Knew I was going to see this one pretty early on. Despite my issues with previous Ryan Reynolds vehicles, his work in the first two Deadpool movies was great, and as the initial teasers started showing up, I started actively not watching any of the other trailers that were showing up everywhere online. (I’ve had this practice of nescience for a while, even though I haven’t named it until recently.) Arranged to see it with a few friends, and bought tickets ahead of time, though it was the into the second week of release before we caught it. I went in pretty much blind.
And really enjoyed it!
(There’s something to be said for actively avoiding the spoilers and the level of enjoyment of a given work.)
The movie lived up to the hype, a frenetic bundle of kinetic energy that only slowed down when it had to interact with the TVA HQ, in it’s studio mandated ties to “metaplot” and the wider MCU and streaming series (which perhaps says something about the issues with that part of the franchise, that it’s such an anchor that it can drag the momentum of Deadpool to a halt). But the jokes landed, the violence was cartoony (in the way of Warner Brothers, not Disney), the cameos were a genuine delightful surprise, and the 4th wall was repeatedly broken.
With a wink and a smile. 😉
Deadpool’s charm is that the character seems aware. I saw Deadpool with someone who hadn’t seen the previous films and had skipped most of the larger MCU, and they found Deadpool acting as their voice in the movie, asking the questions they wanted asked (what is Gambit saying?) and pointing out the absurdity of it (“til you’re 90!”). Deadpool’s superpower is being able to break the 4th wall, but that break goes both ways, bringing the audience into the film to enjoy the movie alongside him. And it’s that joy that is infectious, and makes the movie fun.
With Deadpool‘s success as the highest-grossing R-rated film ever (at the time I’m writing this), I fear we’ll see a slate of movies leaning onto the violence and profanity in the hopes of the chasing that same success. But in doing so they’ll be learning the wrong lessons from the film.
What have we learned?
Move fast
Have fun
Keep it short
Don’t worry about explaining the plot (too much – show don’t tell)
What’s happening to the Star Wars universe? I mean, yes, there are problems, and some of these are coming to the forefront, where the demand for increased throughput of the EFP (ie “content”) through the pipes of consumption exposes any flaws or imperfections in the infrastructure, and… to absolutely bury the metaphor… eventually the system buckles under the pressure and cracks…
Spewing stuff everywhere in full Technicolor with Dolby sound… ?
Anyhoo, this is an article on tone, mostly. Shades of grey and brown, apparently. Disney isn’t using the full color palette is what I’m getting at. But we’re starting at the end of the discussion, with burst pipes and a flooded basement. How did we get here?
It started with a re-watch of SW9:RotS on the streams a little while back. I was half interested, and hardly paying attention when the scene in the Emperor’s rejuvenation chamber came up… and it struck me.
The Grimdark.
The biomechanical rejuvenation chambers, the archaeotech, the fractured remains, the body horror.
These are not elements of a Star Wars movie.
They come from… elsewhere.
And I think this speaks to the recent disconnect [between the fans and the franchise].
As we’ve argued elsewhere on the Grimdark* , it is an essential feature of the Warhammer 40K universe.
(*check out podcast episode #… Whoops. Did I post that? One moment…)
And as we’ve argued at the outset of the Appendix W series, W40K was a hodge-podge of every science fiction trope from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, put in a blender, and with the mix pushed through the speakers turned up to 11. And early Star Wars (the original trilogy, plus some of the EU stuff available at the time, like the ongoing Marvel comic series and early novelizations) was definitely thrown in the blender like everything else.
Vader as an armored force-using, laser sword wielding transhuman cyborg super-soldier definitely counts as a proto-40K influence.
Of course, in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there’s a couple thousand like him working for the Imperium of man alone. In W40K, the dial that goes up to 11 increases exponentially. Darth Vader would be in for a very tough fight.
The other big influence that makes the Grimdark grim and/or dark is that fallen sense of technology. The “dying earth” subgenre of sci-fi, where the 20th century may be a distant memory. Often indistinguishable from fantasy, and drawing mostly from a couple strong influences like well, Vance’s Dying Earth and the Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer series**. And Herbert’s Dune, after a fashion. All of these are in the grimdark blender too.
** Did we post that up in the Appendix W either? No? Well then, shortly.
And while there is a pretty direct line between Dune and SW4:ANH, the grim dark filter hadn’t been built yet. So the appearance of the Grimdark in the SW universe in 2019 signified a rather significant shift in tone. And it’s appeared in the Mando-verse as well over on Disney+, notably in Season 3, with the Armorer and the mass jet pack fight.
Much like the emperor’s rejuvenation chamber in SW9:RotS, the overlap of the grimdark becomes readily apparent in Mando S3. Part of this is just the material there’s only so many ways to portray a massed group of faceless space knights, and the shift in focal point characters in SW from “space monk with laser sword” to “power armor space knight” will by necessity lead in certain ways. There’s just certain kinds of stories you can tell in that framework, and GW has managed to deliver an exterminatus to the concept with over 100 novels(?) in the 40K universe.
But I digress: when we see the jetpack assault by the massed Mandalorian army in S3E8, there has been no better cinematic visualization of an Adeptus Astartes assault company incursion. And Paz’s stand with the minigun (with it’s echoes of both Jesse “the Body” Ventura’s Blain in Predator (1987) and Jiang Wen’s Baze Malbus in the aforementioned Rogue One (2016)) could substitute for 35 years of a Terminator Astartes armed with an Assault Cannon facing off against innumerable foes. And that last image provides us a rather helpful clue.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of inception, when the SW universe made the Grimdark turn. While there are elements of it throughout the sequel trilogy, Rogue One (2016) feels like a reasonable candidate. It too marked a dramatic shift in visuals and tone, standing apart from the “mainline” Star Wars films the way that it does, and with the generally positive fan and critical reception it enjoyed as well. Rogue One was still recognizably Star Wars, though darker in tone and “more mature”, appealing to an older audience that had fond memories of the original (and perhaps even the prequel) trilogies, and appreciated the mature take. In a post-AGoT era for genre on the big screen, the expectations of a more mature audience were met by Rogue One‘s screen presence.
But this more mature audience isn’t necessarily the audience that the sequel trilogy was needing to court. Star Wars seems to be pointed at a mainline audience of “the eternal 12 year old”***, an archetypical audience that is seduced by tales of the hero’s journey and see themselves within it, as long as they have the merch to go with. And Disney loves getting new fans for their franchises.
***: I could be wrong; they could be as young as eight.
And this is where the tone comes back into the picture. Because the Grimdark is defined as a universe where everything sucks and there are no good guys. Star Wars is more famously a universe with a New Hope.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for darker tales within the Star Wars universe; there most definitely is. The challenge comes in crossing the streams, mixing the Duff with the Duff Dark and Duff Light. Bringing the grimdark aesthetic over from a one-off that was successful for a host of reasons (of which the aesthetic was only a small part) into the mainline film series risks turning off the fans that the mainline audience are geared toward, the ETYO that Disney craves. Star Wars is an umbrella brand, and not all components that contribute to the franchise need to be geared to every part. They recognize this with the merch (I’m sure there is some overlap between Grogu squishmallows, SW Lego builders, and Mando cosplayers, but y’know, different strokes rule the world).
So is this a problem? No, not really, not in the sense that we’re contributing to the “Problemitization of Everything”. And perhaps not in the sense of it’s connection to other ongoing issues. Just an observation, drawn from the images on screen, and the connections and linkages that exist. It’s part of a trend, perhaps, one that fits with some other things that are going on.
The shift in tone, may be a larger problem, long-term, for a multi-billion dollar corporation that is struggling with producing sustainable results while keeping the franchise afloat. But that’s a them problem, and possibly unrelated to this shift in tone.
But it might be, too. I feel like this bears looking out for over the coming years.
Credits:
Star Wars images copyright Disney 2019, 2023
Warhammer 40K images copyright Games Workshop 2023
Where is the line… … when the joke stops being funny? … between cosplay and copaganda? … between parody and promotion? … between representation and reinforcement? … where the successive waves of Disneyization of the Star Wars universe have blurred the lines so much that we forgot what the original represents. That those are indeed “the baddies”. Because if we look at the subtext here, or perhaps even the literal text, it isn’t that subtle.
Then what we have here is objectively terrible:
A foot soldier of an authoritarian and fascist empire uses a war trophy taken as spoils following the extermination of a minority population and celebrates with the unboxing of a new weapon of war.
Did the above capture the essence of it?
Ah, it’s funny, it’s goofy, it’s relatable. And through this cuddlefication of brutality*, the line continues to blur.
When we look back, can we tell when the line has been crossed? Or is that only something we can tell in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight? (Do we know we’ve reached the Rubicon, or are we informed after the fact?)
Where we can say this, this is the point where we became accommodating, where we become comfortable with fascism, with the fun-loving stormtroopers and their goofy antics, where the clear delineations of the original films become blurred and muddied, cuddly and coddled.
So if this is the line, when do we step back? Can we back away? Are we already too late?
(*Perhaps I’m being dramatic? Maybe, but I don’t think so.)
The genesis for this was a cutesy stormtrooper “unboxing” video that circulated on social media, most notably the ‘Tube and the ‘Gram, with the cover that I embedded above. (There’s other similar videos up there as well.)
If you need to see the originals, you can find them on the following YouTube channel:
I had thought about directly embedding them, but decided not to based on the subject matter.
It’s possible to recognize that a lot of skill, talent, and resources went in to the production of the videos on that channel. We’re trying to address the broader impact of the spread of this content, and the underlying ideology that it supports.
This also was (one of) the reasons underlying the Not Feeling the Fourth post from a few weeks back. More on the other reason will be coming soon.
