{Spoilers in this Post for Deadpool}
There’s a lot of things I expected out of Deadpool this Valentine’s Day:
Violence, swearing, guns, inappropriate ball jokes.
What I wasn’t expecting was to leave the theater thinking about how disability narratives are few and far between in the superhero genre, and how maybe Deadpool was the hero disabled nerds needed to see.
If you’re still reading along and you haven’t seen the movie, then let’s fill in some blanks for you. Deadpool gets terminal cancer. From the brief medical scans, we see during the film, it looks like it’s in his lungs.
“But they cure him!” you say, thinking that disability narratives are only about people who are sick or injured.
Deadpool IS injured. Just because he can’t die doesn’t mean that having lesions all over his body makes things easy to live with: and therein lies the disability narrative. Deadpool looks disabled.
What I love most about looking at Deadpool as a disabled narrative character, is that he’s not a nice guy. He’s not a saint, he’s not inspiring, and I don’t particularly like him. What I do like is that a character with a face which looks a lot like say, someone with severe ichthyosis, or some forms of Bullous Disease (or even severe burn wounds) gets a romance plot. A successful romance plot where at the end of the movie, he’s accepted for what he looks like.
A plot which looks like he’ll also be bisexual if things follow the comics.
Deadpool is the first disabled character I’ve seen in a long time to transcend most of the disability narratives currently used in mainstream Hollywood. He’s not out to save the world, he’s not out to do something brilliant in order to transcend his disability. The people around him aren’t coddling or caring for him out for saintly duty to the disabled – in fact, he’s the one facing danger 100% of the time. He’s in the thick of the action – right where he wants to be. Unlike Daredevil, Deadpool isn’t using his powers to “get around” being disabled, there are no cheats and no one tries to help Deadpool when something goes wrong.
As a disabled consumer of nerd culture and geek media I have to say that this was a refreshing twist on disabled narratives in superhero movies – with one exception.
Yes, I am referring to Blind Al. A blind character, played for laughs and by a nondisabled actress. She’s in the movie for very few scenes, and almost any time she’s on screen her blindness is played for laughs – and that’s too bad. The Ikea furniture falling apart fell flat for me, the tripping over the roomba as her entrance played out as a joke about blind people falling down. A lot of the time, the movie punched up rather than down, but in those moments, while the rest of the theater laughed, I looked at my white cane on the ground beside me and cringed. Lines about the cure for blindness being right next to the hidden cocaine in the house aren’t funny, not when there’s better things to be offensive about. Like Wolverines balls.
It’s a bit of a downer in a film that could be a way to break up the stereotypes about disability in the genre, a way to fix something I’ve seen broken time and time again – Deadpool could be our bad cripple hero, but if that’s the case, the writers need to change up how they see disabled people, and stop using everybody but Deadpool as a punchline, and start letting the other disabled characters in on some jokes.
The most exciting thing about all of this, of course, is that no one calls Deadpool disabled. It’s never made a big deal out of, it’s never mentioned or codified. He doesn’t identify himself that way, and neither does anybody else. I’m not sure we’ve ever had someone with a disability play out this way in a mainstream film before.
Now, if Deadpool could identify as disabled in the next film, that would be truly a revolution, but I’ll settle for this: a quiet change in a narrative I live day to day.
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The Blind Al parts felt incomplete, like parts got cut. It’s unfortunate the parts that stayed.
I didn’t read Deadpool at Blind Al’s inception but I understand their relationship to be complicated at best.
Since I cannot visually access most comics, this is purely about the movie, but yes, I’ve been told that in the comics Blind AL gives as good as she gets.
Yup. In the comics Blind Alfred introduced while Deadpool is still just marginally scooting out of Bad Guy territory, so he essentially has her kidnapped and they take turns being absolutely horrible to each other – the IKEA furniture gag is by far more harmless than some of the shit Deadpool would have pulled in the early comics.
After they make peace (sort of) there’s one comic where a bunch of what has to be called Deadpool’s friends team up to try killing him, and Blind Al is in there with a gun using a seeing dog to know where she should aim.
It was hinted at that she was the original Black Widow back in the days, but unfortunately that run of the series ended without fully resolving that plot thread.
So, yeah, Blind Al is pretty damn badass and I have hope that we’ll see more of that if she’s in the next movie too. For now I’m chalking up the problems with her characterisation in the first movie as lack of screen time and lack of in-universe time, as Deadpool and Al in the comics had known each other for a much longer time when the character is introduced in the movie.