Howdy again, folks. Ehud here.
This is a podcast about Christ’s Kingdom, Kinism, and everything relative thereto. Kinism being that radical notion that the Great Commission does not abolish the nations, but rather, redeems them.
Today’s topic is the movie Logan. And, spoiler alert, I will be divulging some details of the film.
I hadn’t expected to plunge into any movie reviews so soon after starting this podcast, but the story of Logan, a.k.a Wolverine, a.k.a James Howlett, strikes me worthy of exception.
First, let me say, as a very earthy character struggling to uncover his own roots, and hunted on all sides by agents of scientific government, the Wolverine character resonated with my teenage self. Even if I haven’t been a reader of comics for more than two decades, and Marvel has no doubt taken steps to denature the character since, his backstory is still compelling: born sometime in the 1800s in the Northwest wilderness, and always preferring less modernized out-of-the-way places like woodlands, small towns, and country road saloons, Logan walked the modern world a man born out of time.
I saw the two preceding installments of the Wolverine franchise. Both of which were rather awful. So I went into this third chapter with low expectations, but, I confess, I liked this concluding chapter, Logan. A lot, actually. Some multicult propaganda notwithstanding. And — parental warning — the first quarter of the movie is profanity-laden and contains a flash of female nudity.
The year is 2025. All mutants, save a sparse few, are dead. Their genome is all but entirely confined now to the weaponized experiments of Technocrats in world government.
In this installment we meet an aged and declining Old Man Logan having devolved to the incognito station of limousine driver on the U.S. side of the Texan/Mexico border, where he and his fellow mutant Caliban tend to an enfeebled and dementia-addled Charles Xavier in a remote shop-turned-ramshackle desert home which might best be describe by the word “Tetanus.”
The opening scene, though quite gritty, is refreshing for the frank and ominous depiction of a post-White America. Therein Logan is set upon by a pack of Mexicans who shoot him down without a word for daring to ask them not to steal the source of his livelihood, his limo. And, no doubt, just for being an uppity Gringo. So when he staggers back to his feet and eviscerates the chollos, the viewer is happy to see them get their comeuppance.
But Logan is shortly approached by a Mexican nurse with a young girl in tow. The woman, having recognized him as Wolverine, infamous as he was from years prior with the X-Men. Now, one of the last of his kind, she pleads for Logan to transport herself and little girl named Laura to a set of coordinates along the Dakotan/Canadian border. The long and short of which is that Laura turns out to be Logan’s daughter, and possessed of abilities like his own. Well, “daughter” may not be the exact word for it; she was bred by the Technocrats from Logan’s DNA and gestated in the womb of some nameless Mexican woman. But in light of the confusion introduced by her laboratory genesis, ‘daughter’ is the closest approximation we can make of her relation to Logan.
And it comes as no small surprise that Laura’s and like experimental children being bred, patented, weaponized for state use, and raised in government dormitories is intimated as profound tragedy. Because it actually exemplifies the liberal dream. To the credit of the script writer, he portrayed that total scientific institutionalization of children championed by the post-family Left today as nothing less than a nightmarish failure, which can only crush the soul, and yield the most broken and feral psyches.
It may be on account of the nature of the central character himself, but with disquieting scenes of driverless-robotic freight trucks barrelling along oblivious to anyone that happens into their path, tracking chips, surveillance cameras, the ubiquity of GM foods, cyborgs, clones, and GM children, the movie really does take a strongly implied stance against Technocracy. Logan represents the vestiges of the natural world pushing back against the new artificial world bent on overthrowing nature forever.
But they swaddled their propaganda in the midst of this otherwise good narrative by making the cyborg army of Reavers all burly White men, and their quarry — the escaped lab-bred mutant children — almost entirely non-White. So in a post-White future all the villains remain White, and the children whom Logan, a White himself, must save, are non-White. Pure coincidence, no doubt.
But dispelling all doubt, the leader of the cyborg army turns out to be a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan posterchild sporting a traditional crewcut, lately called the “fashy cut.” And just as a cherry on top, he has a molasses Southern drawl too. So the penultimate villain in the film is not only White, but the only blond, as well as the only Southron. That’s right: the face of the post-White world of Technocrat amalgamation is a Confederate Nazi. Marvel, if you’re listening, a guy with metal bones is far more believable than your subplot pinning responsibility for the multicult Technocracy on Aryan supersoldiers. That’s too far-fetched even for comics.
There is also a defining segment in which Logan, Xavier, and Laura are taken in for the night by a heartland ranching family. This little brood have all the cultural markers of a conservative Christian family. The father is loving, the mother respectful of her husband, the son obedient to his parents, and a champion horse rider, besides. They say grace and sup together at a common table (a sadly rarefied custom today). Which all provides Xavier an object lesson against Logan’s MGTOW behavior, and which he advises Logan to emulate by settling down into family life with his newfound daughter. This little farm family represents the life Logan never had.
All of which would have been wonderful, really, if not spoiled by one glaring lie: did I mention that the little salt o’ the earth ranching family is Black? Yeah. Because the countryside is just chuck full o’ intact wholesome Black farming families; the Huxtables of Mayberry. Talk about a rare bird! Might as well have made them unicorn ranchers.
But this provides again another psychological juxtaposition, doesn’t it? On the run from evil Southron Gestapo White men, the protagonist (who happens to be White as well) finds safe haven with placid salt o’ the earth Black folks. Uh huh.
That’s why in some ways, this story was better told by Mel Gibson under the title Blood Father. Apart from the absurd ethnic mythologizing in Logan, the metanarrative which resonates in each is one and the same. Think about it — both feature declining and demoralized warriors who, having lost all else, are suddenly sought out by their estranged daughters, and must face down all the nightmare forces of the modernist dystopia in a last-ditch effort to redeem their precarious legacies.
It is the story of Patriarchy fallen, despairing, and at the last, sought out by daughters not yet wholly assimilated into the Comintern, as the foremost hedge of protection against the same.
One depicts a man fighting to save his White daughter from the encroaching ethnic diversity, the other is up against the Transhumanist Singularity, but this is really a distinction without a difference as the protagonist in each is driven by the instincts of paternity and kinship against the same humanist modernism defined as much by multiculturalism as Technocracy. The antagonists in each reflect the same NWO Comintern in equal measure.
Logan, like Blood Father, is ultimately about the redemption of bloodlines by marginalized fathers getting one last chance to put the pieces back together for posterity’s sake. And the desperation that unexpected last chance comes with the implicit mandate of self-sacrifice unto death.
And the fact that the returning prodigals are daughters rather than sons, and seeking the strong protection of fathers, is a vindication of Patriarchy against feminism. As if to say, in the voice of those daughters, “Liberalism has ruined everything, made my life a mess, and threatens my very existence. Only Daddy can protect me now.” And that plea for protection from daughters is like a key forged expressly to open the hearts of fathers, no matter how hardened.
And Logan’s jaded heart is on full display when he faces his greatest enemy, a clone of himself in his prime. If reclamation of his patriarchal role and redemption of his line define the metanarrative, the plot hinges on his battle with himself: his old self, full of reckless, conscienceless rage. When it comes down to it, his own sins were always the biggest threat to his daughter, and his legacy. And to salvage something for her now, and some meaning for the sordid life he lived, his old man — his sin — must be mortified.
But to save his daughter, and the other mutant children of sundry races, and deliver them to the appropriately titled sanctuary “Eden,” his old identity must die. But before that clone representative of his sins dies, he hangs Logan upon a tree, battered, depleted, and pierced through the abdomen by a branch, as if by a spear. And so concludes the life of Logan. He died to save his people; and coming full circle, was buried somewhere along the Canadian border, the same place where he was born.
Albeit a muddled metaphor, we find Logan to clearly be a type of Christ. What then shall we say of this? For my money, Brian Godawa has made a compelling case that all stories are meaningful only in direct proportion to how faithfully they parallel Christian theology. Think about it by reference to the antithesis; I mean, when you reflect on any Asian cinema or even experimental Western-made works intentionally detouring from the classic protagonist-antagonist-innocence-fall-alienation-trial-redemption-reunification components of Occidental storytelling, the end product is always very off somehow. Even if you can’t put your finger on it, most people seem to sense something very out of order about Asian or nihilist storylines. Yes, no matter the production value, the actor’s skill, or directorial pizzazz, the further afield from Christian theology a story wanders, the more one is left with an itch unscratched. All stories in some essential way, in order to find meaning, must reiterate the Gospel.
This is how, in spite of certain glaring flaws, and in contrast to the previous Wolverine movies, as well as the overall Hollywood worldview, Logan works — only by borrowing heavily from Christian themes.
Thanks for listening. Ehud signing off.
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