Hey everyone, disembodied Jared here, back to talk about the merc with a mouth.
Now, Deadpool probably means a lot to you. Its sharp wit is a welcome reprieve from a torrent
of superhero movies,
"Besides... nobodies getting hurt."
and we’re sure Deadpool 2 will be no different. But I’m here to
talk about something else. Not only, as we’ve mentioned previously, is Deadpool a kind of
microcosm for the ironic distance that pervades our culture, but it represents a lot more.
Does Deadpool hold the secret to how people can get you to buy more stuff?
Welcome to bla bla bla. And NO spoilers ahead? Can we say that? Let’s begin our story with
the most recent adverts for Deadpool 2: The teaser at the beginning of Logan, and the
“Wet on Wet” trailer. Both of these succeed for a very simple reason: they actively refuse
to do what normal promotional material should do. In the Logan teaser, Deadpool makes takes
too long changing in a phone booth while a hapless civilian gets brutally assaulted.
In the end, he’s too late. "If I'm honest with myself I probably should have just called 9-11."
The whole thing pokes fun at one of our culture’s oldest icons: Superman. And, for good
measure, a random essay about Old Man and the Sea.We’re still scratching our head
at that one- maybe it has something to do with Logan and Santiago’s sacrificial nature?
I dunno. In the trailer “Wet on Wet,” Deadpool dons a sweet fro and a soothing baritone
imitating Bob Ross’s “The Joy of Painting.” Even before Deadpool, our cultural obsession
with Bob Ross has always included a little dose of irony. "And if you tell ANYONE that
that bush is there, I will come to your house and I will cut you."
The wholesome public television show full of dad humor and happy little trees became
an internet sensations. Its naive authenticity became a joke for disillusioned millennials.
"But I'm not a very good fisherman I take the hook carefully out of his mouth, put a
bandaid on him, a little CPR, pat him on the TUTU and put him back in the water."
In Wet on Wet, the colors are movie jokes, Bob Ross’s very real obsession with whacking
his brushes is highlighted. "Whack that off real good. juuuust beat it like an ??" "Shake
off the excess. I just beat the devil out of that. Its really the most fun part of it."
And the chief engineer is one Geordie Laforge. Both of these are awesome, right? When I saw
them in the theater people were losing their s***. But is there something more to it than
just “it’s funny?” If anything, these promotions are anti-promotions. By flaunting
their absurdity, they mostly avoid teasing the actual movie they're promoting. Hell, the
first Deadpool movie marketed it as a romcom at one point.
"Surprise. This is actually, lucky you, a love story."
Instead of promises of cool fight scenes and a suspenseful plot, the whole pre-Logan trailer
just raises doubts about superheroing in general. "What the f*** is a phonebooth doing on a
street corner?" and Wet on Wet has a real trailer packed onto the end of a series of
not-so-subtle innuendos with no relation to the movie itself. "Wish I could get high on
all of life’s splendor..God I love cocaine." And here’s the point: the secret of self
promotion in 2017 is to make fun of the very fact that you’re being self promotional.
"That's supposed to sell deoderant? Talk about something real. Like the smoothe sophisicated
scent of old spice."
The secret is cynicism. But to understand why this is uniquely successful today, we
have to turn back to a guy who lived in a barrel and made philosophy out of pissing
in public. Diogenes the Cynic was one of the progenitors of Western cynical philosophy.
It’s disputed whether or not he’s the reason we use the term “cynicism” to describe
his school of philosophy. But, the term “cynic,” which in Greek means “dog-like,” was at
the very least an insult hurled at Diogenes by his contemporaries. But either way, he
really embraced the term, and made a habit of urinating and fornicating in public, just like
our four-legged friends. Never one to half-ass anything, he even tried eating raw meat.
Not unlike our foul-mouthed hero, Diogenes spent his time berating the customs and habits of
his peers. Whereas Deadpool may successfully typecast his peers.
"Oh come on. You're gonna leave me all alone here with less angry Rosie O'Donnell?"
Diogenes would do things like: stomp on Plato’s carpet yelling “I trample on the pride
of Plato,” running into Plato’s classroom with a plucked chicken screaming “Behold,
Plato’s man!,” and ordering his remains to be thrown over the city walls so that wild
animals could feast on his corpse. The point, for Diogenes, was to be relentlessly cynical
towards the habits and customs of the well-to-do Athenians. If they viewed themselves as noble
purveyors of truth, Diogenes would carry around a lantern in broad daylight telling those
around him he was searching for an honest man. If they thought defecating in public
was beneath the dignity of a civilized man, Diogenes would drop trou right in the middle of
the agora. It’s not entirely different than the superhero that refuses to be a hero.
“Ooo, Cherry Garcia Icecream? You gonna eat this?”
But despite their similarities, Deadpool and Diogenes are fundamentally different, at least
according to the logic of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. For Sloterdijk, if Diogenes represented
a pointed criticism of his contemporaries, cynicism today has become “universal and diffuse,”
permeating every aspect of our culture. News, film, videogames,
are all made cynically, and we even perform our jobs with a cynical indifference.
The logic boils down to “Hey, at least it’s a paycheck,” on a global scale.
Sloterdijk was writing in the 1980s, but he might as well have been writing today.
If Diogenes publicly performed in such a way to rid the world of bad ideas, modern cynicism is merely
a resignation to the fact that everything is terrible.
And while Deadpool is perfect proof of universal cynicism that doesn’t actually change anything.
Also consider the steady stream of self-aware advertising that succeeds by virtue that it rejects its
very premise. "Marketing gimmick. Hot Women! Hot Men! Even the rabbit's an 8/10."
Lebron James made a Sprite commercial for the Super Bowl where he ironically and repeatedly affirms
that he’ll never tell you to drink Sprite. "Let's get one thing straight. I'd never tell
you to drink Sprite, even if I was in a commercial for Sprite, which I am." Newcastle made a
Super Bowl ad about how they couldn’t afford a Super Bowl ad. “Turns out they didnt even
have the money or permission to make a Superbowl commercial, they can’t even say Super Bowl."
"Basically, the only thing I haven't done is a nude scene and get paid a s*** ton of money to be in
a commercial for a beer I don't even drink."
Cards Against Humanity made a whole Black Friday campaign out of mailing people poop.
And if “mailing people poop” is a metaphor for successful marketing in our modern age,
Deadpool’s advertising is the creme de la turd of film promotion. "Hold each of your
manberries or as I like to call them smooth criminals," Trailers that aren’t trailers.
A superhero who is not a hero. For Brazil’s Comic Con, Deadpool released a video where
he offers a supposedly heartfelt attempt to connect with his Brazilian fans by saying.
“To show my dedication to the legions of Brazilian deadpool fans, I’ve spent up to
20 minutes on Google translate, as well as countless hours watching telenovelas,
to teach me everything about your official language,"
before offering up a clearly not Deadpool voiceover. "Here goes..."
But perhaps nothing exemplifies this trend like a recent Rick and Morty Old Spice Ad.
Rick Sanchez introduces some anthropomorphized Old Spice products in a bored monotone before
counting the thousands of dollars he just made for the shameless promotion. For Sloterdijk
this is what separates modern cynicism from the cynicism of Diogenes. Our modern economy
is “compatible with nothing quite so much as” the lamentations about the corrupting
effect of almighty money. “Money makes the world go round, isn’t that terrible?”
What makes this work for advertising, to use Sloterdijk’s words, is that cynicism is
“criticism with limited liability.” Deadpool can joke about the budget constraints of his
own movie, "Big house. It's funny how I only ever see two of you. It's like the studio
couldn't afford another X-man" or even its own lead.
"You think Ryan Reynolds got this far on his superior acting method?"
And in doing so protects itself from any judgments about budget constraints or acting resumes.
For Sloterdijk, This is fundamentally different than the cynicism of Diogenes. Diogenes met
the customs and ideas of his peers with pure, satirical laughter, it worked because he also
constructed an alternative: living like a stray dog out of a giant barrel. In response
to the contemporary definitions of citizenship, he declared he was a citizen of the world.
Rather, our modern cynicism lacks any alternative. Whereas some thinkers posited that the masses
will follow their leaders with a “false consciousnesses,” a metaphorical wool pulled
over their eyes, Sloterdijk posits that modern Cynicism is “enlightened false consciousness.”
We are acutely aware that there is wool over our eyes, but we say fuck it - Wool is warm and cozy.
Creators may know an advertisement is stupid, "HeadOn your commercial is so annoying but you got a great product,"
or a superhero trope is overused, "Superhero landing! She's gonna do a suprhero landing!
but hey, gotta pay the bills, right? "Woo! Superhero landing!"
The alternative is to make a movie that no one watches. Or a Youtube video.
I’m still hurt about that one. Consider the painting at the end of “Wet on Wet.” It’s an
alteration of Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” depicting a wholesome family
ready to eat a giant, merica-sized turkey. Part of his Four Freedoms series, based on
the FDR speech, the message was: here’s what makes America great:, the freedom to
pray, to eat a ton of meat, to feel safe, and to speak your mind. In typical Deadpool
fashion, a wholesome image is robbed of its original meaning. This is another microcosm
of our cynical era: straightforward defenses of any kind of values are scorned as naive
at best, and at worst, are vulnerable to being wrong.
Consider the worst advertisement of the century: Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad where a can of
diabetes-water brings together protesters and riot cops. On one hand, we all cringed
because the ad cynically watered down social movements to sell soda. But the real mistake
was to defend anything at all, even if , behind-the-scenes, it was cynical. If the ad added a few
“Do not attempt in real life” or “results not guaranteed,” we would have all laughed
at such a self-aware ad. Cynical advertising, up front about its own cynicism, is smart advertising
- it’s advertising with limited liability. So it shouldn’t surprise us that figures
like Superman, a symbol of heroism and goodness, or Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want draw
the ire of Deadpool.
Sloterdijk quotes Georg Simmel who said “the more money becomes the sole center of interests,
the more we see honor and convictions, talent and virtue, beauty and health of the soul
mobilized” on money’s behalf, the more a “mocking and frivolous mood” will arise
regarding these values, “which are offered for sale for the same kind of value as goods
on the weekly market.” Deadpool is the embodiment of this “frivolous and mocking mood.”
Because heroics and values are for sale, how are we not supposed to laugh at them?
"Please don’t make the supersuit green, or animated." And because there exists no conceivable way
to escape the system we criticize, like perhaps Diogenes the Cynic could, what else are we to do?
So what do you think? Is cynicism i marketing the best way to advertise these days? Let’s find out.