So over the July 4 weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class, and…ugh. I know that movie’s a critical hit and all, but it just left me…angry, I guess, that I’d wasted my time. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I hated the movie for the same reason I don’t really like the X-Men in the first place.
I’ve never been able to get into the X-Men. I can dig just about all the other classic Marvel guys–The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Spider-Man, you name it–but by and large my impression of the X-Men is a lot like my impression of First Class–too many characters running around in an overwrought, self-important morality play. (I liked the original 2000 movie, and I remember thinking this was because it avoided the usual X-Men bullshit.) The theme that mutant/human relations serves as a metaphor for real-world civil rights issues is a good one, but it’s trotted out all too often to justify stories where mutants just worry about their personal problems, or sit around being douchebags.
X-Men: First Class suffers from an abundance of douchebags. The movie presents three choices for the mutants–they can follow Professor X and seek peaceful coexistence with humans, they can follow Sebastian Shaw and use their abilities to live like kings, or they can follow Magneto and attack the humans before the humans hit them first. This is a great start for a story, but the movie fell apart for me when I realized I don’t really want any of these three guys to win because they’re all racists. I mean, setting aside the various obnoxious things they do to their fellow mutants, each of them clearly sees normal humans as an inferior race–Shaw treats them like lackeys and beasts of burden; Magneto treats them like irrational savages hellbent on a race war; and Xavier treats them like children who won’t understand tolerance until he talks down to them about it. This is especially problematic when the movie hinges upon Xavier and Magneto as the heroes. The end result is a three-way conflict of equally unappealing ideologies, the likes of which have not been seen since the WCW vs. NWO-Hollywood vs. NWO-Wolfpac feud of 1998.
There are advantages to making Xavier more irritating and Magneto more sympathetic. It certainly makes both of them deeper, more realistic characters. But there’s a reason fiction tends to prefer stark Manichaeism over shades of gray–people don’t want to hold their nose and back the lesser evil, they want to find a clear favorite to root for. Admittedly, in the real world, we’re always supporting one dickhead to better oppose some bigger dickhead, but in the real world we have to. If I don’t like the state of immigration politics in the US, my only choices are to live with it or try to do something about it. If I don’t like the state of mutant civil rights in the Marvel Universe, I have a third option–I can stop buying X-Men crap and it all goes away. So you can see where I think Marvel has a clear incentive to give me a mutant activist I can truly get behind.
What would help such a character win people over is if he would actually accomplish a goal. Pop quiz, when was the last time the X-Men unequivocally won anything? My first thought was the time they beat Norman Osborn in that Dark Avengers crossover, but when I say “beat” I actually mean they fled American soil rather than fight a lost cause. That’s usually how it goes–they blunder into a storyline and consider it a success if they escape with their lives. Restoring the status quo is a typical and acceptable goal for most superheroes, but that’s because most superheroes prefer the status quo. The X-Men are opposed to the status quo (“world that hates and fears them,” remember?) so every story where they don’t make the world better is sort of a failure for them. What are the X-Men comics doing these days? I guess Wolverine and Cyclops are fighting over who gets to lead the X-Men. What difference does it make? I’m sure it’ll be appealing if you’re into the personal relationship between Scott and Logan, but that’s the selling point of a soap opera, not a superhero story. A superhero story is about getting stuff done; the X-Men tend to just mope about how stuff is hard.
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The thing I hate most about the X-Men is that they make other superheroes look like dicks when people do remember they’re in the same Marvel U as everyone else.
Captain America never said shit while the government was creating genocidal super robots. But there is absolutely no way the Sentinel of Liberty would let that shit slide. And most other heroes ignore mutants except when it’s Logan creeping out into everything or Scarlet Witch being batshit fucking insane so Emma Frost can genuinely say to Tony Stark in Civil War: “you don’t care about mutant people.”
And then the X-Men only try to act like heroes when they stop their racist cousins from starting a race war, like that’s a bigger deal than Galactus (I don’t remember any X-Men helping out with that) or the Kree or Skrull trying to invade the Earth or Thanos getting the Infinity Gauntlet (I know Wolverine got involved but seriously it’s fucking Wolverine – he shouldn’t even count as mutant given how overexposed he is) or Kang or Doctor Doom or whoever. How many times have the X-Men stopped AIM or Hydra? Hint: 0 times 0 always equals unimportant mutant drama bullshit!
Honestly, I view Norman Osborn driving the X-Men off American soil as a huge victory for the good guys.
I found it baffling (and annoying) how, in First Class Xavier was so vehemently opposed to Magneto killing Shaw.
Nevermind being opposed to murder in general, Magneto certainly had cause, and he’d already been running around murdering Nazis, which Xavier would have known from reading Magneto’s mind.
Charlie- shut up and butt out.
Professor X’s way of sorting out human / mutant relations is to train mutants into a paramilitary force that acts without oversight.
Despite his mind-reading abilities, Prof X doesn’t get the ‘normal’ people who make up the group he’s preparing his mutants to live with. He rarely seems to get around to actually having humans and mutants interact in normal situations, which is where reducing predjudice would start to occur.
Honestly, I’ve always had a problem with mutants as a stand in for civil rights. Racism and homophobia are wrong because minorities and gay people aren’t actually different from everyone else in any meaningful way, and therefore fearing and hating them is completely irrational.
Mutants on the other hand ARE actually dangerous. Magneto has single handedly destroyed New York a couple of times, Apocalypse has enslaved the world, and even the ‘good ones’ are as Jim pointed out a paramilitary force that answers to no one. When there’s an organization called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants committing terrorist acts in the name of mutant supremacy, it’s not only to be expected but necessary that the government take action.
In the real world the government tries to intercept communications between terrorists to prevent attacks, that’s not possible with telepaths. And while the government monitors the sale of explosives and bomb making materials, why shouldn’t they be tracking someone who can shoot lasers out of their eyes?
I really liked X-Men 3, whatever it was subtitled if it was subtitled, because it actually addressed the issue of “if people have lasers coming out their orifices, they might be a threat to everyone around them”.
Granted, it’s not a real world issue, but in the fictional world of the X-Men, it’s an issue that cannot be ignored successfully for very long.
As far as First Class goes… there was no need for Magneto to break with the X-Men yet. It didn’t help the story of that movie, and it limited what they can do with the next movie (Second Class?)
Urgh. I mean I sort of agree that you’re right, the X-men don’t save the world. But thats just a thing about the X-men- they ideally need to be in their own universe where there isn’t a whole bunch of other super heroes, as it makes prejudice against them look plain silly. There are a lot of things, for instance, Batman could be doing, to quote cracked, aabout poverty, but we don’t care because thats not what the story is about.
Yes Xavier is a bit flawed, but I don’t see a problem with that- thats called room for character growth.
Um, for the record: Batman IS doing something to fight poverty:the Wayne Foundation.(He also funds Leslie Thompkin’s free clinics).
But yeah, superpowered mutants as a metaphor for persecuted minorities is almost as bad as VAMPIRES.(Seriously, people? Bloodthirsty predators are who you want to be identified with?)
The X-Men HAVE saved the world (or different worlds) a few times, but it’s usually because they caused the problem in the first place (Dark Phoenix, Cassandra Nova, Vulcan, Magneto about a dozen times). There was the first Astonishing X-Men where they actually act like superheroes and actually DO save the planet, but that story had to job the entire rest of the Marvel Universe to get that done.
I think the Morrison/Ellis “international rescue force specializing in extreme circumstances” makes for a better position in the Marvel Universe than “militarily aggressive nation with persons of mass destruction who disregards sovereign borders.” I mean, the X-Men SHOULD be scary and dangerous, that’s their nature, but scary and dangerous AND assholes AND indifferent to loss of life and property just doesn’t work in a superhero universe (that’s not wildstorm).
Racism requires an institutional backing in order to be true racism. Xavier can’t be racist against humans for the same reason it’s pretty much impossible to be racist against white people: racism cannot be directed toward those who hold the power in society.
“Xavier can’t be racist against humans for the same reason it’s pretty much impossible to be racist against white people: racism cannot be directed toward those who hold the power in society.”
…May I ask where you got that definition? Because it sounds rather like you made it up. Racism does not mandate that the targets be socially inferior; while it may more frequently be directed at the lower classes, it’s still ultimately defined not by social status, but by race.
That being said, while I’ve loved the X-Men, this has always seemed like a major problem. Picture living next to Nightcrawler. “I’m your new neighbor; I can teleport anywhere I want, I can stick to the walls and the ceiling, and I’m all but invisible in shadows. Have fun sleeping!” Or, as people have pointed out, Cyclops, who could destroy your house if he tripped while mowing the lawn. It’s similar to the Civil War situation, in which the allegory was broken by the fact that, in a world where people actually had these powers, the basic idea of registration and accountability (if not conscription and cloning) seemed like a rather logical response.
The problem with X-men at whole, is that they do not seem to have any clear idea on how integrate with humankind, being rather pushed to form their own sub-society like other parallel humanoid races if MU(like Atlanteans and Inhumans..the last being the most usccesful as they freaking seized control of intergalactic empire..by force..). And it is ironic, considering that the part of DNA that allow superpowers is actually common in all humans of MU(thank for Celestials creating the humankind of Marvel Universe) and what the mutants have is a unique innate trigger for it, the gene-X. So in the end they are not that different by FF, Spiderman or other mutated humans. But only the X-men seem to have problem to interact with humans.
On other side normal humans of Marvel univers, are kinda ungrateful d-bag who do not know what sort of nightmarish universe they inhabit(we got devourer of worls, that got defeated more by sheer luck than else, A race of cosmic gods that manipulate DNA of entire galaxies for shit and giggles and were directly behind the birth of Apocalypse, the lvign embodiment sof death that want 25% of entirely of universe life offed, various actualy pantheons of deities in all sort of mess, crazy human scientist who mess with eveyrthign ther eis to mess for shit and giggles(seriously is there some scientist in MU who did not wnating or not, triggered the end of the world as we know it?), demons and elder inhuman gods that make Lovecraft cringe in fear in his grave(remeber when New York become briefly a literal Hell?), Dracula vampire being real, insane and quite dangerous(X-men fought dracul quite a few times), galactic empires in war at each others and with a perverse interest in earth, who underground is inhabitated by various species of sub-humanoid and filled with giant monsters.Oh yeah a cosmic war ended poorly and now the universe and time are broken. Not that psychopathic time traveller messing with the history help(between Kang and Bishop they quite fucked up all the history, I’m surprised there are still futures).
At this point giant mutant killing robot and evil mutants are the less of the problem.
Fuck if i knew this and lived in MU I will going insane and curl in fetla position 24/7…
I had a problem with First Class because it’s about Magneto working with the CIA to bring down an evil mutant who wants to wipe out humans and who killed his mother, which kind of dilutes the character. You see him slowly coming around to Xavier’s side, and what pushes him back towards hatred (and cartoonishly, heavy-handedly becoming THE VERY THING HE HATES) is apparently the fact that the US and USSR try to wipe them all out with nuclear missiles. And yet it was pretty clearly an attempt to stop Shaw, something you’d think Magneto would understand. Given Magneto’s plot arc in this film, I don’t buy that he would become a genocidal maniac in the last ten minutes; he only gets there because that’s where we know the character ends up. It’s symptomatic of a lot of problems with this film, in which characters make decisions for no reason. And don’t get me started on Darwin’s death, which makes no sense on several levels.
“Prankster said on July 9th, 2011 at 11:38 am
I had a problem with First Class because it’s about Magneto working with the CIA to bring down an evil mutant who wants to wipe out humans and who killed his mother, which kind of dilutes the character. You see him slowly coming around to Xavier’s side, and what pushes him back towards hatred (and cartoonishly, heavy-handedly becoming THE VERY THING HE HATES) is apparently the fact that the US and USSR try to wipe them all out with nuclear missiles. And yet it was pretty clearly an attempt to stop Shaw, something you’d think Magneto would understand.”
But the government knew that Shaw was dead before they launched the attach on Magneto and the others, so Magneto’s reaction isn’t that unreasonable.
“Why do you humans hate and fear us mutants? Why can’t there be peace between you Homo sapiens and us Homo superior? Can’t you see that Homo superior only wishes to… what? What?!”
(According to the Marvel wiki, the proper nomenclature for mutants is actually “Homo sapiens superior,” but really that’s not much of an improvement. In the Marvel universe, the perception that mutants are dicks is officially endorsed by science.)
“But thats just a thing about the X-men- they ideally need to be in their own universe where there isn’t a whole bunch of other super heroes, as it makes prejudice against them look plain silly.”
That’s always been one of the main flaws in the concept of the X-Men for me. It’s possible to buy that people would hate and fear people with incredibly innocuous powers like “having wings and flying” and “healing abiities” due to their having the “X-Gene” or whatever and being perceived of some larger mutant threat. It’s a little harder to buy that those same people look at a team of super-scientists who hijack a government rocket and crash back to earth mutated into indestructible rock-monsters and walking supernovas after being bombarded with cosmic radiation, and treat them like glamorous celebrities.
In a world where mutants are the only ones with powers, and a good chunk of them are terrifying mutant supremacists that can level city blocks by clenching their fist, it can work. As soon as you fill the world with hundreds of other superheroes, aliens, and mythological gods come to life who the populace as a whole is completely fine with, there’s no reason why the average person wouldn’t just lump Apocalypse in with Annihilus and treat the X-Men the same as The Avengers, who, hell, they’ve even shared members with.
Crap, I didn’t mean to italicize all that.
I don’t think that Magneto’s heel turn was nearly so last minute as that. I think he was leaning towards genetic supremacy all along, and was just quiet and subtle about it for most of the time because he did need help to get Shaw. (The “we already are the better men” line goes there relatively openly, given his circumstances at the time, but it also shows in his comments to Mystique and Beast about how they shouldn’t hide their true natures.) He was willing to discuss alternatives with Charles, and maybe if things had gone a bit better, he might’ve been okay with trying Charles’ way for a while longer, but the determination that had already gotten him as far as he had by the time they met meant that it was always eventually going to be his way or the highway. It was just that once he finally got his moment alone with Shaw, particularly with being able to steal the Charles-proof helmet, he was finally free to admit what he’d felt all along, to the one person he felt needed to know it before dying. And then they get fired upon, and he gets what he feels is confirmation that he’s right.
Yes, Magneto becomes the thing he hates, the thing that had traumatized and abused him. That’s not entirely uncommon. If anything, the only real problem I had with it is that in his rage at his mother’s death, he kills two guards and wrecks some stuff, but never even tries to attack the man who actually killed her. I can only imagine that they didn’t want to blow the reveal that “Schmidt” had powers too, but being The Villain in a superhero story, that was kind of a foregone conclusion anyway, so they should’ve had Erik try and fail, just to establish why the movie didn’t end ten minutes in with Schmidt dead on the floor.
Also, damn, I didn’t realize just how huge that was going to be.
@Slarti-
If you feel that Magento had anything even remotely resembling actual control of his powers in that scene where he (accidentally) kills a pair of guards by collapsing their coal-scuttle helmets around their skulls, I can only conclude that you were watching an entirely different movie than the one onscreen.
He COULD have flung his underfed ten-year-old frame physically at Shaw, of course, but even at that age Erik wasn’t DUMB.
This is why the only version of the X-Men I’ve ever been very interested in is Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, where mutants started to actually seem like a real minority, beginning to integrate itself into normal life. The X-Men were making things better, they were globalizing their “mutant emergency squad” through the X-Corporation and expanding the student body to train the next generation of mutants. They weren’t really mutant rights activists so much as they were about keeping everyone safe until humans and mutants began to reconcile on their own.
But I liked X-Men First Class. The 60s stylishness was a lot of fun, the X-Men should always be very stylish and sexy IMO. I didn’t feel that Charles was racist, he was just young and egotistical. It wasn’t about how humans had to be talked down to, it was about how Professor X thought he was so smart he had to talk down to everyone. His journey was actually really enjoyable, as he finally starts having to make grown-up decisions that can’t be solved with telepathy, and he actually matures a bit.
@Murc: Well, uh, for one thing, the helmet-crushing looked by no means like an accident to me.
I’m not saying that a hypothetical attack on Shaw would’ve been even vaguely nuanced, but when I saw a room full of sharp metal objects right next to the guy who just shot Erik’s mother, I expected at least some of those sharp metal objects to fly in Shaw’s direction by the end of Erik’s screamfest. Total Chekhov’s Gun failure, IMO.
I agree that the Xmen (or mutants in general) shouldn’t be any more of a problem than having spiderman or Sue Storm for a neighbor.
My bigger problem with mutant=minority:
•We no longer have to tackle that issue covertly. It’s quite possible to have gay characters (or trans, or Muslim or whatever) so why bother with a stand-in?
•The only alternatives considered are either violence or submission, never passive resistance, even though that has actually worked in the real world, with real minorities. If there was a sit-in at a no-mutants lunch counter, the Xmen would refuse (“We can’t force ourselves on them——we have to wait until someday, humanity asks us to sit and eat lunch with them.”) and Magneto would flatten the place with some scrap metal.
Apparently, one of the two new X-Men serieses will be “(probably) Cyclops leads a team of mutants to be Earth’s greatest superheroes, leaving people thinking of the X-Men like the Avengers or the FF.”
So, that’s interesting.
The more I really think about it, the more I dislike the X-Men as a metaphor for the fights of civil rights/tolerance. Either the X-Men will be forced to be elitist (we will allow the lowly humans to keep their society as long as they will allow us to share it) or defeatist (forget the humans, we will create our own society even if we have to fight others around us). Either way, there is still a distinct sense of “Other” about being a human or mutant, and true integration will never be possible in that Star Trek-like perfectly pluralist society. (Despite it happening various times like having the Beast on the Avengers team and Iceman/Angel on the Champions and Defenders.)
In my mind, the X-Men should be kept on the fringes of the Marvel universe, in the underground (somewhat literally!). It makes them truly a secret society, and one that keeps them on the run. At least at that point, when the X-Men “mope about how stuff is hard,” it makes sense, and it still allows them to “get things done,” because it is more on a personal and community level, rather than on a societal one.That’s the soap opera that most X-Me fans like.
Do all other Superheros really fight for the Status Quo or is that just what is enforced by the Publisher after a writer leaves a book to keep the characters in a publicly recognizable state.
If anything the X-Men are fighting for what every other comic is fighting for, change from stagnant & repetitive stories, the real shame is whenever they succeed they get forced back into their little box by M-Days or Alternate Futures. The tragedy of the X-Men is that they constantly become what they are fighting to stop, stagnant and repetitive.
Rick, think about Superman: the status quo is ‘the world is safe, Clark has Lois, everyone is happy’. MGK’s point is that the X-Men’s status quo is ‘the world hates and fears them’. See the difference?
I’m not sure what it means to say that Superman is fighting for ‘change from stagnant & repetitive stories’. He’s fighting to keep the world safe and to keep everyone alive. For Superman, returning to the ‘stagnant’ status quo is a victory.
Gustopher’s right that Magneto’s departure doesn’t do much for the movie or the series. Having Charles and Erik increasingly at odds while still working together seems to me a more dramatically interesting approach than what we’re set up for now, which is them shouting at each other during Awesome Battle Scenes in their official Good Guy, Bad Guy roles.
It’s not as though partial paralysis has suddenly made Professor X less of an ass (or are we not meant to be revolted at how badly he shanks poor Moira MacTaggert?).
Philboyd, you mean Jim.
Anyway, Jim, I’d like to ask: what would make you read X-Men – what kind of elements would an X-Men story, if not actual comic, require to draw your attention?
(If at all possible, let’s also remove any previously established continuity issues that’d get in the way of your ‘perfect’ story, but it’s up to you.)
A few things:
(a) I kind of like the idea that they made Prof X a bit of a douche here. It’s a younger Prof X, so he needs to grow up a bit. It follows the civil rights analogy … he’s a privileged white guy with a mutant power that is VERY easy to hide, so he doesn’t really have any of he experience of how bad things are for ‘real’ mutants. The story shows that he learns, and his own naivite is, in part, the reason he couldn’t convert Magneto to his cause …
(b) The mutants as an analogy for racism or homosexuality does fail to some extent, but I would think that perhaps now, it would be easier and more accurate to tie it to Islamaphobia. The concept that a small number of mutants are terrorists, but they all have the ‘potential’ to be, sort of fits. But it does, ultimately, fail as a 1 to 1 example.
In the movies at least, they are in their own universe. So the human fear of mutants does make sense. The backdrop of the Cuban Missle Crisis actually shows the best analogy. Superheroes (not just mutants, which is why Marvel was a bit hypocritical until the Civil War) are equivalent to stuff like nukes (Watchmen taking that analogy to it’s logical conclusion with Doc Manhattan). Commies with nukes are like people with superpowers. The way that countries with nukes deal with each other is tenuous. On the one hand, wiping them out would solve the problem, but you can’t really do that without getting wiped out yourself. Also, mutual peace would solve the problem, but requires trusting people and fatal results if the trust is broken. Eric and Charles fill the roles of hawk and dove, while Shaw is the war profiteer.
Within the Marvel Universe, it did seem to be a bit weird that people are fine with say … Thor, but hate mutants. I can buy Captain American, but in a world that apparently hates mutants and lives in fear of them so much, I would have thought they would have got around to the Superhero Registration Act a long time ago. It just seems like a weird world where they hate and fear people with superpowers because of HOW they got the powers. Sure there is Hulk, and J Jonah’s hate-on for Spidey, but people seemed to be fine with most of the other heroes.
The argument for why people would hate mutants but ignore non-mutants (nonsensical though it is given that how would one know the status of anyone with powers) is that non-mutants have received their powers by accident in most cases, something has been done to them or whatever, if the result turns out wholly good then it is like winning the lottery. In that universe every non-powered slob can think of themselves not as non-powered slobs but as temporarily inconvenienced by inhibitor rays.
In the case of mutants, if you aren’t one you’re not going to get to be one. Even more damning is the implication that they are superior to you, and that whether or not they kill you violently in the hear and now or just supplant your kind by breeding it will happen sooner or later. You are going extinct, you are the past, they are the future.
Not a particularly good argument but one that is somewhat implied by the MU narrative on these issues.
It think the reason the general population fears mutants but is ok with (most) other heroes is that, as Civil War, Dark Reign, and now Fear Itself (as well as several other examples) have shown, it is pretty much established canon that the general population of the Marvel Universe are gullible, panicky and dumb as shit.
And, Andrew, I will give credit to Cyclops and the X-Men for their defeat of Osborn and the Dark Avengers during the Utopia crossover in that, up to that point, they were the only group allowed to get anything even remotely resembling a win against him (well, except for Deadpool, and all he really did was annoy the shit out of Osborn until he was paid off not to.)
it is pretty much established canon that the general population of the Marvel Universe are gullible, panicky and dumb as shit.
You left out “ungrateful”.
I’ve been thinking for a while now that Magneto’s plan from the first X-Men movie was the best one he’s ever had: Most people aren’t going to be bigoted against THEMSELVES, so mutate _everyone_!
The part about it killing the mutant who fuels the device was a bit of a snag, though. Well, that’s what improving the design it for.
Agreed, the issue with mutants = civil rights is mutants are in many cases superior to normal humans. I think the problem with anti-mutant prejudice is that it’s actually a prejudice against human nature, it that makes sense. Name five people you’d really trust to have, say, the power to turn into “organic steel” or to teleport, and not eventually use them for some kind of personal gain or nastiness. I can think of maybe one (and I’m not one of them). Does that make sense?
Agreed that Magneto becoming a mutant supremacist does make sense; the abused becoming the abusers.
@Bryan: Ok, you and I know this as readers, but does the average Joe in the Marvel Universe (or even the average Manhattanite) know the difference between mutants and non-mutant supers?
The FF, of course, have a publicist and their own in-universe comic book, and everyone knows their origin story. And I assume Cap’s story is well known, but does an average guy know Spiderman isn’t a mutant?
The X-Men’s ‘brand’ is that they are mutants, does everyone else just assume that the guy shooting energy beams out of his face is a mutant until proven otherwise? (I also assume that any damage someone like Juggernaut causes gets chalked up on the ‘mutant’ ledger, even though he’s a mystically powered and not a mutant) I mean, you’re house is just as destroyed if Hulk lands on it than if Pyro burns it down. Why would anyone pay attention to the difference?
Uh, no. It’s one of the standard sociological definitions of racism.
@MarvinAndroid and @Skemono: What you’re talking about is institutional racism, which does indeed require the backing of an institution to work.
I submit that it’s entirely possible to be personally racist without necessarily having institutionalized advantages in society. Hypotehtically, if some space germs killed off all white people everywhere except one Klansman, that guy would still be a giant racist.
Professor Xavier (at least James McAvoy’s portrayal) doesn’t hate humans and obviously doesn’t have social power over them. But he clearly doesn’t credit humanity with the capacity to tolerate mutantkind, so he spends the whole movie lecturing to the humans, even the ones on his own side, about what should be done and how to do it.
To be fair, some of this is just Xavier being born with a silver foot in his mouth–he’s a preppie who can’t really understand being a Holocaust survivor, a deformed runaway, or a self-loathing closet case, so he always says the wrong things to Magneto, Mystique, and Beast. But there is a double standard in his condescension. To Xavier, fellow mutants implicitly understand the Mutant Question and what’s at stake, so they should just know why he’s right. Humans, on the other hand, are like children who couldn’t possibly know what’s going on right under their noses, so they should stay out of his way while he saves them from their ignorance. I would say he’s at best a mutant chauvinist.
I get that people “become the thing they hate” and that was the point of Magneto’s plot, but it was SO over-the-top and heavy-handed that it became ridiculous. 9/11 turned a lot of Americans into fundamentalist fanatics in response to fundamentalist fanaticism, but they didn’t literally start praying to Mecca and insisting that women wear burkhas. People who “become the thing they hate” keep enough superficial distance between themselves and the object of their hatred that they can keep the pretense up. Magneto literally adopted everything about his archnemesis, including his philosophy and his fucking HELMET, which I get from a thematic perspective, but is impossible to swallow from a character perspective.
It seems like, given Magneto’s formative experiences at the hands of the Nazis and then Shaw, he ought to have a hardcore loathing for people who claim that “my genes are better than yours”. The fact that his archnemesis is a mutant who tormented him for the sake of “bringing out his superior mutant genes” should have only hammered this home for him. For Magneto to become a mutant supremacist, his life should have been ruined by humans ONLY. Having a mutant at the center of things muddies the water and makes him hard to buy as a fanatic.
“The part about it killing the mutant who fuels the device was a bit of a snag, though.”
It also eventually kills the people who get mutated, if Evil!Senator’s experience is typical, seemingly unlike natural mutation. The fact that Magneto hasn’t really bothered to check on that angle, and is totally unwilling to consider it when it’s raised, is part of his villainy. It’s believable, too — it arises from a character flaw, but also from a perfectly reasonable unwillingness to trust the people who’re warning him.
The fact that he’s planning to mutate world leaders instead of random people in the street shows that he’s an irresponsible activist, not a cartoon bad guy out to do the worst thing possible.
The first movie’s Magneto is an interesting and well motivated super-villain. So of course by the end of the second movie he’s an omnicidal maniac, with no interest in omlettes but keen to get on with smashing eggs.
The supposed rationale for mutie-phobia is that they’re a race: They can pass their powers on and create a true master race (of course, other people–Peter Parkers, the Richards–can pass on their powers or some sort of power, but I can understand most people not knowing that).
Of course, one logical solution would be instead of wiping them out, some postage-stamp nation starts enforcing interbreeding, with an eye to getting a majority mutant population (or at least a majority ruling class). Lots of ways it could go wrong, but lots of potential too.
As for Xavier being a jerk, that’s not far off his teen portrayal in comics: He had no qualms using his powers to become a high-school sports star by reading his opponents’ minds, for instance.
BAH! Nowadays X-men ( from Morrison’s crap & on) are complete douchebags! The cartoon versions (both 90’s & evolution) were heroes that were worth rooting for…
I am rooting for Stryfe, Mr Sinister or Apocalypse now, since as amoral or monstruous they may seem, they’re pretty honest when you think about what they say.
And Honestly , the civilians of the Marvel earth are a bit too ungrateful to be saved, if anything , a good chunk of them deserve to be culled by Apocalypse’s kickass monologues ( since the guy’s philosophy ” survival of the fittest” is THE ideology that’s closest to the truth. Humanity ,no matter what history has taught us, is selfish & transient, & En Sabah Nur is only using their own nature against them ,to see who is worthy of living ,mutant or human …)
And about the Xavier/ Magneto dichotomy; I think Sinister puts it best:
“You are fighting for a lunatic fantasy of peace & tolerance ,while you are planning for a war you are bound to lose! FOOLS! we need to improve humanity! Society itself must be replaced by a better system, dictated only BY KNOWLEDGE & SCIENCE & NO MORE OF THESE RIDICULOUS MORALS OR ETHICS! If humanity had those fallacious concepts before, we’d still be apes scratching each others butts to get the fleas!”
Short review of Morrison’s run
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3k8map
& for a trip in Chuck Xavier’s little brain
http://devilkais.deviantart.com/#/d3lceou
Et au plaisir!
The Problem With X-Men…
Is that with the exceptions of two runs (Maybe three) through it’s publishing history, it’s been horribly written and drawn?
@ Jim Smith “But he clearly doesn’t credit humanity with the capacity to tolerate mutantkind, so he spends the whole movie lecturing to the humans, even the ones on his own side, about what should be done and how to do it.”
That’s assuming humans have that capacity, which is seriously in doubt.
The Brood got TOTALLY PWNED by the X-Men, yo!
@MonkeyWithTypewriter: Seeing as humans make up 100% of the X-Men audience, I’m inclined to think they’re inherently capable of that tolerance. Xavier may not believe that, but he doesn’t have to believe it, he could use his powers to check.
There are advantages to making Xavier more irritating and Magneto more sympathetic. It certainly makes both of them deeper, more realistic characters. But there’s a reason fiction tends to prefer stark Manichaeism over shades of gray–people don’t want to hold their nose and back the lesser evil, they want to find a clear favorite to root for.
I completely disagree with you here. That there is a great premise for an X-Men movie, First Class just didn’t execute it well.
What you really need is to make some of the younger mutants like Raven and Hank be more of the viewpoint characters and let the audience feel, through them, the tension of choosing the lesser of two bastards (and having them make different choices!)
@JimSmith, there are people who read X-Men who are homophobic. So it’s not unfathomable that the people who enjoy the X-Men as fiction would be dicks to mutants if they actually existed.
I think one of the problems is how Marvel has presented mutantkind as a whole in the comics. Simply put, there’s no mutant civilian in any book that doesn’t have an X on it.
The “civilian” part is key here; if Marvel was serious about carrying on its’ mutant-as-[insert minority group here] analogy, then we really would have seen, say, Kitty Pryde embark on a political career away from the X-Men. When Marvel insists the only mutants who “matter” are the ones who do function as a strike force, or who are terrorists, that’s the kind of false dichotomy that undermines good intentions.
Well, dude, I completely disagree with you on many different points here, but then, you knew that. I’d put it down to you being a D.C. and me being a Marvel more than anything else, though then again there’s our shared love of Secret Six, so…(shrug).
Art – yep. I think Grant Morrison actually did a good job with this, giving us a lot of mutants who were really weird-looking and/or had no business being anywhere near a fight scene.