Logan: God, Faith, and Eden; a Christian’s reflection on the film

Haunting, aching, beautiful, this super(anti)hero film lingered on long after I left the cinema. So profound is its impact that instead of an exegesis of a Bible passage, I decided to exegete the film for a devotional sharing. Allow me to muse aloud awhile. (SPOILERS ABOUND.)

It is clearly deliberate that there are multiple references to God and Christianity. (As a Christian, it’s good to know that Christianity is still alive in a supposedly post-mutant future in 2029).

Early in the film, Logan (Hugh Jackman), in a conversation with Xavier (Patrick Stewart), says,

This conversation is ambiguous. Just before this, Logan said that there were no other mutants left. They were all gone. Why were they gone? At that point we don’t know yet. But the reference to God’s plan is pretty meta. In the Marvel cinematic universe, the mutants have been treated as gods. I mean, Wolverine was practically immortal and Xavier almost omniscient. Magneto himself said so in Days of Future Past. But in Logan, the mutants aren’t gods. It’s not hard to see why.

In the first scene of the film, we see a haggard Logan who now works as a limo chauffeur sleeping in the car, woken up by a bunch of thugs trying to steal his car tyre plates. Logan gets up and fights them, warning beforehand, “you really don’t want to do this”. As the viewer, you think, “yeah, he’s gonna own you”. But Logan doesn’t. He does kill a bunch of them, but not as easily as you would have expected. And gunshots at his body actually weakened him. Then when we first see Xavier in the film, you expect the professorial gravitas but you get a senile nonagenarian who’s got Alzheimer’s or something. So no, these are not gods. These are an endangered species. The so-called gods themselves could not see themselves as gods. They had to believe in something higher than themselves. Even the so-called gods themselves need a God. They certainly needed purpose. When they were trying to get out of a chase by the bad guy cyborgs, the Reavers, Xavier remarked to Logan, “doesn’t this give you purpose?” That is telling.

Presumably after the demise of mutant-kind, humankind transited into a post-gods reality. Where there had once been fear, the humans have since mythologised and commercialised their former gods. Later in the film, we see X-Men comic books. This gets pretty self-referentially meta. The bad guy in the film, Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook, the Narcos DEA agent), remarked that he grew up reading about Wolverine and had once admired him. We soon realise that the comic books are a loose parallel to religious scriptures, like the Bible. The stories are loosely based on ‘real’ events in the X-Men universe but mostly fiction. We find out that the young female charge Laura (Dafne Keen), who has persistently demanded that Logan brings her to ‘Eden’, got her idea from the comic books. The coordinates given to Logan by Laura’s previous minder Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez), a kindhearted nurse in the bad guy corporation Transigen, turned out to be numbers from the comic books. So when Logan found out about this, he was really pissed. His plans, his life (which was already a rather wretched one), was foiled by her supposed fantasy of Eden, which we are to assume does not exist. Or does it?

 

When we are brought to the pivotal point of the story, we find ourselves at the dinner table in a warm rural country home of a black Christian family, the Munsons. Mommy wears a large cross on her neck. The family says grace, with the mutants no less, before eating. They have normal family conversation. Mommy declares that “the Lord will provide”. We see a Cross in the dark behind Logan. Why is this a pivotal point? The film deliberately slows down at this scene. Unhurried grace. The grace of having a ‘normal life’ with a ‘normal family’. Despite the lurking danger, Xavier insisted that they stay the night. Why? He wanted Logan to experience life as it should be. A family. A home. He says to Logan, “it’s not too late”.

This is where I finally understood the character motivations of Logan and Xavier. They have had their run. They are jaded. They have spilled enough blood. And their friends, their family, have all gone. There was no more meaning or purpose in life. But Xavier did not see it that way for Logan. Remember Logan was presumably immortal. Xavier wanted Logan to find meaning and purpose in being family with Laura (and perhaps hopefully the other mutant kids which Transigen had created in test tubes out of mutants’ DNA).

But there is something even more pivotal at this place. The bad guys came and killed the Munsons. Just before Logan came back to the house, Xavier wept and confessed on the bed, a Bible next to him, that he vaguely remembered what happened at Westchester, “something unspeakable”. Earlier in the film, a radio broadcast mentioned this incident which paralyzed many people and killed the X-Men. So we see a Xavier who was far from a saviour. He could not control his mind in his declining frailty and mortality. The guilt must have been lurking somewhere inside of him. When he remembered, he was a man in need of absolution. He cried, “I don’t deserve any of this!” It was a heart wrenching moment. A sinner crying out for grace. He needed redemption.

 

In a sense, Xavier was redeemed. It is suggested that Xavier had something to do with Laura finding her way to Logan. And because of this series of events, the young mutants survived the humans. This too was Logan’s redemption. Logan brought Laura to where Eden’s coordinates. We do not find heaven, but to our surprise, a temporary haven. A camp built by the other mutant kids who escaped Transigen, they were waiting for Laura before they could make their escape to Canada (yes, America, Canada welcomes refugees). Logan couldn’t have been more wrong about Eden. This Eden wasn’t paradise. But this Eden was all the family that Laura got. This Eden was the hope of, and an ongoing journey to, a place of peace.

At the end, Logan finds his peace. He dies saving Laura and the other kids from the bad guys. Just before he dies, Laura cried and called him daddy. Before this scene, Logan was about to leave the kids to run to Canada on their own, incurring Laura’s resentment. Logan said this wasn’t what he signed up for, and whoever he cared for would inevitably get hurt. Laura’s sharp retort stung, “well then I’ll be fine”. But Logan dies redeemed. He dies as a father.

His last words were, “so this is what it feels like”. It is left ambiguous as to what he meant. He looked satisfied in the end. Was it fatherhood? Was it death? Was it the end of his running? After all, earlier in the film, Logan revealed that he had kept an adamantium bullet with him so that he could kill himself at some point. A depressed suicidal god resigned to fatalism.

Logan dies not so much absolved for his past sins, but in the ultimate analysis, contrite and humbled, his heart filled with love. The outer shell of raw roughness and the impulse of pushing the people he cared about away had finally given way. It has been suggested that he is the Good Samaritan to Laura, reluctant as he was. Perhaps.

The kids bury Logan. They use branches to make a cross at his grave. Laura conducts a quasi-funeral service, because she watched one on a film with Xavier in a hotel room earlier, quoting from the classic Western film Shane:

“There’s no living with… with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her … tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley”.

It suggests that the anti-hero of Logan, like the killer cowboy in Shane, was in a sense never able to escape bloodshed. He had to do what he had to do. And he had to live with the moral ambiguity. But at least for those he left behind, “there aren’t any more guns in the valley”. And so it goes for the kids who then made their way off to a place of peace. Not before Laura lifts the cross and rotates it to form an ‘X’. (In the original comic ‘Old Man Logan’ series, Wolverine was crucified by the Reavers on an ‘X’.)

But that is not the end of this. In the post-show credits, James Mangold plays us Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, a song about judgment day, two verses of which goes like this:

 “There’s a man going around taking names

And he decides who to free and who to blame

Everybody won’t be treated all the same

There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down

When the man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up

At the terror in each sip and in each sup

Will you partake of that last offered cup

Or disappear into the potter’s ground

When the man comes around”

 

There was to be no superhero resurrection for Professor X or Wolverine. But we are reminded that in the final analysis, there will be a resurrection of the dead. There will be a reckoning of all our deeds, all our sins, all our faith. The Munsons were unjustly treated in this world. But in the world to come, they won’t be treated the same. They will be “free”.

The film depicts the wickedness of humankind. So wicked that even the gods could be defeated and then moulded into humankind’s image to be controlled and to be used as weapons. This too is our sin. We try to control God and use Him for our purposes. We commercialise and fictionalise God. The arrogance and the hubris. Do we dare deny traces of these in us?

But we must realise that even the gods we make of the created, of our created things, are transient and fragile. We must neither fear them nor hope in them. We must only fear and hope in the ultimate. The ultimate, when the Man comes around.

In the meantime, don’t give up on ‘Eden’. In a sense, ‘Eden’ in the Christian worldview isn’t a place we find. It is a place from which we fell, but the peace/shalom of Eden is the state of affairs we pursue. And this is not some navel-gazing subjective inner peace. It is a state of justice and righteousness in which every relationship is made right, made good, and made true. In fellowship with our brothers and sisters, in harmony with nature tamed, in communion with God. The truth is we will never be able to fully realise the peace of Eden in this world, because the bad guys will keep coming, and we ourselves will keep falling and thus do bad stuff too. We are like Xavier. We wish we can be the saviour. But we can’t. We end up hurting the ones around us. We do the things we don’t want to do, and don’t do the things we want to do. Because we are humans. But that doesn’t mean we give up trying. Instead, we are told to keep running, keep journeying, keep working to enter the Sabbath rest of God in the renewed Eden. As Johnny Cash sung:

“Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still

Listen to the words long written down

When the man comes around”

Who do you want to be when the Man comes around?