Let me first say that I actually like X2, so my problems with it are much less intense than my dislike of X3 or Apocalypse, etc.
So about themes, let me first strongly recommend listening to School of Movies’ episode on X2, which influenced my thinking on this.
Longer discussion below the cut.
Muddling the Mutant Metaphor
One of if not the single most important theme in the broader X-Men world – including movies, comic books, tv shows, and other media – is the mutant metaphor itself. The mutant metaphor can be problematic in its own way, but at the same time it’s so adaptable that I’ve written no less than three posts about it and I am not hardly done.
However, because the metaphor is so protean, one can easily stumble into a situation where one muddles it by either not thinking through the implications deeply or by presenting mutually incompatible definitions (as opposed to having characters with different interpretations). I think this happens in X2 a fair bit.
The opening words of the film is Charles Xavier discussing mutants from a conceptual level. And what does he have to say?
“Mutants. Since the birth of their
existence, they have been regarded with fear, suspicion, and hatred. Across the
planet, debate rages: are mutants the next link in the evolutionary chain or
simply a new species of humanity fighting for their share of the world? Either
way, one fact has been historically proven: sharing the world has never been
humanity’s defining attribute…”
While in some ways this is boilerplate X-Men, I would argue there’s some underlying weirdness here. To begin with, it’s important to note that this is not a diagetic scene where Xavier is addressing students or a conference or the like, but as a disembodied voice speaking over the credits, and since the voiceover isn’t ongoing it gives the impression that this is more the film’s thesis as a whole.
And while that’s not a bad thing per se, it’s odd that Xavier’s the one giving the speech, because this doesn’t quite fit his way of thinking. First of all, as a ridiculously qualified expert (seriously, Professor Charles Xavier has no less than four PhDs: Genetics, Biophysics, Psychology, and Anthropology), Xavier’s language here on the science is a bit iffy. The idea of “links in the evolutionary chain” is not one that modern scientists use, because (in a rather eugenic way) it presumes linear progress and ignores the many branching off-shoots of evolution. Likewise, the way that he waffles on whether mutants are a new species or not is something he should be more definite on: can mutants and humans produce fertile offspring? Can humans with no X-gene give birth to mutants and can mutants give birth to humans? Etc.
Finally, given that Xavier’s dream is foundationally about human and mutant co-existence, why is he setting up the idea of inherent and inescapable conflct between humans and mutants?
This gets even weirder when we segue from Nightcrawler’s attack on the White House to the Xavier School’s trip to the science museum. Here’s how Storm, an Xavier loyalist to the core, talks about evolution:
“Contrary to popular belief, Neanderthals
are not the ancestors of modern day humans, but rather distant cousins who died
out 30,000 years ago…they were replaced by a more advanced race called Cro-Magnon
man, also known as Homo Sapiens…also known as human beings. In other words, all
of us.” (http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/X-Men_2.pdf)
This is not the first time that the X-Men have used a Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon metaphor to discuss human/mutant relations – in fact, this is sort of a dry run for a longer essay about that metaphor-within-a-metaphor – but it’s very weird coming from an X-Men. Not so implicitly (given how the camera is framing humans as the Neanderthals when they all freeze next to the dioramas), Storm is saying that humans are a dead-end and mutants are the “more advanced race.” And that’s really weird, because that argument has always been used by villains, whether we’re talking about Senator Kelly in the original “Days of Future Past” or Cassandra Nova in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.
It’s especially problematic, because it’s bad science: rather than being wiped out by Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals interbred with them, and almost all of us have a nice chunk of Neanderthal DNA. And while this seems like a pedantic academic point, given how much it fits Xavier’s dream of co-existence, wouldn’t you expect him to make that part of the curriculum? Or wouldn’t, at some point, Doctor Moira MacTaggart (Nobel Prize-winning geneticist) or Hank McCoy (PhD in Biochemistry) bring it up?
I’m not surprised that this is handled a bit sloppily, because it’s not really what Bryan Singer cares about when it comes to the mutant metaphor. Whatever else one thinks of Singer (given recent revelations), it’s clear that his heart is in this scene here:
Now, this is not the first time that the mutant metaphor has been used to discuss gay rights – as I’ll discuss in that essay I talked about above, it came in gradually in the 90s with the Legacy virus – and for what it’s worth I think it’s one of the best scenes in the movie.
I do get really annoyed by the last bit, where Pyro tells Bobby’s parents that men are the ones who pass on “mutant genes.” I get where this comes from as a metaphor for the coming out experience – for quite some time, male homosexuality was thought to come from overbearing mothers feminizing their sons, a retrograde idea that still persists in the thankfully shrinking circle of conversion therapy advocates, so blaming it on the father is a nice inversion.
However, it clashes badly with the genetic discussion above. Simply put, it’s impossible for the X-gene to only be passed down by fathers. And this wouldn’t be an issue, except that it speaks to an underlying sloppiness in the writing, because one of the plots in X2 is that Nightcrawler finds out that he got his mutant genes from his mother Mystique…
Muddled Motivation
Finally, I want to talk about Magneto and Xavier. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, because School of Movies covered it better and I don’t have much to add here.
In the movie, which is heavily inspired by “God Loves, Man Kills,” Xavier is captured by William Stryker, who attempts to use Xavier’s powers in combination with Cerebro to kill all mutants. This forces Magneto to work together with the X-Men, because all of them believe in protecting mutants even if they disagree about everything else.
However, once Stryker is stopped, in the movie, Magneto pivots from rescuing Xavier to reprogramming Cerebro to kill all humans instead, and is intending to force his oldest friend to do it. Not only does this go against the early characterization of Magneto as a shades of grey anti-villain, but (according to commentary tracks) it was changed to this late in the process just to give Storm and Nightcrawler something more to do, which is bad storytelling.
While Magneto has done some bad shit in the comics – in the Ultimate Universe, he almost wipes out Manhattan with a tidal wave, and in Morrison’s New X-Men, a drug-addled Magneto pretends to be a Chinese mutant named Xorn, destroys most of New York as revenge for the genocide of almost all mutants on Genosha, kills Jean Grey, and gets his head chopped off by Wolverine. Notably, in both cases, this abruptly ended the character and the story, forcing a retcon, because once Magneto has shifted from mutant liberationist to genocider, his character is done.
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