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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