Unqualified Offerings

In a hateful post characteristic of the depraved left, Julian Sanchez responds to my recent X-blogging. Unable or unwilling to attack me personally, he is reduced to countering my arguments:

Jim’s defense is a little weird. He notes that people often mistakenly suggest carving up a written work that seems to combine too different themes, failing to note the ways they illuminate and complement each other. Which is fine so far as it goes, but he doesn’t really point to any of the ways the “cure” and “Dark Phoenix” storylines really do compliment and illuminate each other. Because they don’t. They’re not peanut butter and jelly; they’re peanut butter and tuna fish.

Come to think of it, I was pretty thorough in explaining why it’s almost always wrong to “fix” a movie or poem by trying to turn one work into two, but left the idea that these particular two plots fit together distinctly underargued.

Briefly, because I’ve got to go to work, Jean represents everything Magneto thinks his crusade has been about. He regards what Xavier did to Young Jean as analogous to what he sees homo sapiens doing to homo superior. Two things turn out to be the case, though: First, the actual incorporation of Jean into Magneto’s movement underscores the centrality of Magneto’s own will-to-power. As we’ve seen in all three movies, Magneto wants a community of mutants, yes, but more than that he wants a community of mutants that he leads. More even than his own bigotry (think Mystique on the floor of the armored car), it’s the things he’s willing to do to maintain power that earn him the appellation “villain.” He wants Jean free of Xavier’s control, but subservient to him. Second, when at the end of the movie he really grasps how far beyond his own level of power Jean has evolved, he quails in horror.

Is he “right” to do so, to reinforce what Jim Roeg sees as the movie’s “conservative” themes? The question is beside the point. The reaction itself is the point.

And this gets back to what I take to be the real business of the movie, which is deconstructing not just the simplex “mutant = gay” allegory, but the simplex “difference = difference” meme behind it. What X3 says, rather, might be glossed as “Difference is as difference does.” This is why Angel is such an important character in the movie even though he hardly interacts with the main cast. Because we look at those magnificent wings, and that swooping glide through the city and over the park, the glide each of us has dreamed of waking and sleeping all our lives, and we think, “How could anyone want to cure that?” Then we see Rogue’s pain at being unable to touch another human being and we think, “How could anyone deny someone surcease from that condition?” Parts is parts. As in a Frost poem, the metaphors evaporate on examination. Must evaporate to be true.

If there’s a single ethical strand tying all three X-films together, it can probably be summed up as “Your community is not large enough.” Characters go wrong when they commit themselves exclusively to humankind or mutantkind, or when they insist on power over their fellows. Xavier “earns” his death by refusing to meet Jean as an equal even at the last. The thing she does before killing him is physically raise him above her, forcing his body into an objective correlative of his attitude toward her. Jean herself becomes the ultimate danger because she becomes “a community of one.” It’s not who you are but what you do.

UPDATE: Still underargued in that paragraph about Jean’s passivity at Magneto’s side. This gets back to Neel’s idea that sometimes in an X-Men story, “mutation is gender.” Symbolically, Magneto wants a wife: the loyal, subservient kind. Jean is the trophy spouse who replaces dowdy, if loyal and resourceful, Mystique. As soon as Mystique “loses her looks,” he throws her over.