A Comeback And Murderous Quests For The Self

I haven't posted here in about five months. I wanted to do more when I started this thing but life isn't a convenient force of nature. A couple of months ago my best friend of more than ten years was killed in a car accident - an event that took up a lot of my time for a while. I may write on it more extensively at another point but I'm just not in the headspace for that kind of personal/linguistic adventure right now. I'm mostly just here to get this place started back up again.

In what's possibly the most inappropriate segueway ever used, I was reading an article at io9.com earlier today about fictional pop culture characters who are on a self-imposed search for their humanity; only to decide it can only be found by murdering people in cold blood. It's an interesting phenomenon that, I'll admit, I doubt I'd ever thought about in any serious, conscious way but I instantly felt amazed by how frequently the archetype is used for characters in (allegedly) heroic struggles. I won't copy the whole thing but here's a small chunk about the recent Wolverine backstory flick ... Which, indidentally, was a film that was an insult to comics, cinema and multi brain-celled humans:

Recently, I was re-watching chunks of X-Men: Origins: Wolverine and thinking about that movie's insane body-count — both before and after Logan starts trying to regain his elusive humanity. In Wolverine, the mutant known as Logan is caught between his bestial nature and his dignity as an individual. For a hundred-odd years, he is a slaughter machine for the military, and then he joins a super-secret mutant taskforce. But in mid-atrocity, he suddenly starts questioning orders, and then he goes… rogue. (No, he doesn't bleach part of his hair and start talking in a Southern-girl voice. He just wanders off the reservation.)

The point is, Wolverine is just as much of a killing machine after he starts asserting that he's not just part of the machine, or not just an animal. He never makes the connection between the sacredness of his own personhood, and the sacredness of human life in general. I get that you have to fight for your freedom sometimes, but the movie makes a big point of showing Wolverine killing when he could just as easily disable his opponents — one of the movie's few great fuck-yeah moments involves cold-blooded murder. (Sure, he's killing scumbags. But he was just as much of a scumbag twenty minutes earlier.)

It's not a long article, so anyone interested should really give it a read. The rest of it can be found just here.