I don’t know if you’ve seen Logan. I you haven’t, minor spoiler coming.
*don’t read*
Okay, so in Logan, there are these X-Men comics. But they aren’t real X-Men comics, because that’d be super-weird, right? Instead, they are comics that resemble X-Men comics of the late 80’s-early 90’s created specifically for the movie (and even aged to look like they were old).
I found an article about the making of the images and it really spoke to me. I’ve been embroiled in a few debates with different people about Baudrillard and how I utilize his theories in my work. This seems like a perfect moment to talk about how *I* think Baudrillard’s theories work.
Bear in mind this is my interpretation. I’m not claiming to know any better than anyone else. But I think if we decide that a scholar must have meant one specific thing we might as well stop trying to create new theories, since as academics no one wants to read wholly new ideas without references to existing scholarship. < /soapbox >
One of the things about Baudrillard that always appealed to me as the fake Biblical quote at the beginning of “The Procession of Simulacra:”
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes”
The reader who is uninitiated, who perhaps didn’t read the Bible carefully, wouldn’t realize that this epigraph is not real. It’s… “a real without reference.”
That’s what the fake X-Men comics in Logan serve as. They’re not really comics, but if a person wasn’t an X-Men fan, and saw the movie, it could seem like a 4th wall/continuity mistake. Of course there were comics with the X-Men. But would Logan have them? That’s a different universe, right?
But it’s not. In the movie’s universe, these are comic books about the X-Men who existed, but they aren’t REAL. So they’re not real in a world that isn’t real.
But then the mind-freak moment: the “Eden” from the fake comic in the movie universe is real in the movie universe.
That’s simulation.
In the era of alternative facts, the comics in Logan are as real as anything in that they are entirely fabricated. They have real impact on the story. I’m going to put copies of them on the wall of my office.
