20th Century Fox

Minor spoilers ahead. Whatever.

On Thursday night, I went to see Deadpool 2. Like many millions of Americans these days, I love a good superhero movie — especially since I have been reading comic books since I was five years old — but I very emphatically did not enjoy the first outing of the B-list Marvel character in 2016. I found its particular brand of cynicism — gleeful violence punctuated by sardonic quips from Ryan Reynolds — off-putting and depressing. So I was not particularly excited to sit through its sequel. But I am admittedly a sucker for being able to participate in the conversation around zeitgeist-y movies, and my friends were going, so at the very least, an opening night screening at my neighborhood theater presented an excuse to get out of my apartment and hang out with them for a couple of hours. This is, of course, how these mindless fantasy entertainments have become the ubiquitous cultural behemoths of our time: by beating us into submission.

On Friday morning, along with many millions of Americans, I woke to the tragic and all-too-familiar news of yet another deadly school shooting, this time at Santa Fe High School in southeast Texas. As of this writing, 10 are dead, most of them students, at the hands of yet another violently disaffected white male. It was the 16th school shooting so far in 2018, which is now 20 weeks old. These incidents, occurring almost once a week in this country, have claimed 31 lives, many of them teenagers murdered in their classrooms before their lives had a chance to really begin; before prom, before graduation, before going off to college, before falling in love, before children of their own. Their families, their friends, their communities have been torn asunder and will never be the same. That we do nothing to prevent these senseless murders, that our politicians stand by and offer empty thoughts and prayers, and false promises of action, while reaping blood-soaked campaign donations from the NRA, is the great shame of our country.

Stuart Villanueva/The Galveston County Daily News, via AP

The unabated epidemic of gun violence in the United States is a complex problem, arising at a confluence of factors that include gun access, mental health care, toxic masculinity, class disparity, and racial discrimination, systemic and otherwise. But just because a problem is complex, and requires that many steps be taken before it can be solved, is not an excuse to take no steps at all. When it comes to staunching this bloody epidemic, I am in favor of radical gun control. The kinds of yes-the-government-really-is-coming-for-all-your-guns measures that we are likely to never see in our lifetimes, thanks to the widespread failure of moral courage on the parts of institutions meant to protect us and the politicians who populate them. Buybacks, assault rifle bans, stringent background checks, prolonged waiting periods, notes of approval from licensed mental health professionals, national registries, hell, a ban on all private gun ownership, whatever limit you can think of, I am in favor of it.

But the culture of violence in America runs deep, embedded in an extreme interpretation of Constitutional rights, and propagated not by politics alone, but also by our popular entertainment, particularly the images we see in movies and on television. When we become desensitized to violence, our empathy for our fellow man, our very humanity, is threatened. We even become desensitized to the images we see of murdered children on the news, convinced that this is just the way things are, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Now I’m no Tipper Gore; I don’t believe that simply playing a violent video game is going to cause a teenager to bring a gun to school and shoot his classmates. I am not against the depiction of violence onscreen, nor am I advocating for censorship of art. But onscreen violence should matter. We should feel its weight. We should not be encouraged to laugh when, say, Deadpool — a mentally unstable white dude who proudly doesn’t fit into society, and who, confident in his righteousness, never met an injustice he couldn’t correct by shooting it — decapitates and dismembers his enemies. Senseless murder and mayhem should not be treated as a joke, let alone a solution.

In Deadpool 2, nothing, least of all the violence, matters. It is a movie that actively conditions you not to think. Its trademark so-called humor is the breakneck deployment of cultural references — to other superheroes, to other movies, to other characters played by Ryan Reynolds, to its own budget and production. Its meta-jokes have no set-ups, only punchlines, meant to induce a Pavlovian response in its audience, wherein recognition equals laughter. All of that not-thinking lets the movie’s cartoonish bloodletting go down easy. And because Deadpool’s primary superpower is that he cannot die, he is able to suffer every brutal form of punishment imaginable, entirely without consequence. Cue the audience laughter. It is unclear why exactly the audience laughs. Is it funny to see a superhero pumped full of bullet holes, to see his spine broken in half after a fall, to see his head turned backwards after another, to see him explode into a pile of jumbled body parts? And to then inflict that same brutality on the countless unnamed antagonists that appear onscreen only to be killed? I suppose it must be funny when the superhero in question says “fuck” a lot. The audience laughs because they think the movie is getting away with something — breaking a set of studio-established rules for what a superhero movie can be onscreen — and that they are in on it, an anarchic middle finger raised to the establishment. Sadly, Deadpool 2 is what passes for subversive in today’s popular entertainment landscape, when really it just represents lowest-common-denominator commercialism at its most crass.

The first Deadpool movie was hailed in 2016 in part for proving the financial viability of R-rated superhero movies. Indeed, its opening weekend box office was the largest ever for an R-rated movie, and its final domestic tally represents both the largest for an R-rated comic book adaptation and the second largest for any R-rated movie (behind only The Passion of the Christ, that other sadistic and blood-spattered superhero movie). And perhaps its success did embolden 20th Century Fox to take a chance on James Mangold’s Logan, the R-rated third installment of the X-Men-adjacent Wolverine franchise. Logan, however, does not use its R rating to sate its audience’s hunger for ironic bloodshed. Its violence is not played for laughs; it is brutal, and it matters. The entire film is a meditation on the cost of violence, and how the burden of a life of violence weighs on Logan and affects those closest to him. Unlike Deadpool 2, which reverses every death of consequence through time travel trickery by the end of the movie, the violence in Logan has consequences. The dead stay dead, and there is a real emotional weight to both the physical and psychological violence perpetrated in the film. Logan’s tone is sorrowful, a superhero lamentation. It is Wolverine meets Unforgiven. And through technical accomplishment and seriousness of purpose, Logan rises to the level of art. Accordingly and unsurprisingly, Deadpool earned about 60 percent, or close to $140 million, more than Logan at the domestic box office. Logan had a story to tell; Deadpool had a franchise to spawn.