'Logan' and the Death of the Superhero

On James Mangold’s ‘Logan’ and the Evolution of the Superhero Genre

Heroes get old.

We all know this. Or, at least, we should all know this. Sometimes we need a reminder. Even the greatest among us aren’t immortal. No person can be. We can lift up our heroes as much as we want, but eventually, they all fall in one way or another.

No one is perfect. No one lives forever. All heroes get old.

Yet, is this not what makes our heroes so special? They are the ones who will look death in the eye and still, somehow, find a way to move forward anyway? Why does it matter that our heroes are old?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back.

Logan (2017) is a superhero film directed by James Mangold and written by Mangold, Scott Frank, and Michael Green. It’s the tenth overall film in the X-Men film series and the third strictly focusing on the character of Logan, also known as Wolverine. The film was a critical and financial success and grossed $620 million on a $100 million budget. Logan was released seventeen years following the first film, the titular X-Men (2000) - a film that also featured the original debut of High Jackman as Wolverine.

X-Men, for any who are keeping track of film history, is an important film as it is widely credited as being one of the foundational films of the modern superhero craze. If it were not for the success of X-Men, we would not understand Superheroes as well as we do today. X-Men was followed with a string of other successful, comic book based ventures including Spider-Man (2002), Batman Begins (2005), and Iron Man (2008). And we all know what happened to Iron Man.

Logan is a complex film. It has come to represent so much. It serves as the swansong for both Jackman’s Wolverine as well as Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier, it is the final for one of the most influential film franchises, it is a major step forward for the superhero genre, and it symbolizes how genres die.

In his essay “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” author John G. Cawelti outlines what happens to film genres as they age and lose their original gust of energy. When genres, especially genres with a lot of dominant tropes and ideas, begin to age, four main patterns of filmmaking emerge.

First, there is the burlesque film. Burlesques make fun of or parody the genre. They exist on the premise of, if we can laugh at our past, it will show how much we have grown up. Tropes are shown to be ridiculous. Staples of the genre are used in comedic ways. Deadpool (2016) is a burlesque of the superhero genre.

Second, we find nostalgic films. Nostalgic films are acutely aware of the relationship between past and present and serve to update old tropes in new contexts. They make us remember the past fondly, and show us what that genre looks like when updated to new, contemporary standards. This is difficult to see in the superhero genre as it is still quite new, however, the best example would be Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). Spider-Verse updates the mythology of the

Third, there is the demythologisation of the genre. Demythologising films serve to completely destroy the existing genre. They take the tropes and narrative structure associated with such films and destroy them. Watchmen, certainly the 1986 comic and possibly even the 2009 film, could be considered a demythologised work. It takes the tropes of the superhero genre and breaks them down. 

And finally, there is the reaffirmation of myth. Reaffirming films are similar in many ways to demythologised films, but they come to different conclusions. They admit that the genre no longer holds up, but instead of destroying them, they seek to remind us why the genre was good once upon a time, or why we need to believe in it. The Dark Knight (2008) comes to mind.

Where do we find Logan in all of this?

Logan is very literally about the death of a superhero. Set in the not-too-distant future of 2029, Wolverine is living with two other aged mutants, one of which is the famed Professor Charles Xavier, in a decaying farmhouse on the Mexican-American border. It’s been years since the X-Men disbanded. Mutants are disappearing all over the globe.

Our heroes are dying.

This is the central thematic question of Logan: “what happens when our heroes get old? What happens when superhumans have to deal with problems that are just human? Logan strips away all of the bravura and drama of the superhero myth and grounds it in human problems. It exchanges the epic chaos of saving the city or the world or even all of existence from certain destruction (see nearly every superhero movie ever made) for the unglamorous reality of life. It establishes what no other superhero film has ever been able to do: real emotional stakes.

Two of our three main characters are hopelessly damaged and are feeling the effects of illness and old age. Their powers have kept them alive, but at what cost? They have outlived all of their friends. They are suffering. They will both soon die. What was the point of the X-Men if it all ended in tragedy anyway?

Professor X, the hero of mutants, the father of the X-Men, is suffering from Alzheimer’s. It’s a disease that is terrible all on its own, but we are now talking about the strongest telepath to have ever lived and now he can no longer rely on his mind for strength. It’s a tragedy to watch the power and compassionate man that Charles Xavier once was become someone who can barely remember where he is half of the time. It’s not a fictional virus or an alien pathogen. It’s no the effects of a science-fiction plot - it’s Alzheimer’s. 

The indestructible Wolverine is now nearly two-hundred years old. His powers have kept him alive this long, but he’s now in pain and has turned to drink to keep the destruction of his body at bay. His superhuman healing is breaking down. He heals, but it leaves scars. The scar tissue is building up in excess and is causing cancer-like problems to his body.

The world ended. Not in a robotic apocalypse, not in a great battle between good and evil, it just sort of happened. The mutants are dying out. The world has moved passed the need for superheroes. There’s no school, there are no supervillains, there are no more powers. The world of the X-Men ended and it left two old men behind. Logan is the de-apotheosis of Wolverine.

Now, Logan’s greatest enemy is normal things. He is fighting to save his surrogate, senile father who is losing control of his body and his mind, who could kill you while absent-mindedly recalling a Taco Bell commercial. He is having problems with money and is desperately holding onto a service industry job. He is fighting his own growing cancer. Where previous X-films have used superpowers to not-so-subtly explore social issues, Logan explores very basic human problems through a lens of science-fiction. Gone are the sweeping statements about acceptance and equality. Now, our villain is old age.

This the closest Logan comes to complete demythologisation of the superhero genre. It starts off in a place of tragedy and sadness. It seems as if all is lost. Why care about superheroes? They’re all just people who will die in the way all people do - old age, cancer, sickness, and Alzheimer’s. They aren’t special. Logan comes off as an attempt to bury the superhero. If X-Men started it all, then Logan is going to end it.

And this is where we meet the most important character in the whole film: Laura.

Laura: Logan’s daughter born from freak science. Ruthless, confused, violent, and at times inhuman - everything Logan was way back in the beginning. It’s a cycle.

It’s all about family.

He’s hesitant at first. Logan finds a lonely girl from mysterious circumstances and is told that she is somehow his responsibility. She is being hunted and pursued by someone out there and she needs someone to guide her to safety. Logan doesn’t want this. Not now. Maybe, he could have as a younger man, but now he can bearly keep himself alive. If he takes on this new task, he is afraid that this will kill him.

The enemies come and Old Man Wolverine, his daughter, and his father, the closest thing he will ever have to a family, are thrown into their finale.

About halfway through the film, the protagonists meet a kindly family of farmers, the Munson Family, who offers them a place to stay the night in exchange for helping them round up some lose horses. They enjoy a lovely homecooked meal with the Munsons and help them fix up some problems on their property. There’s peace for a moment. But danger strikes in the night and Professor X is killed. The Munsons brutally slaughtered by a gang of savage soldiers. The farm is burnt to the ground. There are minutes dedicated to graphic and explicit violence which lead to Logan’s darkest moment.

Logan looks at his own father. Professor X. Not his father by birth, but a father because he was the first person to ever really care for him. Professor X found him alone and afraid and he gave Logan a fighting chance. That’s when Logan understands what this whole story is about. It’s about doing the right thing. Professor X didn’t save Logan because he had to but because it was the good thing to do. Calaban, a friend of Logan in the film, dies because he chose to sacrifice himself for Logan, which was the right thing to do. The Munsons were killed because they offered Logan, Laura, and Charles a place to stay.

Now, it is Logan’s turn to do the right thing. He accepts Laura as his responsibility and will give everything he has left to her.

Then the film switches main characters. This is not Logan’s story: it’s about Laura. Logan pushes on for her. Carrying the emotional legacy of his father, the X-Men, and all of those who have died simply doing the right thing, Logan sets out to save Laura from her enemies and bring her to safety over the Canadian-American border.

Logan, on the whole, jumps between roles in Cawelti’s four types of generic transformation. It’s a dark burlesque in many ways. It proves how childish the assumptions of superheroes are by making everyone sad and old. Funny, right? It’s nostalgic in its moments of heroics, which are undercut by the tragedy of it all. At points, Logan seems hell-bent on killing the genre it’s firmly a part of in a complete demythologisation of Wolverine. But the switch from Logan to Laura’s dominance over the narrative starts to bring it into the fourth category.

Maybe, if Logan does the right thing just this once, it will have all been worth it. He gives himself up to the myth of the superhero one last time. If he can save Laura, he can rest easy. The painful memories of his long-dead friends might just forgive him. Calaban, Charles, and the Munsons will have not died in vain. All he needs to do is get this one last thing right.

Logan saves Laura and her fellow young mutants and pays the ultimate price for it. There, in those last moments, we see humanity emerge from Laura for the first time as she begins to cry. Logan and Laura say goodbye. Logan tells her to run. Run for safety. Run for freedom.

“Don’t be what they made you,” is the last thing Logan says to his daughter before he dies.

Be something more. Be a hero.

Logan, the hero, dies but is reborn again. He reaches a new level of heroics because he did one last good thing. He reaches a new apotheosis.

          Apotheosis. Noun. “A formal statement that a person has become a god.”

Superheroes are treated as beings beyond our pathetic mortal realm. There’s an apotheosis that goes along with all of the superheroes in mainstream, contemporary fiction. Superheroes are gods that transcend culture and language. Their myths, deeds, and symbols are known around the world. We worship them with merchandise, conversations, and box office revenue. We forget that these heroes aren’t special. They’re just people.

Heroes get old.

Logan wants us to understand superheroes in a new way. It first carefully strips away the god-like status of Wolverine, a hero whose exploits have been on cinema screens for seventeen years, by making him tragically and pathetically human. We need to be reminded of who Wolverine is deep inside. Strip away the powers and what do you get? Logan is just another man who is just as flawed and broken as the rest of us.

But this is where we reach a new level of apotheosis. Logan, Calaban, Professor X, the Munson family - they are all heroes not because they are gods but because they are humans. Humans who each chose to do the right thing. The good thing. The one thing that makes anyone a hero is what they chose to do in everyday situations. Do you choose to do the right thing?

Logan will not be remembered by his daughter as ‘Wolverine, the X-Man,’ but as ‘Logan, the man who did the right thing.’

Is that not the perfect ending to the myth of a superhero?