The Philosophy of LOGAN – Wisecrack Edition

Hey, joke with Jared again 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 new approach. The franchise presents a surprising message about the world's relationship with nature and even a meta commentary on the Marvel Cinematic Universe that you may have missed. Welcome to this wise

edition

on Logan's

philosophy

and you guessed it, spoilers ahead, but first a quick recap. Logan is the heartwarming tail of Wolverine Charles Xavier and his refugee daughter Laura, who evades cyborg child predators to weaponize the mutation.

It takes place in a future where mutants are almost extinct and Logan drives an Uber to save enough money to escape the law. with Charles Before we can dive into the

philosophy

, we have to understand what the film is, it's a Western and not just because it's gritty and takes place in the West, according to sociologist Will Write in his book Six Guns in Society, it follows the classic Western. A pretty standard setup, our hero often a wilderness man enters a social group and is drawn into a conflict to protect his new civilized friends before eventually saving the day and generally becoming part of this new group to understand Logan's western roots. from the wild side.

When I found you, you were pursuing a career as a cage fighter. I gave you a family. Throughout all the X-Men movies, both good and bad, we are reminded of Wolverines animalistic nature, people don't change, Wolverine. You were an animal, then you are an animal, now I only gave you claws. Logan doesn't really find a new group of friends, but he does find a family with Laura and Charles and then with the other transgenic children. The film strives to juxtapose the civilized love of his friends with his innate wild nature. Logan violates his resistance to Picking up Laura in the first place Not available Call a taxi He's cursing from my car and we even hear some distinctly animal-like noises while Logan sleeps as an ode to all of this.

We see Charles and Laura watching a classic western at their hotel. Room Shane In the movie, our gunslinging hero Shane emerges from the wilderness, befriends some settlers, and leads them away from a cattle baron. Shane realizes that his violent ways have no place in society and returns to the forest, perhaps to die depending on who he is. If you ask to replace homesteaders with family and cattle barons with megacorporations, you get Logan in a nutshell, a very deliberate word, but as much as Logan is a Western like Shane, it's also a post-Western in the movie tradition. like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. post Western discards tired black and white binaries between good and evil.

Explore what happens when these men of the Wild West return to a drastically different world, one that has surpassed them - in short, it's about living at the end of an era of Charles I. The world is not the same as it was as it was. publico Western could present the violent nature of the Cowboys as a relic of the pre-industrial era that you want to arrive, it's not like it used to be, but it will do. Logan presents Wolverine as a relic of the era of mutants who liked a post-western hero who has to deal with what it means to live in a new world a world where mutants are almost extinct the only evidence of Logan's previous world is an x-men comic with that considering we can begin 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.

Seriously, let me explain that nature as a theme is everywhere in Logan. Charles tends a garden. Logan wants to escape the world and live on the open sea and Charles compares Laura to wildlife. And by the way, the claws on Laura's feet are the obvious result of her gender, you know? Is that a fact? Nature is also juxtaposed with technology. Natural mutants face off against cyborgs. They were reminded twice that Laura is not natural, she is not a natural shit like you. She is a business mistake. R&D went wrong. unlike you, she is not pure, she was not created by nature, the family farm is up against a giant agricultural company that pumps corn syrup into our bodies, and Charles laments that he has been pharmaceutically castrated by all the drugs he is on. taking.

I suppose you would prefer me. pharmaceutically castrated rambling like a lunatic and Logan, a natural mutant, is being murdered by his artificial adamantium skeleton. There is a specific historical development that embodies the fight and can teach us a little about how our world and Logan's world works. It's called an enclosure. The enclosure was an English practice. of taking free communal lands for anyone's use and enclosing them in private farms isolating them from the public, the underlying logic is to take something open, unpredictable, imperfect and uncontrollable and order it with rules and laws to the detriment of the public in large open expanses of the West. of land were free for animals to graze before the arrival of barbed wire encouraged farmers to fence them to the detriment of these free spaces. fencing not only motivates conflict in Shane did not expect to find fences around here but all the issues in Logan seems designed to mirror it in Shane as well, a group of settlers fight with the cattle baron to see who has the right to order the wet that Riker spreads around.

He thinks the whole world belongs to him, whether that order is for the common people. God didn't make this whole country just for a man like Riker or for the cattle baron's monetary interest in Logan. The Duke of Munson compromised on this same land issue. a conversation about eminent domain becomes very closed as public water becomes unavailable to the Munsons when we wouldn't sell, they tried eminent domain and have been ruining our water. And Logan longs to be on the open sea, a place free of borders and the creeping encroachment of corporate enclosure, but this focus on enclosure takes on another meaning when Logan and Charles Duke confront Transitigen to see who has the right to order the future of The mutation says that enclosure conflicts are not necessarily about open space but about everything, as the writer Raoul Martínez points out.

Enclosure has moved beyond territories, extending the reach of markets to every corner of our lives in what some have called an enclosure of the mind. is being expanded to include facets of life that were once considered non-commodifiable algorithms symbols words ideas seeds and even human genes In other words, if Pythagoras were alive today, someone would have patented his theorem and created some kind of initial idea based on a triangle that once contributed freely to society. are patents and commodities for commercializing genetic 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 research and development projects.

They can't have things with patents that harm people. , Can they? It's not just like corporations are profiting from someone else's gene, the core logic of enclosure is to turn any semblance of the Commons that is unmanageable and potentially dangerous and turn it into something manageable. The goal was not to wipe out the mutant species, but control him. When it comes to locking up genetic material, the natural version becomes a liability to corporate interests seeking to profit from their own artificial version. Random mutation followed the path of polio. We embark on our next endeavor. Your own growing mutants.

Precisely. Therefore, the Wild West of natural mutants must end just as Shane marks the end of the open, lawless land. Logan marks the end of organic mutation. Mutant powers are fine as long as they are in the hands of a corporation that supposedly has everything under control, while events like Charles' seizures become proof that natural mutation is dangerous and uncontrollable. I'm so sorry, lockdown creates a safe and business friendly world. they are isolated from the wild and unwieldy and anything outside these borders must be slowly incorporated into it. The logic of borders, both real and metaphorical, is not lost on Logan.

The beginning of the film shows Logan sailing between the United States and Mexico. The border operates to allow American businessmen and partygoers to come and go in the service of business, while presumably keeping everything else out. The films that end with Laura and her friends escaping to Canada don't give us a physical border, but the open expanses of the Canadian wilderness, this creeping control of business. in all aspects of life frames the eternal struggle of Logan, a man who drives around people for money. Logan only initially risks his life for Laura for a large amount of cash, while Charles serves as a foil, all that gardening stuff becoming a compelling metaphor for Logan.

Charles nurtures people out of compassion and encourages Logan to care for Laura no matter the money. This is your daughter Logan. This nurturing attitude is juxtaposed with Pierce, who reminds Caliban that I have a theory that people don't really change. and the dr. Rice who prefers artificial design to nature. you can't feed anger, just design it from scratch. The real battle for Laura is a battle for her soul. Will he be like Logan, a man who can't break the mold, or can he avoid her mistakes by living with a supportive family? Logan eventually appears to side with Charles and chooses to reject Laura's money and give up on her life.

Logan's enemy x24 is a soulless version of himself, a compelling reminder of what could have been a mindless mercenary at the beck and call of his corporate masters. In the showdown with the Reavers, we get a real Captain Planet moment when all the kids use elemental forces, ice, electricity, and grass to kill a Reaver. Laura gives a eulogy for the fallen Logan by reciting Shane's words about how you run home to your mother and tell her everything. It's okay, there are no more weapons in the valley. He runs home to your mother and tells her everything is okay.

There are no more weapons in the valley. In Shane, these words justify his retreat back into the wild while his violent ways saved the settlers. They will never be able to exist alongside the city they hope to build without violence. Shane can't break the mold and neither can Logan. The man has to be what Joey is, he can't break the mold. I can't break the mold. Laura's words remind us that Logan's violence was incompatible with the future Charles had hoped for Laura, but his violence also allowed them to build that better future free of violence and the interference of people like transitigen.

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 lockdown, what if this also served as a sly commentary on status of comic book movies? Let's not forget that westerns were Hollywood's daily bread. many years similar to what superhero movies are like today, if we want to rethink nature versus business, art versus business, Logan's struggle as a character mirrors the battle for Wolverine's soul in the ruthless profiteering world of the Universe. Marvel Cinematic and they are pissing contest with Fox, which owns the rights to X-Men, nothing is sacred.

Marvel reportedly canceled the Fantastic Four comics to deprive Fox of source material. Fox will sue Marvel if any of their movies dare to say the word mutants and entire movies are simply made. to that Fox Sony or Marvel can retain the rights to a certain franchise and if the MCU ever reacquires the x-men, it would have to fit the mold, so to speak, and adhere to whatever tonal stylistic choices the executives at Marvel have taken while adapting to play nice when they are made up their minds about continuity, all for the sake of ticket sales, in a sense, the freely interpretable source material of the x-men would be included in the MCU and perhaps it is because that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine really had to die to stop Fox or Marvel. or anyone else get their dirty little hands on what might be one of the best portrayals of a superhero ever made.

Thank you very much for watching the jokes. Peace. Hey, thanks so much for watching, if you can't get enough pop culture criticism be sure to check out our friend Mike Rugnetta on the PBS Ideas Channel, whether you're wondering about the origins of the hoodie or worried that we are all cyborgs. Mike's got your back, he really knows what he's doing and, like us, uses theliterature, philosophy, history, and science for everything, so check out Mike on the PBS Ideas Channel, tell them I said what's up, and be sure to subscribe while you're there. If you like what we do and want to help us do more, consider becoming a patron, you'll get access to our growing library of patron-only content, including my latest video on daddy issues in Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2, my rant on Suicide Squad and our 8-bit philosophy episode on VR porn and there's more exclusive material for patrons like early access videos, quick takes and more, so check out our patreon page by clicking here or the link on the description below, that's all for now, just a joke, don't forget to subscribe.

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