Andrew Clavin’s Our Future on the Line dissects Hollywood’s "leftist takeover," from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to Logan, framing superhero films as hollow myths lacking traditional family structures. He contrasts GOP healthcare negotiations—praising Gomert’s pragmatism over Jordan’s purism—with Elizabeth Warren’s hypocrisy, then pivots to sci-fi anxieties: Alien: Covenant’s "unnatural" threats and a Mars pod’s "daddy custody" dilemma expose fears of tech eroding biological imperatives. Clavin argues Christian morality falters when consequences (pregnancy, procreation) vanish, leaving only relativism—unless God’s laws anchor values beyond nature. The episode ends with a warning: without roots in faith and biology, even heroes like Logan’s Wolverine become relics of a collapsing worldview. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, a lot of conservatives don't like modern movies.
They feel Hollywood has become a cesspool of decadent weasels churning out poisonous leftist propaganda while raking in millions of dollars from an audience they basically despise.
But this, of course, is totally unfair to weasels.
Instead of going to the movies, many conservatives prefer to stay home and watch old Doris Day films on TV.
Conservatives like Doris Day films because they remind them of the days when women were happy virginal housewives back in 1950 never.
But perhaps conservatives could learn something by studying how leftists use the cinema.
Remember the film Men in Black in which an evil alien devoured the insides of a human being and then wore the human skin as a disguise.
That's pretty much how the left treats respected institutions.
Whether it's Yale University or the New York Times, leftists enter the institution, eat away its inner values, replace those values with leftism, and then walk around wearing the institution as a disguise, saying things like, look, I'm an Ivy League University, or look, I'm the newspaper of record, when they're really just leftism wearing an empty Yale suit or a New York Times costume.
So too it is with movies.
Leftists love nothing better than to take over a beloved film franchise that built its reputation on solid values, destroy those values from within, and then disguise their leftism in the franchise.
James Bond, for instance, was once a daring agent who spread Western values to foreign climes and fought against the evils of communism.
But in Quantum of Solace, written by lefty message guy Paul Haggis, Bond became a guy who fought the spread of Western values and supported communism.
He had become leftism, disguised as the great James Bond.
Likewise, Walt Disney became a mega studio by making animated films that showcased beautiful princesses with traditional ideas of love and marriage.
But bitter feminists have transformed the Disney princess into an angry, weaponized action character destined to end her life in the animated home for lonely old cartoons.
The home is in New Jersey, by the way, for those of you who'd like to visit Merida from Brave.
Now, in keeping with its policy of polluting whatever decent people love, Disney has announced that its new live-action film, Beauty and the Beast, starring smoking hot cutie pie Emma, what's her name, will be a, quote, feminist fairy tale containing a quote, exclusively gay moment in which LeFou tries to kiss Gaston.
Now, I know many Hollywood filmmakers are very busy, rushing from their mistress's house to pick their kid up from rehab and bring him home to their third wife before they hurry off to a party in Encino where they'll sleep with underage boys.
Obamacare Light Repeal Plan00:13:48
So it's nice of them to pause once in a while to explain to our children how they should run their sex lives.
So I know I'm really eager to see the new Beauty and the Beast when it opens and to hear all about Hollywood's great sexual values.
Unfortunately, I'll be home that day watching Doris Day movies on TV.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Life is tickety-boo Birds are winging, also singing Hunky-dunky, tipsy-topsy The world is zippity-zing It's a wonderful day It makes me want to sing Hooray
It's the Andrew Clavin Show where we have transformed our own cultural correspondent Michael Knowles into a monster.
think it is now time for us to get together, put on our Tyrolean hats, grab some torches, and chase Michael Knowles to the old mill where we destroy him until the sequel, Return of Michael Knowles, his Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a completely empty book, a book with no words in it, is now number one on Amazon.
And here's the thing.
If you go on Amazon and buy Reasons to Vote for Democrats, this empty book, you must, you must buy my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, and any one of Ben Shapiro's books as well.
You can buy anyone you want, or you go to hell.
I'm just telling you, it's a theological point.
Once you put an empty book on the bestseller list, you must buy decent books or you're done.
All right.
So we're going to talk about Logan tonight today.
There will be no spoilers.
I do not spoil things.
But it really is a fantastic film and said a lot.
Just to start with politics, we're going to get to Logan afterwards, but we have to start and just talk also this week.
I mean, so much is going on this week.
The stuff about Russia and tweets and Trump's tweets about being spied on and all that stuff, which is all falling apart for the left as far as I'm concerned, because now they're saying, no, he was never under investigation.
So then there's no Russian story.
You know, either way they go, they blow themselves up.
But I do want to talk, this was the week that the healthcare bill, this is the signature bill of most of the Republicans ran on, and it's out there.
And I just heard somebody, it's so rare that somebody in the media and in politics says something adult and true that, and it's no surprise that it was Representative Louis Gomert, who is my, I think he must be my favorite person in Washington.
Louis is, first of all, he's a wonderful, like non-pretentious guy, but he is a solid conservative who never backs down and he always says what he says with a great deal of humor and easygoing.
He's from Texas, easygoing kind of Texas charm.
So they've got this bill and of course the left is just like, oh, this is going to destroy, people will die in the streets.
And they keep lying about the fact, you know, all the insurers are pulling out of Obamacare.
So soon Obamacare will just be this empty shell.
There'll be nobody there and the prices will be incredible and there'll be no health care, no health insurance.
And yet the Democrats are saying, you can't replace this because it's a wreck, but it's our wreck, so you have to leave it there.
So they've got to replace it.
The Republicans ran on repeal and replace.
And by the way, just to be frank, you know, repeal doesn't really mean anything because if you pass another law, the modern law replaces the old law.
So the repeal thing is kind of for show.
But like, okay, there it is.
And they bring out this thing and it's got some entitlements in it.
It's going to keep some things that, you know, it, I actually am not sure that it's take on Medicaid, which is to send out block grants to the states.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
And it's still early.
It's hard to get, you know, there's a complicated bill.
It's hard to get it all done.
So Gomert, now they go into this thing what's called markup, which is where they change the bill entirely.
They rewrite the bill.
There are amendments and the amendments totally change the bill.
And Louis Gomart had this to say about it.
So there are things that have to be done, that have to be included, but we got a starting point.
And I think amidst the horse excrement, we can find a pony around here somewhere.
And that's what we're going to be looking to have.
I think we'll have a racehorse as long as we get a good amendments when we're done.
I love that.
It's an old joke.
An optimist is the little kid who claps her hands when she sees a pile of horse manure because she knows there's a pony around here somewhere.
And so he's saying it's in there and they're going to find it.
The thing is, you and I and our emotions and our principles and our anger and our happiness is what these guys use to negotiate with.
It's all about negotiation.
And Trump has sold himself to us as a great negotiator, so he's going to go in there and hopefully get some kind of version of the bill he wants.
Because if the bill fails, Trump fails.
And this is the thing that people don't understand.
If the bill fails, Trump is going to have a hard time getting future bills through.
And the Republicans are going to scatter and split and divide, and they're going to lose in the midterms.
So that's what's at stake.
Let alone the fixing the health care thing.
That's what's at stake.
And what Paul Ryan understands, and I know a lot of conservatives don't like Ryan.
I'm actually kind of fond of him because I think he's done some brave things that he, you know, you don't get credit in the House because you're always compromising.
So people who are sitting at home and never have to compromise because they're living in their own imaginations are like, oh, you know, if I were there, I would, well, you know, he's herding cats.
He's got to get something that goes through.
So Ryan went on Tucker Carlson, and he said something that was really clever, that most of these guys, I think it's over 60% of the people in the House of Representatives, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, have never been a governing coalition.
So listen to Ryan.
Here's what we did a year ago.
A year ago, House Republicans said, we need to take a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare to the country.
We spent a year working on this plan.
All House Republicans participated in this.
We had these working groups where anybody who had an idea brought it to the table.
And then we reached consensus as conservatives, as Republicans, on what that plan looked like.
We called it a better way.
We put it on the internet.
We all ran for Congress in 2016 on that plan.
Remember.
It was modeled on the Tom Price legislation.
That's what this is.
This is the legislative text of that plan that we ran in 2016 on what we would replace Obamacare with.
Tom Price, who's now the Secretary of HHS, was the architect of it.
Twelve Freedom Caucus members were the co-sponsor of that bill as recently as December.
So we are going through what I would call the sort of typical growing pains from being an opposition party fighting Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to a governing party.
And now we're translating that legislation, that plan, into a bill.
So, you know, what he's saying is up until now, Republicans, I think it is 60% of the House, have never had to take responsibility for the things they do.
Because when you pass laws, laws have consequences.
And consequences, those consequences play out in the elections, in the midterms.
So, you know, here's Jim Jordan, who's part of the Freedom Coalition.
These are the guys, the Freedom Caucus.
These are the guys who are opposing the bill from the right.
They're calling it Obamacare Light.
And they're saying, oh, well, we repealed it all these times.
Why don't we just repeal it now?
And Jordan is one of these guys, I think, who came in in 2009.
So he has never had to govern before.
Now he does.
And listen to what he's saying.
And I know a lot of people will approve of this.
A lot of people on the right will hear this and go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But hear him out.
So let's do this right.
And more importantly, let's do what we told the voters we're going to do.
That's why today I'll be introducing legislation which just says clean repeal.
Let's vote on the exact same thing 15 months ago.
Every single Republican in the House, every single Republican in the Senate voted on.
We put it on President Obama's desk.
Of course, he vetoed it.
But let's put that same legislation on President Trump's desk and then work on the replacement model that will actually bring down that cost of insurance.
I don't think the plan they introduced yesterday is going to bring down the cost for working class and middle class families.
Okay.
Now first, two points about this.
First, everything is poker, right?
Everything is negotiation.
This guy's taking a position.
He knows that he has some power.
He has a caucus.
And your anger, your anger that you feel about this, that we're going, yeah, Jim, you know, let's just repeal it.
Those are his cards.
Those are his cards.
Those are the cards he brings to the table.
He's bringing your anger and your principles to the table.
But theoretically, if he's a smart guy, and I think he is, if he's a smart guy, he knows he's going to lose.
He's going to compromise.
He's going to get some stuff.
He's not going to get some stuff.
If he's not a smart guy, then he's serious, okay?
Because if they bring a bill to just repeal Obamacare, what would happen is Obamacare, which is collapsing, would collapse a lot faster.
It would just collapse entirely.
And all the people who got insurance or got on Medicaid in Obamacare would suddenly be without insurance, without health care, and you'd have daily reports, minute-by-minute reports of each child who is dying of some disease that he can't get treatment for because the Republicans left him without a safety net.
That is what would happen.
Obamacare was passed in 2009.
The world in which Obamacare is passed no longer exists, right?
They can't step in the same river twice.
Eight years ago, it was a different market, a different marketplace, different health care system.
Obamacare changed that.
It did change it.
So now these guys have to react to what is there.
And so you can't just repeal it because there's nothing else there.
There's no net to catch the people that it actually brought in.
Those people have been screwed in a lot of ways.
Obama made sure that you had to buy.
What Obamacare does is it makes sure that you have to buy expensive insurance to pay for the insurance of poor people, right?
So that, in other words, your insurance now, you're a male, and suddenly your insurance covers OBGYN care or something like this.
It's this Cadillac plan that you don't want and you don't need.
But at the same time, what's it called, the deductible, is so high that it's like having no insurance at all unless your daughter goes to buy birth control, then she gets it for free.
You know, it's like it's an insane system, just an insane leftist hodgepodge of a system that wasn't meant to work.
It was meant to collapse.
But, you know, if the Republicans do what Jordan wants to do and repeal and don't have a replacement, and they ran on repeal and replace, there won't be Republicans in there in two years.
That's not who will run the, you know, Republican, that's not who will run the Congress.
And what we're looking for is we're looking for like President Mike Pence like eight years from now.
That's what, you know, we're like clicking ahead.
So you've got to govern, you've got to do the things, you've got to compromise.
I know it makes everybody angry, but you've got to do it.
Here's what it looks like when you don't do it.
Okay.
I got to play this before we start talking about Logan.
Elizabeth Warren, darling of the left, right, is on Stephanie Rule shows.
It's MSNBC, isn't it?
Stephanie Rule.
Yeah.
Let me just play the introduction.
I want to play the introduction that Rule gives her.
It is this worshipful introduction of Elizabeth Warren.
So let's start with that.
The policies are for the bill.
My next guest has been a public thorn in the side of Republicans for quite some time.
It came to a head when she faced off with Mitch McConnell over a speech on the Senate floor in February.
McConnell's complaint about the incident became a rallying cry for women and Democrats everywhere when he said that Senator Warren had been warned to stop, but quote, nevertheless, she persisted.
Okay, nevertheless, that became the slogan, this Twitter hashtag.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
What a hero she is.
So she's given her the full hero's welcome, rolling out the red carpet.
And Elizabeth Warren uses her moment to now say, send out the leftist line.
You know, Washington is all about the fat cats, and all Trump and his millionaire friends, all they're doing is helping the fat cats.
Never in mind that more middle-class jobs were created in February, twice as many middle-class jobs as anybody thought there would be.
Never mind all that, but she's going to sell the leftist line.
And listen to what Stephanie Ruhl, this worshipful interviewer, asks her.
The policies here are for the billionaires.
They're for the bankers.
They're for the giant corporations.
They get the tax breaks.
They get the regulatory boosts.
They get the great deals in Washington.
And regular families, just people who are trying to put it together day by day by day, they're the ones who get left behind.
But Senator, you guys were in power for the last eight years.
Why is it that it didn't work for those good Americans you're not working for?
Let's be clear about what it means to be in power.
The Republicans had a blocking position.
Yeah, it's all the Republicans' fault.
You know, and for two years, the Republicans had no zero position.
And we got Obamacare, which is collapsing, okay?
So just while you're yelling at guys like Paul Ryan, who is a cat wrangler, I understand he's going to make some compromises.
While you're yelling at those guys, just remember these guys have to think about the future.
If they're not in power, they can't do anything.
And they'll wind up on Fox News with Sean Hannity asking them exactly that question.
You were in power.
Why didn't you get it done?
So they've got to do something.
I know that is not the purest of the pure.
I know it's not the uncompromising conservatism that you can operate in your own mind or on the comment section of a blog, but that's the reality that they're dealing with in the house.
So just as you watch it, remember, you're watching a poker game, and there's going to be some compromises and horse trading to mix them out for.
Although we have, at our poker games, we have horse trading, right?
Yeah, it's okay.
Compromises In The Poker Game00:14:52
All right, we're going to talk about Logan and a lot of movies and what the movies mean, but you've got to come over to thedailywire.com to hear it.
While you're there, you can subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month.
You get the movie Arroyo and you get to be in the mailbag.
Boy, that was a great mailbag.
It was really a fun mailbag yesterday.
And the people who want to be condemning, throwing their Bibles at people are always angry at me at the end.
But that's okay.
That's all right.
All right, come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
All right, so Logan, let's start.
Since we're talking about the X-Men, I think we have to start with the poet Shelly.
This is my show.
We're going to start with the poet Shelley.
Here's what Shelley said.
Poets, poets, philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians are, in one sense, the creators, and in another, the creations of their age.
So when you're looking at the arts, you're looking at people who are not just feeding information into the era, they're also created by the era and can only do what the era demands.
Now, I have said this before.
I have stopped liking superhero movies.
And I think that the turning point for me was Doctor Strange, because Doctor Strange is a really, really good superhero movie.
And I really was bored in it.
It's really well done.
It's smart.
It's funny.
It's exciting.
It's all this.
But I'd seen it a million times.
I mean, I just felt that every superhero movie is the same superhero movie.
There's a personal tragedy.
Then there's this kind of Zen-focused training with some kind of Zen monk who teaches you all this stuff.
And then you return home and there's a super villain and then a city gets destroyed.
And I'm so tired of watching cities get destroyed.
I mean, at the first time you see it, it's like, wow, they can do such great stuff with special effects.
Now, stop doing it.
We've seen it already.
You know, it's enough.
So this is to me, I think this genre has kind of played itself out.
And Logan is a wonderful movie.
I should mention, by the way, that it's R-rated and has lots and lots of violence and language in it, just in case that's going to keep you away.
And again, I'm not going to have any spoilers, but I'm going to write a column about it either for PJ Media or for maybe for City Journal, which will have spoilers in it.
So if you've seen the movie and you want to hear more about why I'm saying what I'm saying, that'll be there.
But Logan is, in a way, a movie about the genre.
It is a movie about what has happened to the genre and the fact that the genre has kind of reached maybe the end of its rope.
I mean, it may reinvent itself.
There may be more.
There's obviously going to be more movies because they make money.
But in terms of a creative exercise, Logan really breaks the mold.
And it's about a world.
It takes place in a future world in which there are no, this is the X-Men, so the X-Men are mutants.
There are no more mutants, right?
And basically, the superhero world has ended.
And the last guy is Logan, the Wolverine.
He's the last guy out there.
Now, it's directed by this guy, James Mangold, who made Three Tenti Huma, and I think he made the Johnny Cash movie too, yeah.
But it's based on the Western, and especially it's based on Westerns.
It's kind of a Western, but also kind of a tough guy noir movie.
And the thing that's really I loved about it, the thing I love about it, is it's slow, it takes its time to build up its characters.
It's built like a 1940s movie.
It is built by a guy who obviously knows the movies.
And the movie that it refers to most often is Shane, which when I was a kid was one of my favorite movies.
I read the book five times.
The book is 75 pages.
If you haven't read it, it's one of the great Western novels of all time.
It's better than the film, but the film is a classic.
And the film deals with Shane is about a mysterious stranger who rides into a valley.
He comes to stay with a family, a husband and wife, farmer, and their son.
And they bring him on to work on their farm.
But it turns out what he really is is a gunfighter on the run.
And they use him to stand up to the bullying ranchers who are trying to take over all the land.
They have all the land.
They don't like these farmers coming out and building their farms.
But of course, the farms are the wave of the future.
The farms bring out families.
The farms are the things that America loves.
And so the gunfighter has to go and stand up to the bad guys because the farmers are peaceful people.
They don't have the means with which to stand up to the bad guys.
So here is the scene: Alan Ladd playing Shane in his most classic role, where Shane walks into a bar and the great Ben Johnson, as a young man who had a career that went on forever, but the great Ben Johnson challenges him on behalf of the ranchers.
I guess you don't hear very well, Sodbuster.
I thought I told you if you wanted to keep healthy to stay out of here.
Now get going.
Look, pig farmer.
You better get back inside with the women and kids where it's safe.
Don't push his kill away.
Did you hear me?
I said, get going.
Did you think you were going to come in here and drink with the men?
Shut up, bartender.
Two whiskeys.
You bought me a drink the last time I was in here.
Now I want to buy you one.
You ain't going to drink that in here.
You guessed it.
He throws the drink in his face and then punches him so hard he flies across the room out into the storeroom.
So that's Shane.
So here's the same scene from Logan.
Logan is on the run.
He's wandering through the countryside and he's got a girl, an into, and also Patrick Stewart, who is Dr. Dr. Xavier from Xavier, yeah.
And they come and they stay with a family, a good old-fashioned Christian family, who is having the same problem.
They're having somebody has taken over their land and has the same thing that happens in Shane, which is they've taken over the water source on their land and they keep ruining the homesteaders' water.
And so the guy is Eric LaSalle, who was from ER, right?
He was the doctor in ER, is the father and he goes out to fix the water and the bad guys show up and Logan is again the gunman from the gunslinger from the stranger who comes to town and he stands up to them for Eric LaSalle.
You understand your trespassing right now, right?
I have an easement with the previous owner of your property.
Previous being the operative word.
Who's this?
Just a guy telling you to get back in your nice truck and go play Okie Dead somewhere else.
Hey, Carl, looks like Mr. Mosenhire has some muscle.
Looks that way.
He's a friend of mine.
Friend with a big mouth.
I hear that a lot.
And you probably hear this too.
More than I'd like.
And you know the drill.
I'm going to count three.
And you're going to start walking away.
Yeah, right, so this one.
One.
I have a lawyer now.
Two.
Three.
You got that boss.
You know the drill.
It breaks.
If you couldn't see that, it breaks a rifle over his leg, which I mean, it takes a lot of strength.
So obviously, there's a lot of connections.
And there's a scene in which the little girl who Logan is protecting actually watches Shane on TV.
And she has no socialization.
She has not been socialized.
And she starts to learn about values from watching Shane.
And the connection is profound because Shane is famously a Jesus story.
Shane is, I think in Hebrew it means a gift from God or I come from God or something like that.
And Shane is the Christ figure who comes into town and rescues the world and then goes off again into the sunset.
And the famous last line, you know, Shane, come back, is also obviously a Christ reference.
And the Christian symbolism runs through Logan.
A lot of people have been talking about the last scene and what it means.
And I'm going to tell you what it means.
I won't tell you what the last scene is, but I'll tell you what they're saying, basically.
The movie is saying, I'm almost sure this is intentional.
I'm virtually positive it's intentional.
The movie is saying that the Western used to be American mythology.
It used to be the American myth that translated the Christian story into popular entertainment, right?
Through Shane, we got to know Jesus as one of us.
We got to know Jesus as the Western, that our story, the Western story, became the Christ story and the two became one.
In this, Wolverine, the X-Men story, becomes the Western story, which becomes the Christ story.
And that's the symbolism that takes place at the end of the movie.
And that's the story that's being told.
And the basic, the idea is that they're looking for a place called Eden.
They're looking to return to Eden, which is, of course, the Christian myth.
And so this is a story basically arguing that the superhero story is our mythology, as our modern mythology, in the same way that the Western was our old mythology.
And the movie's great.
I love the movie and all this.
But it did point out one of the problems that I have with superheroes.
And I think that problem points to something kind of profound and really interesting.
There's no sex in the movie.
There's no sexual character.
There's no mother character except the mother of this family.
There is a father.
There's a son.
Wolverine is basically Professor Xavier's son.
And there's a child, but there's no mom because the child is a creation.
The child is actually a kind.
I don't know if you wouldn't call her a clone, but she's a chemical creation.
And so there's no sex.
Now in Shane, there's a sexual conflict.
The man comes to town.
Not only does the little boy have to choose between the daddy who is the kind of bad daddy but gets the job done and the good daddy who's a little weaker but builds a family and stays with his wife and makes a home.
The son has to choose, but also the wife has to choose between the bad boy and the good father.
You know, every woman has to make that choice at some point.
And the woman in this, in Shane, makes the choice.
But that choice doesn't exist in Logan, okay?
And it bothers me about superheroes that this is true, but it's got to be true because in superhero stories, except for Superman, where Lois Lane is being repeatedly rescued over and over again until it becomes ridiculous, in superhero stories, oftentimes the women are superheroes too.
And that's not how the world was made, right?
The world was originally made.
If you think about a little tribe somewhere, the most important, most valuable thing they have is children.
The new people from the tribe.
And the way the children get produced is through the women.
And the women, while they are producing children, can do precious little else.
You know, they can't fight.
Obviously, they can't fight.
Obviously, they are kind of weighed down.
And so if they get invaded, the men have to protect the women.
And that is what creates all of the values of being a man.
All of society is built to create women and homemakers and the caretakers of our children.
That is how societies come to be.
If you go back and look, go on Wikipedia one day and look up famous inventions, see how many of them in the early days are inventions of weaponry.
I mean, almost all of them, before you get medical inventions, and then communication inventions, are inventions of weaponry.
It's ways to protect the women.
It is ways to protect the women.
And that's why war is so fraught with rape, because the first thing that men instinctively do when they take over another place is they take over the women and they start to produce their own children.
I'm just talking about this because it is how, it's where our values come from.
And when children start to become less valuable because you have enough of them and because they no longer do the work of the farm, they go off and do some other thing that didn't even exist when you had them, right?
So children have now become a total expense.
Women, as children producers, start to lose their value, okay?
Women start to lose their value and men start to lose their value as protectors.
And the whole sexual element starts to go out of society, right?
One, we went to see, we all went to see this film Logan.
Before it, there were two trailers, one after another, that were exactly the same.
And they spoke into this anxiety that I think, this anxiety and expectation that superhero movies talk about, that we are about to become something other than wholly human.
I mean, this is not, it's not science fiction.
I'm not talking crazy stuff.
Eventually, very soon, probably within my lifetime, they are going to produce children directly out of test tubes.
Like right now, they can make a child in a test tube, but they can't really bring it to term, and they have to use human materials.
How long will that be true?
How long will it be true before they start to create synthetic humans who are enhanced?
Maybe they won't have blades coming out of their fists, but they'll be enhanced in some way, enhanced in intelligence and all this stuff.
And what is that going to mean for our relationships with each other as human beings?
Let's just take a look at these two trailers, right?
The first one is Life, which is coming out, I think, in a week or something like this, with Jake Gillenhall.
And who is that, Ryan?
Reynolds.
What, sorry?
Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds.
Okay, thank you.
So listen to this trailer, right?
They're in this spaceship and they acquire an object.
And listen to the way the trailer works.
Hey, guys, it's the girl.
Congratulations.
Do you have any idea who the father is?
Shut up.
All right, let's go.
Three, two, one.
This is Dr. David Jordan.
Our mission is to intercept a research pod from Mars.
16 steps to fix the shower.
I'm an astronaut, not a gym teacher.
This is the first capsule ever to come back from the planet.
We have visual confirmation.
This could be a major scientific breakthrough.
Come on, Woo!
Q Instagram!
We're looking at the first proof of life.
Beyond lowering oxygen, more carbon dioxide.
That's beautiful.
You finally a daddy.
It's going to be a big custody battle over this one.
Are you going to bring the Martian back to Earth?
Couples Among Fields Gold00:07:22
No, we're going to keep it up here.
We're going to study.
We're safe.
Look how fast it's growing.
Every single cell is a muscle cell and a nerve cell.
Muscle and brain.
Okay, so it starts with happy music, and the guy is celebrating the birth, the natural birth of his child.
He's had a child on the spaceship, and he's showing the picture and everything, and everybody's celebrating.
Who's the father?
He says, that's the joke.
Who's the father?
But of course, the guy is the father, and it's a natural child.
So the music is happy and all this.
And suddenly they find another kind of life, right?
And this life and all it is, it is enhanced life.
All it is is muscle and brain.
And it suddenly starts to grow.
Right after we saw this trailer comes the trailer for the new alien movie.
Here's the trailer for that, Alien Covenant.
You've all sacrificed so much to be here and be a part of this thing we're doing.
This crew is made up of couples.
It's the first ever large-scale colonization mission.
And everyone back on Earth is really grateful for your hard work.
Your courage.
We're making history here.
This is weird.
What are the odds of finding human vegetation this far from Earth?
Who planted it?
You hear that?
What?
Nothing.
No birds.
No animals.
Nothing.
Same trailer.
It starts out with happy music and then they're celebrating their couples.
They're all couples.
They're going to settle a new planet.
And we know why they're all couples, right?
Because to settle a new planet, you need men and women to have sex and create babies.
And then it's going to have, and all the values that come out of that arrangement are going to come out.
And then they start to discover the alien.
And as we know, the alien is always the anti-mother, the alien.
That's why it's always a Sigurdi Weaver who takes on, it's always a woman who takes on the alien, because the alien is the mother who implants.
You know, it's this weird, unnatural way of creating life.
So here's what I think Logan is telling us as a creation of the age.
And I don't think this is necessarily what the director of the writers meant, but I think this is what it is telling us.
You know, our values, the things that we hold most dear, are created out of the imperatives of our lives, right?
We all know this.
I mean, that as long as, you know, men and women have to come together to create new life, there are going to be imperatives that are involved in that.
How do you treat women?
How, you know, are they property?
Are they leaders?
Are they creators?
Why do I have to protect them?
Why do I have to do certain things?
And all our values come out of those things.
But our values, our morals come from God.
Our morals are absolute.
Somebody called me a relativist the other day, which I thought was just hilarious in one of the comments.
It's like morals are absolute, but ethics change, of course, right?
You can say, thou shalt not kill, but if you have to defend your family, you kill.
So it's the ethics, the way you put forward your morality.
The morality is that human life is sacred.
That is the morality.
That's the moral point.
But whether you kill or not depends on the situation, whether you snuff out human life.
All right.
So let's say you talk about the importance of the complementarity of male and female.
I mean, this is something Catholics talk about, but it's very, very true.
Certainly affects most husbands and wives.
As they live together over the years, they start to understand the point of view of the opposite sex.
And it's like looking through a stereo opticon.
Suddenly the world is three-dimensional, where it was just male or female before.
when you put male and female together, you get this complementary view of the world.
Well, you know, that might be in a small tribe, that's a good reason for being against gay people, or the fact that you need each person to produce new life is a good reason to be against gay people.
Once you have enough children, once you have enough children, and you don't have to live with a woman, and it's expensive, and creating, you know, children is expensive, you lose that complementarity.
It becomes a spiritual value.
And the question is, does the spiritual value still adhere in a world in which it's become obsolete?
And that is kind of what Logan is asking.
Logan is asking is in a world, in a world, this modern desert world that they're living in, in which people are created in test tubes, does this Jesus story still matter?
Does it still matter?
And that is the question that Logan asks throughout the movie.
Is this thing that I'm doing real?
Or is it just out of a comic book?
He keeps saying that.
Does it matter what I'm doing?
Or am I just following this kind of mythos from a comic?
He literally says from a comic book, from an X-Men comic book.
It's a fascinating movie.
And I think when we turn to the arts, a lot of times they're telling us stuff we don't actually know yet.
We don't actually know.
This stuff is coming down the pike.
I'm not making it up.
It's not science fiction.
We can say it's not here yet and it's not here yet.
But we are going to have to bring our values, conservatives especially, are going to have to bring our religious values, our sexual values, our moral values to bear in a world in which technology has eliminated some of the immediate consequences of violating those values, okay?
Right?
I mean, in other words, once you have, a lot of people, a lot of conservatives get angry about birth control because once you have birth control, the immediate consequence of having sex out of wedlock is gone.
And you have to make a moral argument for not having sex out of wedlock, which is a much different thing.
It's a much harder thing to do.
It's easy to explain to a girl, don't have sex out of wedlock because nobody's going to support your baby.
It's a little harder when she's not going to have a baby because she's on the pill.
You know, that makes it a very different argument.
And that's what this movie is dealing with.
It's dealing with whether or not the values of the Western, which are the values of Christianity, are still relevant in a world of superheroes, basically, in the coming world of superheroes.
All right, I'm going to end with stuff I like, which is kind of relevant.
One of my favorite Sting songs, Fields of Gold, in which he takes basically a medieval story and upgrades it to folk rock world.
And the video shows a guy walking through an empty, it's interesting, video shows a guy walking through an empty city, a ruined city, but in the shape of the human being, you can see families and people still loving each other.
And that's what happens in Logan, too.
You know, you see this empty place, but still people get together and they love each other.
And that's where family and values begin.
So anyway, Sting, Fields of Gold.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us, talking about ruins and wreckage and empty cities.
It's going to be an apocalyptic couple of days, but those of you who survive can come back on Monday.
We will start the show again.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Hair Among Gold00:00:10
In his arms she fell as a hair came down among the fields of gold.