I sometimes think about those awful Ninja Turtles movies from the mid 2010s. The ones with Megan Fox and Will Arnett and…Johnny Knoxville? …Really? The ones that weren’t directed by Michael Bay or J.J. Abrams even though you could be forgiven for thinking it was either or both. Where the character designs for the turtles weren’t flirting with the uncanny so much as they were drunkenly groping at the grotesque? The ones where the amount of inter-species sexual innuendo involving April O’Neil was enough to make regulars on the boards at Deviant Art blush? Is this enough? Can I stop now? I don’t blame you if you’ve purged the whole painful affair from your memory. And I doubt that I would remember them myself if it weren’t for a very specific realization that they caused me. 

I should explain that between the ages of five to twelve, I was an absolute fanatic for the Turtles. The action figures and the Saturday morning cartoons were staples of my childhood. When my parents initially refused to buy them for me (my mother went on a lengthy puritan arc before deciding to “get with it” later in life), I tried making my own with paper, staples, and cotton balls. So with all this personal history, when I saw the initial trailers for the 2014 film, the grittier look and the…let’s just say “less kid-friendly” visual designs, my subconscious latched onto an idea of what this movie could be. It could be a love letter to the older fans of the IP, harkening back to the more grounded feel of the 90s movies, but drawing them into a more complicated and mature world with deeper conflicts and higher emotional stakes. There was something genuinely exciting about the possibilities of having these relics from my childhood meet me as an adult, a chance for something truly poignant. Of course, all of this was happening below the level of conscious thought, but it created a certain expectation. I assumed that the filmmakers must have been equally aware of the opportunity, and so I went into the theater with this desire to see something that would, yes, be engaging for younger audiences, but which would also acknowledge the older audience of people for whom this IP had been a significant part of their formative years. If this was a desire for fan service, it was fanservice in the most literal and elevated sense. I just wanted something with a little gravitas. Of course, what I got instead was an overcooked pot roast of mindless action, with a side of lens flares and brainrot. I left feeling that I, as an audience demographic, had been totally neglected, and I remember thinking that I probably ought to be getting used to that feeling. 

It might seem odd to begin a review of Deadpool & Wolverine by talking about a different movie franchise from nearly ten years ago, but the connections are there. First of all, Deadpool was the only comic book series that I actively tried to collect, and there is (hopefully) still a cardboard box somewhere with my copy of Deadpool #1, illustrated by, at the time new-comer, Ed McGuiness. Before you get the idea that I’m pushing myself off as some big comic buff, let me assure you that I’m not. I grew up in a small town and just about every comic book I ever bought came from Walmart or the grocery store. It didn’t take long before both of those places had stopped carrying the series, and I lost track of the merc with a mouth long before the more insane aspects of his character had been established, but I loved Ed’s style and line-work and back when I did a lot of sketching, he was a big influence–so much so that it took me ages to learn how to draw people without them looking completely roided out. 

And when the test footage dropped in 2015, I fangirled to an absolutely embarrassing degree, mostly because I was covertly proud of myself for knowing who this was ahead of all the other Marvel casuals. Yes, I know, it was an unfortunate period and I’m not proud of it. 

I say all of this simply to show that this character and I have history. And so, even after having been mostly disappointed by the first two films, I felt obligated to see the finale. My expectations were low. I hoped that at best, I would be treated to a few laughs and the satisfaction of getting to see Reynolds and Jackman’s chemistry. But instead, and to my immense surprise, I got more from this bizarre little flick than I have from any Marvel movie that I can recall, including End Game and Infinity War. 

And somehow, the reasons for this have something to do with the feelings of being let down that I had after watching a failed 2014 reboot for the Ninja Turtles. 

I know that the early consensus about this movie is that it is simply a meaningless good times romp through an amusement park of R-rated goofiness, but this is a shallow reading. That stuff is fine, but I’ve grown very bored of it. I’m not 17 anymore and whether or not people want to admit it, the comedic value of gratuitous dick stabbing does eventually exceed its shelf-life. Though themes are usually the result of intentional design by a writer, sometimes they leak from a work of art as unintentionally as miscalculated flatulence. Such is the case with Deadpool & Wolverine. 

A brief aside: I know that there will be some who accuse me of reading too much into a movie that’s just supposed to be stupid fun, and it’s interesting to me that these are generally the same people that will say that you are also at fault if you don’t enjoy a movie because you didn’t turn your brain down enough. For them to launch the same criticism of someone actually appreciating a movie more because of its deeper meaning indicates to me that their real problem is simply with people who like to think. 

Whether it was by design or simply arises out of the nature of certain narrative elements, there is a rare depth hidden away behind the seemingly shallow meta-jokes and one-liners, and despite the vast amounts of money and praise that the film has gotten, it has not yet been given its due, and that’s what I’d like to attempt to accomplish here. 

*Spoilers Ahead* 

Deadpool and Irony

The observation that movies in general and Marvel movies especially have become saturated with irony and self-awareness is so common today that even to mention it is to risk boring your audience. Yes, we all know what bathos is by now. We are all painfully aware of the fetish for “subverting expectations.” And Deadpool as a character exists on an even higher plane of ironic self-awareness than the one that we are accustomed to. Where other movies might tacitly make use of our expectations, Deadpool is the character that can speak to them explicitly. And it is in just this fashion that the movie begins, with Deadpool addressing the audience directly to alleviate their concerns about how this film will respect or disrespect the ending given to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in Logan. The film answers this concern, not just by disrespecting that ending, but defiling its corpse as Deadpool uses Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton to massacre a group of time cops while dancing to NSYNCs hit single “Bye Bye Bye.” All of this informs the audience that they are in for an irreverent romp in which nothing will be held sacred, and the more you resist, the more painful it’s going to be. 

But then something both expected and unexpected occurs: this massacre is interrupted by an extended flashback. This is expected because it is on beat for the character–in fact the first film began in exactly this way–but what is unexpected is the tone of that flashback. We discover that things haven’t gone well for Wade since the last film. He’s working as a car salesman with Peter, and Vanessa, the love of his life, has left him. She now works a boring corporate job and is dating someone from the office. I’m going to say it now and I’m surely going to repeat it several more times before the end, what makes this movie work is the ways in which it is meta, not in the cheap method of tapping on the 4th wall to amuse the audience with some reference, but in ways that are actually, dare I say it, a little thought provoking. 

Deadpool’s new situation is notable because of how it reminds us of all the other series in which previous victories have to be undermined in order to give the reins to a new cast of characters. The Star Wars sequels gained a reputation for doing exactly this and it is a reputation that continues to split the fanbase. Same thing here, even after all of his previous adventures and triumphs, Wade’s worse off than he ever has been. It’s a big change of pace from the Deadpool of previous films, who was a paid killer and constantly being begged to join the X-men. Wade’s no longer the cool guy. He’s an incel with a lame normie job, and he doesn’t matter. 

Deadpool Doesn’t Matter

Of course, not mattering is sort of Deadpool’s sine qua non, part and parcel of a character who is frequently wreaking havoc across the multiverse in ways that never seem to have much impact on the more popular or established storylines. He’s so inconsequential that he can kill the entire Marvel universe without anyone really caring,the narrative equivalent of a gimmick. And so it’s always been tough to sell his status as a “hero” especially since his ability to break the 4th wall indicates that he is aware that the real stakes are related to ticket sales and copyright legalities. He is the incarnation of ironic postmodern detachment, and his irreverence, his habitual 4th wall hijinks, his over-the-top banter are all aimed at denying the seriousness of any situation. The struggle for each of his films is to find some way to have stakes when the main character is cynical, insane, effectively immortal, and aware that his life is contrivance created for the entertainment of audiences. 

In this regard, those movies have mostly failed. The damsel-in-distress girlfriend angle in the first movie was hacky and didn’t work, in large part because it didn’t ring true to the character. It felt more like a concession to Ryan Reynolds’ romcom leading man status. You could just imagine some producer saying “He’s so hot right now. Let’s get his clothes off and have him make out with a hot girl. Hot people having sex is in right now.” Deadpool is many things, but sex icon is not one of them, and Reynolds’ attempts to make him one were as hollow as the weak gestures towards feminism and “not objectifying women” in a film that included more fan service than a porno. 

It’s easy to forget, but Pool’s entire motivation in the first film is that he wants to get to be hot again so he can go back to stripper girlfriend, Vanessa. This is why he’s hunting for Ajax, which in turn is what causes Ajax to target Vanessa. The flick ends with Wade failing to get his face back and returning to dating Vanessa anyway, thereby revealing that the entire conflict of the movie was unnecessary, and the thing that posed the greatest danger to Vanessa in this story was Wade’s vanity and insecurity. But if we’re being honest, once the novelty of Deadpool’s bag of gimmicks has worn off, that movie doesn’t hold up well in most regards. Stay mad, nerds.

Did you remember that it starts with non-cancerous grown-ass-man Wade Wilson threatening and humiliating a teenage boy (and some random dude) so he can play cool-guy savior to some random teenage girl before launching into that “I’m no hero” speech? I don’t think we thought much about it in 2016, but in 2024 when apparently every major internet personality is caught out for inappropriate dealings with minors, this reads as pretty damn weird. How did he even get in contact with this girl? Does he hang out at this skate park? I find it tough to believe that she came down to Weasel’s bar to put up a ticket. This is one of the most try-hard and inadvertently creepy examples of “saving the cat” that I’ve ever seen. 

The sequel was possibly even more insane, beginning with the death of Vanessa, after which Wade just wants to kill himself so he can join her in death. But he can’t both because of his healing factor and because “his heart’s not in the right place.” In order to get his heart right, he’s got to play surrogate parent for this abused orphan before that kid avenges himself on a hacky 2016 political allegory. All of this is so that Wade can, in the end take a bullet for the kid and die (which is what he wants) only for Cable to–rather than returning to his wife and children, who he came to this time to save–use his last time charge to save Wade’s life, which he doesn’t want, but which ensures the possibility of more movies. 

Then in a mid-credits scene, Wade uses Cable’s time-machine watch to travel throughout the timeline to correct various “mistakes” (even though there should be no charges left or else Cable could just…ya know…go back to his family) including rescuing Vanessa from the beginning of the film. Whenever the film is not doing its meta-ironic thing—which it does well and which is its greatest charm—the only word fit to describe the characters and the plot is corny. 

How is a franchise around a character who does this kind of thing supposed to have stakes, especially when it’s already failed twice? 

The answer is by actually playing to Pool’s strengths as a character. Deadpool has always been the character who could hold up a mirror to the audience, so let him hold that mirror, and let us look at ourselves. For Deadpool to want to matter makes little sense for the character, but it makes plenty of sense for us. Because we kind of don’t matter.

Modern Meaninglessness

If one takes a look at our pop culture landscape, the question of meaning and purpose seems to be on a large number of minds in recent years. Everything Everywhere All at Once, Rick and Morty, and the great bulk of other multiverse content have dedicated themselves to exploring modern nihilism. Sometimes this nihilism is presented cheerfully: Nothing matters, so let’s at least have a good time. This might have some plausibility if it weren’t for the fact that for a lot of people, feeling like their life means something is pretty important for having a good time.

In a recent study of Gen Z and the influences on their levels of happiness, the most important factor named was a feeling that their lives had meaning or that they were involved in some kind of meaningful work, but about half of those questioned said that they did not get this kind of satisfaction from the things they were typically involved in, and this dissatisfaction only seemed to grow as the members of this cohort got older. 

Pew Research in 2021 showed that fewer people find any sense of meaning or purpose in their jobs, probably because more and more of those jobs (the ones that pay decently anyway) are what David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs” such as the parasitic administrational bloat that is devouring so many fields. What’s worse is that these jobs are where the bulk of the money is in the economy, so if you want to live comfortably, you’re incentivized to pursue this kind of “work.” But no matter where you work, it’s unlikely that you’ve avoided the sense that people do not care very much about you or each other. This can be observed in the general decline of niceness across society and the rise in entitlement and “main character” personalities.   

What was really surprising is that the same research found that fewer people derived a sense of purpose or meaning from their romantic relationships, and the biggest falloff was among married couples. 

So no wonder people are finding it difficult to believe that their lives matter. We have shallow, unsatisfying relationships; we work bullshit jobs that leave us bored or tired or frustrated; and to make up for the ways in which our lives are not what we would wish them to be, we engage in compensatory consumption like binging entertainment products, social media, or drugs and alcohol, maybe even at the same time for the overachievers among us. Our lives are safer and more comfortable than they have been for most of recorded human history, and yet we are in the middle of a massive mental health crisis. 

The issue is obvious. We all want to matter, and more and more, we’re keenly aware that we don’t. Neither are we a part of any grand narrative because all of those have basically gone defunct and the few which remain are so unsatisfying that they might as well not exist at all. Do you derive satisfaction from the thought that the purpose of not just you but your entire species is simply to bring about the birth of AI and after that we can all be sloughed off like the husk of an insect after it molts? Does that make you feel good? After this realization (that we probably don’t matter and our lives are mostly meaningless), there are essentially two available options. 

The first is to honestly despair. But have you tried despair? It absolutely tanks your social credit score, or what the kids these days are calling “aura.” Honest despair is like putting “depressed” on your dating profile. Nobody is going to want to fuck with you. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone. The other, much more attractive option is to shroud oneself in irony. Life might be a joke, but at least you’re in on that joke, and you show this by laughing at it. Laughter allows you to, for a few seconds, pretend that you are above it all, even when the “it” is your own meaningless life. This ironic posing that mocks itself in order to avoid its grief is the quintessential postmodern posture. And while Deadpool may not stand up to the likes of a Hamlet or a Odysseus in terms of literary merit, he is a pretty decent expression of our condition. 

Irony invests his every movement. His ability to dance to non-diegetic NSYNC while slaughtering a cadre of impersonal cop-types and defiling the remains of another beloved hero shows just how resistant he is to the impositions of meaning. For moments like this, it’s actually crucial that Deadpool doesn’t matter. If Deadpool mattered, then the people that he is killing would also matter, as would the corpse he is desecrating, and if that were the case, then what he is doing would be horrific. Our laughter is only possible because we are aware of how insignificant all of it is. This has always been Deadpool’s charm. He is aware of his own insignificance. Deadpool is the character who is aware that his own story is a story in the modern sense, something contrived by others and lived for the gratification of an audience, something that ultimately doesn’t matter. 

But deep down, I think everybody, even Deadpool, knows that all of this ironic posturing is just a cope. And if Deadpool shows us as we are, then Wolverine shows us how we got here: by always being the cool guy, by keeping our distance, and not getting too attached. But he’s compelling because he has a motivation that is genuinely profound: he wants to be redeemed. 

The Death of Longing

Redemption is a powerful concept. It has immediate gravitas because even the act of desiring it requires a certain level of what can only be described as nobility. It requires self-knowledge and the ability to look honestly at one’s failures. And it is one of few remaining sources of genuine longing left to the human experience. 

Longing itself has been dying a slow death for decades in modern society. People often mistake longing for desire, but they are very different emotions. Desire is ephemeral, usually materialistic, and generally easy to satisfy. Longing is what comes when desires are submerged and sublimated into something higher. Whereas older societies were filled with repressions on desire, repressions which gave people experience of deep longings and ideals, our modern society functions along a different philosophy: liberation of desire and the minimization of the length of time between desire’s origin and its satisfaction. On top of that, our economy requires the continual creation of new, artificial desires– this is the purpose of a massive segment of the economy, the advertising industry. There should be no shame, no taboo. The only sin is to not greet all things with blanket approval. Of course there are still a few lines left in the sand, but honestly, how long do you expect those to last? 

But longing is what happens when desire is thwarted. And that space between desire and satisfaction is where every interesting thing about a person exists. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t still representations of longing in media, but they are almost entirely geared towards young people. The young in general do not have very refined tastes in anything (except maybe memes), but they do have their own unique experiences of longing, the most typical of which is the longing for the future and for the exploration of the unfamiliar. This is Luke Skywalker, Belle, Simba, and many many more. The song “Part of Your World” is probably one of the most poignant expressions of this longing that has been achieved in pop culture. The young know there are good things in the world, and they sense that these good things are held behind a series of doors. And these thwarted longings are the source of much of the beauty of youth, which has been expressed in numerous works of art and achievements across all of history. 

The desire for redemption is one of the few genuine longings available for those who have passed outside the boundaries of youth. Except for the charmed and the stupid, experience makes us cynical and jaded. One realizes the ways in which the idealism of youth is so often a ploy by those who know more to fool the young into doing stupid things for stupid reasons. After this, the world starts to look tawdry and cheap. The satisfaction of base desires is all there is. Que the regrets. Que hedonic materialism. Que compensatory consumption. Que the long nights wondering if it is even possible to get back what has been lost. 

What does it mean to be redeemed? There are three primary definitions in English: to compensate for something’s faults, to regain possession of something for some payment, and to fulfill a promise. The core of the concept orbits around the possibility of fulfilling the unrealized potential of something. 

Logan

The Logan that Deadpool finds is someone who has failed to live up to his potential. He let down people who loved him, and then, in his grief, he allowed his bloodlust to cause even more damage. Now, he wanders through the world, despised by everyone, wearing the suit that he once rejected as a constant reminder of his failures, but he hides it beneath his regular clothes so that anyone seeing him will not associate him with the X-Men. 

This is practically ancient history by now, but Logan’s original character arc even back in the year 2000 was always about getting him into the suit. Admittedly, it wasn’t that suit, but that was the gist of it. He was bitter, cynical, and didn’t want anything to do with Xavier or the X-Men, but by the end, he’d become the cornerstone of the team. That line he gives X-23 at the campfire about not being the guy that she thinks he is, he said almost exactly the same thing to the same character played by the same actress in Logan. And I’m pretty sure that he said the same thing to Rogue or Storm in the first film. This has always been his thing. He’s always telling us that he’s no hero, and we’ve heard it so many times that we barely contain our knowing smiles when he does. Sure thing, lil’ buddy. You just keep saying that. 

But the Logan that gets picked up by Deadpool is a version of the character that was not able to fulfill this arc. After refusing to put on the suit, after carefully maintaining his distance from Xavier and the team, one night Logan returns to the school to find that everyone has been murdered in his absence, and he realizes that he has lost his only chance to be part of something. By the time he meets Wade, the fight has almost all gone out of him. His famous prickly attitude is still faintly discernible, but tinged with a kind of futility. It’s a little weird that Pool tries to threaten him by shooting him in the head, but it gives Logan a chance to demonstrate how little he cares about his own life anymore. His devil-may-care attitude once came from his sense of self-confidence. He’d say what he wanted because he knew there was literally nothing you could do to hurt him. But the same attitude is now the result of no longer having any self worth preserving. 

In spite of all their promise, both he and Wade have turned out to be failures, and both of them have something to prove. And it works precisely because the stakes are lower. Not lower in the sense of what is to be lost cosmically if they fail though, once again, the stakes here are ludicrously oversized. Cassandra has gotten her hands on a device that will enable her to wipe out all existence everywhere. They aren’t aiming at some abstracted idea of the heroic, something which our generation is not very good at understanding, but many people can understand wishing to protect their loved ones or feeling that they could have done more with their lives. 

How It Feels to Watch This Movie

As someone who has seen both the rise and fall of the modern superhero movie, it’s surreal to watch this film. It feels for once as if I am the target audience: the person who has grown, not just bored, but exhausted by it all–the spin-offs, the cross-overs, the continual contrivances that are supposed to duct-tape this tiresome narrative monstrosity together. The person who–thanks to a massive industry of public commentators on social media–is keenly aware of the commercial, legal, and political considerations involved in each of these stories and why they are told in the ways that they are told. I am equally aware whenever I sit down to watch one of these movies–something which I haven’t done for a while–that I am witnessing a product, and a product of consistently declining quality. 

None of it matters. These stories don’t matter, which is tough news to the people who have spent years crafting personalities around them. But that’s just the way we live now. For decades, we have been encouraged to invest our passion and identities in the things we consume. Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. “You are what you eat” turns out to be at least as true for the mind as it is for the body and probably much more so. 

But eventually, the disposability and hollowness of it all must become apparent to even the most committed fanboy. Everyone has to go through a dark night of the soul where we realize those souls are made up of trash. 

This disposability is what we see when Deadpool and Wolverine make their way to the Void. Here, again, the movie uses diegetic elements to signify meta-textual objects and events. The Void is the repository for all the forgotten and abandoned storylines of the Fox cinematic universe. These characters were once full of excitement and promise, but after their moment in the sun, they wind up here in the junkheap, caught between the twin threats of Cassandra Nova and Alioth, the big cloud monster from Loki. Chris Evans reprises his role as Johnny Storm, and many of the original X-Men antagonists return, but there is also Jennifer Gardner returning to her role as Elektra, and Wesley Snipes returns as Blade. (I was a little disappointed that there was not any reference to Ryan Reynolds’ having played a supporting role in the 3rd Blade movie, but maybe I just missed it.)  All of them have been yanked out of their actual stories and made to play a role in this meta-story about fictional characters dealing with their real world disposability. That’s the cynical reading at least, but when I was watching, it didn’t feel cynical. It felt nostalgic, endearing. There was a note of actual generosity in reviving these characters, knowing that it would surely have been cheaper to write it differently. And there was something touching about seeing these forgotten characters given one final chance to ride off into the sunset. And somehow, the fact that the movie is self-aware about this makes it feels more honest, not less. It has the look of that thing that is desired but also forbidden: sincerity. Deadpool’s self-aware conceit ends up, paradoxically, being the perfect narrative device for taking a heartfelt look back at some two decades of superhero films. 

Reasonable minds may disagree, but I personally found this more charming than the kind of fan service given by Spiderman: No Way Home. It was as if the movie was knocking elbows with you saying, “God, do you remember when we tried to make the Fantastic 4 work? What a trainwreck. Don’t even get me started on that reboot. Do you remember X-3? Remember how we ruined Gambit? Ha, yeah, sorry about that. We thought it was really important that we make these people with magic powers more realistic, lol. Yes, I know, we were very confused. We’re not hiding any of it. We know we’ve made some real shit. But thanks for coming to see our shit.”

It’s hard to stay mad at someone when they’re admitting their sins. 

Redemption

In the end, everyone gets to have their moment of redemption, with the team helping Logan and Wade get to Cassandra, but they are still unable to subdue her. 

After knocking out Pool, Cassandra attempts to appeal to Logan. She enters his mind and finds that his interiority is a vast line of graves for all the people he had failed. He tells her that he can always hear their voices. And then she tells him that she can silence them all. “I just want to be free,” he says. 

The subtext here is very interesting. In addition to representing the junkheap of Fox’s failures, the Void is also a representation of a world of postmodern atomization, the extreme outcome of individualism and what Emile Durkheim called anomie. Atomization as a social issue and as a theme in literature and media has become increasingly salient in recent decades as the decline of social cohesion has become a serious concern for modern societies. As many people have pointed out, social cohesion is typically a function of a shared identity with a strong unifying ethnic narrative that gives that identity depth and nobility. In the Void, there are no unifying stories or ends that bind individuals to one another in any significant way. The characters have been removed from the worlds in which they were once deeply embedded. They are decontextualized individuals, bound by nothing but the crude impositions of power, aka Cassandra Nova, the supreme power in the Void (excepting of course Alioth, the beast of pure annihilation). 

These stories are what provide people with a sense of purpose both individually and collectively, the absence of which leads people to feel that their lives are meaningless and to despair. And what Cassandra offers Logan is effectively therapy. Historically, therapy has often served the purpose of “liberating” people from negative feelings of guilt and shame, usually those associated with religious traditions. And today, the task of therapy in modern societies is to reconcile people to less pleasant aspects of that society, typically by teaching them tricks and ways of hacking their emotional responses or slinging pharmaceuticals at them. Without these, those people might find the modern world unbearable. If she were a regular therapist, Cassandra would be telling Logan about how he needs to learn to “forgive and accept himself” and teaching him various positive affirmations or just filling him up with SSRIs. Luckily for all of us, when you’re a psychic god, you can just go to the source, and erase the pain. 

It’s worth pointing out that, in reality, Logan didn’t do anything that isn’t perfectly in line with our contemporary sensibilities. So he didn’t want to drink the Koolaid and become an X-man? So what? That’s every person’s right, to decide for themselves whether they want to commit themselves to some group or another. To pressure free individuals into making commitments against their will is manipulative or, at worst, some species of abuse. If you’re seriously going to tell me that it’s fine to have no fault divorce, then you’re going to have a tough time arguing that Logan did anything that wasn’t firmly within his rights. We live under a consent-based moral paradigm and under that paradigm, Logan did nothing wrong. All that matters is authentic choice. Be true to yourself. This is the first and most important commandment, and it can be seen in previous films in the franchise. In X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan himself encourages Rogue to leave if that’s what her true desire is, “Leave or stay, it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s what you truly want.” 

Choices themselves are not to be judged. To judge them would be to acknowledge some moral imperative over and above the free choice of the individual, and since we cannot agree about these moral imperatives, we pretend that they do not exist. But regret is the price paid for this denial. 

Obviously, it’s cold comfort to this Logan that the choices he made which resulted in the deaths of his friends was within his rights, that he did nothing wrong. On the contrary, Logan is firmly convinced of his guilt. He made a choice, and he sees now that the choice was wrong. He wears his suit as a constant reminder of it, and this is actually the most noble thing about him, at least when we first meet him. He has the dignity to be ashamed of himself. He may say that he just wants to be free, but that’s just a lie to bait Cassandra into his trap. Freedom is not the goal, truth is. And as Kierkegaard says, “The truth is a snare: you cannot have it without being caught.”

Logan rejects Cassandra’s offer of mental health, choosing instead something better: action. Using Juggernauts helmet to dampen her abilities, the two convince her to help them by showing her mercy. Cassandra then produces a sling-ring and makes them a portal to return to Pool’s timeline. 

I’m sure lots of people will get upset by this obvious contrivance, but I think these objections are misplaced. Everything this movie does encourages us to think of it as a metafiction, one that is more about the reality that sits above it than the plot details themselves. This might even be an intentional joke about how many problems sling rings have created for multiverse storylines. Once again, I read this with a wink and a nod on the part of the writers. One might point out the obvious plot hole that if Dr. Strange could simply use this to get out of the Void then how would Cassandra have ever gotten a chance to kill him? But this is hardly a new issue. Previous films have been chock full of shenanigans with these things. It’s like the writers are saying, “Yeah, these stupid rings are absolutely plot breaking. We probably should have thought harder about it when we introduced them because they’ve been nothing but a pain in the ass.”  So for all the times when they could have provided the obvious solution and didn’t, here’s one time where they are used to their full extent.

They return planning to stop Paradox from using the Time Ripper (yeah, it’s a silly name), but Cassandra follows them back. She quickly incapacitates both of our heroes and sets off with Paradox with the intent of erasing timelines until all that remains is the Void. To keep Wade and Logan from interfering with her plans, she’s enlisted the help of the Deadpool Corps (essentially a collection of all of the Deadpool incarnations from across the multiverse). The final battle for Deadpool, who began this adventure wanting to matter, ends up being against an army of all of his possible selves, and there’s something so beautiful about this. Narcissism is arguably the greatest threat to our ability to form meaningful attachments and commitments, to our ability to matter to anyone. To embrace our authentic selves, we have to let go of our vanity and also of all the different options for ourselves that we can imagine. For many people, especially those who are unusually gifted or have special talents, the knowledge of one’s possibilities can be a curse. Being aware of all the things that one might become can lead to an unwillingness to choose any of them for fear of making the “wrong” choice, ultimately resulting in a failure to become anything. People will of course accuse me of “reading too much into this” but the number of times that silly visual gags in this movie had deeply symbolic meaning is simply too great to disregard. 

After making it to the Time Ripper (it really is such a silly name) they are told by Paradox that in order to stop the machine, their only chance is to go into the basement where the twin wells of matter and antimatter are feeding into the machine. By creating a circuit between the two, they can stop Cassandra but, Paradox warns them, whoever does this will be completely destroyed. There will be no coming back. Let me be clear, this is all idiotic. But it is honestly not that much stupider than anything else that has happened in Phase 4, and if this is the silly plot contrivance to put an end to things, then I can forgive a whole lot. Wade and Logan make their way to the basement, and there is a sudden tonal shift. Pool begins to earnestly tell Logan that he needs to be the one to sacrifice himself. “You didn’t ask for any of this,” he says, acknowledging that he tricked Logan with the promise that he might be able to change his own past, but Logan turns it around. “You didn’t lie,” he says, “you made an educated wish” repeating the words that had previously been the cause of an extended bout of blood-letting between these two. He shows Wade the picture of Wade’s friends and tells him that he still has a world to return to, whereas Logan has nothing, so he should be the one to make the sacrifice. 

This is one of my few misgivings with the film, the idea that it is the man who has nothing who is willing to sacrifice himself for the nothing that he has. I don’t think this is very true. The man who has nothing always has himself. It’s only the man who loves something that is willing to give that up. 

But Pool pulls a fast one, locking Logan outside the room so that he can make the connection himself. Because this is HIS movie, and that’s how it’s supposed to work. But the gap between the two reservoirs is too large, and he can’t close the circuit. Again the specter of failure raises its head. Of course, intellectually we know that this isn’t even remotely possible. But the point is that at that moment, I was so immersed in the moment that it didn’t even occur to me that Logan is trying break down the thick metal door with his shoulder rather than…you know…slicing his way through it with his claws which are made of the hardest, sharpest stuff in the universe. Whatever. At the last moment, Logan breaks down the door, joins hands with Wade, closing the circuit, and at this moment Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” returns with an entire gospel choir accompaniment. And it is…beautiful. 

On the Phenomenon of Pop Love Songs Used as Dramatic Anthems

I am sure there have been other examples, but I first became conscious of this trend while watching Free Guy (another film about a character wanting his life to matter). Guy is a man who discovers that his whole reality is fake, a consumer product sold for entertainment, but it is real to him and it is also all that he has available to him to give his life meaning. Guy is also a symbol of our own condition. He’s just a more obvious example of what is also true for us in the ways that have already been discussed. And in the end, as his best friend–whose name is literally Buddy–is about to die, Guy says “I’m sorry.” Sorry basically for everything, for messing up Buddy’s world, for getting him involved in this mess, for getting him killed, and Buddy does something incredible. He says, “I’m not. This has been the best day of my life.” And at this moment, a cover of Mariah Carey’s 90s hit “Fantasy” begins playing and…holy shit is it a good moment. I don’t even like this movie, but for about 30 seconds, it achieved something totally sublime. 

Whereas Carey’s original song had an upbeat summer pop vibe to it and the lyrics are a not-even-remotely subtle sexual overture to the imagined listener, this version is slowed down, stripped down, and given greater depth. Rather than the flirtatious enthusiasm of Carey’s original, the cover sounds sadder, more disappointed, but still somehow hopeful. It ceases to have anything to do with sex and instead points to longings more obscure and complex. And it shows that the ghost of true art is still alive somewhere in the bowels of the grotesque monstrosity that is the modern entertainment industry. For all its failings, for all the bullshit, it still occasionally stumbles across one of the power-notes of the human condition: in this case, the longing that our lives might mean something, might point to something beyond us. And since we, like Guy, only have these cheap consumer products available to us, we imagine them transfigured in some glorious moment in which they become more than what they are. For Buddy, and for us as the audience, the hope is that one day of the actual would be enough to make up for a lifetime wasted in hyperreality. 

In his poem, “The Wasteland,” TS Eliot mixes imagery from memories, from art and literature, from scholarship, from religion, and says in the end “The fragments I have shored against my ruin.” And the ruin that he’s speaking of is the collapse of meaning that he was witnessing in the 20th Century, a collapse which we live in the aftermath of, and his poem was an expression of despair, but also a defiant hope: a belief that these fragments might be enough to save him from the hell of nihilism, where nothing matters. Eliot was a prodigy, a man of incomprehensible learning, a product of a different age. He drew his fragments from that immense storehouse of knowledge. Where he had his learning, we have these forgotten relics of entertainment that once meant something to us, and which we hold onto like charms that have been imbued with the magic of our having lived with them and through them. And our love for these trivial nothings, ends up being a love for our own lives and the hope that they might have meant something, that they might have mattered. 

Nietzsche theorized that the Last Man at the End of History would be a soulless husk who cared only for his own trivial pleasures, the perfect consumer. But what he didn’t count on was the possibility that the Last Man would be haunted by the ghost of meaning and the desire for redemption. 

Logan and Wade close the circuit, causing the machine to backfire on Cassandra, but she pushes back and it becomes apparent that this will be a contest of wills. They are going to need to withstand incredible pain in order to overcome her. It might seem absurd, but symbolically, this scene is about two men pushing back the tide of nihilism, represented by Cassandra and the Void, with their willingness to sacrifice themselves, and that’s not just meaningful; it is a radical idea. In the midst of the torment, time slows down and both men flashback to previous moments in their lives. Wade remembers Vanessa, the only thing which has ever meant anything to him, imagining a world in which she is absent, and how empty that world would be, how ridiculous Paradox’s offer had been in imagining that Wade could ever choose to exist in a world without her. Wolverine reflects on his failures to live up to the example of other Logans, failures which he is now able to atone for. And we see a scene that was not previously shown to us, apparently sometime around the fight with Cassandra, in which Logan says that “for the first time,” he’s proud to wear the suit. 

It means I’m an X-Man. I am the X-man. 

Revealing a truth that has been substantially lost to our generation, a truth that we can now only approach through these characters that we originally met in our childhoods: that there is no self apart from the commitments that we make. That the answer to who we are is the things that we devote ourselves to. 

Hugh Jackman’s “I am the X-man” echoes Robert Downey Jr.’s “I am Ironman” moment, but it works better for Wolverine. Downey’s tenure as Ironman was a charmed one, with basically no major flops. When the weakest link in your chain is Iron Man 3, count yourself among the favored few of all cinematic history. By contrast, Jackman’s time as Wolverine was perhaps mostly flops. None of the original X-Men trilogy were much good. The first was decidedly mid, the second was probably the series’ peak and still not great, and the third was a legendary failure. The subsequent Wolverine spin-offs were equally mixed. Days of Future Past was solid, but it began Logan’s complicated relationship with his own character, a dynamic that was continued in the 2017 Logan, in which he struggles to live up to his own legend. Marvel learned a lot from Fox’s mistakes. By the time Ironman came out in 2008, the original X-Men trilogy had already been completed for two years, and the next installment would not come until 2013’s utterly awful The Wolverine. 

And yet, even through a tenure marked by some abysmal failures, Hugh managed to craft a character who was universally beloved and even impacted the entire superhero genre with his physical transformation. For better or worse, it was not Robert Downy Jr. or Toby Maguire or Chris Evans who was the true poster child for the comic superhero revival that is now coming to a close. It was Hugh Jackman. It was Logan. 

And while the 2017 film was written as a send off for the character, I never felt that it did a great job of this. I know that’s an unpopular take, and I’ll have to dig into it some other time, but the gist is that the tone was not quite right. It was too bleak, too defeated. It also wasn’t the same timeline as the earlier films, as demonstrated by the fact that Xavier is alive in this film after having been disintegrated by the Phoenix in Last Stand. By contrast, this film allows Wolverine to go out on his shield, not as a diminished and despairing old man, but as we best remember him. And so it means something to see a 55 year old Hugh showing off his physique one last time, whether or not it involved a serious amount of steroids. It points to the real history that occurred outside of these movies. 

This is not a film that will age well; love-letters rarely do. A person who did not have that experience of growing up with these films can of course still enjoy this movie, but they won’t see what is best in it. That isn’t meant as a put down to young people, someday they will have their own version of this feeling, and they’ll understand. It just wasn’t their turn this time. 

And so when the two men look at each other one final time and nod, reaffirming their choice, this silly little movie is able to punch way above its weight. 

The Fanboy Exit Ramp

But the moment is short-lived. When the smoke clears, it turns out that neither of them are dead and as satisfying as it was to be reminded of The Goo Goo Dolls’ iconic rock ballad “Iris,” I have to say that it didn’t negate my disappointment. As Wade explains, the damage when spread across two bodies is so much more manageable that the two can emerge completely healed (and with their suits intact) within about two minutes. It’s very silly. Paradox gets his just desserts from the head of the TVA,  and the film ends with Wade right back where we found him, in his apartment with his loved ones. But this time joined by Logan and X-23. And he (Wade) turns to Vanessa and tells her “Even if you don’t want me, I did it for you.” She takes his hand but says nothing, and the movie fades out as the camera pans to a table with both of our heroes’ masks and Wade’s voice-over informing us that “sometimes, the people we save, save us right back.” 

And the vibe, while friendly and predictable, is totally wrong. It is wrong, in large part, because it ignores that Wade was (minus having a girlfriend) already part of this little community at the beginning, but still felt meaningless. As with the hero’s journey, the epilogue places us back where we started, but there is something about it this time that is manifestly unsatisfying, as is the film’s stale final message that you just need to have friends, you just need to “matter” to the people around you. This is because that wasn’t actually what the movie was about, and it isn’t what heroes do. The heroic peaks have been smoothed down to the kind of lame life advice that is available to anyone. And the heroic sacrifice that was made has been undermined by the survival of the two heroes and the audience’s awareness that this is in large part because there have to be more of these movies. Wolverine, after having done all of this for the chance to go back and save the people that he failed in the past, is told “there’s nothing to fix” by the TVA lady and then simply stops caring. His next spoken line is about food. The culmination of all of this raw emotion and sacrifice is the realization that it was all just an amusement park ride. Obviously, at the end of every story, the listener knows that nothing in the world has changed, but the goal for the storyteller is that the story might change the listener. In this case, the only message for the listener is that they should be satisfied with their lives as they are. 

This return to the mundane is always there in the background of every heroic tale. In some sense, the role of the hero is to make normal, unchallenging life possible for all the non-heroes. But even when he has accomplished this and he seems to have gone back to being just one of the normies, the hero is never a normie. Every normie has the potential to be a hero, but he can only accomplish this by raising his spiritual temperature and becoming aware and sensitive to things outside of the mundane world which is characterized by petty self-interest, the pursuit of comfort, and acquisitiveness. It is only by acquiring this awareness that he is able to do what the regular man cannot do: put something above his own life and become heroic. And even when he has returned things to how they should be and has put up the suit, he retains that knowledge, and this sometimes makes it impossible for him to remain in the world of the mundane. 

In the poem Ulysses, Tennyson imagines an epilogue for the Greek hero Odysseus, who, after leading his countrymen to victory against Troy, then struggled for twenty years to return home. But after having finally returned and reclaimed his household, he finds himself dissatisfied with normal life, and he chooses to take to the sea once again in search of new adventures. It ends with the iconic lines, “come friends, it is not too late to seek a newer world.” Whether it is the call to adventure or to battle or to romance or to religion, what is undisputed is that the hero is the one who hears a call coming from outside the world of the ordinary. 

I think that what I am trying to express through all of this is just the emptiness of nerd shit. At least for the first half of my life, I was a nerd, and I loved nerd shit way before nerd shit meant big money and was more or less “cool” (if you count “cool” as just being the novel moment of what later becomes normal). And in fact, I think that my generation was the first of its kind in its relationship to nerd culture. Of course there were comics before us, and Saturday cartoons, and toys and collectables, but they were more or less acknowledged by everyone to be kid stuff. Grown men who collected comic books and played video games just as they had when they were kids would have been mostly unthinkable 50 years ago, but the culture industry now makes cradle to the grave fandom a real possibility. But that doesn’t mean that it’s satisfying. The triumph of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it is able to speak to our deepest longings, but its failure is that it ultimately doesn’t know what to offer them, though bless ‘em, they try. 

Smarter people than me have observed that pop culture fandoms today operate as a kind of surrogate for religion. When one hears stories about crew members crying because they saw a couple of men in comic book costumes or witnesses the ferocity with which the various “standoms” of pop music battle each other online, it’s hard to deny the truth of this. In the world of digital atomization and declining social capital, where friendships and even familial bonds are always getting thinner or disappearing altogether, these hobbies form the basis of the only communities that many people really know, even if they only experience those communities digitally. So it’s bad news that these things can never satisfy us because their entire raison d’etre is to always produce new stories and new experiences and new ticket sales that will always be aimed at a younger crowd with less complex desires, which means once again, that none of it can matter. Disappointment becomes the norm. The more often we return to the well, the more aware we are that we always come away thirsty. 

I’m sure that some will say “Of course, what did you expect?”–an answer which is as dismissive as it is simplistic. Obviously people expect something. And they’ll look for it in the places that are available.    

When I watched the Turtles movie in 2014, I felt neglected because I wanted it to matter. And yeah, I know it was just a stupid show that was made to sell toys, but I bought those toys, and I spent years of my life playing with them in the woods beside the house where I grew up. And my friends and I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Make Believe on the playgrounds of my elementary school, and somehow I came to love those characters, stupid as they were. And I just wanted to see something made by someone who loved them at least as much as I had. No matter how humble the beginnings, in the end, we tell stories to help us make sense of our own lives. And the kinds of stories that we tell can give us a clue as to what we feel is missing.  

As far as reviews go, I’ll admit this one is a mess. But this movie caused me to experience some complex emotions, and I just wanted to try to explain how that happened. If you got something out of this, please like and share and maybe even think about subscribing. If you didn’t…well man, that sucks. Sorry about that.