Hey Wisecrack, Jared here and today we're talking about one of the best superhero movies
in years - Logan.
Logan is radically different from other superhero movies, and especially other X-Men movies.
That's because, well… it's not really a superhero movie at all.
This fresh approach to the franchise puts forward a surprising message about the world's
relationship to nature, and even a metacommentary on the Marvel Cinematic Universe that you
might have missed.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the Philosophy of Logan.
And you guessed it- spoilers ahead.
But first a quick recap.
Logan is the heart-tugging tale of Wolverine, Charles Xavier, and a mute refugee kid evading
cyborg child predators out to weaponize mutancy.
It takes place in a future where mutants have become nearly extinct, and Logan drives an
Uber to save enough money to escape from the law with Charles.
Before we can dive into the philosophy, we have to understand what the movie is: it's
a Western.
And not just because it's sandy and takes place in, you know, the West.
According to sociologist Will Wright in his book "Sixguns and Society," the classic
Western follows a pretty standard structure: our hero, often a man "from the wild,"
enters a social group, gets dragged into a conflict to protect his new civilized, but
weak, friends, before finally saving the day, and usually, becoming a part of this new group.
To grasp Logan's Western roots, pay attention to the "from the wild" part.
Throughout all the X-Men movies, both good and bad, we're reminded of Wolverine's
animal nature.
Logan doesn't really find a new group of friends, but finds a family with Laura and
Charles, and later, with the other Transigen kids.
The film makes a point to juxtapose the civilized love of his friends with his innate "wild
nature": there's Logan's violence, his resilience to pick up Laura in the first place,
his swearing, we even get some distinctly animal-like noises while Logan is sleeping.
As an ode to all this, we see Charles and Laura watching a classic Western in their
hotel room: Shane.
In the film, our gun-slinging hero Shane emerges from the wild, makes friends with some homesteaders,
and saves them from a cattle baron.
Shane realizes his violent ways have no place in society and rides back into the woods,
perhaps to die, depending on who you ask.
Replace "homesteaders" with "family" and "cattle baron" with "megacorporation"
and you've got Logan in a nutshell.
A very deliberate nutshell.
But as much as Logan is a Western like Shane, it's also a "post-Western" in the tradition
of movies like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.
A Post Western discards the tired black and white binaries between good and evil and explores
what happens when these men of the Wild West return to a drastically different world- one
that has moved past them.
They are, in short, about living in the "end of an era."
Just as a post-Western might feature a cowboy whose violent nature is a relic from the pre-industrial
era, Logan features s Wolverine as a relic from the age of Mutants.
He, like a post-Western hero, has to grapple with what it means to be living in a new world-
a world where mutants are nearly extinct.
The only evidence of Logan's former world is in X-Men comic books.
With that in mind, we can start to understand what Logan is trying to say about nature.
All we need is a little help from a 500-year-old English legal practice.
Let me explain.
"Nature", as a theme, is everywhere in Logan.
Charles tends a garden, Logan wants to escape the world and live on the open seas, and Charles
compares Laura to wildlife.
Nature is also juxtaposed with technology: natural mutants are set against cyborgs, twice
we're reminded Laura isn't natural, the family farm is pit up against a giant agricultural
company pumping corn syrup into our bodies, and Charles laments being "pharmaceutically
castrated" by all the drugs he's taking.
And Logan, a natural mutant, is being killed by his artificial adamantium skeleton.
There's a specific historical development that embodies this struggle, and can teach
us a bit about how our world, and Logan's, works.
It's called "enclosure.
Enclosure was an English practice of taking communal land, free for anyone's use, and
"enclosing" it into private farms; cutting it off from the public.
The underlying logic is: take something open, unpredictable, imperfect, and uncontrollable,
and "order" it with rules and law, to the detriment of the public.
In the West, vast open swaths of land were free for animals to graze in, before the advent
of barbed wire encouraged farmers to fence them in, to the detriment of these free spaces.
Enclosure not only motivates the conflict in Shane, but all the themes in Logan seem
designed to reflect it.
In Shane, a group of homesteaders duke it out with a cattle baron to see who has the
right to order the West: whether that order is for everyday people or for the cattle baron's
moneyed interest.
In Logan, the Munsons duke it out with Transigen over this same issue of land use.
A conversation about eminent domain: becomes very enclosure-esque as public water becomes
unavailable to the Munsons.
becomes very enclosure-esque as public water becomes unavailable to the Munsons.
And Logan yearns to be on the open ocean, a place free of borders and the creeping encroachment
of corporate enclosure.
But this focus on enclosure takes on ANOTHER meaning as Logan and Charles duke it out with
Transigen to see who has the right to order the future of mutancy.
See, Conflicts of enclosure are not necessarily of open space, but, well, everything.
As writer Raoul Martinez notes, "Enclosure has moved beyond... territories, extending
the reach of markets into every corner of our lives...
In what some have dubbed 'an enclosure of the mind', intellectual property rights are
being extended to include facets of life that were once considered uncommodifiable.
...algorithms, symbols, words, ideas, seeds and even human genes.
In other words, if Pythagoras were alive today, someone would patent his theorems and create
some kind of triangle-based startup.
Ideas, which once freely contributed to society, are patents and commodities to be traded.
Gene sequences freely available in nature are becoming the intellectual property of
pharmaceutical companies.
Transigen has turned the genetic information of Wolverine and countless other mutants into
patents and R&D projects.
It's not just that companies are making a profit off somebody else's genes.
The core logic of enclosure is turn any semblance of the "commons," which is unmanageable,
and potentially dangerous and turn it into something manageable, When it comes to the
enclosure of genetic material, the naturally occurring version becomes a liability to corporate
interest seeking to profit off their own artificial version.
Hence, the wild west of naturally-occurring mutants must end.
Just as Shane marks the end of lawless open land, Logan marks the end of organic mutancy.
Mutant powers are fine, so long as they are in the hands of a corporation that allegedly
has everything under control.
Meanwhile, events like Charles' seizure become proof that natural mutancy is dangerous
and uncontrollable.
Enclosure creates a world where "safe" and "business-friendly" are walled off
from the unwieldy wild, and anything outside those borders must slowly be incorporated
into it.
The logic of borders, both real and metaphorical, are not lost on Logan.
The beginning of the film shows us Logan navigating between the United States and Mexico, the
border operates to let American businessmen and party-goers in and out, in the service
of business, while presumably keeping everything else out.
This creeping control of business into all aspects of life frames Logan's internal
struggle.
A man who drives people around for money, Logan only initial risks his life for Laura
for a fat stack of cash.
Meanwhile, Charles serves as a counterpoint: all of that gardening stuff becomes a compelling
metaphor for Logan.
Charles nurtures people out of compassion, and encourages Logan to care for Laura regardless
of money.
This nurturing attitude is juxtaposed with Pierce, who reminds Caliban: "I've got a theory
that people don't really change" and Dr. Rice who prefers artificial design over nature.
The real battle for Laura is a battle for her soul: will she be like Logan, a man who
'can't break the mold,' or can she avoid his mistakes by living with a nurturing family?
Logan eventually seems to side with Charles, opting to refuse the money from Laura and
giving up his life.
Logan's nemesis, X-24, is a soulless version of himself, a compelling reminder of what
he could have been: a mindless mercenary at the beck and call of his corporate masters.
In the final showdown with the Reavers, we get a real captain planet moment as the kids
use elemental forces, ice, electricity and grass, to kill Reaver.
Laura gives a eulogy for the fallen Logan, reciting the words from Shane.
In Shane, these words justify his retreat back into nature.
While his violent ways saved the homesteaders, they can never exist alongside the town they
hope to build - devoid of violence.
Shane can't break the mold - and neither can Logan.
Laura's words remind us that Logan's violence was incompatible with the future Charles hoped
for Laura - but his violence also enabled them to build that better future, free from
violence and the interference of people like Transigen.
It's the "end of an era" for the X-Men, and Logan's sacrifice established a new
world for his daughter.
So while Logan shows a triumph over the logic of enclosure, what if this also served to
be a sly commentary on the state of comic book movies.
Logan accomplishes this "end of an era" schtick really well, in the movie, but also
as early as the marketing campaign.
Remember that Post-Western stuff before?
The original post-Westerns were about the "end of the Wild West."
Our uncivilized and free cowboys have settled off to live a peaceful existence, before being
drawn back into a "West" they no longer recognize.
And for us, the viewer: we are drawn back into the world of the X-Men, but confronted
with a strange and alien world.
But what if also something really meta going on here?
Let's not forget that Westerns were Hollywood's bread and butter for many years, similar to
how Superhero movies are today.
If we want to reframe "nature vs business" to "artistry vs business," the struggle
of Logan as a character reflects the battle over the "soul" of Wolverine.
In the ruthless profiteering world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and their pissing
contest with Fox - who owns the X-Men rights - nothing is sacred: Marvel allegedly cancelled
Fantastic Four comics to deprive Fox of source material, Fox will sue the hell out of Marvel
if any of their movies dare say the word "mutant," and entire movies are made just so that Fox,
Sony, or Marvel can retain the rights to certain franchises *cough* The Amazing Spiderman.
Marvel allegedly cancelled Fantastic Four comics to deprive Fox of source material,
Fox will sue the hell out of Marvel if any of their movies dare say the word "mutant,"
and entire movies are made just so that Fox, Sony, or Marvel can retain the rights to certain
franchises *cough* The Amazing Spiderman.




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