Here's an idea.
Deadpool knows he's a comic book character because
of his unique relationship with his own body.
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It's amazing what you can get away
with when you think nobody's watching,
and also, what you give yourself permission
to do when you know that you have an audience.
And you would probably think that both of these states
are mutually exclusive.
And they are, for most people.
But Deadpool isn't most people.
And I think he'd be first to tell you that, directly.
At the heart of what makes Deadpool work as a character,
and work so well, are some deeply complicated dualisms,
like this one, which I want to try to explore.
But before we do, for the unfamiliar, some background.
So before Deadpool, AKA Wade Wilson, was Ryan Reynolds,
he was Cable's nemesis in an early '90s Marvel series
created by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld.
By the mid-'90s, he had his own self-titled series.
And by the late '90s, he was a fixture of the Marvel universe,
having transitioned via several writers, most notably Joe
Kelly, to a kind of slapstick, antihero parody
of the grim darkness found throughout comics.
Today, it would be an understatement
to say that he's a fan favorite.
Oh, and by the way, we have a new set.
We're going to unveil the whole thing pretty soon.
Anyway, his popularity may be a little surprising,
given that Deadpool has, at first glance at least,
kind of a standard load out of superhero abilities.
He's got superhuman strength, agility, world-class combat
skills, which essentially add up to the oh, so distinctive
characteristic of good at fighting, which is not exactly
Eisner-Award-winning material.
More notably, like fellow canuck Wolverine,
Deadpool is a product of the infamous Weapon X program,
which means he has a healing factor that's based
on Wolverine's.
But in comparison, Deadpool's is exceptional.
It keeps everything from injury and dismemberment
to cancer from killing him.
He just will not die.
His most defining feature, though,
isn't his substantial physical capability, but his wit.
Nicknamed the Merc with the Mouth,
Deadpool is a wise-cracking, guff-giving, insult-hurling
red-clad source of constant commentary.
However, Deadpool's quips aren't quite like, say,
Hawkeye's, who has something to say about everything,
but not everything everything, by which I
mean Deadpool knows, or according to who you ask,
thinks he's a comic book character.
Deadpool will often comment on the gutter between panels.
He'll react to particularly gross onamonapia.
He will reference and even sometimes directly address
the nice people reading his book.
Deadpool knows what his context is.
He can sense, somehow, the complete frame
of his own existence.
This is Deadpool's definitive power.
It is what makes Deadpool Deadpool.
Arguably, what allows him to put his other abilities
to such effective use is this sense.
And I want to talk about how I think it works.
Specifically, I think in addition
to being a physical and mental adept,
Deadpool is also a phenomenological one.
Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy concerned
with describing human experience, specifically
in relationship to perception and the existence of the world.
It's all about how the world around us
is a result of our sensations, not the other way around.
Phenomenology is the domain of many well-known thinkers.
But 20th century French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty is who we're going to draw
from the most, specifically his book
Phenomenology of Perception.
Phenomenology posits that reality
is comprised of phenomena-- events and objects
that are perceived by people.
Everything we perceive is organized
into what Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls
the "text of reality" by our consciousness via experience.
But OK, what counts as experience?
First, there's our senses, the big five.
But it doesn't stop there.
Thinking and imagining are also experiences, emotions, too.
Desiring something is an experience
that you have of that thing.
Memories, sentiment, literal and emotional feeling,
making meaning with language, you know,
experience, the sum total of all of our possible senses,
perceptions, and experiences directed at
and responding to phenomena in the world comprise reality.
This is our phenomenological frame.
You can also think of it kind of like sonar.
Metaphysically, the world is a very dark place.
And our consciousness sends out and receives back
various modes of perception, which
construct the lay of the land from the darkness.
Give it meaning.
So what we're going to try to do is
explain how Deadpool's perceived reality is different
because his experiences and therefore, consciousness, are
also different.
To start down that road though, we
gotta believe, or at least perform the belief,
that he possesses perceptions and a consciousness
in his own world.
I think he does.
And I think we treat most fictional characters
as though they do.
If you don't want to attribute agency and consciousness
to fictional characters, then talking
about how and why Deadpool is the way he is
becomes really simple.
The reasons are textual.
He's a smart-ass because Rob Liefeld
thought it would be funny.
Deadpool has three separate inner voices
because it is tons of work for the staff to write and draw
a whole other character, so Deadpool becomes
his own fractured straight-man.
In this explanation, Deadpool knows
he's fictional because the comic itself is meta and made
by clever people.
Done.
Who wants to chimichangas?
Oo, me!
I do.
Oh, hey, Scott, from NerdSync.
I am actually now just realizing I only
have the one chimichanga.
And I haven't had dinner yet.
Well, that's a bummer.
I guess I could just talk more about that Deadpool's
inner voices since they do have an interesting history
behind them.
Deadpool debuted in New Mutants number 98
from 1991, where he didn't even have
so much as one inner voice, let alone two.
It wasn't until nearly two decades later in Wolverine
Origins number 21 that writer Daniel Way
decided to give Deadpool those distinct
and often argumentative voices in his head.
Deadpool had his main inner voice in his now trademarked
pale yellow boxes.
But the second one was designed more
like a torn piece of paper, ripped
straight from his mental diary.
The dynamic between all three of Deadpool's voices--
spoken, thoughts, and journal, I guess--
was a hit with the fans, which was great news,
since Deadpool's appearance in Wolverine's comic
acted as a kind of backdoor pilot for a new series
that Way was planning for the character.
This allowed Way to launch his famous run
on Deadpool, which lasted four years
and spawned many memes that you've probably
seen around the internet.
In this new series, the design of the two inner voices
were standardized the way the most of us
would likely recognize them today.
Initially, they were supposed to represent
what Deadpool was really thinking
and what he wanted you to think he was thinking.
Over time, however, the voices started
to take on attributes coinciding with Freud's
model of personality.
The yellow box is the id, Deadpool's speaking voice
is the ego, and the white boxes are the super ego.
And the balance between them is what makes Deadpool Deadpool.
This is what we're talking about over on my channel, NerdSync.
So come on over and check it out.
Desperate for attention, are we?
Cut me some slack, man.
This YouTube stuff is hard.
Sub4Sub.
No, no, no, no, no.
Hey, oh.
Sorry, sorry.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
Everybody make sure to go check out Scott's video
at the end of this one.
But yeah, just as Deadpool's authors
have had different ideas of what those text boxes represent,
fans have had ideas about what exactly
Deadpool must be going through in fiction
explanations of his meta, yellow-box-aware quirks
and capabilities.
The most compelling, I think, is that Deadpool
should have died hundreds, if not thousands, of times
from both sickness and injury.
But his healing factor is always bringing him back
from the brink.
Deadpool is in constant pain, always
feeling, always aware of his body and its torment, which
never ceases.
Also if I'm not going to eat dinner,
let's finish this theory back in the corner.
This theory posits that a potential side
effect of that torment is a kind of brain damage,
and a symptom of this brain damage,
delusions that he is, in fact, a comic book character.
This would mean that Deadpool isn't just
a meta comic, but a comic about someone
with a very intense and unique experience of their world,
a very unique phenomenological frame, due in no small part
to his physical state.
We perceive and sense things with
and because we have a body made of, like,
meat and nerve endings, and however it comes about, a self.
This distinction between the mind and the body
is probably really familiar-- vessel
versus soul, corpus versus consciousness, et cetera.
Mind-body dualism says that there
is stuff, including the body, and then there's
immaterial spirit, including the mind, which is us.
We are our spirit.
Cartesian dualism specifically holds
that while the mind and body may interact, things which exist
are either stuff or spirit, thing or consciousness,
and that in order to know about the existence of stuff,
we must rely on our own internal subjective existence.
That is the seat of both self and the knowledge.
Your mind knows things.
But your body doesn't.
So our man Merleau-Ponty said that this
is a bunch of the hokum.
He spent no shortage of time trying to adequately explain
this idea.
So our defense in this video is, you know, abbreviated.
But basically, he says that the human body-- if it
is an object, stuff in the Cartesian sense--
is considered and treated unlike any other object.
When you move your hand, you don't move your hand
like you'd move a coffee mug.
You move some complicated internal sense
of your own hand.
Merleau-Ponty wrote that one does not
move their objective body.
They move their phenomenal body.
The parts and processes of bodies, yours and others,
can't be separated from the experience of you
know, having one.
And consciousness, he said, is not pure thought
separate from having a body.
There's no consciousness without sense.
And there's no sense without meat.
Even more cerebral experiences like thinking, imagining,
desiring, and dreaming are totally
bound up in the physical.
Merleau-Ponty wrote, "I am my body.
And reciprocally, my body is something
like a natural subject or provisional sketch
of my total being."
Instead of the self and knowledge
being wholly interior, Merleau-Ponty
thought we know and understand the world because
of our embodied experience of it.
"My body is that by which there are objects," he wrote.
So, I mean, what if your embodied sense
is extraordinary?
What if you are always feeling your body,
hyper-aware of exactly what's happening to it,
as Deadpool is?
What if because of your healing factor,
you can think of and interact with parts of your own body
as though they were objects and so
develop a sense of them the way that you
have a sense of things?
Phenomenologically at least, it stands
to reason that this would fundamentally
alter your knowledge and perception of the world.
And I mean, let's review .
Deadpool perceives the space between panels on a page.
He knows about the weird sounds made as he's
stabbed through the gut.
He references, interacts with, and understands thought
bubbles, knows that typefaces, coloring, issues,
and series endings are a part of his reality.
In short, he knows that his reality
is literally and phenomenologically a text which
he is interpreting, assembling, constituting
by his particular experience of it.
He's always aware of how his body is working,
what it's doing, how it's reacting, sensing, and feeling.
He's always in dialogue, often literally, with it.
So of course, in a grander sense,
he would be in dialogue, often literally, with his reality.
Incidentally, this also really makes
me wonder if this has an effect on what
it's like to be a Deadpool cos player.
I've interacted with more than a few at cons here and there.
What's up, Phoenix?
And they always remind me of something
that Deadpool's creator said when he was first created,
that since they couldn't imagine his book wouldn't get canceled,
they kind of just let him do what he wanted.
They figured no one was looking.
And when the higher ups would eventually
notice this weird, madcap Merc with a Mouth,
they'd be all, well, that is certainly enough of that,
and just can the book.
So they kind of just let him loose.
How is that for poetic, a character who
became notable for his canonized knowledge
that everyone is watching given free rein because, hey,
no one's looking?
I can't imagine that this doesn't perfectly
explain what it must be like to be Deadpool, both actually
and performatively as a cos player,
to sit in that weird limbo between dance
like you're alone in your bedroom and ham it up
because everyone's watching, you might as well
give them a good show.
Where Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell is other people
because you can't help but imagine yourself
in their gaze---
"By the mere appearance of the Other,
I am put in a position of passing judgment on myself
as on an object."
Merleau-Ponty thought that the gaze of others
was an integral part of one's experience of the world.
He wrote, You are literally what other people think of you."
And Deadpool, unlike pretty much every other comic book
character, knows it, or depending upon who you ask,
thinks it's the case.
What do you guys think?
Is Deadpool's reality different from everyone else's
because of his relationship to his own body?
Let us know in the comments.
And I will respond to some of them
in the next week's comment response video.
Special thanks to Scott from NerdSync.
If you haven't checked out his video on Deadpool this week,
go and do that right now.
And while you're there, of course,
click all of the buttons.
Actually, click Subscribe and Like and then
the post underneath the comment.
Those are the good buttons to-- I
mean, actually, yeah, click every button.
They're all helpful, except if you've already subscribe--
this is getting out of hand.
In this week's comment response video,
we talked about the Fallout Universe and the transistor
as a symbol of peace.
If you want to watch that one, you can click right here
or find a link in the doobly doo.
One small bit of news.
I was recently on an episode of Flash Forward, which
is a podcast that my friend Rose makes about distant futures.
And the one that I am in, I play a guest voice.
I'm someone who's advertising for sex-bot storage solutions.
So the episode is all about sex-bots and a future
where those things are common.
So if that tickles your fancy, I put a link
to that in the description.
In case you missed it, we uploaded the dramatic readings
of the t-shirt-winning short stories on Friday.
I will put a link, you know, somewhere so you
watch those, which you should.
They're very good.
And I can say that because I didn't write them.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit links
to those in the doobly doo.
The tweet of the week this week comes
from Victor Rocco, who asks whether or not
the last episode of Idea Channel was claiming that Fallout is,
in some way, Atom Punk, which is a thing
that I had never heard of and had not considered.
And I think we're going to end up
talking about this in the comment response videos
this week.
So I don't want to over-pose this question here.
But I think it's a really good one and a really interesting
once.
So I'm curious if you have any reactions about the idea
of Fallout being Adam Punk.
And hey, in case you were wondering,
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