Deadpool 2 Explained - The woman problem, family and the tragic backstory

"Bring it on, One-Eyed Willie." The first Deadpool movie introduces us to a superhero who insists he’s not heroic. "I may be super, but heh, I'm not hero." But the sequel Deadpool 2 is done fighting that superhero label -- and the whole movie is about revealing the core themes of the superhero story in a deeper way. So like in the first film, what we're seeing is that Deadpool's bold breaking down of conventions is really just on the outermost surface, in its wordplay, its self-aware dialogue, its humor. "But here we are, trying to overcome our differences. Like Beyoncé says, please, please stop cheating on me." If you go even a little deeper than that, this mock-superhero movie is actually super conventional. "Our favorite thing to do is to come into a genre and make fun of it while also being it, so that's what we do with Deadpool. We go ahead and parody superhero movies but we are a superhero movie." So what does Deadpool 2 reveal to us about common themes in superhero movies -- and what does it say about both the strengths and limitations of those conventional stories that get retold? "Everyone calm down, the pros are here, I." Before we go on, if you're new here be sure to subscribe and click the bell to get notified about all of our new videos. As we said in our first Deadpool video, the plot of the first movie is a romantic comedy. And because Wade and Vanessa are such a fun couple, viewers were excited to see more of their dynamic in the sequel. "Kiss me like you miss me, red." But right away in Deadpool 2, Vanessa is fatally shot, and for the rest of the movie we get to see her for only a few moments in a kind of afterlife place. There’s a joke opening credits sequence that asks in text, “Did they just kill her?” and “WTF?” And yes, most of us in the audience are probably thinking, “Seriously, did they really just do that?” but not necessarily for the reasons the filmmakers seem to think. The tone of these faux credits implies that they think they’re shocking us, but the real shock is that they’ve just resorted to such an outdated and predictable cliché. Essentially the problem here is that the writers sidelined a character who was interesting in her own right and could have done a lot more in this movie -- because instead of developing her as a character, they wanted to turn her into a motivation for the male protagonist. This is a hugely hackneyed and lazy plot device that we’ve seen in countless superhero and action movies. "Rachel believed in what you stood for." As critics have noted, there's even a word for killing off a woman as a means of creating motivation for the hero -- and that’s “fridging.” The term comes from Gail Simone’s idea of the “women in refrigerators” trope -- Simone came up with this in response to a Green Lantern comics plotline, where Green Lantern’s girlfriend is murdered and her dead body is put in a refrigerator. Ironically, that’s the source material for another Ryan Reynolds superhero movie -- the very one that Deadpool and Deadpool 2 mock mercilessly -- "And please don't make the supersuit green, or animated!" Deadpool 2 even ends with a post-credits scene of Deadpool going back in time to shoot Reynolds before he can make that movie. But the Deadpool franchise prides itself on supposedly picking apart and subverting tired story conventions -- so how did the filmmakers not spot this gaping cliché when it came to Vanessa in their movie? In interviews, the Deadpool 2 screenwriters have addressed the fridging problem -- but they actually kind of make it worse. Incredibly, the screenwriters said in an interview with Vulture that they didn’t even think about this. Co-screenwriter Rhett Reese said that initially Vanessa was only going to break up with Deadpool, but then they decided that Deadpool is at his best when he’s at rock bottom. So in Reese’s words, Vanessa had to die to, quote, “engender great suffering” for Deadpool -- a slightly unfortunate choice of words there. Vanessa isn’t even the only case of “fridging” in this movie. Josh Brolin’s Cable is traveling through time to retroactively prevent the deaths of his wife and daughter, whom we only see momentarily. So this whole plot is driven by the violent deaths of female characters who are almost totally offscreen while men take action on their behalf. For the brief moments these women are onscreen their brutal murders are being romanticized -- and romanticizing or sexualizing violence against women is another huge problem in action and comic book stories. Co-screenwriter Paul Wernick summed it up, quote, “the desire was to give a motivation to both Cable and to Deadpool.” In reference to criticism about how they treated Vanessa, Reese also said, quote, “I don’t think that’ll be a large concern, but it didn’t even really occur to us.” We would disagree that this isn’t a concern -- it very much matters, and it certainly doesn't belong in a franchise that positions itself as a fresh deconstruction of comic book movie tropes above all. The really strange part about not utilizing Vanessa in the story is that in the comics she actually has a superhero identity, CopyCat. Fans of the comics even expressed hopes that they would get to see CopyCat eventually. There’s a lot she could be doing in a movie about a team of superheroes -- so it kind of seems like the writers had to work harder to leave her out of that team and intentionally throw out this aspect of the source material. The writers did add one female superhero to Deadpool’s new gang -- Zazie Beetz’s Domino. And Domino is great -- she’s got the really fun superpower of luck. "Luck isn't a superpower." "Yes, it is." And she’s a happy addition to the crew. But sadly, it feels almost as if the creators felt they’d filled their quota with Domino, and that box was ticked. So why is there this assumption that a movie about a group of superheroes just needs one woman on the team? See: The first Avengers movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Justice League. Why couldn’t X-Force have included Copycat as well as Domino? We’re not counting Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio as core parts of X-Force because they’re barely used on the team. Deadpool 2 is very overtly trying to feature a diverse cast -- Deadpool even says, "Our group will be forward thinking, gender neutral." And it’s great that the film features characters with a variety of backgrounds and ***-orientations -- it’s more upfront about Deadpool’s pansexuality than the first movie was, and Yukio and Negasonic are the first openly gay couple in a major superhero movie. At the same time though, Yukio and Negasonic get almost no real development. And the diversity here feels more like tokenism, since none of these characters get any kind of time to explore their backgrounds or deeper story. So again Deadpool straddles this weird line where it’s pointing out a lot about superhero movies, "Tell me they got that in slow motion." while not really changing much -- and especially when it comes to how they treated Vanessa in this story, that’s disappointing. Deadpool himself tells us straight off the bat that this is a family movie, "Deadpool 2 is a family film." just as he told us the first film was a love story. "And that's exactly what this is -- a love story." Of course the joke is that this “family movie” is gleefully gory and profane -- but the overtly R-rated tone compensates for a surprisingly sweet and sentimental message underneath. Contemporary superhero movies are all about embracing your found family. This is at the heart of Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, and Deadpool’s favorite reference point, the X-Men. "I am not X-Men material at all. First off, I'm not even a ***." But a ragtag team like the X-force is probably a more realistic vision of what family feels like -- a random assortment of oddballs whom life throws us together with and whom we come to love, for reasons we don’t totally understand. "Any power you want to tell us about?" "I don't-I don't have one. Um, I just saw the ad." "You're in." To get more specific within the family theme, this is a movie about fatherhood. Deadpool alludes to his own daddy issues, and he wants to start a family with Vanessa, before he ends up becoming a surrogate father to Russell. Originally, the filmmakers planned on picking up the sequel with Deadpool as a biological dad, but they said they couldn’t find a way to make it work. It makes sense that Deadpool is now tackling this milestone of becoming a father -- as we've talked about the first Deadpool offered men in the audience an outlet for their romantic side. So the sequel is speaking to the desire for family bonds from the male perspective of its demographic. Centering on the father-son dynamic fits Deadpool 2 squarely in the superhero genre of today. The daddy issues trope comes up a lot in the MCU. "You are a vain, greedy, cruel boy!" "And you are an old man and a fool!" Deadpool 2 makes tons of jokes mocking the superhero genre, as usual. "So dark. You sure you're not from the DC universe?" But on the deeper level, the movie is completely endorsing the sentiment of the family story. There's not a significant difference plot and emotional payoff-wise between what Deadpool is doing with these themes, and what Guardians, Avengers: Infinity War or even Toy Story, Up and Monsters, Inc. are doing. Star and co-screenwriter Ryan Reynolds even said that the Deadpool 2 storyline was partly influenced by Pixar movies. Deadpool 2 also engages more with the idea of the superhero’s tragic backstory. In the first movie, Deadpool and Vanessa banter about being abused as kids, but it’s mainly played as a joke, "I was molested." "Me too. Uncle." "Uncles. They took turns." In the sequel Deadpool gets serious about this issue. He’s overcome with emotion when he finds out Russell was abused by his headmaster. He says, "you can always tell" -- implying he recognizes trauma because he’s experienced it. In the comics, Deadpool was physically abused by his father and later sexually abused in foster care. As an adult, he was sexually assaulted by Typhoid Mary. Even if his backstory is a little more explicit or gritty than the average traumatized hero’s, ultimately it feeds the classic tale of the hero who channels his suffering into making the world better. Just as Vanessa and Wade connected about the darkness in their lives, darkness here becomes a vehicle for connection. Deadpool isn't an automatic do-gooder. He needs his heroism to be inspired by personal feeling. In the first movie, he discovers it via his love for Vanessa. "The right girl will bring out the hero in you." In this movie, it's his pain that lets him empathize with Russell and become a heroic father figure. The trauma theme also ties into the movie’s time-travel motif -- another common element in comic book and superhero movies. In fact, turning back time was a huge part of this year’s Avengers: Infinity War, which also starred Josh Brolin. "Pump the hate brakes, Thanos." As in many of these other movies, time-travel in Deadpool 2 is driven by the desire to go back and undo wrongs of the past. But Deadpool resolves to stop Cable from killing Russell -- the future murderer of Cable’s family -- insisting instead on saving the boy from becoming a killer. "I ain't letting cable kill this kid." So the moral of the story is that instead of wishing we could literally go back and fix past events, which most of us generally can’t, we should focus on improving the future. Pay it forward. And that, after all, is what parenthood is all about. Trying to make life better for our kids, trying to be better than our parents were for us. "Kids give us a chance to be better than we used to be." In the end, though, there is some past-altering after all: in the post-credits scenes, Deadpool conveniently gets to turn back time and save Vanessa, delivering that last-minute happy ever-after which completely undoes the “motivation” that led the screenwriters to waste Vanessa for the whole movie. So like its predecessor, Deadpool 2 delivers a pretty wholesome message and conventional plot within its fun, provocative packaging. Audiences enjoy the Deadpool movies because of their clever humor and self-referentiality. "Your time's up, you dumb [BLEEP]." "Well, that's just lazy writing." And Deadpool 2 is even funnier and better in a lot of ways than the first movie was. But we can’t help wishing that Deadpool’s smart-alecky innovation would push a little further, escape the group-think, and do something more meaningfully fresh with the deeper story itself. For that, perhaps we can look forward to Deadpool 3. "[BLEEP] it, they probably won't even make a three." "Yeah why would they? Stop at two. You killed it." It's Debra. And Susannah. You're watching ScreenPrism. Thanks guys so much for watching. We post videos every Saturday and Sunday and during the week so hit that subscribe button and you'll get access to all of our videos. We can't thank you enough for your support. Thank you!