Who Would the X-Men Endorse? The Politics of Spandex Gods
We all like a bad boy but Deadpool’s morality is not dubious enough
The X-Men’s narrative world has always contained a strand about minorities, difference and prejudice. In the cinema franchise, the third film, X-Men: The Last Stand, puts this strand at the centre of its plot, in which a ‘cure’ for mutant genes is discovered. Whereas X2 floats genocide as the potential solution for the majority’s mutant ‘problem’, The Last Stand offers the ultimate assimilation; the eradication of difference all together. The X-Men, like many oppressed minorities, constantly have an internal debate raging between those who favour assimilation and co-operation (Xavier and Hank McCoy/Beast) and those who advocate resistance and dissent (Magneto). This is an intriguing pop culture landscape in a nation founded on migration (forced and voluntary) but whose political contests forever feature immigration as a hot button issue. As a political metaphor, X-Men is problematic because, in the overall story arc, living together frequently wins out by barely a whisker and only seems to work temporarily. The ‘enemy within’ ultimately brings annihilation in the X-Men film universe. That unfortunate tendency aside, the not quite X-Man, Deadpool, illuminates a more fundamental political problem with the superhero metaphor.
Superheroes are ridiculous, but still ridiculously popular. The comic book origins of cinema’s masked crusaders have always been comfortable with examining their shiny heroes’ feet of clay: adaptations to moving image, not so much. Part of the impact of Batman Begins in 2005 stems from the freshness of its revisioning intent, but it’s not really until 2009’s Watchmen that movies take a steel-capped boot to the whole superhero concept. Christopher Nolan’s Batman is complex, but still a hero. Zack Snyder’s crew of narcissistic megalomaniacs have very few redeeming features and are f**king with the Earth and its inhabitants ‘as flies to wanton boys’. All very well, but if you’re inherently uneasy with the very concept of fictional superheroes, as I am, you really need something that clearly exposes the source of that unease.
Superhero fiction of all genres and shades is reactionary to its core. It’s starting premise is the failure of society, the ineffectiveness of the rule of law and the weakness of government. More than that, it suggests government, collective action, is not the appropriate mechanism for dealing with sin and that all questions of dubious moral behaviour can only meaningfully be dealt with ‘mano a mano’ and, of course, by violence. The superhero movie cannot serve as a vehicle for a critique of violence or disdain the vigilante. No matter to what extent it lards irony onto the subject or deflates its protagonists, the only recourse that such a narrative has for resolution is through the endorsement of violence. Whether violence succeeds or fails, whether there are victims or not, it is the only permissible solution attempted for every problem. For ‘might is right’ supporters of the military industrial complex everywhere, no better manifesto could be written.
Films that attempt to examine these issues in a critical light are few and far between and often expose the difficulty of situating such a critique within the multiplex cash-in ethos of the genre itself. In 2010, a year into the Obama administration, two movies came looking to flip the bird at the golden age of Bush 2 era neocons. Mathew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass is a partial superhero deconstruction while James Gunn’s Super looked at the same material in more uncompromising style. If you want to have a go at superhero mythology now, in the post-truth era of Trump, you’re left with the post-post-modern Deadpool. Clearly, the Deadpool franchise is not critical of anything except itself. While Kick-Ass and Super are almost attempting a dialogue with their reliance on violence, Deadpool just doesn’t care. Shit happens and the only reasonable response is a shrug. Faced with the rationality onslaught inherent in the Trump presidency, perhaps this was understandable from anyone not in the MAGA cult.
Meta-movies are not new. Film makers reflecting on the procedures of film making within the movie itself goes back to the birth of cinema. Plenty of silent movie stars broke the ‘fourth wall’, a habit they brought from their stage and vaudeville origins. The Deadpool movies take this navel gazing to its logical conclusion. The distinguishing feature of the Deadpool franchise is meta critical commentary on the process of meta movie making and then piling further layers on top, such as riffing on Deadpool making fun of the way Deadpool movies make fun of Deadpool movies … and so on. In Deadpool and Wolverine, this dizzying process spins so fast that actors, writers and audience risk losing their bearings and the very idea of a story is diluted beyond recognition.
Deadpool and Wolverine comes full circle to a kind of vaudeville act. What is a relentlessly repeating fist of adamantium claws in the chest other than a slapstick plank in the face? Vaudeville acts sometimes have plots but they’re not important, merely a scenario to hang gags on that doesn’t have to have any dramatic coherence. The resemblance to the Trump mode of political campaigning is striking. The story for Trump is what he thinks about a thing, not the thing itself. Trump randomly constructs a self-organised landscape of ever shifting political notions and then indulges in a form of self-referential meta-reflection on his own processes and ideas. For example, he says to the National Association of Black Journalists conference that Kamala Harris used to be Indian and now she’s “blaaack” and then ruminates at a rally on the response to this ‘analysis’. As with vaudeville, coherence is the enemy and chaotic energy is the goal. The resemblance of the vaudeville act to everyday life is not only irrelevant, it’s counterproductive; only the laughs count. “Are you not entertained”?
The dumbest move in an American action film is to bring a knife to a gun fight, although someone should probably tell James Coburn’s character, Britt, in The Magnificent Seven. The sentiment behind this wise crack also serves as a neat precis of ongoing US defence policy as well as the legal principles behind some US States implementation of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws in self-defence. While Batman disdains guns in favour of bone-crunching fist action, Deadpool loves guns and quip-kills many people with them. Even though his ‘forgetful’ nature puts him in the knife / gun situation for the finale of the first film, he still slickly despatches dozens of minions with a katana. The dead pool concept gets a 1980s film outing and provides the title for the fifth of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films. Famous for its idolatry of a powerful handgun, in the world of Harry Callaghan, the only good hoodlum is a dead one. In Kick-Ass, eleven-year-old Mindy is a stone-cold killer, offing villains left, right and centre with an array of bespoke projectile weaponry. Apart from the hero worship of vigilante mores, Deadpool, Dirty Harry and Kick-Ass have another thing in common; they’re unadulterated gun porn, an essential component of any right-wing ideology.
I have mixed feelings about Kick-Ass and there are plenty of things to dislike about its ambivalent messaging on the superhero concept. The extraordinary performance of twelve-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz as Mindy, and her alter-ego Hit Girl, is central to this unease and deliberately so. Having a child as a ruthless killer without an iota of guilt or bad conscience, who elicits our sympathy regardless, is a consciously provocative part of Vaughn’s strategy for problematising the superhero mythos. It is one of the great shibboleths of western culture that children must be innocent and ours must be aggressively protected to that end, regardless of the impact on ‘other’ children. To see Hit Girl, having inherited the family vigilante business from her father, Big Daddy, joyously slaughtering dozens of adults ‘Matrix’ style is both beguiling and deeply disturbing, as it makes any notion of innocence absurd while simultaneously reaffirming it within her fragile frame. The film delights in teasing us with this dualism, reminding us that she’s a kid by her frequent mistakes and need for guidance (“switch to strobes, honey”), and then abruptly ‘ageing’ her with adult level profanity or driving the car while Kick-Ass sits passively in the passenger seat. The ease with violence mixed with vulnerability reaches its conclusion in a face off that sees Mindy being beaten into submission by a grown man twice her height and body slammed into a glass coffee table. What kind of allegory is this? Are we meant to feel the uncomfortable mix of fear and compassion felt for dead-eyed gun bearing child soldiers in conflicted states; our revulsion for the deeds mixed with a desire to rescue them from that situation with an overwhelming sense that they are not supposed to be there.
If art is a way for society to explore its fears, obsessions and passions, both light and dark, without active destruction, then comic books are the quintessential American medium for the exercising, but not the exorcising, of that nation’s paranoid obsession with violence. One of the interesting aspects of Kick-Ass is that it reflects on this mechanism while being wholly entwined within it. The curious place of superheroes in the imaginative landscape of teenagers and younger children is superbly incarnated in Kick-Ass. It is as if Kick-Ass, Red Mist and Hit Girl, were the rambling daydreams of teenage boys made real and then reality bit back in the most satisfying way.
This generates one of the key dilemmas with Kick-Ass and one that Deadpool doubles down on. The material is peppy, invites the viewer to take it with a pitch of salt, is often wry and knowing and wears the cloak of humour to deflect criticism of gratuitous excess. However, it brings a psychological intelligence to bear and a deftness in creating the identifiable world of its teenage protagonist, as well as an approach to violence that veers between balletic and realistic. The result is a film suggesting a consequence-rich context for brutality one moment and shaking it off the next when it doesn’t suit. However, the resolution of such ambiguity and the destination of any deeper analysis can only ever match the same fate as Mark Strong’s Frank D’Amico; annihilation by bazooka.
Super, written and directed by James Gunn, is something very different. Ironic in its title only, Super is unwilling to toy knowingly with the flaws of comic book fiction, adopting instead a full-frontal assault. It frames the action in a lesser but similar self-reflective, postmodern, image and culture referencing mode that we later see supercharged in Deadpool. This spry form, endlessly seen seasoning demented plots in the MCU, is smashed repeatedly into the reality of the protagonists’ mental derangement and banal exasperating lives. Super is interested in decoding the psychopathic DNA from which superhero fiction is built.
Super’s hero is an almost completely repellent figure, a morbidly self-hating sociopath in a mid-life crisis who would succumb to caving in a stranger’s skull with a wrench for queue jumping but for cowardice and a sense of social conformity. Super is the tale of the loosening of those restraints by way of a badly made spandex suit and a cheesy false identity. Pitched into a break from reality by the departure of his wife into the arms of a drug dealer, Frank Darbo, played by Rainn Wilson, shows an alarming propensity for religious flavoured delusion that leads him inexorably into a crimson jump suit crouching behind dumpsters waiting for crime.
It’s one of the laws of the comic book universe that psychopathic vigilantes flock together and one of Frank’s few redeeming features is his relative moderation in comparison with his lunatic side kick Libby, played full throttle by Elliot Page. If skintight stretchy lurid fabric can be blamed for releasing Frank’s inner demons, then it was always likely to deal a fatal blow to Libby’s sense of reality and frail mental cohesion. The overt eroticism of countless figure-hugging outfits on comic hero young women is mercilessly parodied in a vicious scene where Libby, in a mixture of sexual aggression and identity confusion, uses superhero alter egos The Crimson Bolt & Boltie, to affect a desperate seduction and gratingly brief sexual conquest of Frank.
Violence is exposed as the first resort of the incompetent. Almost sexual in the blood lust it evokes in Libby, violence flows from chips on shoulders, opportunities for settling grudges and petty frustrations that have nothing to do with the victims. Finally, and most chillingly, the absurd invulnerability of superheroes is brutally ridiculed when the first exchange of fire with the villains blows a large hole clean through Libby’s head.
Although Super is unrelenting in highlighting the moronic inconsistencies and dangerous subjective morality encoded at the heart of the superhero myth, it is unable to leave the pro side of the ledger completely blank. Frank’s wife, played by Liv Tyler as if submerged throughout under an addictive fog, is somehow redeemed by means of a tragic pastiche of the superhero showdown and the sacrifice of Libby’s abrupt and shocking slaughter. Selfless and precise performances throughout, particularly from Tyler and Kevin Bacon in unglamorous but weighty supporting roles, help the film enormously in its intent. Rainn Wilson stakes out the loser heart of this movie with impressive candour in a performance that feels like a living autopsy of Frank’s many personality defects. Super grudgingly acknowledges that every dog may have his day but tartly remembers that he’s still a dog.
The Deadpool material presents an opportunity to take Super’s critique to the next level but instead the three movies engage Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson in an ironic hero beauty contest alongside Robert Downey Jnr’s Iron Man and Chris Pratt’s Star-Man from Guardians of the Galaxy (also directed by James Gunn). If Super’s Frank Darbo is morally repellent then Deadpool should have us ethically retching in the toilet bowl, not applauding, otherwise we’re simply lost in a sea of relative indifference. It’s strange that from ratings to commentary, the film industry behaves as if superhero movies and the action genre more widely have no connection to the broader culture, as if the allegorical form of the Bible, for example, stripped it of all emotional power.
The economic and narrative constraints of the short form mean that Super may be the last film that seriously takes superheroes to task, whatever the flavour of the source material. Can the creative freedom of television take up the challenge? Since Adam West’s Batman in the 1960’s, TV’s approach to superhero fiction has been innocuous until recently. The Watchmen in all incarnations is severely cynical about superhero mythology but the 2019 TV version on HBO is particularly harsh and it was joined the same year by Amazon Prime’s adaptation of The Boys. The popularity of The Boys is surprising as it is persistently brutal in parodying not just superheroes per se but the metastasising of cult publishers like Marvel and DC into the grotesque marketing monsters / entertainment goliaths they have become. Perhaps two decades of force feeding us live action comic book adaptations, and the inevitable superhero fatigue it has induced, has favoured The Boys’ uncompromising approach.
As the title ironically suggests, the sexism and misogyny implicit in most superhero fiction are rife and radioactively toxic in The Boys. Crucially, its superheroes are openly fascistic authoritarians or else reckless destructive ego buffoons, while the handful of relatively virtuous ones are compromised and mostly ineffectual. Whereas Kick-Ass, Super and the majority of the watchmen are super power free, which emphasises the delusional propensity of the vigilante, The Boys explicitly links the exposure of character weakness to drug acquired metaphysical abilities. Weird useless aberrations rub shoulders with self-destructive powers and ‘gifts’ capable of abuse for sexual kinks and freakery. It falls to television then to finally nail the reactionary core of superhero fiction and draw attention to their fatally antagonistic attitude to government itself. In the forthcoming US election, I think we all know who Homelander would endorse.
Superhero fiction is a straightforward form of modern mythology by which I mean it directly translates the themes and metaphors of classical mythology into a marketable form suitable for 21st Century audiences. Let’s remember that classical mythologies originate as a way for people to process the unpredictable destructive potential of the natural world on their civilisations, as well as highlighting the frailties and weaknesses of human nature, where power invites corruption. The gods are fickle, destructive and without conscience or morality. The power of might is not right but arbitrary.
