A product of the 1960s, X-Men comics’ depiction of mutants and their persecution at the hands of non-mutants frequently draws comparison to the civil rights struggles of that era. Professor Xavier is the Martin Luther King Jr. to Magneto’s Malcom X, for example. In 2000’s X-Men, Ian McKellan’s Magneto even borrows Malcom’s famous “by any mean’s necessary” declaration.
Over the last sixty years, the mutants central to the comics and the 11-film franchise serve as convenient analogies to any number of marginalized groups. More recently, queer communities found they could relate to the struggles of the misunderstood mutants who discover their biological reality at puberty and often feel revealing their identity could endanger them.
So, it is not surprising when these social themes show up in X-Men movies. It is just a little odd to see it in a movie like Deadpool 2.
The plot of the film centers on Deadpool, the fourth wall-shattering mercenary played by Ryan Reynolds, and his quest to get his heart “in the right place” by saving the life and soul of angsty teen mutant Russell Collins, a.k.a. Firefist. Russell is played by Julian Dennison, a brilliantly funny 15-year-old Kiwi, for whom the role was essentially written for.
The audience is introduced to Russell outside Essex House, a mutant reeducation center. Surrounded by a SWAT team and orphanage employees, Russell refuses to let anyone get near him lest they feel the fiery wrath of Firefist. Deadpool and friends arrive on the scene to talk Russell down. Instructed by his X-Men buddies Colusses and Negasonic Teenage Warhead not to kill anyone, Deadpool promptly shoots an orphanage employee nicknamed “Jared Kushner" after Russell quietly reveals he had been abused.
Flashbacks reveal Russell was abused by the employees and headmaster of the Essex House in a particularly sadistic manner. The headmaster, portrayed by the eerie Eddie Marsan, electrocuted mutant children while incanting “blessed are the wicked who are healed by my hand.”
Sound familiar? It should. Americans send tens of thousands of LGBTQ youths to conversion therapy each year. The practice, which aims to “pray away the gay,” is discredited by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Only 8% of Americans believe the process has efficacy.
Yet, the practice is still legal in all but nine states and the District of Columbia (although this number is growing). And conversion therapy has friends in high places. Vice President Mike Pence took a despicable stance in 2000 when running for Congress. He stated on his campaign website he would support HIV treatment funding only if federal funding was redirected from organizations that encouraged “the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus” to organizations “which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”
In recent years, Pence used the carefully worded phrasing in that 2000 campaign platform to deny he ever supported conversion therapy. Still, he shows his support, or at least friendship to those who promote conversion therapy, in other ways. Last July, Pence spoke at the 40th anniversary celebration of Focus on the Family, a Christian group that maintains conversion therapy is an accepted practice in the medical community. In the speech, Pence called the group’s founder, Dr. James Dobson, a “friend and mentor.”
“Saying you don’t support conversion therapy and then calling Dobson your mentor is like saying you a staunch vegetarian and a law-abiding citizen and, by the way, please meet my lifelong friend and mentor, the Hamburgler,” Last Week Tonight host John Oliver said in a recent segment covering Pence.
Deadpool 2 is a raunchy, vulgar and violent comedy. If it was nothing more than that, no one would have batted an eye. But in the vein of its more series cousins, the X-Men, the writers decided to take on real social issues in a surprisingly effective way.
Conversion therapy is not the only social issue the film touched on either. Russell’s rampage through the orphanage late in the film draws parallels to the homicidal anger of disillusioned men that leaves thousands of Americans dead each year.
Two decades into the cinematic superhero explosion, Deadpool 2 depicts the first unambiguously queer relationship, between Brianna Hildebrand’s Negasonic Teenage Warhero and her girlfriend Yukio, portrayed by Shioli Kutsuna. There’s not a lot to discuss there, unfortunately, because they are tertiary characters in the film, but it is a start.
Deadpool 2 is not perfect (see: the fridging of Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa, the unfortunate presence of T.J. Miller and the hysterical Karan Soni as the cliched cabbie Dopinder), but it addresses important conversations amidst all the dick jokes and gratuitous gore. It’s not the vehicle for this conversation we need, but it may be the one we deserve right now.