Deadpool and Wolverine, bankable heroes of a bankrupt culture

Until this week, the R-rated film with the biggest box office in America was "The Passion of the Christ." In a damning indication of where the culture has gone in 20 years when Mel Gibson’s magnum opus debuted, the new record holder is the latest and greatest exercise in intellectual property exploitation known as "Deadpool & Wolverine" — a movie panned and reviled for its shamelessly irony-poisoned fan service, which happens to lean almost entirely on trashy juvenile humor.

For these reasons, most critics — from the trad right as well as the intersectional left — have rushed toward moral condemnation of the film. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the film’s paying audience, increasingly protected by a dissident-ish media sphere of Rogan-esque righties and disgruntled liberals who’d just as soon hold fire on a Hollywood stinker that at least avoids wokeness.

But the bankruptcy of the culture lit up by "Deadpool & Wolverine" isn’t reducible to ethics or ideology. There are lessons to this film’s success that should be clocked by anyone with a serious interest in pumping up America’s aesthetic and artistic vitality.

Once upon a time, that kind of heroic calling inspired even the more morally compromised of Hollywood’s executives to take big swings — and, often, to take big profits. Unfortunately, the spiritual message behind so much of our once-great cinema was too warmed-over of a new age trip to survive the pressures placed on us by the digital revolution.

The first is shockingly simple: Marketing doesn’t just work, it’s mission-critical. A movie as annoying and vacuous as this has done extraordinarily well because its stars and its studio insisted on putting it in front of the target audience. Today, most of media culture is captive to a FUD-driven (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) obsession with organic virality. Corporations, brands, and news organizations resist big marketing spending or simply don’t know how to effectively market their products, pinning their hopes on the belief that throwing content at the wall and seeing what “blows up” is a viable business model. Alas!

Meanwhile, ad agencies have consolidated their power into a handful of cartelized entities — flexing their market power to impose across the internet of content news “safety” standards that conform to their hyper-woke principles. The kind of good content that millions and millions ostensibly crave simply cannot make a dent in a culture controlled by propaganda cartels ... unless that content is effectively marketed. It feels miserable to be in a place where we have to speak of having the courage to market, but here we are.

That’s not the only lesson our vulgar superheroes are teaching us. Vince Vaughn recently went off on why the R-rated comedies finding big audiences are IP retreads like "Deadpool" and not the kind of fare he rose to fame with — original narratives about timelessly relatable human predicaments and situations. It’s a risk-averse double bind. Not only do the consolidated media corporations want to extract every last drop of value from the properties they already own, they also want to avoid placing costly bets on talent that don't pay off.

There are important exceptions to that rule: tech companies in the entertainment business. Amazon spent huge amounts on its "Lord of the Rings" project and considered its very mixed success an essential first step in continuing to use its market advantages to find or unearth bankable new talent that can deliver fresher, more meaningful entertainment. Netflix and Apple, the other major tech firms in the content game, also have the war chest to make similar gambles.

But by and large, media executives know they’re quite replaceable if the projects they’re responsible for don’t work out. That leads to a strange kind of content bottleneck: Cautious execs converge on mediocre projects that are also “safely” woke — ideally, woke enough to attract each stripe of the woke flag but not so woke that the normies are scared off.

The result is an arts and entertainment culture dominated by corporate content that’s too ideological and formulaic to serve the primary purpose of film and television in America, which is to help people make spiritual or psychological sense of the present world they’re in personally and socially. This is a strange kind of cultural bankruptcy, masked by an equally uncanny kind of cultural inflation — debasing the value of our cultural currency and creating a bubble that must pop. Hopefully, it pops before our ability to make sense of our shared world in the present moment breaks down completely.

In the meantime, there’s one more harsh lesson about our aesthetic and artistic poverty to learn from the dysfunctional Marvel duo. The deepest reason why Hollywood isn’t making the kind of richly human R-rated comedies Vaughn and many others fondly remember is because writers and auteurs need to create them — and this requires from writers and auteurs a profound understanding of not the past or the future but the present.

Today, our present place and time is a scandal in the old sense: a stumbling block that sends away many — even the smartest and most creative — to retreat into nostalgia, futurism, or fantasy, places in alternate times where one doesn’t have to deal with our present reality, where our personal and shared spiritual fates are busy being decided.

The only way our culture will artistically and aesthetically restructure out of bankruptcy is for a lot of money to be reallocated toward identifying, developing, supporting, and rewarding the very few writers and auteurs spiritually strong and attuned enough to face the reality of our present place and time. These precious artists meet us with love and suffering amid our miseries and hopes and put soulful visions to screen that let wide audiences join creators in joyfully and painfully communing through images that measure up to our real lives.

Once upon a time, that kind of heroic calling inspired even the more morally compromised of Hollywood’s executives to take big swings — and, often, to take big profits. Unfortunately, the spiritual message behind so much of our once-great cinema was too warmed-over of a new age trip to survive the pressures placed on us by the digital revolution. Now is the time for artistic visionaries who see the truth of our spiritual condition, and for the deep-pocketed companies and individuals that can bring their visions to life, to summon some fresh courage of their own and get to work.