Chris Sims | The Verge

Domino deserves a spinoff film, and there are amazing comic stories to mine

2018-05-24T13:09:06-04:00

The breakout star of Deadpool 2 is unquestionably Domino, a mercenary with a mutant power that ensures the odds always fall in her favor — especially when it means gliding through brutal fight scenes unconcerned and unscathed. Thanks to a charismatic performance from Zazie Beetz and fight choreography that demonstrates just how effortlessly cool this power can look, odds are pretty good that we’ll be seeing a lot more of Domino in the future. Fortunately for filmmakers, there’s plenty of source material to draw from in Marvel comic books.

Her Catholic ninja origin story

Like a lot of comic book characters who debuted in the ‘90s, Domino is a perfect mix of a simple, high concept layered with a ludicrously complicated backstory. It’s so complicated, in fact, that she technically made her official debut a year after she showed up in the comics in 1991. See, in that first year’s worth of appearances, Domino wasn’t actually Domino. Instead, it was actually Copycat, a shapeshifting doppelgänger who infiltrated the X-Force team. She’d kidnapped and replaced Domino at some point before her debut in New Mutants #98, but after her real first appearance in X-Force #8, which was a flashback set years in the past. If that sounds needlessly complex, well, that’s because it is.

That complexity isn’t just a product of the ‘90s, either. Domino, a 2003 miniseries that filled in the gaps in her origin, began as a relatively straightforward espionage romp and quickly spun out into something truly wild. Over the course of four issues, Domino’s search for her mother led her back to the government lab where we learn she was genetically engineered to be a living weapon.

All things considered, that’s pretty standard superhero stuff, but it goes off the rails in the most enjoyable way possible when it’s revealed that her mother is actually leading a cult of Catholic ninjas called the Armajesuits, who have targeted Domino’s 20-years-younger clone brother because of a prophecy that says he’s going to end all religion with his psychic powers. It is exactly as weird as it sounds, but it’s arguably the single best Domino solo story ever.

Even beyond the Armajesuits and the classic “let’s save a kid” storyline that was at the center of both Deadpool 2 and Logan, it delves deeper into the ideas behind her powers, going beyond the vague concept of “luck” in order to drive the stories. Her mother can see the future and take steps to avoid a bad outcome. Her “brother” can manipulate reality around himself to get what he wants. Domino can do both, she just can’t control how it happens. And there’s one place in particular that this ability would work for her in a way that wouldn’t necessarily click with other big-screen heroes.

She needs to go to Murderworld

Given her ability to improbably escape from elaborately contrived peril, it’s surprising that she’s never really gone up against the character who would be a natural archnemesis: Arcade.

If you’re not familiar with him, Arcade is one of the Marvel Universe’s premier assassins, despite the fact that he has exactly the track record you’d think when it comes to killing people whose names are on the covers of their comics. As his name implies, his preferred method of killing people is to lure them into Murderworld, an amusement park full of deathtraps that are built out of stuff like giant pinball machines and roller coasters. Like Domino, he has that same kind of versatility that allows him to crop up anywhere. He first appeared as the villain of an unlikely team-up between Spider-Man and Captain Britain, then he spent a while battling the X-Men, then he settled into the role of showing up whenever someone decided that heroes needed to go through a theme park where the theme was violent death — which, honestly, should be all the time.

The most difficult part of writing Domino is coming up with situations that her luck can get her out of — all the wheres and whys to go along with the hows that you already have. Arcade solves that problem by being a character whose entire purpose is to drop heroes into convoluted situations where they need to be lucky to survive. What better conflict could there be for a hero who can always win at games of chance than a villain who only exists in the context of rigging the games? We already know that movies about assassins trying to out-assassin each other can be great, but imagine how amazing John Wick 2 would’ve been if it was built around the Six Flags of murder instead of a fancy hotel.

Imagine how amazing ‘John Wick 2’ would’ve been if it was built around the Six Flags of murder instead of a fancy hotel

It seems like a natural fit, but in the 27 years that these characters have coexisted, they’ve only crossed paths once, in a backup story in a Cable and X-Force Annual from 1995. Even that was less about Arcade himself and more about the fact that he tends to have robotic duplicates of superheroes laying around. Rather than being a full-on confrontation, it was more of a vehicle for Domino to ruminate on her past by fighting ersatz versions of former teammates and herself.

There is one weird hook, though: according to the story, this is something that Arcade and Domino do every single year, an idea that seems to be lifted from the way that Sabretooth always shows up to ruin Wolverine’s birthday. The difference is that that’s an idea that occasionally gets revisited, while Arcade swearing to conquer Domino’s uncanny luck hasn’t been followed up on once, let alone the 22 times that it should’ve by now.

But we can always hold out hope.

Obviously, Arcade and Domino’s eternal enmity for each other was more of a throwaway line in the second story of an Annual that very few people remember. That said, Domino is a character built on taking those little coincidences, those small, unlikely opportunities, and making them work in her favor.

Her powers are about luck — but also trusting your instincts

Her serendipitous powers are at the heart of what makes Domino compelling and put her in an eclectic pantheon of comic book characters that are supernaturally lucky, but with restrictions. In addition to her family, there’s also Longshot, another probability powered X-Men affiliate who is only lucky when he’s using his powers for the benefit of others, and Gladstone Gander, Donald Duck’s irritatingly fortunate cousin, who is only lucky as long as he’s not working. That’s an admittedly strange group to be a part of, but Domino fits right in with the kind of over-detailed sci-fi explanation for her powers. Instead of being magic, her powers are the product of an unconscious ability to manipulate reality around her, which extends to her own motions and reflexes.

In other words, she’s more of a Jackie Chan than a Buster Keaton — if she stands in one place, that famous collapsing wall would smash right into her, but if she was running through it, she’d be underneath the window at exactly the right time. Despite her name being linked to the domino effect, it’s as much about instincts as it is about favorable coincidences lining up. She’s always going to make the jump, punch in the correct code, or clip the right wire on a bomb, but because it’s unconscious, and because even she doesn’t always know what the most favorable outcome is in a given situation, those risks that she takes still have that thrilling element of danger. If you get shot, the bullets missing every vital organ is a very lucky outcome, but you still got shot.

Her powers codify exactly the kind of uncanny luck that we all take for granted in action heroes

Buried underneath all that complexity are two simple ideas, and that’s what makes Domino work so well. First, her complicated backstory functionally severs her connections to her past, freeing her up to be defined as a mercenary — or, at best, as a teammate — whose motivations can be entirely situational. Second, her powers codify exactly the kind of uncanny luck that we all take for granted in action heroes like Die Hard’s John McClane. When you put all of that together, it makes her the kind of character that you can drop into virtually any story and make it work.

That’s the same kind of adaptability that you see in great characters like Batman, or, not coincidentally, Deadpool. Even Spider-Man has a tough time working once you take him out of a city environment that’s full of walls to crawl and high buildings to swing from, but Domino? Like James Bond, she’s the kind of character who can go anywhere and work with a variety of villains. In the same way that Bond just needs M to slide a folder across the desk in order to jet off to exotic locations or Batman is willing to go to the ends of the Earth to fight crime, Domino just needs to be given a mission that would be suicidal for anyone who wasn’t the luckiest person on Earth.

There’s also an element of randomness that adds to the thrill, mixing with the idea that she has to trust in her own instincts and the power that’s guiding them, even when everything around her is telling her she’s wrong. As a character and even as a central hero, this makes her surprisingly relatable, despite a superpower that makes the most incredible feats as effortless as breathing. It might be difficult to relate to someone who’s defined by the ability to have everything working out in their favor, but a character whose only real weakness is doubting herself is something everyone can understand.

On the page or in front of the camera, Domino is all about taking long odds and building to the best possible outcome with confidence and determination. It takes luck, sure, but it only works if you’re trying.

To understand feuds between virtual Instagram models, you need to understand pro wrestling

2018-05-09T09:00:01-04:00

Even by the standards of the internet, the recent feud between two computer-generated Instagram models named Lil Miquela and Bermuda was almost incomprehensible. It spread across multiple Instagram accounts and seemingly unrelated websites, and in the weeks since, there have been timelines and character breakdowns that attempt to make sense of it. But if you really want to understand this feud between two completely fictional people fighting in a scripted conflict with the illusion of being real, then the best place to start is in the world where that happens all the time: professional wrestling.

But first, let us examine our contenders. In this corner, hailing from the Uncanny Valley, is Lil Miquela, a “virtual influencer” whose backstory includes a “real name,” Miquela Sousa, and whose rise to a nebulous online fame has led to collaborations with brands like Prada. All this has happened despite the fact that she does not technically exist, even if her high-res looks are convincing enough at first glance that you could be forgiven for missing that last bit. It’s only on second glance that you realize that she looks slightly more like a Pixar character than an actual human being.

A fictional model with endorsement deals, an album, and a vaguely sinister mystery about who’s really behind the account is a strange enough concept to get your head around, but it really gets weird with the introduction of her foe Bermuda. She’s another virtual Instagram model and also Miquela’s ideological opposite, a crucial ingredient in creating an archnemesis. Miquela is portrayed as a Brazilian-American who posts about defending DACA and uses her modeling fame to support charities that benefit homeless youth. Bermuda’s account, which simultaneously declares her own hotness while denying climate change and lauding James Damore, is loaded up with pro-Trump memes interspersed with her own modeling pics, which look more like low-res screenshots of The Sims than the pixel-perfect shots that Miquela posts.

If Miquela is Pixar, then Bermuda ranks somewhere around the DreamWorks knockoff animated movies you can buy at Walgreens every Christmas, and that’s kind of the best part. It gives her an obvious human motivation, a burning jealousy at being replaced by a newer model that is easy to understand narratively, even if Bermuda never acknowledges it herself. See, in more sense than one, Miquela is a face, and as every professional wrestling fan knows, every good face needs a heel.

Miquela is a face, and as every professional wrestling fan knows, every good face needs a heel

The conflict kicked off when Bermuda appeared to hack Miquela’s account, and there was a brief moment where it seemed like an actual feud was taking place, at least between the people who run the two accounts. But before long, it was clear that the Instagram audience was getting a taste of what the professional wrestling world calls kayfabe — the blanket term for anything within the storyline that’s meant to seem real.

If you really want to understand the complexity of kayfabe and how it relates to the blurred line between reality and fiction in the Miquela vs. Bermuda battle, the best place to start is a 2001 episode of Monday Night Raw.

Toward the end of the show, there’s a match between Lance Storm, a young wrestler who was new to the company, and William Regal, a veteran whose most recent on-screen role had been less about wrestling and more about his exploits as the bumbling, put-upon “commissioner” of the World Wrestling Federation. Regal is clearly playing the cowardly bad guy, and as the match begins, he’s reacting to Storm’s fiery offense by reeling from the hits and stumbling around the ring like one of the Three Stooges. And then something happens.

Storm throws a punch that, unlike most pro wrestling moves, looks like it actually hits. A few seconds later, Storm goes for a pin, and rather than the customarily dramatic two-count, Regal immediately shoves Storm away. When he stands up, he’s got blood gushing from his nose. From there on, the scripted, theatrical fighting style of pro wrestling is replaced by Regal legitimately attacking Storm, apparently in revenge for breaking his nose. He dumps him out of the ring, bouncing him off the ropes backward in a move that looks legitimately dangerous, knees him in the head a few times, and then spends the next few minutes brutally elbowing him in the chest and face, before finally locking on a version of his signature move, a submission hold called the Regal Stretch, which looked a lot more painful than it usually does. When Storm taps out, Regal refuses to let go — a pretty common tactic for one of pro wrestling’s bad guys, but something that seems a lot more vindictive here.

On turn-of-the-century message boards, there was an immediate outcry. Some fans wanted Regal punished for his violent, unprofessional response to an in-ring accident, others saw it as an appropriate reaction from a veteran to a younger wrestler whose mistake caused a legitimate injury and put them both in danger. The one thing nearly everyone agreed on was that it was real.

Until a few years later, that is, when someone asked Storm about the incident, and he told the real story: it turned out that the whole thing had been planned. Regal had been getting frequent nosebleeds as a result of a sinus problem that he’d later have surgery for, and the backstage staff wanted to shift Regal’s character from the on-screen bumbler to something closer to a vicious, capable veteran. The entire thing, including the appearance of Regal deviating from the script, had been planned from the start.

In other words, a fake fight pretending to be a real fight turned into another, completely different fake fight pretending to be a real fight. In wrestling, this happens so often that there’s a term for it, and people occasionally complain about how tired they are of seeing it.

In pro wrestling, anything that’s fake is called a “work,” and anything that’s real is called a “shoot”

In pro wrestling, anything that’s fake — all the pageantry that goes along with the scripted fighting — is called a “work.” Anything that’s real is called a “shoot.” That term was lifted from the first step of a takedown in actual Greco-Roman wrestling, hearkening back to the early carnival roots of pro wrestling, where they’d keep a “shooter” around to deal with any tough guys in the crowd who were so convinced that wrestling was fake that they wanted to step into the ring and try it themselves.

The modern audience, on the other hand, is well aware that wrestling is scripted. One of the best ways it’s ever been described is that the wrestlers are pretending to be legitimate competitors, and the audience is pretending that they’re at a legitimate sporting event. They’re in on it, in the same way that every audience for a scripted drama knows what they’re watching. The only difference is that, if you say you’re into Game of Thrones, nobody ever feels the need to inform you that the dragons aren’t real.

But because actual shoots do happen, and because the business spent the better part of a century working the audience into thinking it was real, pro wrestling has this unique ability to break the fourth wall while keeping a secret fifth wall in place. Those are called “worked shoots”: the times when someone acknowledges the unreality of what’s going on around them, but in a way that advances the action within the story. When the legendary Japanese grappler Antonio Inoki got frustrated with an opponent and stomped him into unconsciousness, that was a shoot. When Lance Storm and William Regal planned their match to give the appearance that they’d gone off-script, to the point of wildly over-the-top selling at the start of the match to underline the change when things got “real,” that was a worked shoot.

If you say you’re into Game of Thrones, nobody ever feels the need to inform you that the dragons aren’t real

Lil Miquela vs. BermudaIsBae was a worked shoot.

This became apparent the moment Miquela regained control of her Instagram account and made the breathless confession that Bermuda had demanded: she isn’t human. (Which is something everyone already knew.) From then on, it was a work. It was pure kayfabe, a storyline about how Miquela was a robot actually built by an ersatz Cyberdyne called Cain Intelligence. (Uh, not to be confused with Kane, the wrestler who is kayfabe the fire-demon brother of a zombie cowboy, and who is shoot running for mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.) Needless to say, Cain Intelligence also does not exist.

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But that doesn’t mean that Miquela’s feud with Bermuda and the sudden reveal that the fictional model that Prada struck a real endorsement deal with is actually a fictional robot with a supervillain nemesis isn’t worth discussing, or that it doesn’t matter. In staging it the way they did, Miquela’s creator(s) brought the idea of that secret fifth wall, the one that usually only exists on the four sides of a wrestling ring, into an entirely new medium and audience.

After the initial shock of Miquela getting hacked and being forced to admit that she was a robot who escaped captivity to become an Instagram model — the truest possible iteration of the 21st century American dream — the beats of the story have been pretty standard sci-fi. Like Miquela herself, and like Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Nature Boy Ric Flair before her, this work blurs the lines between reality and fiction, but thanks to internet media, it manages to make those lines blurrier than ever before.