On X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A Movie Review
By John David Ebert
There is a scene in this movie that occurs early on which shows how Wolverine derived his enormous physical strength. He was part of a government experiment that involved injecting his bones with an indestructible metal called “adamantean.” We watch as Wolverine descends into a tank full of water and a series of needles inject his body at various points with a liquid form of this metal which coats all his bones, effectively transubstantiating their calcium into a mythical metal that is indestructible.
This is, of course, an old shamanic motif: shamans, during their initiatory ordeals, normally have visions in which they are torn to pieces either by some ancestral being or a totem animal — in Mesoamerica, this was the jaguar — and then their bodies are reconstructed using some type of higher, stronger substance, such as crystals or rocks. The “death” and “rebirth” of Wolverine, then, is a retrieval of ancient shamanic practices that were once especially common amongst hunting societies, including Native Americans.
“Wolverine” was actually a character in Native American mythology, just as was Batman, Spiderman, the Black Panther, and many others. This was also true of many of the villains: Batman’s nemesis Two Face, for example, first appeared as a clay mask carved at the early Mesoamerican site of Tlatilco; Spiderman’s nemesis Lizardman also appears in Native American myth, as does the Sandman. And indeed, the mythic archetype of the Twins was the primary Native American mythic structure, and the dual identities of characters like Superman / Clark Kent, Spiderman / Peter Parker, Batman / Bruce Wayne is a variation on this twin myth.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not a particularly good film (it is full of cliches and has no interesting villains), but it serves as an occasion to remind us of the acculturation process that has been, and still is going on in American culture as Native American myth formations slowly thrust up into the field of our culture. Such processes, moreover, are entirely unconscious and they happen everywhere whenever a new people moves into a landscape: the myths and myth-motifs of the aboriginal populations slowly, but ever so surely, begin over time to surface into the imagery of the dominant culture’s discursive vocabulary. It doesn’t happen by anyone’s conscious consent or control, either. Jung once remarked, after visiting America, on how the skylines of our cities resemble those of Native American pueblos. There was, of course, no conscious intent on the part of the inventors of the skyscraper to imitate the rectangular formations of such pueblos, it is just that the landscape has its own morphogenetic fields, as it were, through which the incoming cultural forms are gradually forced to express themselves.It is in this way that the conquered peoples of the native populations all over the globe gradually achieve a sort of victory over the peoples who once dominated them.
I have long suspected comic book superheroes of representing such an acculturation process in American civilization. The taking off and putting on of masks is an essential attribute of Native American culture, just as it is a basic staple of the myth of the American born and made costumed crusader. Native American myth is inherently polytheistic and now, in the guise of comic book folklore, American Christian culture is gradually being perfused with Native American mythic structures which are causing it to undergo transformation into something that resembles polytheism. Comic book superheroes are an American mythology and they represent the slow, gradual inevitable victory of the American Indian psyche over that of the incoming White Protestant culture that displaced, dispossessed and degraded it.
Thus, the whites who thought themselves victorious over the Native Americans, closed off into reservations (or are they concentration camps?) had a surprise in store, for the future of their pop culture was destined to become the property of the Native American mind, just as the Grail legends of Europe arose out of the native influence of Celtic mythology, with all its cups and vessels of inexhaustible renewal, upon the incoming Christian mythology that was imported and instituted by force onto the European psyche.This is only the first, and still early, phase of the process of the victory of the Native Americans over Anglo-American culture; later, other, unpredictable forms of Native American influenced religiosity will ultimately create new and surprising American mythologies. The cult of Christian snake-handlers is perhaps one such example.
Thus, though X-Men Origins: Wolverine is actually a rather poor example of the genre, it serves to remind us that the acculturation process is still ongoing, and the dismantling of the Euro-American psyche is well underway. Make no mistake about it: we owe comic book superheroes and their present success to the Native Americans, and they should actually be credited with playing a huge, though entirely unintentional and unconscious, role in its creation. And this is no mere blut and boden theory, either. Cultural processes are rooted in the landscape, from which they derive their character and style, just as a child inherits many of its neuroses from the particular anxieties of its parents.
American popular culture is largely a creation of its dispossessed peoples: without Africans, there would be no jazz and no rock and roll. Without Native Americans, there would be no comic book superheroes. Thus, much of the strength and vitality of American pop comes from the semiotics of its dispossessed and discredited peoples, and it is largely to these peoples that it owes its vigor. Don’t bother seeing Wolverine, though, it’s a waste of your money, but if you do, think on these things.
