The “Deadpool” Phenomenon and the American Male

The “Deadpool” phenomenon is more fun to observe than “Deadpool” itself is to watch—although the movie’s not a terrible experience, either. It’s the one superhero movie I’ve seen that feels like a classic-era comic book. It’s insolent yet earnest, flashily inventive and brazenly aggressive, joining seemingly boundless male-adolescent bravado with primal fears and a nearly pious dream of higher purpose. The flagrantly filthy (though actually grounded and principled) dialogue as well as the gory (but actually pristinely abstracted) action makes a mockery of a movie-ratings system that holds today’s teen-agers to standards of innocence that haven’t held since “The Age of Innocence.” “Deadpool” is no artistic masterwork, but it’s an exemplary pop contrivance, and what spares it from the charge of cynicism is the sense that its makers actually believe in the formula that they’ve devised and realized.