I recently stumbled upon a review of "Deadpool & Wolverine" in Jacobin, a publication long known for its pillow-soft leftist cultural analysis. As I skimmed it in that half-awake, half-gooning state in which all online writing is meant to be engaged with, I found myself increasingly frustrated—not because the review was bad per se, but because it completely missed the point.
The review focuses on surface-level details—plot points, jokes, actor performances. Basic-b Roger Ebert stuff. It notes how the movie pokes fun at superhero tropes and Marvel's corporate history. But it fails to engage with the more disturbing implications of what's really happening here.
Deadpool & Wolverine isn't just another superhero movie. It's a perfect illustration of how thoroughly capitalism can subsume cultural critique. Here we have a Disney/Marvel production—made by one of the most powerful media conglomerates—raking in billions by selling audiences a faux-edgy critique of itself and the media ecosystem it's part of.
This is precisely the kind of phenomenon that Marxist cultural theorists have warned about for decades. Louis Althusser argued that while art and culture aren't simply part of society's ideological superstructure, they have a complex relationship with ideology. He suggested that lasting cultural expressions can make us see the ideology from which they're born, while simultaneously detaching themselves from it.
But what happens when the dominant ideology becomes so totalizing that it can seamlessly mass-produce its own critique? That's exactly what we're seeing with Deadpool & Wolverine.
The movie’s saturated with what Althusser would call "spontaneously perceived 'lived experience'"—in this case, the experience of being a jaded consumer of superhero media. It presents an allusion to our real conditions of existence under late capitalism, while simultaneously offering an illusion of resistance or critique.
This is ideology functioning at its most insidious. As Dick Hebdige noted in 1979’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, "ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense." What could be more commonsensical in our current cultural moment than cynicism about corporate media franchises? Deadpool & Wolverine takes this cynicism and weaponizes it, using it to further entrench the very system it pretends to critique.
The movie's self-referential humor and fourth-wall breaking serve a crucial ideological function. They give the false impression of distance or critique while working to reproduce the existing relations of production. Audiences leave the theater feeling savvy and in-on-the-joke, but nothing has been challenged or changed—except, that is, for e-wallets now a few dollars lighter.
This is the "material function of ideology" in action—reproducing relationships between people and their means of producing and reproducing daily life. In this case, it's reproducing our relationship to media consumption and corporate culture.
What's particularly insidious is how this process neutralizes potential sites of resistance. Any criticism you could make of the movie or the system it's part of has already been preemptively surfaced and defanged by the movie itself. Try to point out how it's a cynical corporate product? Well, Deadpool already made that joke. Want to critique how it relies on nostalgia and familiar IP? There's a one-liner for that too.
This is what the Marxist theorists mean when they talk about capitalist ideology imposing a "general direction" on social existence, defining the limits within which people consent to the organization of daily life under capitalism. Deadpool & Wolverine doesn't just operate within these limits—it actively works to reinforce them behind a patina of transgression.
The fact that Jacobin—which has long since evolved from whatever ostensible organ of resistance it was intended to be into a glorified hot-take site overlaid with a smattering of leftist window dressing (many such cases)—now refuses to even bother addressing any of this is telling. It reveals how thoroughly pop culture has consumed most of the theoretical tools we might use to critique it. We've reached a point where there is no outside perspective, no Archimedean point from which to mount an effective critique.
Here, the Marxist perspective would suggest that we need to return to a fundamental analysis of class struggle and ideology. We need to recognize, as Althusser pointed out, that a revolutionary situation isn't simply an opposition of the working class to the capitalists, but "a complex accumulation of many social contradictions acting simultaneously."
In practical terms, this means trying to articulate new frameworks for cultural critique that can see past the superficial snark and understand the deeper ideological mechanisms at work. We need to relearn how to think outside the system that has enveloped us.
This will require a renewal of what some Marxists might call "revolutionary cultural practice"—cultural production that genuinely serves to break down the hegemony of the ruling class rather than reinforce it. That’s a nigh-impossible order in a world where even a penny-ante bit of pop cultural detritus like Deadpool & Wolverine serves to strengthen capitalist ideology.
Nigh-impossible or no, it's a worthwhile task. As more of our culture is produced and controlled by a handful of risk-averse, thought-terminating conglomerates, our ability to imagine alternatives—to think outside their manufactured consensus—diminishes.
We need to wise up to this game, and fast. Otherwise, we risk living lives where all the content we consume is as CGI-superficial and toothless as a wisecrack-filled Marvel movie—endlessly referring to itself while going nowhere, and leaving the fundamental structures of capitalist society unchallenged and unchanged.
The stakes of the conflict couldn't be higher. Our very ability to conceive of alternatives to the current system hangs in the balance. If nothing else, it’s intellectually stimulating to move beyond shallow cynicism and develop forms of critique that can at least challenge or provoke the prevailing ideology.
Even so, never forget that the house always wins. There’s something gratifying about fighting back, but you mustn’t grow disappointed over the fact that it’s a rigged system: there’s no way to break free from the ideological ouroboros that Deadpool & Wolverine so perfectly exemplifies. Pay full fare for the overpriced ticket and take the pitch-black ride, my fellow content consumers.