Okay this is just false lmao.
I donāt want to get into it bc I hate participating in internet arm-chair academics shit but like metamodernism doesnāt have awareness in the first place lmao. Iāve been wasting my day reading critiques of meta modernism (and feeling increasingly depressed), and the oscillation in it, i knew I had a problem with it, just couldnāt pinpoint it, is inherently meaningless. Itās being both (modernism and post-) at the same time and going between them, avoiding their conflicts. Metamodernism isnāt a synthesis, rather placed in between, its praxis is meaningless as contradictory, because even in metamodern writings it claims to be descriptive rather than prescriptive of our situation, not a dogma, but then praises the oscillation in a manifesto-like way as if itās meaningful progress past postmodernism.
Deadpool and Wolverine then, is just metamodernism personified, the oscillation between Deadpoolās postmodernism and Wolverineās modernism, a film about both, not about what each means for the other, not their relationship, but rather oscillating between them over the sequence of the film. For example the intro scene, and Deadpoolās scenes as a whole, is completely postmodern, taking the āgrand narrativeā of Wolverine, his meaning, and literally ripping it out of its grave and apart to kill TVA time police who manage more āgrand narrativesā, but then Wolverineās scenes are all about his more grounded, modernist search for meaning. Overall, the film uses the two characters, but thatās it, thereās no fundamental shift in either, none for the world it inhabits, not even really the meta-narrative of MCU films, all the characters stay alive, the TVA didnāt change, neither characterās worlds changed, itās like nothing happened, because nothing really did. This film is not a synthesis, it is metamodernism at its core.
One last thing I want to mention, all of this critique is seeded within metamodernism itself, as I said already of it being descriptive. But the oscillation, in practice, becomes more of a manifestation of postmodernism; a dry attempt to capture a future under a postmodern condition, and thus embodying that very same condition. Not all doom and gloom though, as the Inside always exists as a folding of the Outside, the hopeful feeling of metamodernism will be imprinted just as its (lacking)substance will, for when there is an attempt at meaning, there is an attempt at hope. Everything Everywhere All At Once is heralded as the metamodernist movie, or the absurdist movie, or both depending on who you talk to, but the thing about the film is that it actually manages to move through that drudgery of metamodernism, towards a true synthesis of love and praxis through process, the yin and yangs of meaning together, as opposed to the oscillation between and continued separation of the two.
