A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 12: The Mutant Metaphor (Part IV) – Lawyers, Guns & Money

Face front, true believers! In the last entry in this series, I was intending to write about Chris Claremont’s stamp on the mutant metaphor. However, recently I got bitten by a (non-radioactive) different idea and so instead I want to talk about another aspect of the mutant metaphor, a metaphor-within-a-metaphor, one that’s cropped up in …

Have you ever written about Deadpool (the movie) ? If not, maybe write something now?

I don’t know if there’s anything particularly deep to say about Deadpool, but I’ll do a short post:

First, Deadpool is an impressive feat of economy. While $58 million is a decent budget for most movies, blockbuster action movies, especially superhero movies, have budgets that are several multiples of that. So Deadpool had to do a lot to compensate for lack of spectacle with humor and style – the gag where Deadpool forgets his giant bag of guns in the taxi is a nod to that, because they couldn’t afford to do the big spectacle shootout that they wanted to do.
Second, Deadpool pulls off the humor. Deadpool’s particular style of humor – a weird blend of “edgy” sex and violence, fourth-wall-breaking and superhero satire, and randomness – is incredibly easy to get wrong and turn people off. (I tend to avoid Deadpool in the comics for this reason.) So it says a lot about the writing and Ryan Reynolds’ delivery that the humor works really consistently throughout the film.
Third, Deadpool actually has one of the best portrayals of sexuality and romantic relationships in superhero movies, strange as that is to say. Wade and Vanessa’s relationship is straightforwardly sex-positive and kinky and fun without being leering or exploitative, Wade’s decision to disappear to “protect” Vanessa is called out clearly as being the wrong move, and while Vanessa is made a bit of a damsel, the movie goes out of its way to avoid fridging and tragic backstories.

Was the idea in DOFP supposed to be that Raven killed JFK, and framed Erik when he tried to stop her?

If I recall correctly, the idea was that JFK was a mutant, and Erik tried to bend the “magic bullet” to save his life. Which is bizarre for a whole bunch of reasons:

First, the “magic bullet” theory is bullshit. It’s based on a misunderstanding of the layout of the car that JFK and entourage were sitting in.

Second, even if we accept for the sake of argument that Erik found out that JFK was a mutant and that JFK was going to be assassinated (which is never explained) and where and when that would happen (ditto), why wouldn’t he just stop the bullet, something he’s clearly capable of doing?
Third, if JFK was a mutant, wouldn’t he have gotten way more involved when the Director of the CIA took a meeting with Xavier and found out that Shaw was behind the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Fourth, Magneto not dying would have changed U.S culture around conspiracies enormously, which would have had a significant impact on popular trust in government. We don’t really see any signs of this.

You said in a post about X2 that it has theme issues? Could you elaborate?

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.

What are your thoughts on Mutants as an analogue for persecuted minorities in our own society? I can see some parallels, but there is no race, creed, or sexual orientation with members who can read minds, manipulate metal, create illusions, walk through solid objects, etc. It’s hard not to sympathize with people who see Mutants as potentially dangerous.

See here and here.

At the same time, I don’t think that “mutants are dangerous” is a good counter-argument; show me a persecuted minority that wasn’t believed to be dangerous to the majority or to have unnatural abilities. The fact that mutants exaggerate the historical rhetoric doesn’t make it a good argument.

Mutants exist in a world in which Galactus and Mephisto are real; the fact that public policy focuses on the “mutant threat” is ultimately due to feelings of inadequacy, of being an evolutionary dead end, not a clear-eyed risk assessment. Hence the constant use of the scientifically-incorrent Neanderthal metaphor:

Regarding mutants in the MCU: Ride the wave set up by the inhuman outbreak and the anti-inhuman persecution in Agents of SHIELD. We had some people randomly developing powers after consuming fish oil supplements… now we have hundreds of people randomly developing powers just because. Boom! Paranoia rise and you have the Friends of Humanity and Senator Kelly or the likes doing an extreme reading of the Sokovia Accords, demanding summary detention of suspected mutants

That’s certainly an option, even though the MCU has tended to avoid story filtering upwards from the TV shows to the movies, and the whole drive to get Inhumans to replace the X-Men is dead now that the deal with Fox has gone through.

If I were going to do it, I’d start from the Sokovia Accords: world governments were freaked out enough by a small team of superheroes, several of whom are baseline humans, and many of whom are sui-generis accidents, that they passed a global registration initiative, backed up by black site prisons, indefinite detention, and UN-backed death squads.

Now all of the sudden there is an entire population of people who are born superheroes, no one knows how many of them there are, and their most prominant public figure is Magneto, who’s loudly proclaimed that he views the Sokovia Accords as a genocidal threat to his people.

Thoughts on the Disney Fox deal?

As an MCU fan, I’m happy that the Fantastic Four and their Rogue’s Gallery can be a part of the MCU. The X-Men films will take a bit of finessing to bring into the MCU, because

A. I don’t think you want to lose the genre/experimental vibe they’ve been going with since Deadpool/Logan (otoh, the main X-Men films are not going in a good direction), and
B. getting the place of mutants in the MCU right is critically important, because if you get it wrong you get Inhumans and no-one wants Inhumans.

However, I strongly disagree with arguments that the X-Men should be in their own universe. Wolverine started as a Hulk antagonist, the X-Men met the Avengers in X-Men #9 and hung out with Spider-man all the time, various X-Men join the Avengers, etc. We know that these characters can work in the same universe because they have for a half-century.

At the same time, as someone who doesn’t like corporate consolidation, I’m not super-thrilled about every part of the deal that doesn’t have to do with Marvel IP.

What are your thoughts on Fox’s decisions regarding X-Men: Dark Phoenix? Cast, direction, characters and etc.

I think they’re going to screw it up like they did before.

First, they haven’t given nearly enough screen-time to Scott and Jean for the story to land – the Phoenix Saga worked in the comics because it was the culmination of character arcs going back 17 years (it was also given 4 years to play out in the comics too), whereas in the movies this Scott and Jean have only had a few scenes together in X-Men: Apocalypse. Are audiences going to care enough about these two characters for the overall plot to land?

Second, the casting news suggests underlying weaknesses in the Singer X-Men movies are causing problems with story structure. The Phoenix Saga is about Scott and Jean, but the return of Fassbender, McAvoy, and Lawrence suggests they’ll be the central trio as they were in Apocalypse, Days of Future Past, and First Class, overshadowing every other element of what should be an ensemble cast. Also, Lilandra being described as the villain makes me worried that important people don’t get that the Dark Phoenix is the villain of the Phoenix Saga.

Third, I’m a bit worried about the director. Kinberg is primarily a writer and producer – having written or co-written Last Stand, Days of Future Past, and Apocalypse – and while he may well want to get the Phoenix Saga right this time, I worry that as a first time director he’ll hew pretty close to the Bryan Singer model (which as a writer and producer he was instrumental in creating and sustaining) that has shown itself to be increasingly creaky as time has passed since the first X-Men movie came out in 2000.

Does “Logan” count as an X-Men story where there’s been progress on mutant rights? No-one except the villain has any prejudice against mutants.

Logan is an X-Men story where the X-gene has been bred out of the population through tailored genetic diseases distributed through the food chain so that the military-industrial complex can monopolize and patent the X-gene to breed slave-soldiers. I wouldn’t call that progress.

In that scenario, there’s not much prejudice against mutants, because the popular perception is that there are no more mutants – as is stated by the radio host that Logan is listening to early on in the film when he’s driving his limo.

Do you think that there’s a problem with Marvel’s handling of the X-men as a minority metaphor in that there doesn’t seem to be any actual in-universe social progress on mutant rights? They constantly hammer home that even the mainstream hates mutants and that otherwise “moderate” individuals are bigots when it comes to mutants. Doesn’t that create the idea that Xavier’s dream is futile? After all other heroes seem to just ignore all the anti-mutant terrorist groups.

Great question!

I talk about this in greater detail here, but the more accurate description is that social progress on mutant rights gyrates wildly, depending on the direction that the writing and editorial staff want to take with the X-Men. So for example, you have a story where all of the sudden 70s America reacts to mutant-hunting robots tearing up midtown Manhattan by suddenly engaging in a wave of anti-mutant hysteria, as opposed to a wave of anti-robot hysteria. Later on, you’ll have incidents – the X-Men saving Dallas in full view of the TV cameras in Fall of the Mutants, X-Factor saving New York from Apocalypse – that significantly reduce anti-mutant hysteria.

What you don’t have is much consistency about how social progress is going, because the X-Men hasn’t historically been a book about social movements. As I’ve discussed in that link, the X-Men engage in a particularly elite form of politics, primarily centered around debates, trials, and press conferences, and we don’t really get to see much in the way of social movement organizing. The 1970s were an era of massive social movements of both the right and the left, you’d think you’d see some mutant rights groups organizing on college campuses, liberal big cities, protesting the Registration Act, pushing for a Genetic Equality bill, arguing in the courts that the 14th Amendment covers mutants, etc. Hell, you don’t even get mutant neighborhoods or mutant culture until Grant Morrison’s run.

Now, related to this is the problem of Marvel and the future. Especially in the case of the X-Men, Marvel has a hard time imagining a future that isn’t dystopic – either anti-mutant dystopic or mutant-supremacist dystopic or Terminator-by-way-of-Apocalypse dystopic – which I admit makes the Dream seem a bit futile, but only really due to a failure of imagination. I’d be really curious to see someone clever take a run at a future America where the majority of the population are X-positive, where superpowers are so common that the distinction between superhero and civilian breaks down – and before anyone says that won’t work, let me point you in the direction of Alan Moore’s Top 10.