How Clint Eastwood Influenced Wolverine
A mutant of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.
Clint Eastwood has one of the most iconic and storied careers in modern movie history, a career that casts a long shadow, especially within the Western genre that made his name. Likewise, Hugh Jackman‘s turn as Wolverine is perhaps one of the most iconic portrayals of a superhero. With over two decades and multiple films, Wolverine (aka Logan) and the X-Men films were instrumental in revitalizing the modern superhero film boom that we now are claiming fatigue over, with that era of films culminating with Logan, a film that owes a debt to Clint Eastwood’s magnum opus, Unforgiven.
Logan was originally set to be Hugh Jackman’s swan song for the character. He was determined to end it on a high note. In a USA Today article, Jackman said: “I don’t think we could have made this movie if I didn’t know it was going to be my last…The stakes tripled for me. There was no safety net. There was no ‘Oh, if it’s dead on arrival, have another go.’ This is it.” It succeeded. It garnered over $600 million at the box office, buckets of praise, and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Not only did it receive praise for its storytelling and embrace of a more violent and grittier world that’s distinct from the previous X-Men adventures, but compliments on its reexamination of a character we, as a movie-going public, have known and loved. In presenting this deconstruction, the brilliant director James Mangold and his co-writers, Scott Frank and Michael Green, utilized a Western point of view. The filmmakers were influenced by Westerns such as Shane (a clip of Shane is even referenced in the film) and, of course, Unforgiven. “It slightly subverted Clint’s history and what people knew and expected of him,” Jackman said in that same USA Today article. But its influence of Unforgiven is not just limited to the story of an old gunslinger coming back for one more fight, but as a deconstruction of the myth of the hero.
The Superhero and The Cowboy
Unforgiven falls into the category of Western referred to as the revisionist Western. The revisionist Western takes the stories that have been traditionally told about the Old West with the cowboy heroes and the outlaws, and the clear divide between good and bad, and says: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” It showed the Old West was filled with murderers, thieves, and crooked lawmen and throws cold water over that romantic view of the Old West. Unforgiven follows that idea of the West. Clint Eastwood’s character, William Munny is known as “a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” He’s a violent, murderous outlaw who has tried to give up on that life. (“I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another.”) He agrees to go on one more bounty to provide for his kids.
In Logan, Logan and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) have run off to El Paso, and have given up the superhero trade. Logan’s healing factor is slowed down, and his body’s adamantium is killing him. He agrees to help Logan’s daughter-clone, Laura (Dafne Keen), across the Canadian border to get paid for a boat for him and the professor, who is now senile and suffering from powerful telepathic seizures that everyone around him can feel. As a result of the more R-rated and violent ways of the film (the first scene has Logan slicing a man’s arm clean off with the blood and all), it’s a revisionist superhero film. Where the revisionist Western says what really happened in the Old West, the revisionist superhero story is more like: “Here’s what would most likely happen if a superhero exists.” There would be a lot more collateral damage and innocent lives destroyed as a result of someone having powers. In one of the most harrowing scenes of the film, Professor X has one of his telepathic seizure effects and harms everyone around him, and we’re treated to a sequence of what it’s like to be one of X’s victims. The constrained paralysis and disorientation as one of the greatest telepaths ever is suffering and bringing everyone with him. We feel what it’s like to be in that environment.
Is There Such A Thing As Good Violence?
The violence in both Unforgiven and Logan is more meditative than in either the traditional Western or the traditional superhero story. We as the audience are expected to cheer when John Wayne or Gary Cooper shoots a bad guy off his horse and cheer as well as Superman and Iron Man blast someone. Unforgiven and Logan are telling you as the audience that violence ain’t pretty. Let’s take one scene from each film. The scene where one of the cowboys is shot from Unforgiven and an attack at a farmer’s house in Logan.
In one of the shootout scenes, Will, along with his party of old friends Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) are in a shootout across a canyon. Will shoots one of the cowboys, Davey, but he doesn’t die immediately. He languishes in death and begs for help. It’s sad and pathetic and not really a cathartic release that is expected in the shootout. You’re left feeling a bit sorry for Davey, even though his actions led to a woman being physically scarred. Even Will feels sorry for Davey and says that he won’t shoot Davey’s party if they come to help him.
When Logan’s clone comes to the farmer’s family home that helped Logan, Professor X, and Laura kill not only Professor X but then the entire family. This sequence of violence is gruesome, shocking, and unsettling as we see a bloodied child’s corpse as Logan slashes his clone and vice-versa. It ends with the father pointing the gun at Logan, turning it on himself, and killing himself. While your sympathies lie with Logan who has now just lost his father figure in Professor X, but more so with this family, whose only crime was helping the three of them and now are dead as a result of it. Despite being on the side of good, violence and death still come for them. We feel unsettled and emotionally battered as seeing innocent lives lost.
Violence is not cool or exciting, for the most part, in these films. They are a way of presenting the true cost of a bloody life. Will seeing someone in agony, wants to at least send someone out in dignity, even though, he’s a notorious killer. And Logan initially didn’t want to get this family involved because he knows that violence follows him and anyone in its way. Despite being filmed with extensive violence, they were decidedly anti-violence. They showed that with each act, a little bit of goodness and light is lost. It’s not until the final climaxes that involved big battles. It comes at a cost for the heroes as they embrace their violent past. Munny loses his sobriety and claims that he’s a changed man, while Logan loses his life, even as they are saving people.
Da Art of Mythmakin’
These films not only examine these characters’ lives but the myths that come from them. The W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek) and the English Bob (Richard Harris) sequence in Unforgiven were set up to show how the myth comes to be. Beauchamp is Bob’s biographer and wrote “The Duke of Death” based on English Bob’s stories of his exploits. Later on, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) tells the real stories, the real ugly and less noble version of English Bob. In essence, in that scene, The “Duke of Death” is the Old West story, and Little Bill’s version is the revisionist era. Stories like Beauchamp’s have led a whole genre to believe those myths of noble heroes who were more likely scoundrels and degenerates.
In Logan, Logan finds the comic books that Laura has on the X-Men in the form of the film’s meta-commentary where they show the X-Men going to Eden. (“We got ourselves an X-Men fan?”) Logan takes on the Little Bill role at the moment and scoffs at these stories about the X-Men’s heroics and in a later more aggressive scene, he screams that it’s all made up to Laura. “They made this whole thing up. Okay? This whole… It happened once, and they just turned it into a big fucking lie!” In the real world, these comics are more or less showing that these characters are heroes and are heroes to do good for humanity. They are our protectors and weapons against evil. But how sure are we that super-powered beings would automatically be moral leaders?
We also see the dismantling of myth by the actors behind the roles. Clint Eastwood took the cowboy persona and archetype that made his name and made him a star and deconstructed it by portraying the character of WIlliam Munny. We are carrying the baggage of seeing Clint Eastwood playing the noble hero and Eastwood switches it up and makes this story even more impactful. Likewise, Wolverine was what made Hugh Jackman a star and action hero, and Logan is his way of subverting that character. In those films, Logan is always someone who was unfazed by killing a bad guy with his claws. Think about all the times in the past X-Men films of Logan slicing people and going straight through people, how many times has blood dripped from the blades afterward? (Granted, PG-13 can only do so much). In an interview for AFI, Eastwood even says that it’s a myth. What these films really ask is, are our heroes really that heroic?
Clint Eastwood will grace our screens one more time for his new film, Juror #2, for his 40th turn as a director. Likewise, in a few years, Hugh Jackman will grace the screens again as Wolverine in Deadpool 3 for their introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hugh Jackman’s best outing as Wolverine was inspired by Eastwood’s best Western film.
