Like how the USAmerican Right’s use of class consciousness/politics is what I call a consciousness-without-awareness,
Deadpool and Wolverine is metamodernism-without-awareness
Okay this is just false lmao.
I don’t want to get into it bc I hate participating in internet arm-chair academics shit but like metamodernism doesn’t have awareness in the first place lmao. I’ve 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 couldn’t pinpoint it, is inherently meaningless. It’s being both (modernism and post-) at the same time and going between them, avoiding their conflicts. Metamodernism isn’t 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 it’s meaningful progress past postmodernism.
Deadpool and Wolverine then, is just metamodernism personified, the oscillation between Deadpool’s postmodernism and Wolverine’s 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 Deadpool’s scenes as a whole, is completely postmodern, taking the ‘grand narrative’ of Wolverine, his meaning, and literally ripping it out of its grave and apart to kill TVA time police who manage more ‘grand narratives’, but then Wolverine’s scenes are all about his more grounded, modernist search for meaning. Overall, the film uses the two characters, but that’s it, there’s 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 didn’t change, neither character’s worlds changed, it’s 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.
