Actually...
Jun. 17th, 2011 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMore X-Men: First Class meta: short and to the point, and long and poignant. Other than these being great posts, I admittedly link them because, like me, their authors don't seem to be on the "Erik was/is right about everything" side of things.
Slight detour: a hero's lot is not an easy one. If they're characterised without flaws, they're deemed boring. If they're characterised with flaws, as, say, Charles Xavier is in this film, they're often declared hypocrites/ineffectual/tools and their flaws are seen as unforgivable, whereas flaws in antiheroes of course are what makes them interesting/more dimensional/human (and then a part of fandom proceeds to dryclean them of any of those flaws, faults and ambiguities, but that's another matter. One thing I love about the Marvelverse at its best is that they do make an effort to show the sympathetic sides and credible motivations of their darker characters and the flaws of their heroes, and so I find it frustrating to read responses which default into black and whiteness again, just with reversed roles.
Some thoughts of my own, previously expressed in comments to other posts:
One thing I appreciate about the X-films, including this one, is that they point out that telepathy can be bloody terrifying. Both in its passive application (reading other people's thoughts) and in its aggressive one (overriding other people's willpower). The B5 fan in me is especially intrigued, because telepaths have their own extensive sideplot on that show through the five years, and by and large it does a great job of showing multiple perspectives - there is ostracism and apartheid-like social repression going on for telepaths, but it's also clear why people fear them so much.
Now, Xavier, Charles Xavier, in this film is one young telepath who makes the rules up as he goes along, and there don't seem to be that many, other than "don't make yourself overlord just because you could". He's reading private thoughts left, right and center (unless explicitly asked not to), and he thinks nothing of freezing people to a standstill if necessary. Until they meet Emma Frost, movie!Charles also happens to be the only telepath of his acquaintance. He's the only mutant in this film (other than Shaw, and we don't know about Shaw for sure) who doesn't have a teacher of any kind. t's not like child!Charles had a Darkovian Tower to teach him how to handle his powers. Or, well, anyone. At all. It's a minor miracle he didn't go insane a la Jason Stryker when growing up. He's making up the rules as he goes along, yes, but then - there is nobody else who could have done that for him. I always thought, and this movie confirmed me in the idea, that one of the reasons why Charles is so determinedly optimistic etc. isn't just because he's privileged - which of course he is, incredibly so, and the film keeps pointing this out - but also because if he did adopt Erik's world view completely he could be far worse than Erik ever could be. Because Charles can, as X2 with the Stryker plot illustrates, literally kill you with a thought. Or, as all the X-films point out, take away your free will. Change the way you see and perceive reality. Etc. Now young Charles who is flawed and very much still a work in progress, as we all are when young, uses his powers mostly in a defensive way and when he overrides someone's free will only briefly. But he does it, easy as breathing. Now if Erik had Charles' powers - actually we do know what Erik would do if he had Charles' power at his disposal. At least we know what older Erik will do. He'd committ global genocide.
Which brings me to: Erik and Sebastian Shaw. Where I disagree entirely with several reviews I've read is that the "killing will not bring you peace"/"peace is never an option" dialogue is supposed to make Erik into a villain and Charles into a hero. (Not least because the "peace" they're talking about here is not peace between mutants and mundanes, or Erik and his former persecutors, it's about Erik's state of mind, and well, killing doesn't bring him peace. Which as the film also points out he didn't expect it to.) The moment Erik - who in this film is a tragic hero, not a villain - starts his fall and future supervillain career is when he tells Shaw "I agree with everything you said - but you killed my mother". I.e. when he accepts Shaw's ideology. (And also gives a terrible implication, which I don't think he has thought through, that if Shaw had killed someone else's mother, but otherwise had been the same man, death camp past included, Erik would have fought with him.) And no, I don't think he's just saying that to fool Shaw, or to distract him, because he says it after he put the helmet on, when he's in charge of the situation and nobody but a frozen Shaw and one Charles Xavier are listening.
Also, aslabingi points out: by choosing his mutant identity as the sole identity and community to define himself by, Erik sets himself up for rejecting his Jewish identity. Because most Jews aren't mutants. When Erik at the end of X2 tells under-hypnosis Charles to kill all the non-mutants, guess whom that includes, in massive numbers? "My people" early in the film, in the scene with the two old Nazis in Argentina, refers to the Jews, non-mutants and mutants alike; "brothers and sisters" at the end of the film refers to mutants, and only mutants, including two who helped Shaw kill a lot of people and were planning on mass murder on a global scale just moments ago.
It's the tragedy of Erik's life - well, one of many - that he IS a fascist. Utterly and completely. (This is no reason for me to dislike the character. One of my favourite B5 characters, the telepath Bester, also is a fascist. It's tragic in both cases, but it's undeniably there.) And no, that doesn't mean I think he's Shaw with a new name, or that the movie positions that. He's still able to care for people beyond the cause (hence the end of the shooting as soon as Charles gets hit), and he's treating his fellow mutants (if nobody else) with respect whereas Shaw simply saw them as minions. However, he is very much Shaw's student, more's the pity, and in a horrible way Shaw's success story.
Back to Charles, and dealing with some points I keep seeing raised: a) a reason why I would be with Team Xavier, not Team Magneto, as opposed to the majority of fandom, is that Charles when racing into the Russian general's mansion in order to help Erik stops to render the poor panicked Russian soldier who is busy strangling himself with the wire Erik put him into unconscious (thus saving the guy's life). It's a tiny scene, but imo THAT shows why Charles is a hero in addition to being a privileged tool and what not. Because that Russian soldier is no one important, and is not a mutant. But he's a fellow human being in pain, and Charles responds to that. You know, most people watching these films imagine themselves mutants. I imagine myself a bystander without powers or anything that makes me special, and Magneto? Would kill me without hesitation as colleteral damage. He wouldn't even remember my existence five minutes later. Xavier might freak me out and invade my privacy by reading or even wiping my mind, but he'd also bother to save my life if I got in the way of some showdown or the other. I'd rather continue living than being regarded as necessary debris, thanks a lot.
b) Charles and Raven. To me, both the ways he's being clueless and a dick to her and the ways he's actually being a great brother come across really well in the film, and sometimes in the same scene, as when he's studying for his exams and first being a tool when evading her "would you date me if etc. " question, and then when she asks him to read out loud doing just that just because she asks (complete with sisterly teasing this will put her to sleep). He doesn't get the way she feels about herself, but note each and every time he sees her in this film after something dangerous went down he makes sure she's okay first. (I was very confused when reading that after their initial encounter we never see Charles show Raven affection. I suppose that means I must have hallucinated the shouts of "Raven!" and following hug after Charles sees the ruined CIA base and immediately looks for her, the kiss on the cheek after she and Erik kid him about his mansion, the way he takes her hand when the future X-jet goes through the missile-caused turbulence.) And in the end on the beach I think it's for Raven's benefit more than for Erik's that he doesn't reveal how badly he's hurt until they've left, because by then he does get what she needs, and what she needs is not his way of life, and he supports her choice as much as he can.
c) Which is amazing considering the state he's in and I don't just mean the being shot and crippled for the rest of his movieverse life part. I've seen the film three times now, and to me the most fascinating and disturbing thing about Erik killing Shaw remains that Charles keeps holding Shaw and keeps in full telepathic contact with Shaw while Erik is killing him. I think there are three layers of reasons for this. At the start it's some hubris/hope Erik will stop at the last moment, the way he did with Emma. Also, pragmatism and making a choice, because if he releases Shaw then Shaw might very well make mincemeat out of Erik. Erik asked him in that conversation "I'm going to kill him - do you have it in you to let me do that?" and as it turns out, Charles doesn't just have it in him, he by holding Shaw still participates. And it's the worst kind of self-punishment for doing that, because the way they cut it the film clearly implies that Charles, due to being fully immersed in Shaw's mind and staying there throughout the procedure, feels Erik killing Shaw as Erik killing him (Charles). He feels every bit what Shaw does until that coin emerges on the other end. To conclude with what I've started, I'm surprised Charles isn't insane at the end. But I am surprised that people condemm him for not being on board with Erik's "let's kill the fleet that just tried to kill us" plan, or see this as Charles just being naively idealistic and/or privileged. You know, Charles just experienced what it is to die (at Erik's hand), and rather than share that experience with thousands, he'd rather not. If it's privilege to consider the Russians and Americans on those ships, quite a lot of whom probably were not even told who the hell was on that beach, other than the people who just tried to start WW III, as individuals with a right to live rather than an evil mass deserving of death, if it's deluded to keep your own pain in check enough to try and keep other people alive instead of going for yet another round of an eye for an eye until everyone is blind, than give me privilege and delusion.
Slight detour: a hero's lot is not an easy one. If they're characterised without flaws, they're deemed boring. If they're characterised with flaws, as, say, Charles Xavier is in this film, they're often declared hypocrites/ineffectual/tools and their flaws are seen as unforgivable, whereas flaws in antiheroes of course are what makes them interesting/more dimensional/human (and then a part of fandom proceeds to dryclean them of any of those flaws, faults and ambiguities, but that's another matter. One thing I love about the Marvelverse at its best is that they do make an effort to show the sympathetic sides and credible motivations of their darker characters and the flaws of their heroes, and so I find it frustrating to read responses which default into black and whiteness again, just with reversed roles.
Some thoughts of my own, previously expressed in comments to other posts:
One thing I appreciate about the X-films, including this one, is that they point out that telepathy can be bloody terrifying. Both in its passive application (reading other people's thoughts) and in its aggressive one (overriding other people's willpower). The B5 fan in me is especially intrigued, because telepaths have their own extensive sideplot on that show through the five years, and by and large it does a great job of showing multiple perspectives - there is ostracism and apartheid-like social repression going on for telepaths, but it's also clear why people fear them so much.
Now, Xavier, Charles Xavier, in this film is one young telepath who makes the rules up as he goes along, and there don't seem to be that many, other than "don't make yourself overlord just because you could". He's reading private thoughts left, right and center (unless explicitly asked not to), and he thinks nothing of freezing people to a standstill if necessary. Until they meet Emma Frost, movie!Charles also happens to be the only telepath of his acquaintance. He's the only mutant in this film (other than Shaw, and we don't know about Shaw for sure) who doesn't have a teacher of any kind. t's not like child!Charles had a Darkovian Tower to teach him how to handle his powers. Or, well, anyone. At all. It's a minor miracle he didn't go insane a la Jason Stryker when growing up. He's making up the rules as he goes along, yes, but then - there is nobody else who could have done that for him. I always thought, and this movie confirmed me in the idea, that one of the reasons why Charles is so determinedly optimistic etc. isn't just because he's privileged - which of course he is, incredibly so, and the film keeps pointing this out - but also because if he did adopt Erik's world view completely he could be far worse than Erik ever could be. Because Charles can, as X2 with the Stryker plot illustrates, literally kill you with a thought. Or, as all the X-films point out, take away your free will. Change the way you see and perceive reality. Etc. Now young Charles who is flawed and very much still a work in progress, as we all are when young, uses his powers mostly in a defensive way and when he overrides someone's free will only briefly. But he does it, easy as breathing. Now if Erik had Charles' powers - actually we do know what Erik would do if he had Charles' power at his disposal. At least we know what older Erik will do. He'd committ global genocide.
Which brings me to: Erik and Sebastian Shaw. Where I disagree entirely with several reviews I've read is that the "killing will not bring you peace"/"peace is never an option" dialogue is supposed to make Erik into a villain and Charles into a hero. (Not least because the "peace" they're talking about here is not peace between mutants and mundanes, or Erik and his former persecutors, it's about Erik's state of mind, and well, killing doesn't bring him peace. Which as the film also points out he didn't expect it to.) The moment Erik - who in this film is a tragic hero, not a villain - starts his fall and future supervillain career is when he tells Shaw "I agree with everything you said - but you killed my mother". I.e. when he accepts Shaw's ideology. (And also gives a terrible implication, which I don't think he has thought through, that if Shaw had killed someone else's mother, but otherwise had been the same man, death camp past included, Erik would have fought with him.) And no, I don't think he's just saying that to fool Shaw, or to distract him, because he says it after he put the helmet on, when he's in charge of the situation and nobody but a frozen Shaw and one Charles Xavier are listening.
Also, as
labingi points out: by choosing his mutant identity as the sole identity and community to define himself by, Erik sets himself up for rejecting his Jewish identity. Because most Jews aren't mutants. When Erik at the end of X2 tells under-hypnosis Charles to kill all the non-mutants, guess whom that includes, in massive numbers? "My people" early in the film, in the scene with the two old Nazis in Argentina, refers to the Jews, non-mutants and mutants alike; "brothers and sisters" at the end of the film refers to mutants, and only mutants, including two who helped Shaw kill a lot of people and were planning on mass murder on a global scale just moments ago. It's the tragedy of Erik's life - well, one of many - that he IS a fascist. Utterly and completely. (This is no reason for me to dislike the character. One of my favourite B5 characters, the telepath Bester, also is a fascist. It's tragic in both cases, but it's undeniably there.) And no, that doesn't mean I think he's Shaw with a new name, or that the movie positions that. He's still able to care for people beyond the cause (hence the end of the shooting as soon as Charles gets hit), and he's treating his fellow mutants (if nobody else) with respect whereas Shaw simply saw them as minions. However, he is very much Shaw's student, more's the pity, and in a horrible way Shaw's success story.
Back to Charles, and dealing with some points I keep seeing raised: a) a reason why I would be with Team Xavier, not Team Magneto, as opposed to the majority of fandom, is that Charles when racing into the Russian general's mansion in order to help Erik stops to render the poor panicked Russian soldier who is busy strangling himself with the wire Erik put him into unconscious (thus saving the guy's life). It's a tiny scene, but imo THAT shows why Charles is a hero in addition to being a privileged tool and what not. Because that Russian soldier is no one important, and is not a mutant. But he's a fellow human being in pain, and Charles responds to that. You know, most people watching these films imagine themselves mutants. I imagine myself a bystander without powers or anything that makes me special, and Magneto? Would kill me without hesitation as colleteral damage. He wouldn't even remember my existence five minutes later. Xavier might freak me out and invade my privacy by reading or even wiping my mind, but he'd also bother to save my life if I got in the way of some showdown or the other. I'd rather continue living than being regarded as necessary debris, thanks a lot.
b) Charles and Raven. To me, both the ways he's being clueless and a dick to her and the ways he's actually being a great brother come across really well in the film, and sometimes in the same scene, as when he's studying for his exams and first being a tool when evading her "would you date me if etc. " question, and then when she asks him to read out loud doing just that just because she asks (complete with sisterly teasing this will put her to sleep). He doesn't get the way she feels about herself, but note each and every time he sees her in this film after something dangerous went down he makes sure she's okay first. (I was very confused when reading that after their initial encounter we never see Charles show Raven affection. I suppose that means I must have hallucinated the shouts of "Raven!" and following hug after Charles sees the ruined CIA base and immediately looks for her, the kiss on the cheek after she and Erik kid him about his mansion, the way he takes her hand when the future X-jet goes through the missile-caused turbulence.) And in the end on the beach I think it's for Raven's benefit more than for Erik's that he doesn't reveal how badly he's hurt until they've left, because by then he does get what she needs, and what she needs is not his way of life, and he supports her choice as much as he can.
c) Which is amazing considering the state he's in and I don't just mean the being shot and crippled for the rest of his movieverse life part. I've seen the film three times now, and to me the most fascinating and disturbing thing about Erik killing Shaw remains that Charles keeps holding Shaw and keeps in full telepathic contact with Shaw while Erik is killing him. I think there are three layers of reasons for this. At the start it's some hubris/hope Erik will stop at the last moment, the way he did with Emma. Also, pragmatism and making a choice, because if he releases Shaw then Shaw might very well make mincemeat out of Erik. Erik asked him in that conversation "I'm going to kill him - do you have it in you to let me do that?" and as it turns out, Charles doesn't just have it in him, he by holding Shaw still participates. And it's the worst kind of self-punishment for doing that, because the way they cut it the film clearly implies that Charles, due to being fully immersed in Shaw's mind and staying there throughout the procedure, feels Erik killing Shaw as Erik killing him (Charles). He feels every bit what Shaw does until that coin emerges on the other end. To conclude with what I've started, I'm surprised Charles isn't insane at the end. But I am surprised that people condemm him for not being on board with Erik's "let's kill the fleet that just tried to kill us" plan, or see this as Charles just being naively idealistic and/or privileged. You know, Charles just experienced what it is to die (at Erik's hand), and rather than share that experience with thousands, he'd rather not. If it's privilege to consider the Russians and Americans on those ships, quite a lot of whom probably were not even told who the hell was on that beach, other than the people who just tried to start WW III, as individuals with a right to live rather than an evil mass deserving of death, if it's deluded to keep your own pain in check enough to try and keep other people alive instead of going for yet another round of an eye for an eye until everyone is blind, than give me privilege and delusion.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-17 05:22 pm (UTC)I was really pleased by this inclusion. It feels like a very real callback to the first scene in which we learn that Erik is a Holocaust survivor - where he attempts to strangle Kitty by her Star of David and then has a moment of insight as to what he's doing and refuses to kill her. It still plays (30 years on) very much like he's not refusing to kill her because she was a mutant, but because he suddenly remembered he too, was/is Jewish.
One of the reasons I think a Genosha arc in the films could be very good is that it's a science fictional way to discuss some very real world issues we are all still dealing with. Of course fictional Magneto of the maybe-stateless, maybe-Israeli citizenship would be influenced by political Zionism enough to start his own mutant homeland. (And yes, I know Genosha was originally an apartheid metaphor but then again, look at the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. So yeah.)
Unfortunately, I have pretty big doubts this would ever come to pass though I did like the take that 'Wolverine and the X-Men' had on it recently. (Did you watch that one?)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-17 07:00 pm (UTC)If they do a Genosha arc, I wonder whether they'll use Pietro and Wanda. They do exist in the movieverse, their names are on Stryker's file when Mystique investigates in X2.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-17 07:41 pm (UTC)The reason I mentioned: Genosha exists as the mutant homeland in that series. There's a mini arc in which Nightcrawler, post-disbanding of the X-Men, decides to immigrate and gets into various troubles there. Pietro and Wanda are there are the heirs to Magneto's benign fascist dictatorship. (In that it's clearly a dictatorship that imprisons political troublemakers without a trial, but much like modern day China, the trains run on time and you get the sense most of the citizens are happy to overlook it for a decent economy and security from the outside world.)
Interestingly, I recall that it is Dust who is the mutant who informs Nightcrawler of what's going down. At the end of the series, Quicksilver and Magneto get busted for conspiracy to go to war and Wanda becomes the new head of state of Genosha.
It feels like that might be a good approach for Genosha, in the film series, though closing it so that old!Magneto is a free agent and not a head of state would be tricky.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-18 05:46 am (UTC)As to his identity as a Jew, I think in the movieverse he's deliberately put that aside (as we see in this movie) because he sees it as weakness and vulnerability - he identified as a Jew and was put in a camp and his family killed; he identified as a mutant and survived and fought back. He still keeps the ideas of "my people" and "the chosen people" and even a mutant homeland and parallels very strongly to post-WWII Zionists in many ways. In the comics, of course, he moves to Israel after the war, hunts Nazis in South America, goes to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC, has Jewish friends who know him by his real name, and forms a close bond with Kitty after learning she is Jewish, but that's not directly relevant to the movies.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 02:18 pm (UTC)No, he doesn't set out to be, but he had a lot of time contemplating his action at the end of X2 (I think two days pass between Erik's jailbreak and them reaching Charles in Stryker's compound?) before he actually did it; that was not spontanous by any means, and he had ample time to think about his phrasing and what exactly he wanted to order. And it was Stryker, not humanity, who tried to wipe out the mutants. Even if you take Stryker as the representative of the American goverment because being military, he's employed by same, this does not in any way make him the representative of the rest of the global population. And Erik's order as related to under-hypnosis-Charles wasn't "kill Stryker and his men" or "kill the American military" or "kill all American non-mutants" but "kill everyone who is not a mutant". Everyone, regardless of nationality.
I would like T'challa, if he exists in the movieverse, or Namor to confront Erik about that aspect, btw - the incredible presumption of letting one American general be taken as the speaker for the entire non-mutant population of a widely divided Earth, how imperialistic is that? - but I suppose it's just a minor one when compared to the, well, global genocide that was planned.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 10:04 am (UTC)You can imagine that I've been fighting the urge to bang my head on the nearest solid object while reading First Class meta that asserts that Erik was right about everything. (Just as I would be if I were reading lots of meta that asserted Charles was right about everything, but somehow I never actually see that argument get made ...)
The film did such a brilliant job of showing Charles Xavier as a complicated human being who is young and foolish and privileged and right about some stuff and wrong about other stuff, but also enormously compassionate. It irritates me when people ignore some of those layers.
(And I love being gainfully employed, but I wish I had more time right now to write fic and meta myself!)
Which is amazing considering the state he's in and I don't just mean the being shot and crippled for the rest of his movieverse life part.
Charles Xavier's ability to put aside his emotions and deal with the immediate situation is his other mutant power. Having seen the backstory, I now understand better how he manages the events of X2. Where his immediate reaction to being used a weapon by two factions of people who between them are trying to make him kill everyone on the planet (one of which consists of Erik and his adopted sister) and then losing his surrogate daughter is ... to put on a clean suit and go have a friendly chat with the President of the United States.
I think everyone has good cause to be grateful about his epic capacity for repression.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 02:10 pm (UTC)Just as I would be if I were reading lots of meta that asserted Charles was right about everything, but somehow I never actually see that argument get made ...
Quite, and agreed, that would be just as wrong. It's so great that canon gives us complicated shades of grey in rightness and wrongness, and it FRUSTRATES ME when fandom just ignores them.
I think everyone has good cause to be grateful about his epic capacity for repression.
No kidding. I wouldn't like to imagine what a telepath of his abilities venting his emotions after such traumatic events by projection could do.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-20 11:45 am (UTC)Alas, you have found me out!
Quite, and agreed, that would be just as wrong. It's so great that canon gives us complicated shades of grey in rightness and wrongness, and it FRUSTRATES ME when fandom just ignores them.
You would think I would be used to this when it comes to Charles after almost fifteen years on the internet ... and yet, I still get annoyed. Especially when we just got a film that made me bounce out of the theatre in glee over his characterisation, then come home to 'CHARLES XAVIER IS A USELESS PRIVILEGED TOOL.'
No kidding. I wouldn't like to imagine what a telepath of his abilities venting his emotions after such traumatic events by projection could do.
I think this falls under the heading of 'ways in which the beach scene could actually have gone much, much worse.'
no subject
Date: 2011-06-20 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-20 09:13 pm (UTC)They're in the same room precisely once during the trilogy - I checked when rewatching the films before going to see First Class. And that's when Charles is brainwashed and Raven is helping Erik use him to kill all the humans on the planet. Who's meant to be the jerk in that scene, again?
That settles it - I have to go and write that post-X3 sibling reunion story.
So yes, the foster siblings are a retcon, but it totally works precisely because we've seen no interaction betweeen Charles and Raven in the later/earlier films to contradict it.
Exactly! It's a brilliant idea, and my favourite new thing introduced in First Class.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 11:16 am (UTC)If it makes you write this, the stupidity on the internet has had a point.:)
Sometimes, internet stupidity can be very inspirational.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 07:38 pm (UTC)did you also notice in that bit, how he (totally unnecessarily) throws his arm across her, like a mother throwing her arm across her child in a car? that alone says worlds about how he feels about her.
excellent meta. thankfully I haven't seen much of people agreeing with Charles or Erik to any extreme degree and more acknowledging that Erik has a point and Charles isn't perfect. but I concur, I would be on Team Xavier.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 04:25 am (UTC)