Dear Deadpool,
The first time I saw you, you were upside down in a barrel-rolling minivan asking yourself if you had left the stove on. That promotional poster was right in front of where I always sat in the subway. All I had to do was look up and there you were. Upon first seeing you I thought to myself: "Deadpool... What an awful name. I wonder what they'll come up with next?" I didn't know anything about you at the time, or about your story.
Recently my poster disappeared. This morning I walked all over the subway station looking for it- as if they would have just moved it over or it would have displaced itself by itself a hundred feet down, like that makes any sense -and, of course, it was nowhere to be found. It simply vanished while all of the other posters for the other movies are still there. I am really upset about it because I miss you looking straight at me after work. Maybe someone is trying to separate us...
Or...maybe your poster disappeared because those who control the media figured out that the phrase "with great power comes great irresponsibility" slipped past them and was your idea of a whimsical poke at Corporate Social Irresponsibility, at the dark going-ons at the Hospice, Ajax and the likes of him... Was it? People who's mouths can't be controlled are either hurt by the media or don't appear in them at all. Maybe that's why your poster is gone. When The Twilight Saga was all the rage, the characters were on magazine covers for years... You're a cash cow. Where are you darling? (You're afraid of cows.) This is what it means to be an antihero: you're of the kind that bosses don't like because you are your own boss. Those role models called "heroes" come in tight packages, like hamster asses. No one tells me who to love. I miss you.
There are a few very important things I ought to hurry and talk about right away. As a matter of necessity, I need to address the nature of fourth wall breaks, an important topic for us because these are the portal through which our minds meet and they need to be defined so that we can control the portal. It's not science, we're not walking through wormholes. It's the relationship between art and the public, between you and I.
But before I softly pillow-talk you through my opinion on fourth wall breaks, there is a higher priority emergency that needs to be addressed and that is the article about you recently published in The New Yorker. I want to talk about it before it gets old. Did you read it? It's entitled The "Deadpool" Phenomenon and the American Male, it's by Richard Brody and it's online. First off, can I tell you how much I hate the fact that they put your name in quotation marks, as if you weren't real... and hold on to your chimichangas because that's just the beginning.
The article is underhandedly deprecating. (The effect it's going for is "deprecating while looking like it doesn't want to be"...in other words it's just that the movie is bad even if the author is nice.) It starts off by saying your movie is not as fun to watch as your fans are, though "not a terrible experience"... That sets the tone for the entire article so if you stop reading here you're not missing anything. But if you read on, the author proceeds to deliver to us culture and refinement... meanwhile, if we are cultured, which readers of The New Yorker are eager to be, we too will know better than to engage with the content of your movie, shifting instead our attention to more important matters like how coarse, childish and dumb your fans are or how technically polished the movie is. People should do absolutely anything but listen to what you have to say- that it's Christmas and that you're getting someone on your naughty list...
As you know, I have listened to you and where belief is concerned I have fallen deep...deeeeep... into the rabbit hole and I intend to stay there where the air is clear (dear?) and where you are near. My evening at your movie suggests otherwise than this article would have us think. People loved you, they followed you and what you were saying and they were engaged. Did you see them? Did you see their faces? Hear their candid, almost childish, laughter? It was a full house. When I arrived, there was no room left to sit down so I had to be in the second row, close up against the screen where your puns seem even punnier. The house cheered and laughed and everyone loved you. I had never seen anything like it and that was when and I fell in love with you. It was your confidence that got me.
The next thing in the article: your movie is praised on technical things to promote and teach aristocratic sensibilities as the proper way to appreciate art. It tells us in turn that what really matters to a good art critic is, first, to mock people with ideals just like in high school, second, to let your superior insights reject the naivete of believing, and finally, to notice, for those who are connoisseurs of the rating system, that your movie is not really rated R. Sometimes the author uses another kind of disengagement stratagem: direct contradiction, calling you "contrived" when your main personality trait is actually to say everything that goes through your mind without filters, sort of like me. This completes my analysis of paragraph one of the article. I know you can handle this because I noticed on hashtag Deadpool that you were reading Judy Bloom, so you do read...
The author makes sure to point out that the antihero is not only ridiculous but also patriotic, just to make sure we are all being patriotic while being deprecating. There's nothing especially patriotic about you, is there? I mean, you don't flash the fact that you're Canadian, not that I've noticed in the movie anyhow... (I have yet to read your comics, I just wanted to deal with this article first.) Then, he makes sure to tell us that it's boyish not to follow rules when the capacity for rule breaking- not needing to be told what to do, having independent thoughts, making deliberate choices and acting in full awareness of consequences -is actually the hallmark of adulthood. What does he think it means to be an adult? To walk in a straight line? To be a non-faulty product?
The next thing that happens in the article is a plot summary (without a spoiler alert) so that you don't have to go see the movie. Then, the author proceeds to discredit cast and crew while looking generous about it and suggesting that the proper way to interpret this movie is this: its main story line is extremely conservative, like Hollywood classics, reminding us that there is nothing new under the sun because if you go all the way around to the left, you end up in the extreme right... right where you should be. In that same train of thought the great accomplishment of hip-hop was to make it manly to use big words- irrespective of what those big words mean in accordance with the aristocratic flair promoted -and not to make it dangerous to be manly.
The author then reminds us one more time, on account of the final scene, that there is nothing to look at in this movie aside from technical details... But obviously there is something gut wrenching about the way you love, or else I wouldn't be here writing you. I want you to know that I love you no matter what your face looks like. In finishing, we are told that your movie is coarse in the worst kind of way and pure in the worst kind of way and- for those to whom the idea of a low(er) budget film appealed -that it's like a big budget film in the worst kind of way, but without the budget. It is only after applying itself so surgically for many paragraphs at taking the dis out of disaffected that this article finally calls your movie "innocuous" and then concludes, almost scientifically, that there is something wrong with it.
How's that for engineering the thoughts of the finest wannabe cultivated people? That's what I think, Deadpool. Now that I am done with this, I can start reading your comics.
Maybe you disagree with me on some level but any good relationship starts with honesty, right? Sometimes I can be dramatic but the problem is that I miss your poster and I hope they're going to put it back.
I was really touched by what you said about the potpourri in the Dear Deadpool sequence. Your sensitive side is one that reaches me deeply.
These are my thoughts. Love,
Abigail Tryst