https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pU9LxgCGZY0
The movie Logan is a very tightly constructed and surprisingly complete symbolic pattern. It’s written as the basic ascent of a mountain. The kind of ascent you find in religious stories all the time. The movie is so densely structured that I won’t even try to unpack all the implications of how it’s set up, but hopefully I can give you all a basic line to follow in trying to interpret the details. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. The opening of the movie shows a kind of fallen world, the world of the limit we could call it. In a very real way, the movie begins at the bottom of the world. That’s represented as the southern border. In my video on Guardians of the Galaxy, I discussed the notion of the hero as the one who stands on the border and in many ways acts as a kind of guard to defend it. But in an almost paradoxical way at the same time, the hero is a hybrid and straddles the border himself. If you haven’t seen it yet, watching that video of Guardians of the Galaxy will help you see the extent of what I’m discussing. Logan himself is a border crosser. He moves from one side of the border to the next every morning and then in the evening he works in the United States and then he returns to Mexico where he’s hiding. All the images line up. The desert, the fence on the border, the poor, but we also see these decadent rich people. Mostly there is this image of death. Logan is dying. His body is falling apart. He’s not healing anymore as he usually does because of his mutant powers. His incapacity to pull his body together is shown as a form of dissipation, of impotence. It’s also a giving in to his passions as well as a kind of selfish self-absorption. This is all brought together at the very beginning of the movie where waking up from this drunken stupor he tries to defend his rented limo from a band of thugs. The car is a proxy for the body or the house, the container. It doesn’t really matter at which level you see it. What’s important is in the fact that he can’t stop it from being damaged. His claws come out slowly to show his impotence. But then he also completely goes berserk and then slaughters all the thugs in gruesome ways. All of this is a very powerful image of this loss of cohesion. It is that loss of control which happens at the edge. Another image of this attempt to bring together to protect or to hold on to the vehicle of life is in the fact that Logan’s sole remaining purpose seems to be to get enough money to get an ark like Noah get a boat by which he can escape the chaos. And these different aspects of the edge they lead us to a funeral in the rain. So death as I said is the frame of this loss of cohesion. And standing on the brink of death knowing because we’ve been told that he’s in Phoenix. Unlike the bird that rises from its ashes standing in the face of death is where he hears the first call for transformation. The call to ascend. Though he doesn’t know it yet. He doesn’t know what’s happening because he’s too self-absorbed to attend to a call for help. So here’s this angel calling him. Gabriella is her name. Gabriel, feminine of Gabriel. She wants him to help her save what turns out to be his own clone. A feminine child version of himself which is in danger of being killed. And so by helping Gabriella and this child by helping another he is and will be helping himself. So symbolically we have now these two Logans. The old dying Logan and the young future Logan. And her name is Laura which is very close to Logan in terms of of sonority. Now to understand the transformation that occurs the character of Wolverine itself plays an important part because he’s constantly related through his name, through his appearance and through his character to a kind of animal passion. A kind of berserker rage. So the basic ascension of the mountain motif in the whole movie can be seen as the difficulties and the possibilities of taming something. Of taking something out of control. Something self-absorbed, something dead, wild, foreign, drunk. All these images of chaos which line up. This idea of naming something then. Taming it. Bringing chaos to participate. To become the body or the vehicle of Logos. Of the world. So in a way it’s a story of redemption. Of creation, recreation and redemption. Now with the two Logans we have a beautiful pattern because we can both see the raw chaotic young Logan in the little girl. In a wild, without manners, without self-control but also silent at the beginning. Without Logos herself. An image of chaos if we’ve ever seen one. And at the same time we have the final result of that state. The old dying Logan. She is a drunk, cynical, selfish, angry, sick and falling into death. Even contemplating suicide. Now all these images are quite traditional. And for more about this you can check out the talk I gave called Pentecost for the Zombie Apocalypse. Where I explain the relationship between animality and death in biblical symbolism. So Logan has to bring this child, which is at the same time his future self, out of the bottom of the world. Out of a prison. Slavery. Because you know just like the Hebrews in Egypt remember that little girl was a slave to those that made her. She has to escape this cyborg, half man, half machine, you know this dry, technical, medicated, etc. etc. world and bring her where? Bring her to Eden. Now Eden is of course an image of the center. An image of the height. The ascension from the edge. From the bottom of the world. The edge or the bottom of his person. And up towards a place of refuge. That’s why they insist that Eden is north. In North Dakota. Opposing it to the southern border. But at least what Wolverine has been going for him, or at least he is somewhat following let’s say Jordan Peterson’s advice. He’s trying to save his father from the underworld. And Professor X lives in an empty, fallen water cistern. This is of course a very potent image of the grave. A kind of cave, a shell, but dried up. A return to dust. In the Bible we see this image when Joseph is lowered in a cistern, in an empty cistern to die on his way to Egypt. And the movie is pretty amazing because Professor X is really the past, very cohesively. He’s four things at the same time. He’s a kind of scattered, rambling vestige of the past. The new quesalupa from Taco Bell. Get it with chicken. Get it with steak. He also carries a great past sin. You know, being responsible for killing all the mutants. He’s also this powerful force of immobilization. Capable of freezing people into statues so they can no longer move forward. But at the same time he’s also this wise father encouraging Logan. Recognizing in Laura that she is a better version of Wolverine that needs to be encouraged and saved. So encouraging Logan to help Laura, to help that family in trouble. All of this is pretty amazing. But at the beginning Logan wants to save Zegir, but he only sees the negative parts of his father. He wants to save him, but he’s incapable of hearing the wisdom. And that will come gradually as the movie progresses. So they’re going to Eden. But then Logan finds out that Eden comes from a comic book. Eden exists at the story level of reality. And so obviously Logan doesn’t believe in Eden. He’s something maybe of a new atheist with all the drunken cynicism of a Hitchens. Though he still moves, he still moves coaxed by external events and slowly attending to the wisdom of his father. But in the act of moving towards the heart, moving towards the center, there will always be resistance. And the biggest resistance comes from within ourselves and from our own passions. And so enter third Logan, Shadow Logan, the doppelganger. And this Logan is pure rage. Pure animal without logos. He only grunts and kills. And so there’s this fight between the two Logans to decide about future Logan. Which way will it go? And so we basically got set up something like this. What is the future? Will you go up towards Eden or back down towards chaos? And there’s a very powerful scene in the movie where Xavier confesses his great sin to Logan. He realizes it. He knows that he’s been the cause of a horrible thing that’s kept underground, kept secret. And then it’s in fact Shadow Logan who then goes on to kill him. So Logan is both trying to kill the tyrannical father and save the wise father at the same time. It’s a pretty amazing set up. But what is also amazing is that the death of Xavier is the beginning of the real movement up the mountain. Logan buries his father and he can’t speak at the funeral. His logos is not there. He can only utter the chaos. All he can say is, it’s got water. It’s got water. It’s got water. Which sounds like it doesn’t make sense but you’ll see why it does make sense. And at that moment Logan takes on what he needs from Xavier. But he is at his lowest point. And then like in the limo scene at the beginning we see him losing control of his car again. And then he passes out. So here the passing out is a kind of dying. The baptism one could say. And he awakens symbolically underwater. You see him looking up at these floating fish. And from then on there is this beginning of an ascent. The ascent begins as a literal, let’s say, ascent of logos. Because the silent child begins to talk. Let me drive. First in a foreign language, then in English. Which is a powerful image of this taming of what is foreign. We’re shown the ascent. As we see the once again passed out Logan being lifted up towards the sunlight in a stretcher. And there he confesses to his future. He confesses the desire to die. The difficulty of redemption. But he’s moving up. He’s tonsured. His beard is cut to make him look more like himself. More like the wolverine that we know. And he starts to heal. But he still hesitates. He still stumbles. He hesitates one more time and then finally he commits himself completely. He rushes up the mountain. To go up the mountain is many things at once. And the movie shows it quite powerfully. In a way that going up the mountain is a fight. But it’s also a dying. Not the kind of sickness and loss of cohesion which is the death at the bottom of the mountain. But it is the death of self-sacrifice. It is the cross on Golgotha Hill. And that’s what happens. Logan accepts to die to himself. To be hung on a tree in order to save others. But ultimately to save himself. There have been many superhero movies recently which show the hero with his hands out in the shape of a cross. But here the symbolism is more profound than just a simple visual reference to the crucifixion. So hung on a tree and then sacrificing himself, Logan attains the highest point of Logos. And there his shadow also dies. And we find that Laura as she is bringing him, where Logan could not speak to the death of his father, Laura speaks clearly. She speaks of identity. Of the opportunity and the consequence of identity. She says, a man has to be what he is. A man has to be what he is, Joey. And it’s pretty good, it’s pretty effective. And now we know that Laura will cross the border north, finishing the whole set up of a southern border of death and a northern heavenly gate of freedom. Through Eden and then above. Through Eden and the cross at the same time. So it’s pretty amazing. Of course more laterally the image of going north is playing with the references to the Underground Railroad which brought slaves to Canada in order to free them. But what’s also amazing is that by going north to Canada we conclude this basic symbolism of procession and return, this pattern. And so in the end it’s a return to the origin. For if Laura was born in Mexico, Logan was born in Canada. So all in all it ends up being a very effective movie. Now I have to admit there are some strange aspects to the movie. And one is of course that it seems to participate in this new tendency of replacing the masculine with the feminine. In a way, in this case we could see that the girl is the potential of the future and is moving into this potential. But there’s something else going on. If we look at it as a larger social pattern, we see this happening in many media right now. The new Ghostbusters, the new Doctor Who, a lot of the Marvel heroes in Marvel comics were changed into women. And we see it very clearly in the story of Moana, the Disney movie, who replaces the line of male chiefs and adds her pink and rather suggestive shell on the top of the masculine column. And I think we need to stay away to the consequences of this rising pattern. Apart from that, I would say that in terms of symbolism, Logan shows us how deep the imagery and symbolism of Christianity goes in our culture. And despite its gruesome violence, this movie, it’s in many ways the pattern of the struggle that we all have in us. And as for the symbolism of the mountain, for those who might want to learn about the direct parallel with the structures that are in the Bible, especially the story of Moses, I would suggest to watch my video on divine patterns in St. Gregory of Nice’s Life of Moses. So that’s it. I hope it was helpful. So I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of the movie Logan. This is the third time that we upload this video. We’ve been having problems with copyright, we think, because the clips are too long. And so this is, I think we re-edited it three times to make sure that it’s okay. Hopefully this time it’ll work out. So it’s actually a good opportunity for me to give a shout out to the person I’m working with who’s editing my videos, especially the movie videos. His name is James Covenant, and I’m going to put a link to his channel in the description, and you’ll see he’s doing some amazing stuff. We’re putting up a Facebook page for the videos, and so put a link to that as well. It’s a good way to follow what we’re doing, to engage with what we’re doing, so make sure you go in like that. And finally, I just want to tell you that I finally got the audio, and hopefully some video for the event that I did with Jordan Peterson in November in Seattle. And so look forward to seeing that. I’m going to put up the two talks that I gave, and the question and answers in which Jordan and I and other people answer questions from the audience. And so there’s still a lot of stuff going on, and we’ll see you soon.