loss of many lives, and puts it in the control of the military who plan to police the actions of the Avengers.

Seventeen….

“Captain, while a great many people see you as a hero, there are some who prefer the word vigilante.  You’ve operated with unlimited power and no supervision.  That’s something the world can no longer tolerate.”

– General Ross

Civil War has a very Jason Bourne feel in its attempt to ground the more fantastical to the real world.  The film oddly has a tone and palate of a real life based thriller.  Unlike the battle at the end of Batman V Superman, Civil War wants its audience to look at the consequences and actions of its superheroes, echoing Alan Moore’s The Watchmen.  Batman V Superman somewhat alienated its audience by promising realism and bombastically delivering this non-relatable cartoon.  Civil War has something clearly to say that has an actual grounding and topical meaning behind its spectacle.

Daybreak…. 

Civil War is about the system of freedom versus an individual’s freedom.  This problem has always been the conflict in most societies, historically and in the present.  Captain America believes that the safest hands are his own where Tony Stark, suffering from an avalanche of guilt since becoming Iron Man, has decided to allow the system to partake in the responsibility.  Tony no longer wants the consequences of the actions of Iron Man and the Avengers to fall directly on them anymore.  His ego is damaged and his vulnerability is palpable.  Tony Stark is breaking and he knows it.

Furnace….

Steve Rogers believes, and rightfully so, that the government is controlled by people, and powerful people have agendas, for him, they can’t be trusted.  Steve’s right to think the Sokovia Accords are a misstep, an excuse for the United Nations to gain control of a power that is well out of their control.  They mean to tame the Avengers and cage them if necessary, quite similar to that of animals.  This military industrial complex would not only use these superhuman people as a nuclear deterrent but also, if necessary, as its own form of nuclear weapon, with the likes of Thor, Hulk, Scarlet Witch and Vision have the power to achieve.

Nine….

Steve Rogers was a soldier for the government that woke up and became a rebel for the people.  Tony Stark was a playboy looking out for himself and now has become an Iron weapon for the very government he quite vocally opposed.  Both these men grew in opposite directions.  Steve still stayed pure and the problem with Tony is he sought medicine for what he believed he became.  Tony is right to be concerned with not only what the Avengers have done but what they could do that may harm or kill innocent people.  The problem here is Tony is being Tony and only really thinking out for himself.  Tony is concerned with what they do and how it makes him feel.  Steve is never concerned with his ego and how he feels about what he does, he’s more concerned, in a utilitarian sense, with what’s best for the greater good and the quality of life for the majority.  

Benign….

 

The civil obedient is fair worse a problem than the civil disobedient.  A problem that philosopher Henry David Thoreau had with the population was what they were all willing to go along with and what they weren’t.  The civil disobedient during the history of all civilizations were almost always met with disapproval, dislike, displacement, dismemberment and even death in many cases.  The real problem is never with those people that didn’t go along with the system, the real problem is the blind, the ignorant and the conformists that welcome their own enslavement, as they eat fried chicken and watch a reality show about survival in a location they’ll never see in real life.  

Homecoming….

There is this peevish discontent that develops during the divide of the Avengers.  The airport fight showdown between this divide is one of the most entertaining and delightful parts of this film.  This is when we see Spider-Man in action and boy does he deliver.  We know they can all take a little beating from each other, we know some of them were even pulling their punches because they really didn’t want to fight each other. 

One….

“An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again, but one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.”

- Zemo

In the end Team Cap versus Team Iron Man were only playing checkers when their real opponent played the biggest Bobby Fischer game, with only a couple chess moves to get the Avengers in check mate.  The real fight, the real check mate moment was during the end when Iron Man found out how his parents really died.  This resulted in a near fight to the death between Cap and Bucky against Iron Man.  Colonel Helmut Zemo, the film’s more mysterious bad guy, beat them all in the end even though he was arrested and incarcerated afterwards.  Zemo set out to dismantle the Avengers, dividing them as they fought each other over autonomy versus accountability, for what they unknowingly did to his family in Sokovia by the calamitous end of Avengers: Age of Ultron.  He wasn’t your typical power hungry marvel villain, he actually had a pretty relatable reason for what he did.  What really made him wrong, in his manipulative act of vengeance, was he didn’t have all the facts, like the fact they would all have been dead if Ultron created the extinction event he wanted.

Freight Car….

The Avengers are responsible for killing many people.  The bad guys dying can be looked at as an occupational hazard, but the collateral damage is the real problem here.  There are numerous innocent people dying during all these big epic battles because they were in the wrong place, and in the wrong time.  Here’s were the fiction of the comics bleed into our real world.  The reported collateral damage around the world is becoming more ubiquitous than we’d all like to admit.  Drones are dropping bombs on ‘targets’ and are sadly killing innocent bystanders as the ‘evil’ of the world is being exterminated by the so-called ‘just’.  Back in the fiction world of the Avengers, if they left Ultron to execute his plan, most, if not all the people of this planet would be dead.  It could be argued, quite successfully, that the saving of the planet was the greater good. 

Soldier?

LONDON HAS FALLEN and the Ongoing War Against the American People

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MARCH 06

There are some minor spoilers but I promise you, it really doesn’t matter anyway.

London Has Fallen was a mediocre propagandized American action movie that is a sequel to the equally mediocre propagandized American action movie, Olympus Has Fallen.  London Has Fallen certainly has more action than its predecessor, more explosions, more killing, which should make most of the American movie going audience elated as they sit on their butter-stained theater seats and salivate as the unbridled jingoism, proudly parades the screen from beginning to end.

The movie follows the bellicose Secret Service Top Agent Mike Banning, who’s in charge of the Presidential Protection Division, again as he aggressively fights to save his Commander and Chief, the President of the United States of America.  Again he’s saving him from the evil, character-less terrorists that are hell bent on destroying America’s way of life, even on British soil this time around.

The British Prime Minister died after mysterious circumstances which led the leaders of the free world to conjoin in London to attend his funeral.  Here is when the evil-doers decide to make their move by blowing up various London City land marks in a massive ambush to kill all the world’s leaders.  The Canadian, French, Italian and Japanese Prime Ministers, through separate simultaneous attacks, are discarded as the focus to save the United States President from assassination is well, the only focus the movie cares to focus on.

Aamir Barkawi is the terrorist mastermind behind all the attacks because of revenge against the west for bombing his daughter’s wedding in Pakistan.  This massive explosion, executed by a US military drone, almost killed Barkawi but he got away. Barkawi is an arms dealer, said to be responsible for destabilizing many poor countries in order to sell them weapons to fight each other with.  Create the demand then create the supply, I thought that was the United States’ foreign policy monetary enterprise.  In London Has Fallen the evil terrorists are the one’s initiating all the instability around the world apparently, just because they are evil.    

London Has Fallen is pure propaganda, not only politically but also deeply psychologically.  This movie will further the USA down that deep dark xenophobic hole and continue to blind its own citizens to the realities of how the world really is.  There are many moments in the movie that I wouldn’t want to be a member of any region of the Middle East.  Not because what the movie is espousing is right but because how effective it is at convincing white people to fear anyone of color.  There’s a scene toward the end of the movie where Gerard Butler’s character Banning beats a terrorist to near death while telling him the problem with “you people” as he punches harder and harder.  Banning is inflaming a desire of many Americans to hurt an enemy that the corporate operated media machine tells them is an enemy.  The Military Industrial Complex along with the office of the President tell the American people that an enemy wants to hurt them and their families.  That enemy is simply known as ‘terrorist’ which is a brush that the Government and its Corporate Media conspirator can paint anywhere they want to paint it.

The war carried out by the America/Corporate elite is inside not outside its borders.  The war is against the every people who blindly believe, because they are told day-in and day-out, that America is the greatest country on the planet Earth.  Yet there is no real evidence that supports this belief.  This is also why religion is so powerful in America because it too is not supportable when it is subject to the scrutiny of evidence. Most Americans, certainly not all, fashion their lives around a fantasy that is presented to them by the very institutions that have sworn to protect them.

Many of the citizens of America are not treated with any kind of human dignity.  When this crucial necessity is waylaid in support of control, this becomes indicative to a decline of a civilization.  The only real reason why it’s hanging on as long as it has is because of a mass tsunami of distraction available to the average American citizen.  The War on Drugs is a joke, it’s a political slogan that’s been reduced to a weathered stained bumper sticker stuck to the backs of 30 year old rusted trailers.  Americans are on drugs, they are on illegal drugs and legal big pharma drugs and are convinced there’s an actual difference.  They are on the drug of alcohol which provides the necessary hostility required for them to fight each other over their ludicrous beliefs.  They are on one of the biggest drugs of them all, they are addicted to television, with its sports, its MMA fighting, and now throw in social media.  They are addicted to the detached nature of the cell phone and the banal music that it plays.

Sadly the biggest drug of them all is America itself.  The country of America is a drug, a very persuasive drug that is quite rapidly addicting the world.  It’s illusion of freedom is too strong in order to shock this nation out of its sedated lethargy.  Hope exists in movies now, in video games, in the flowing vapid river of Facebook posts, hope exists at lottery ticket booths and fictionalized Church sessions, it exists during binge-watching a horde of TV shows that dramatize our desires for a better world, or better people using actors that read scripts written by boardroom writers.  

What can we really do to get out of this hole that our leaders have led us so cunningly into?  What can we do to un-do what has been done?  What do we want, what are we really doing here?  We want centralization, we are in a pursuit for relevancy.  Is that our human legacy outside of the very few that reach beyond the limitations of the emotional human project?  Is Newton, Tesla and Einstein the exception, among few others compared to the human population entering this mass idea of a civilization, to the devastating rule that we are all doomed to be perpetually ignorant?  Is the majority of us chasing ghosts and angels as we attempt to understand the nature of reality or are we not even doing that?  

There are so many people whose potential development has been systematically neutralized by the education system, the media and their corporate and governmental sponsors.  In life we are told we are free and are able to get away with what we want but that’s not an actual reality.  Most of us are shut down to which we seek vengeance, not with the potential of our minds, no, we retreat to virtual simulation to save us from feeling pathetic.  We live on the internet, we vent through video games.

What has happened to us?  We are sick, we are desperate, we are lonely, we are loveless, and we are strangers among friends.  We are separated within crowds, the raw reality is that we have been abandoned, not by ideas but the idea of ideas, we have been left marooned on our little individual planets under the belief that we are connected even though there is very little to qualify that. 

London Has Fallen, with its main character almost behaving nihilistically, was a movie, but underneath all its gloss and so called glory, its abandon us all, it’s a movie that acted irresponsibly, it’s knowingly misleading its audience into the belief of ‘it’s us against them’ then it goes on to say not only ‘fuck them’ but ‘fucking kill every last one of them’.  This level of detachment in a seemingly and certainly a celebrated civilized society speaks volumes of the effectiveness of its propaganda machine.

((Sorry I wanted to go on about how it’s all going to turn around when people clue in to how they are being misled….but I just couldn’t.  I don’t want to be a pessimist or a cynic but I just can’t see an out and I don’t want this article to end with the kind of hope for the future the propagandized film London Has Fallen has falsely left us with.))

DEADPOOL and Living in the World with a Foot Dipped in Animation

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 22 

“Time to make the chimi-fucking-changas!!

Spoilers alert!!
Get with it, it's a fucking reality

Deadpool was a film about friendship and love and communication and (anti) heroism and punishment and revitalization and sort of about Jesus and revenge and love…….

Deadpool was about a guy… (Created by comic book artists Rod Liefeld and writer Fabian Nicieza)

Deadpool is about an ex-mercenary named Wade Wilson that is diagnosed with terminal cancer, “El Cancer”.  His girlfriend Vanessa wants to find a cure while all he wants to do is get away from her so he can die painfully without her being around him.  Wade’s relationship with Vanessa was established through a gauntlet of lustful sexual moments that helped define their association.  It wasn’t until Wade lost her that love for her became his real defining moment. 
  

Wade went into the Weapon X program, the same as Wolverine, and was subject to various stages of high-level torture to induce a mutation believed to possibly be within him.  He ended up being impervious to death.  His body also became scared everywhere.

Deadpool was a movie that knew it was a movie and it knew that other movies are just movies.  This meta-realization was littered throughout the insane story line of the reality of the Deadpool production movie within the fictional Deadpool movie.  Actor Ryan Reynolds was mentioned in the movie by a character played by Ryan Reynolds.  This self-realization could have backfired easily because the audience generally go to movies to suspend their disbelief, they go there to be lied to.  So when a movie tells them that they are watching a movie and that they are being deceived, this generally doesn’t go over too well.  The extreme case would be a priest telling his flock at Sunday morning mass that the whole thing is made up.  People don’t like their illusions disturbed in any case, they want the lie because the lie breeds comfort and momentarily removes fear.

“Let’s hope these guys are wearing their brown pants.”

Because Deadpool was so filled with comedy bits, the reality of its fiction became somewhat camouflaged behind all the laughter.  This movie is post-structuralist as it introduces its audience to a very contemporary idea about the world and how we assign our symbolic reality to it.  Deadpool is the vanishing mediator between the fictional-fiction and the reality-fiction, the fiction of the fantasy and the fiction of celebrity.  This conflict between the two fictional worlds, the theoretical abstraction and its empirical negation is resolved by a sort of cinematic fusion.  Deadpool the character breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience about the movie and even the production of the movie, its special effects, its budget, and its long pre-production.  Deadpool even gave a nod to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off during the post credits scene because that glorious 80’s comedy broke its fourth wall as well.  Breaking the fourth wall isn’t necessarily new, Shakespeare did it a number of times in his plays just over four hundred years ago, the difference here is Deadpool is crazy, so we may very well be a figment of his imagination and his desire to be glorified.  Essentially he may just be talking to himself and we just think he’s talking to us.

“Hashtag driveby”.

When Hamlet breaks the forth wall to speak to the audience, no other character is aware that he’s doing that.  The same goes for Ferris Bueller but with Deadpool he’s asked by Colossus who’s even talking to.  Deadpool points to the camera, the window into the movie theater and says, “them”.  It’s important here to understand that part of Wade Wilson’s forced mutation was brain damage.  We’re all going along with Deadpool because he’s funny and pretty cool as he kicks ass.  Under the comedy and the witty remakes is a very angry man that not only wants to kill people to get his revenge, he wants to knowingly, and quite overtly, to do this in style.  The point here is he’s enjoying this.  He’s climbing the mountain of bad guys to get the big bad but he’s, along the way, having way too much fun doing it.

We should be concerned by this, not because it’s a movie about a guy that wants to avenge his continuous torture by a villain named, Ajax, but rather he’s implicated us as an audience in his actions.  It’s rare that a movie involves its audience in such a personal and equally sinister way.  The movie Deadpool is a declaration of our narcissism, it is our justification to be mean and have fun doing it.  We are all jacked up as he kills and jokes around.  We enjoy his immortality as he gets shot and heals.

This self-aware topical movie is recognizing the sort of Matrix we are all living, not only within society but within our own minds.  Facebook and twitter are simulated virtual avenues for us to express our government and corporate manipulated thoughts.  Everything isn’t as real as we are lead to believe.  Most beliefs in society are fabricated to either distract the population so the ruling class can control without transparency or so we as individuals can get up in the morning and work for companies that essentially rob our freedom.

The question is, what is up with illusions?  We lie to ourselves….period, we do it, this is not a debate…. we do it.  Why do we feel the need biologically and more a matter of the brain, psychologically to lie about our neurological experience?  We certainly don’t know this on a decided level or from a conscious experience.  This is all happening below the level of our psychological conscious reach.  We have no immediate access to these neurological sub-structures of the mind.  Most of us believe that the surface, what we believe is our full mind, is our control panel to all of it. 

We are not in control, we are only recklessly in the belief that we are in control of our own beliefs.  But why are these beliefs easily accepted by the mind?  Is the mind and what we believe about our version of the reality of the world, together?  There are debates about politics, environmental issues and certainly individual problems but why is the mind so easily convincing?  How does one set of people believe that we all die and go to heaven because Jesus says so, and others burn hearts on Central American pyramids for polytheistic gods and find that acceptable?

Who are we if we are always thinking different thoughts, not only of ourselves, but of how we see our world.  We are not reliable agents of what we think about our world because it is flowing like a river, it is changing, I am changing as I write this.  We want concrete, we want finite, we want a blanket, we want to mentally predict the future, oddly, of our immediate experience.

Deadpool was about symbolic arbitrariness of life, it was about how the fantasy that we think we see in the theater is in fact more than that.  The crazy psychotic nature of this character is a real reflection of ourselves and our own selfless desires to be in total control, not only of our thoughts but how these thoughts anthropomorphise in our own perceptive version of the real world. 

Deadpool was a great time at the cinema, it was rewarding, culturally, to see a character call out and pass judgment on the very platform that it stood on.  For that my favorite thing about Deadpool, the movie version, is that it was brave.  It was incredibly exciting to see a character mouth off at the audience with such glee.  This beauty and the beast story us lovingly and has set us all up for more.

Who are you?  What would Derrida do?  If you got this far then you can go a little further.  Our very language is a representation of reality.  As I write this , this test, and you read this, how close to reality does each of us arrive?  If you got down this far, you are just being polite or you are interested, or curious.  If you have something to say then you should say it.  We get Deadpool at this point, do we?  He’s a self-indulgent narcissistic military machine that sort of changed his ways because he lost something he wanted. 

Is Deadpool not our own desire to be free?  I’m a writer writing about Deadpool like I think I know what I’m talking about.  Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, I’m under the illusion that I have an idea.  Sure I don’t know all that "Google" knows about the history of Deadpool, what I do know is this; Deadpool is a fucking psycho and I love that.  Deadpool is a catharsis in the pages of a comic and the film footage of the editors room,  He’s what we really want to be, not a hero, that Colossus goes on and on about.  Deadpool, and we love him for it (?), is a product of getting what we want, he’s a product of capitalism.

In the end, as much as we love him, what we are really celebrating about him is he’s a product, he’s a product of everything that we want, not what we need.  Deadpool was fun but he was also a sad reflection on the voyeuristic mirror of the state of modern day culture.  We all exist in a detected state at this point in our history.  We are connecting to simulations as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard predicted.  

If you are still reading this then you are willing to go further.  What is Deadpool?

Deadpool is a product of capitalism, he’s a mercenary that kills for the fuck of it, he says it’s for revenge… In the end it's for love...  Keep reading....

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