When irony loses its superpower

Hindustan Times

a day ago

'Welcome to the MCU. You're joining at a bit of a low point,' Ryan Reynolds' quipaholic mercenary greets Hugh Jackman's rageaholic mutant in Deadpool & Wolverine, a corporate alliance bulletin in the guise of a superhero team-up romp. Fox's Marvel properties are welcomed into Disney's fold not with the red carpet rolled out, but with a snarky dig. If you thought the franchise had hit rock bottom already, there are phases yet to come in its business cycle, by the end of which you may forget if there ever were any peaks to begin with. Self referential comedy when it's done right: Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr (1924) (Courtesy iMDB)
A corporate alliance bulletin in the guise of a superhero team-up romp. (Publicity material)
For a movie about IP integration amid company-wide restructuring, the villain is a fitting one: a corporate bureaucrat by the name of Mr Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen) who has been tasked with cleaning up loose timelines across the multiverse. When Deadpool finds out his timeline is going to be 'pruned' from existence, he seeks out Wolverine for help. Their battle for survival stands in for Fox's battle against erasure upon being gobbled up by the Mouse House. From the very opening moments of Shawn Levy's movie, Deadpool goofs on the business acquisition that greased the wheels for the franchise crossover, a building block for grander crossovers in the future. The movie even pokes fun at the Disney-owned Marvel for persisting with the multiverse despite diminishing returns, while being a glaring example of why the returns keep diminishing.
If the MCU has grown into a monster devouring itself into a void of nothingness, the Deadpool movies have become the ouroboros in reverse: a franchise with its head up its own ass. Not that there's anything wrong with self-referential comedy.
Many a filmmaker has directed our attention to the artifice of their creation for laughs. In Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), a projectionist dreams of entering the very film he's projecting; once inside the film, he is subject to the whimsical rules of continuity editing; each cut leaves him stumbling and unmoored in one of the most enterprising sight gags. Mel Brooks took aim at the whitewashed myths of the Old West and the absurdity of racism in Blazing Saddles (1974), a satirical Western that has a brawl break out of the set, spread through the Warner Bros studios, pour into the streets and end at a theatre premiering Blazing Saddles. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) finds the monster Freddy Krueger has grown beyond folklore; out of his creator's control, he trespasses into the real world to haunt the actor who defeated him on screen. Two years later, with Scream, Craven established the rules of a slasher only to break them. Charlie Kaufman re-energised the modern book-to-film adaptation with a decidedly post-modern approach in Adaptation (2002); on being assigned to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, Kaufman wrote himself into the film; as he dramatized his own struggles to adapt said book, he confronted the self-doubts, the anxieties, the chaos that can paralyse the creative process. Ocean's Twelve (2004) had less serious intentions when it had Julia Roberts play a character who must pretend to be Julia Roberts.
Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles (1974). (Film still)
It is no surprise that some of the funniest shows on TV in the 21st century similarly took the self-referential route. The metamoments in Arrested Development were like annotated jokes in the margins of its episodes. But the show was also loaded with all sorts of running gags, callbacks and double entendres. Being a situational comedy, it had a good nose for inventing the most absurd situations without the need for a laughter track to punctuate its punchlines. What made the comedy of Community so refreshing was its pop culture references were intertwined with its identity as a sitcom. The nods to movies and shows never once felt out of place. In 20-odd-minute episodes, Dan Harmon's series encapsulated how it feels to live and nerd out in a world saturated by mass media. Community laid the groundwork for another Harmon creation with a flair for the meta: the animated series Rick & Morty. The meta-layers provide Rick, an alcoholic jerk of a superscientist, the necessary distance to confront his cynicism, his failures as a parent and a grandparent, and the consequences of his selfish actions. Its most meta episodes evoke the feeling of living inside an MC Escher lithograph. In Fleabag, creator-writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge's quizzical side-eyes to the camera gave the audience an intimate glimpse into her character's inner life. We as the audience became her confidante, her coping mechanism, her emergency escape to dissociate when she felt overwhelmed, nervous, embarrassed, guilty or witty. What was for her a way of taking a breather shaped not only how we saw her but how we engaged with her story. In Season 2, Waller-Bridge broke the very device of breaking the fourth wall. As Fleabag's emotional bond with Andrew Scott's Hot Priest deepens, he begins to clock her asides — a sign of just how much he truly sees her.
There is nothing quite as clever or thoughtful about Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick's approach to metacomedy. Their execution is tantamount to a gag being slapped in the face again and again instead of organically kneaded in. Sure, it might grab your attention by sheer force. But you are left feeling bruised. And not from spasms of laughter. Listening to Reynolds' endless asides is like watching a movie with its built-in commentary track on — and an exhausting one at that. The fourth wall has been flattened to dust. Irony loses its inherent superpower once writers begin to resort to flippant asides as a rhetorical device by default.
Deadpool's fourth-wall-breaking antics is a device carried over from the comics (Amazon)
Bear in mind Deadpool's fourth-wall-breaking antics aren't a character quirk created exclusively for the movies. It is a device that carries over from the comics. Deadpool, alter ego of one Wade Wilson, was a comic book character aware he was in a comic book. When he is being tortured in a Joe Kelly issue, he reasons, 'None of this is really happening. There is a man. With a typewriter. This is all part of his crazy imagination.' Gail Simone's run saw Deadpool refer to his not-so-inner monologue as his 'little yellow boxes.' Sometimes, the references were about things outside the confines of the comic book medium. In one issue, he cues an action movie montage, instructing the reader to play Pantera's Five Minutes Alone, as he gets ready to kill 10 zombie presidents and their henchmen in about six pages. In another, he shoots a guy in the head for even suggesting he preferred the Star Wars prequels to the original trilogy — years before Lucasfilm and Fox became Disney properties.
When the first Deadpool movie came out, Reese and Wernick didn't dial down the references. In one scene, a handcuffed Deadpool pulls out a knife, winks to the camera, says 'Ever see 127 Hours? Spoiler alert' before severing his hand. David Leitch, the director who replaced Miller for the sequel, billed himself in the playful opening credits as 'one of the guys who killed the dog in John Wick' (a piece of trivia that feels a lot less amusing when the end credits dedicate the movie to the memory of Sequana Harris, the stuntwoman who was killed while filming the movie). Deadpool & Wolverine repackages a lot of the same tired routines in a slightly different context. In its crosshairs are more or less the same targets. Ever so often, there might be a dick joke just to say 'Yeah, we went there if you can believe it.' Dress it up in postmodern regalia or undress it with a wink, a dick joke is still a dick joke.
'In Fleabag, creator-writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge's quizzical side-eyes to the camera gave the audience an intimate glimpse into her character's inner life.' (IMDB)
On page, Deadpool and Wolverine have enough in common (two violent men capable of healing themselves from any wound, haunted by the past and seeking redemption) and enough differences (a glib merc who won't shut up vs a grumpy loner who sulks in silence) to make for a watchable pair with testy dynamics. But their collisions barely draw a laugh. When Deadpool quips, 'That is a shit ton of exposition for a three-quel' or 'Big CG fight coming up!', don't mistake it for satire. Acknowledgement isn't commentary. It is a cynical ploy to vindicate a movie for perpetuating the very tropes it is mocking. It is the writers getting ahead of the punch line of any joke the audiences might make at its expense. The writers are essentially saying 'Hey, we know everyone's grown tired of these same old conventions. But look, we are pointing them out for you this time. Please laugh so as to grant us an automatic free pass.' This kind of self-referential comedy is facile. There are no set-ups to the punchline. Sometimes no punchlines even. Just throwaway lines. Why bother earning our laughter with a fresh well-written joke when you can simply piggyback on the coattails of old material? 'It's a superhero movie that doesn't take itself too seriously' has become an excuse for not putting in the work.
This consolidation project and all the Disney properties by themselves provide Deadpool & Wolverine a broad cultural ground to cover. While the movie takes a wild swing at the stakes, the milestones and the characters, it never really has anything interesting to say for itself. About the erasure of a past legacy to create a future one. About bureaucratic meddling. About the superhero monoculture. About our consumption patterns. About fan service. About the state of the entertainment industry. About the annoyingly snarky characters Reynolds always seems to play. The movie wants to have it both ways: to mock MCU while ultimately conforming to its vision. Deadpool is after all a Disney-sanctioned disruptor.
A scene from She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (IMDb)
In the season finale of the Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) finds herself in the middle of a chaotic conclusion. 'What is even happening here? This is a mess. None of these storylines make any sense,' she complains, looking straight at the camera. Jennifer then literally breaks out of the She-Hulk thumbnail on the Disney+ page to scold the writers, who blame it all on their boss Kevin. Not Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, but an AI bot named K.E.V.I.N. (Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus) wearing a similar kind of baseball cap. Calling itself 'the most advanced entertainment algorithm in the world,' K.E.V.I.N. claims to 'produce near-perfect products.' It takes some persuasion on Jennifer's part before K.E.V.I.N. tweaks the ending as she wants it. This turn of events could be seen as a Marvel-approved self-critique for churning out algorithmic trash as well as a warning about a future where AI could replace writers. But it also gets at the core of the problem when self-referential comedy is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card. There is a similar moment in Deadpool 2 where a plot complication is branded as 'lazy writing' — an apt epigraph indeed for formulaic meta-comedy.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.