Logan and Superman

Hollywood has painted itself into a corner with its recent (and not-so-recent) fascination with superheroes, and Logan seems like a breath of fresh air for the floundering Hollywood creative. Let me explain.

This week my wife and I went with some good friends to see the the new Logan movie.

The last X-men movie I saw was X-3: The Last Stand; so I have 'missed' Origins: Wolverine, First Class, The Wolverine, Days of Future Past, and Apocalypse. Besides my growing fatigue of super-hero movies in general, I'm especially tired of the Marvel universe and the repetition of the same story over and over again with different characters in different locations. I tried Daredevil on Netflix and was bored, I tried Iron Fist which captured my attention for an evening before I forgot about it. I never bothered with the new Incredible Spiderman movies, Agents of Shield, or Doctor Strange. But without watching them I bet I can recite the plots for each of them right now:

-Something unfortunate happens to unassuming person
-unassuming person becomes a vigilante
-vigilante makes joke
-vigilante meets something/someone who is more powerful than they are
-vigilante makes joke
-vigilante suffers a betrayal
-vigilante makes joke
-Vigilante decides to become hero
-Hero's family/friend/city is in peril
-Hero fights bad guy in climax scene
-Hero wins and makes joke

I'll be honest, I really liked the first Ironman, the Avengers, and Guardians of the Galaxy. I would say mostly because they were original when they came out, they were different, and mostly I think it was due to the fact they were comedies first with a heavy helping of action sauce.

I wasn't excited to see Logan for the exact reasons above, I was expecting more of the same. I mean, how many times can you make a movie about a guy with knives coming out of his fists who can't die? How many variations of "I punch you and stab you at the same time" can there possibly be?

But I was surprised. Not wildly surprised, but I enjoyed the movie. It gave me the feels. And I think it succeeded for the same reasons that every Superman movie is inevitably going to fail. And the reason is Hollywood.

Anyone who is a regular reader of Superman comics would be able to tell you why the comics are good, and why they keep reading them. On paper it doesn't make any sense: a person who has x-ray vision, laser-beam eyes, flies so fast he can rewind time, is invulnerable to everything except a rock that can't be found in our solar-system, how could someone like that possibly have any conflict that could even remotely be considered fair? Besides a few instances where Superman met his match, and the writers deliberately put Superman at a disadvantage, the focus of his stories aren't about the fights, or the external conflict, it's about the internal conflict. What species of moral dilemmas are introduced when a being who can kill anyone with a glance is fundamentally opposed to killing? What happens when an evil villain will kill anyone and everything to achieve their goal, and stopping them would require people's deaths?

Those are the kinds of questions the comics explore. Yes there are epic battles and fights, but those are stops on the trail to explore the characters, not the other way around. Take the character of Superman from Red Son. Instead of crash-landing in America, Superman lands in Soviet Russia. How much more complicated do his questions become when he's a communist?





So when I walk into the local Logan theatre to see the movie Logan (yes I know), I wasn't expecting it to explore characters in the way they did. How deep can you dive into a character who has already had three of his own movies? And I certainly wasn't expecting a western.

You read that right. Logan is a western movie. Now, when people hear the term western, they think of horses, shootouts, and whiskey shots. But westerns are more than that, westerns are a style. They are typified by the old brooding male protagonist who hates the world and gets called to save someone or something, and ends up shedding his rough exterior to show a soft, caring, broken person beneath. Halfway through the movie Logan even gives us a long look of a western being played on a TV, probably in the hopes that the audience will take the hint. I mean, look at this promotional poster:

I didn't come out of Logan thinking "Wow, those fight scenes were cool." In fact they are exactly what you would expect from a movie starring Wolverine. I came away having just explored the mind and life of Logan and was rewarded with a deep and emotional experience. It's all there in the title, actually. The movie is about Logan the man, not Wolverine the invincible human wrecking-ball.

So there it is. Logan was a better movie than almost every other recent superhero movie because we could relate with the main character, feel sorry for him, and cheer for him. Superman is always going to be a disappointment because we cannot relate, we can't feel sorry for the demigod, and half the time we're cheering for the bad guy to see if he's up for the challenge. In fact, if you have seen the new Justice League trailer, someone is suspiciously missing...

So when I say Hollywood has painted itself into a corner this is what I mean: Hollywood wants to make money making superhero movies, and to do that they need to make them funny, action-filled, piles of quick-witted nonsense that appeals to the larger audience. But they also want them to be good, and faithful to the source material (in other words: actually have a story), which means they need to be slow, thoughtful, stories with actual moral conundrums (not the Tarzan mentality of  ME: GOOD YOU: BAD. I PUNCH YOU). And with Wolverine and Superman, they can't have both. With Logan, however, they took a chance and I think it really paid off. Let's hope everyone else was paying attention.

Making Snowballs

Growing up I had a unique fascination with the relationship that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. If ever I had a term paper due, or a historical project to research, the Cold War was usually on the top of the list of candidate topics. 

It wasn't because I liked the Soviet Union, or what it stood for (let me be clear on this point), but the dynamic between the two most powerful nations in the history of the world, fascinated me. Naturally the order, the organization, the sheer work-ethic that existed within the Soviet government and military (at the expense of the rest of the people) was, in a way, beautiful. In the same way that a pitch-black illustration is beautiful when contrasted against it's pure-white background. (Read into that what you will).

I won't go into too much detail here, but I found it very helpful to view the world and events of today through the lens of those that lived through that time, and analyze the politics of today with that in the back of my mind. Especially during college, when in my political classes a majority of the students thought, spoke, and wrote alike. Everyone was trying so hard to be "progressive" or different in some way that they all just sounded stupid when they repeated each other like parrots for hours. Oftentimes I would kick the bees' nest on purpose just to see what would happen (voicing opinions I knew would get a rise out of the group-think that often is today's college classroom, but that is a topic for another post). But one topic that fascinated me was the idea of deterrence. I wrote a number of papers on the subject that I felt confident in debating any of my classmates on the nature and virtues of the topic during my studies.

The following unfinished (and edited for the purposes of the blog) excerpt from Annals of an Empire employs this idea of deterrence. Though taken out of context, and employed in the book in the wrong way, (I won't elaborate on this point), I feel as though these few paragraphs do a good job summarizing deterrence in an elegant way, and I'm particularly proud of it.

“Have you ever made a snowball, sir?”

            “Once, I believe, on the moon of Lasyr.”

            “Why did you make it?”

            “I was teasing my fiancé at the time; I threw it at her.”

            “I see, and when you raised your arm to throw it, did she flinch?”

            “Yes, she ran.”

            “Now imagine, sir, if you had instead dropped the ball after raising your arm and then proceeded to make another, would she have reacted the same way to the second?”

            “I would assume not, she would think I would drop it again.”

            “Precisely, you did not make the ball in lieu of the intention of throwing it. You fully meant to throw it, and that is why you made it. Such it is with great nations. They do not create these weapons without the intention of using them, for the first moment another calls their bluff and they do not make full on their threats and their destructive capabilities, the next time a nation encroaches on their liberties, they will be that much more disinclined to believe any threats made by the invaded nation. They may hope the moment does not come in which they must use them. They may pray, deliberate, talk, and make concessions with the expectation that there is yet another road besides destruction. But in the end, they have made the weapons because they know there is a possibility they might be required to employ them, and they fully intend to use them should that moment come. And they expect them to work as designed.”

            He took a breath. “However, so many nations have created such means of death and destruction in the past without the intent of using them, and their enemies knew it, or eventually were made privy to such information. History has proven this fact quite frequently. By trying to avert disaster, they unwittingly engineered a nightmare. The trick is, then, convincing your enemy that your weapons, and your power, are real, functional, and you quite intent on making use of their capabilities. What better way to accomplish that than to actually use them?”

            He looked at him dead in the eye, without blinking; a cold hard stare. “Anything short of that invites the enemy to test your threats, to see for themselves if your power is real or imagined, truthful or exaggerated. By playing nice, and seeking the good of all, you invite your enemy to a game of chicken in which millions of lives are on the line. Are you willing to gamble with their lives, the lives of their families, neighbors, friends, grocers, mailmen, plumbers, and everything they have because you refuse to make good on a threat you made against a hostile, evil, barbarous nation that plans to test your threats by murdering every single one of them? Are you willing to risk a waking hell for all of us because you fear to make the tough decision? If so, the game is lost already. The enemy is on the move, and you fully intended to turn away from conflict at the very beginning. The lives of those people on the frontier are as good as forfeit if you believe more talking will divert the foe.”

            He calmly turned and walked to pick his coat from the rack, and retrieved his hat. “The villain isn’t always the one who pulls the trigger, sometimes it is he who stands idly by as he watches innocent people burn to death and says: ‘It isn’t my fault.’”

            The thin man was silent, staring back at him. “You made your snowball, sir, I suggest you throw it.”

A Christmas Letter

The company I work for has a tradition of a gift-exchange for Christmas. This year the price-limit was $15. My wife and I went to Target to find a last-minute gift, and when I walked past the games section and saw the card-game version of Oregon Trail for $12, my mind was made up on the spot.

Obviously that was not going to be good enough, it was only $12 after all... I needed some way to make up the $3 difference. (Yes, I realize that it was a $15 limit and not a goal. But really anything less than that is just going to give the passive-aggressive ones in the group another reason to be...well...themselves! And we couldn't have that on Christmas, no sir.

So naturally I pulled out my dusty calligraphy tools and set to work on a hasty, yet thoughtful, letter that would accompany the card game.


Keep in mind I am a procrastinator, and I am well aware that the meter and the rhymes do not sound as good now as they did at midnight the night before, but I was pressed for time and wanted to go to bed. Priorities.

Trying to make Oregon Trail and Christmas come together in a meaningful way was difficult enough, so I tried to take up as much space as possible with the title "Dear Traveller", but at the end of it, this is what I came up with. When I look at this my eyes are drawn to the title itself actually, which I am happy with, because that is the part that took the most work, and the part I'm practicing to improve. So the fact that it draws the eye (in a good way) makes this a successful letter for me.

The point of this, however, is to talk about something that entered my mind while I was working on the letter. That is: The Oregon Trail seems to be one of those things where the memory of the 'thing' is better than the actual thing itself. I would hope you know what I mean. It happens with places you visited as a child, food you tried once, original internet videos, etc. Over the years we build up the reputation of something so much in our heads that when we eventually go back to the source of the legend, we are inevitably disappointed.

Everyone I know who is my age has fond memories of The Oregon Trail. It almost seems like a rite of passage for the 'millennial' age demographic. Myself included. "It's a classic!" We say, or "Best game I played as a kid." We'd all agree. But when I sat down to write this letter, I was thinking: how much did I actually enjoy playing The Oregon Trail?

Did I actually play the game because it was fun? Maybe it was because it had earned the reputation of an "unbeatable" game in my 4th-grade class, and those who beat it were famous for a day? Or maybe it's so engrained in our memories because we all spent at least some time wanting to punch right through the monitor and grab Abraham by the neck and beat him senseless for daring to contract dysentery.

Would any of us choose to play The Oregon Trail right now if we had a copy on our computers? Of course! Who wouldn't want to re-live those frustrating childhood moments? But after the first, second, and third inevitable failure (probably because we waste all our money on bullets and then spend them all shooting buffalo) we would remember why we stopped playing in the first place, and go back to Facebook that affords us a sense of false success and security that The Oregon Trail  withholds from us!

Then, five or ten years down the road, we'll think about The Oregon Trail again with fond memories, and try our luck, only to be disappointed yet again.

Is there a moral to this story? No. But I thought it was interesting. And that's how I wrote my company christmas letter.