Deadpool and Wolverine

My daughter gave me a t-shirt, portraying classic white Jesus riding a velociraptor. It has some weird writing about creation and how much fun Jesus had before the earth had people. I don’t wear it around town much. I imagine it would puzzle if not offend evangelical Christians here. I like the shirt, however, because it satirizes a stereotype of Jesus, associating that image with the controversy over the age of the earth and origins of life. As a Christian, it reminds me that our popular culture often threatens to make important, interesting things—such as the Person of Jesus Christ, divine creation, and modern science—serve ideological purposes rather than the truth about the Christian faith and the world.

This recently flared again in the controversy over the Olympics opening ceremonies. What appeared to some American Christians to mock Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper, turned out to be primarily a tableau based on a modern painting of the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Or, so we’re told. What artists intend doesn’t discipline how audiences respond. Just a little Da Vinci in the French art? Sure. And, it’s not as if ancient philosophers didn’t think of Christ/Dionysus connections. It’s an interesting mess.

Christians do not own the rights to public portraits of Jesus; they don’t even agree with one another about how that representation goes. I thought of these puzzles while laughing through the raucous and profane Deadpool and Wolverine movie. In particular, Deadpool’s deranged obsession with being the “Marvel Jesus.” That phrase might be a source of offense to some Christians, along with the rest of the movie. But the modern superhero as a secular god has been around quite awhile. Superman was rooted in the religious legacy of two Jewish kids from Cleveland. There is a lot of speculation about why modern people have latched onto superheroes. For some time since, we’ve lived with satirizing superheroes, famously since Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. Now we’re awash in troubled superheroes: The Boys, The Umbrella Academy, the Suicide Squad, too many more to mention.

The Marvel Universe is a money-making world engine. We are witnessing its critical and audience exhaustion. Deadpool isn’t Ryan Reynold’s first grab at the cape and cowl. But the failure of Green Lantern encouraged him to revive his fascination with a minor but belovedly shocking character, turn Deadpool into three movies satirizing the superhero and the superhero movie, especially the Marvel versions. Deadpool and Wolverine combines two offscreen friends famous for their portraits of disturbed, less than noble messiahs.

Film as much as any art lets audiences savor a messianic hope. Bryan Singer self-consciously portrayed Superman as a Jesus figure. I love Superman movies, more than comics, for that reason; Superman’s humility, his self-emptying ruthless sacrifices. And, these stories are remarkably apocalyptic. A catastrophic threat faces Earth and humanity. Conventional responses, including the military, fail. The destruction often comes at the fist of a vengeful superbeing, or a scientist bent on some twisted sense of justice. Superpowered beings descend from space or the sky, to wage global scale war.

Reynolds and his Deadpool crew satirize the superhero genre, filled with pop culture references and jabs at celebrity culture. Reynold’s makeup, action-packed assaults on his genitals, mocks his own status, good looks, and marriages to equally hot actors.

His repeated declaration that he is the “Marvel Jesus” includes a sense that the film’s popularity contrasts declining audiences for conventional Marvel movies. Will Deadpool “save” the franchise? Deadpool is a hard R series, and attracts an audience including people indifferent to the Marvel versions of supergods.

In the new film Deadpool’s desperation to matter on some cosmic level and save his “chosen family” from cosmic catastrophe, lets him confuse a far less noble mission for the typically superheroic messianic one. Deadpool is not just a human with superpowers of skill, speed, and regeneration. He’s not just a regular guy thrust into all or nothing cosmic warfare. He’s deeply troubled, needly, often mining an S/M vein in his psyche.

Movies are desire machines, showing us what we want to see, often what normally we cannot experience on our own terms. Modern fiction in general often provides so-called “godlike” access to behaviors, inner lives, private spaces. Movies heighten these using their peculiar cinematic devices, from production, framing, camera movement, editing, score, etc. Deadpool’s lust to be “Marvel Jesus” ridicules the typically earnest Marvel portrait of supergods. He reminds us that we may want, even if only suspected, the supergod to intervene in today’s intractable challenges and overwhelming catastrophes. It’s not just a giant joke (as Watchman’s Comedian said). It’s grotesque, its obscene, it’s an assault on our visual and moral senses. Critics seem to hate this movie, but audiences don’t care. They are not buying tickets for another 2-hour cinematic reaffirmation of selfless, technological hope in the face of disaster. They aren’t paying for righteous kick-ass justice doled out against horrifying villains. They want to see the supergod crack wise, attack the movie industry from the inside (especially Disney’s acquisition of Marvel), while making a sequence of anal penetration jokes that promise to go too far. Viewers want to see the moral integrity and nobility of the supergod exposed as ideological, cinematic flim-flam.

Deadpool’s Marvel Jesus is, then, a real character. The supergod is and has been self-sacrificing, loyal, determined. Well, Cap America has. But we get redemptive arcs from others who, to varying degrees, are selfish, traumatized, calculating, even vicious. We empathize with the awkwardness of Spiderman’s adolescent quandaries. We root for Black Widow and Iron Man journeying from abusive beginnings and entwined in ideological systems, towards nobility. Throughout, Frankenstein-level scientific arrogance pervades these stories. The supergod movie celebrates technique as much as violence; there’s really little difference here. But in Deadpool and Wolverine, Marvel Jesus sees utter catastrophe, calculating ends and means, objectives and collateral damage. Outside the Marvel world, Zach Snyder’s Superman and Justice League movies may be the most honest about what would happen if such creatures were turned loose. Since the Italians began filming Roman history to capture spectacles of catastrophe and warfare, there’s often been a Futurist streak in epic movie making. Audience taste for wide-screen catastrophe suggests we’re more Futurist in taste than we might be comfortable admitting.

Without question, Marvel Jesus isn’t the Jesus of the Gospels, or the Incarnation. While no less “cosmic” as John’s Gospel (and Colossians and Revelation) depicts him, Jesus hardly seems moved by a mantra like “great power comes with great responsibility.” Jesus, the Scripture tells us, set aside his divine rights and power. He did not treat it as a kind of private property. On a few strange occasions he exhibited that power, by walking across a lake’s surface. Mostly, he healed and fed people, acting with such extravagance that it appeared his obedience to the Father in Heaven and preaching of the Kingdom of God had no calculated strategy, no 5-step program or action item list. Jesus moved mostly around the poor and cast offs of Galilee, preaching and teaching and being moved by the great needs of his people. Gospel Jesus did not fight evil with a war against Rome; he led no uprising and takeover of the Judean kingdoms. In the words of the La Chambon Christians who hid Jews in Nazi-occupied France, he waged “weapons of the Spirit.” As a king, he won his Kingdom and redeemed creation nailed to a vicious wooden throne. As grotesque and shocking as Deadpool and Wolverine might be for many people, shouldn’t the scandal of the Cross leave me more shocked, while strangely, joyfully aware of the strange mercy of the Jesus of the Gospels?