The X-Men and Their Discontents

(Disclaimer: this is entirely in response to the movies; I last regularly read the X-Men comic book in the Hank McCoy and Warren Worthington days, before Chris Claremont took up scripting. [err, McCoy and Worthington were characters, not authors!])

I find myself having a philosophical problem with the setup for the X-Men. We are told over and over again that the dichotomy between Prof. Xavier's X-Men and Erik Lehnsherr's Brotherhood of Mutants is like unto that between pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., ("I have a dream....") and extremist Malcolm X ("...by any means necessary!") (Yes, I know this is gross oversimplification.)

Prof. Xavier's theory is coexistence and mutual understanding, but his practice is separatism: get troubled mutant children out of human society and into the isolated cloisters of his school. What's more, the X-Men look to me a lot like a private paramilitary group or militia. Prof. X. talks the talk of a moderate liberal, but he walks the walk of extremism. The real difference between Prof. X and Magneto lies in some of the details of the execution of their programs.

I'm also troubled by the way the mutant question seems to trump (almost) every other kind of difference or otherness we might see. Does it matter to Storm, who asserts she is driven by anger, if the reason she might be mistreated by a grocery store clerk is racism rather than anti-mutant feeling? What about within the team — what does it mean to her that she is expected to follow the lead of Cyclops, a rich white man who wears his privilege like a chip on his shoulder? The only difference that seems to matter among the X-Men is social class: the antipathy between Wolverine and Cyclops seems to me to be obviously class-based, the love triangle having Jean Grey at the apex seeming secondary.

I can't help but feel that the screenwriters killed off Jean because of her leanings towards polyamory, in a manner analogous to the way homosexual characters, even sympathetic ones so often get killed off in het-authored drama and melodrama. The final climax of X2 seemed broken and shoddy to me; I thought that the writers pulled a bunch of rabbits out of hats in sequence without explanation to contrive her altogether gratuitous death.

I came out of the theater holding dialogues in my head with various characters; what I wanted to say to Jean was, "You may feel different and alone, but there really are other people like you. Perhaps you should spend time in their society so you can find out who you really are." I tend to shy away from identity politics in general and would rather not play the identity-politics card with regard to my own polyamory; but Jean's treatment in this movie, second in a series trumpeted by so many as comfort and consolation for young people who get ostracized as different for whatever reason, left me feeling uncomfortable and unhappy.