The newest addition to the Marvel cinematic universe, Logan, may be the finest and most endearing ‘superhero’ film of the last 20 years. It is clearly the most violent film of its type-so violent it’s anti-violent-but like the best of the genre (Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are obvious examples) it is dripping with philosophy-X-23’s backstory is a textbook in bioethics, while Logan’s initial treatment of her, and Xavier’s arguments in favor of protecting her, gives us a resounding discourse in situational and value ethics.
The entire plot of the film is a dissertation in political philosophy, and Logan’s eontological requirements to right action, which he ardently tries to circumvent before finally giving in, very much resemble a certain Kierkegaardian fear and trembling: Logan is clearly called out by a greater power (let’s call it Kantian Responsibility or Duty, if not God), and is offered a choice from which there is no escape-ostensibly, protect X-23 or hand her over; of course, being a man of character there is but one authentic option, and he must obey his conscience.
What ties all this together is the slightly less evident thematic infrastructure, identifiable as Walker Percy’s three concepts of alienation, rotation, and repetition, which in true Percy fashion come together and find resolution through the existential crisis of the story itself. Logan is set in a dystopian near-future America, a scant 12 years from now. The X-Men are no more, and the meta-human mutants movie-goers and comics aficionados are so familiar with are virtually extinct, the victims of government-sanctioned and executed genocide.
Logan, better know to many as Wolverine, and the one-time leader of the X-Men, Professor Xavier, are in hiding in Mexico. Logan has been reduced from orld-saving superhero to a kind of budget chauffeur. Professor Xavier is holed-up in a collapsed grain silo, constantly sedated. Both men suffer from a disease common to mere mortals but utterly alien to the superhero persona-old age. Logan’s alcoholism is almost beyond control; and Xavier has advanced Alzheimer’s disease, so much so that he is incapable of controlling his world-destroying psychic powers.
From the opening scene, Logan disrupts our lives. The unstoppable and uncanny Wolverine looks ancient, grandfatherly; and he’s very nearly stuporously drunk. A gang of hieves are brazenly trying to steal the tires from his car as he sleeps in the back seat! In a strange sense we feel like this is a laughable moment; a bit of comedy. But the jarring juxtaposition of our hero brought low by drink and age sucks all the humor away.
In the theatre there is no movement, no sounds from the audience at all; the chew-chew-chew of popcorn and the steady susurrus undertone of slurps of Coke are caught in the in-between of a moment that none of us can process. Logan, who just wants to live in peace (he says as he exits the car) and perhaps leave his violent past in the past, leads with the bandits to leave off and go. Their response is to shout obscenities and rudely advise the “old man” to “limp back to the nursing home.
Then they promptly shoot him in the chest with a shotgun and laugh about it as they go back to stripping the car. But wait! Here’s the Wolverine we remember and came to see: a growl and the snick-snick of claws extended.. claws that then pierce skulls, sever limbs, and send blood spraying in violent red jets. What is this? Then, kicking away the jack, he jumps in and drives off, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching a flask; the mournful and whisky- oney melancholy of Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” playing softy through the speakers.
In this moment we see how undeniably alienated Logan has become; he is “a stranger in a strange land,” he recognizes none of the signs around him, and we the audience share in his alienation, the epiphenomenon of the flickering light across that silver-coated plastic in front of us is mass empathy. And something else happens: Percy’s notion of rotation has entranced us-we came to this film with the expectation of a new story in a familiar universe, but what we’ve been given is an unexpected experience of the new.
In this way we achieve something unique and genuine: authentic surprise under mentally and emotionally engaging conditions that, despite the fantasy of the medium involved, hints at some otherwise unknowable and inaccessible personal truth-this story is about us, in this time, in this place. Throughout the film, the audience is subjected to numerous assaults on the integrity of our shared cultural nostalgia, what Percy calls repetition.
Similar to the experience of rotation, it is the expectation of repetition that motivates us to see cinematic sequels in the first place; assuming we enjoyed previous ncarnations of the story and characters, we are anticipating a return to whatever it was we enjoyed the first time around. Both rotation and repetition are artistically visualized as a meta- experience in Logan as both the audience and characters watch scenes from the 1956 western Shane, a story that is almost perfectly mirrored by the philosophy of the movie.
This film within a film likewise mirrors the virtuous Campbellian monomyth hero whose thousand faces are scintillatingly front- lit by the movements of Logan and his young charge; once again the audience is captured in an unexpected and truly novel way. So, there is a center of gravity to this film, a single focal point whose undergirding is the Percyan trifecta of alienation- rotation-repetition: human violence that is itself a heart- breaking plea for peace and nonviolence.
I cannot genuinely believe that any normative individual might not be perceptively affected by the depth of violence done to and by the film’s titular character. This is a level of close-quarters fighting never before experienced in this type of genre film-normally the bad guys (at worst) get blown up, which we really don’t see in any eaningful way; but fights between the heroes and villains end up with villains in prisons (from which they are destined to escape, one or two years later, and just in time for Memorial Day Weekend! ).
So, when we see our teflon-coated Sunday afternoon heroes very appreciably murdering the bad guys in Logan, not only do we begin to feel some sympathy for the devil, to wince in virtual pain for the severed body parts, but we begin to see our heroes quite differently: they become, ironically, more human. Now, in many violent films, the sheer inhuman madness is esensitizing and dehumanizing, and we are as likely, a la the days of ye olde coliseum, to laugh at the bloodshed and recount it with a subtly grotesque excitement, a kind of perversion of the Percyan repetition.
But in a film like Logan, the bloodshed is reluctant, and the result is a humbled and remorseful audience: we walk away from the experience having heard an appeal for humanity. In this way, the film (like the film within, Shane) is a dramatization of the O’Connoresque eternal return of violence. Recall that in Flannery O? Connor’s stories, violence begets iolence in an unending cycle that is largely lost to her characters but painfully evident to the reader.
In Mystery and Manners O’Connor said, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. ” In this way, we see a literary artist like O’Connor epitomizing the Percyan rotation as the reader experiences something new beyond their expectations. James Mangold does the same thing in Logan, and so we experience that sense of alienation- rotation-repetition, which allows the film to say something meaningful, and ultimately, quite enduring.
