Bad Fathers in X-Men: The Last Stand

[truepenny]

Yes, mirrorthaw and I spent the afternoon in air-conditioned comfort.

And I came away thoughtful.


[N.b., I am talking only about the movies, NOT about the comic-book canon. I do not and never have read The Uncanny X-Men or any of its spin-offs.]

I'm not going to claim that any of the X-Men franchise is particularly feminist, but I am going to note that they are movies that are very suspicious about patriarchy. Partly, this is the inevitable result of the premise: with an American setting, if the government is the bad guys, then the anti-patriarchal reading comes pre-loaded. But X3 in particular is almost obsessed with bad fathers.

In the prologue, it's Jean's father who calls her mutant powers an illness. Warren Worthington is a scientist--although he presents as a political/economic tycoon just like most of the other middle-aged white men in the movie (and the occasional middle-aged black man) and please note that the people in positions of power in the human community are ALL middle-aged men; the mutants are more egalitarian--but that's quite incidental: it's as Angel's father that he reacts to the mutant gene, and as Angel's father that he tries to force him to take the "cure." Worthington and his lab-coated sidekick are in loco parentis to Jimmy, and they keep him in a white sterile room which makes the accoutrements of childhood look alien and bizarre. And there's a definite failure of the paternal paradigm for Worthington when the members of Magneto's army capture him. "I was trying to help you people!" he cries desperately as they bend him backwards over the edge of the roof. To which Kid Omega responds, rejecting Worthington's right to parent him: "Do we look like we need help?"

(And then Angel rescues him. I was disappointed, but not surprised. It's one thing to rebel against the Bad Father, quite another to kill him. And Angel is a "good child," unlike the Lost Boys of Magneto's army.)

Wolverine--who is our touchstone in these movies--talking to Rogue about whether she should get the "cure" or not, specificly rejects the father role: "I'm not your father. I'm your friend."

And of course the entire premise of the X-Men is set up around the competing performances of fathers offered by Magneto and Xavier (Xavier's memorial stone labels him father explicitly).

Now, Magneto is plainly and obviously a bad father: he rejects his daughter/lover Mystique without a second thought (or, literally, a backwards glance) when she gets the dose of the "cure" meant for him. "In chess, the pawns go first," he tells Pyro, as his young army throw themselves at the cure-armed soldiers. A more subtle indication is his influence on Pyro, who--unlike Iceman--is not growing up, but staying spoiled and reckless and arrogant.

But what I find really interesting is the ways in which this movie suggests Xavier is also a bad father. On the general level, Xavier's bad parenting is fairly subtle. He tells Storm he stopped thinking of her as a student long ago, but it's obvious that she's never stopped thinking of him as a teacher--a father. And that he hasn't encouraged her to be independent of him. Xavier treats Wolverine like a stupid child--I don't remember the exact line, but it's something along the lines of "I don't have to justify myself to you," when Wolverine is questioning his treatment of Jean. And a man as smart as he is--never mind the telepathy--should know how Wolverine will respond to that. I.e., badly. But he can't bear to have the "child" questioning the "father."

Xavier runs his school very much as a paterfamilias. He visits every potential student personally (as we see in the prologue with Jean, and as Iceman specifically says to Kitty Pryde after Xavier's "death"), and I think the logical assumption which follows is that he hand picks them.

And that's fine. Except.

Magneto's army is predominantly Hispanic, Asian, black--specifically his lieutenants. The underpeople--just as Magneto himself, as a German Jew, was classed: and there's a reason his concentration camp tattoo is brought into play in this movie. And there are a lot of them.

But not at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

He's not rescuing kids like Arclight and Callisto. He's rescuing nice middle-class white kids like Jean Grey. And Cyclops. And Kitty Pryde. And Iceman. And Colossus. And on and on and on. You get the idea.

Storm has been assimilated. (Partly, okay, yes, because Halle Berry plays her flat like a flatfish, but again we can argue Xavier's pernicious influence, just as I argued above with Jean Grey.) Jubilee is listed in the credits, but I don't remember seeing her (did she have so much as a line?). The people we see around Xavier, the people his interest and therefore ours are focussed on, are the white middle-class. The same class as Warren Worthington, the Bad Biological Father Supreme (and yes, I am punning on "biological" there, since Worthington's fatherhood and his discovery of the "cure" are so intertwined). Magneto may be a bad father, but he has scope for his performance precisely because Xavier's paternal benevolence is so narrowly bestowed.

And then there's the effect of his benevolence, which we see most clearly in the case of Jean Grey, as we learn that he has deliberately made her psychotic in order to "protect" her from herself. (On a more meta level, the fact that Jean Grey is a phenomenally boring character in the first two movies can also be laid at Xavier's door, because this movie makes quite clear that whatever she is--boring, repressed, chemistry-less--he made her.) Both Magneto and Wolverine think this is a bad idea; Magneto explicitly points out that Xavier is doing exactly what Jean's biological father did: defining her natural state as sickness. (Cf. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady for the historical use of this gambit against women by the medical profession.) While undoing his work in the present has terrible consequences, I think that the argument can be made that that's because he never gave her the chance to learn to control her powers normally. Yes, of course, Wolverine and Magneto are being stupid now--but isn't it also true that they are merely reaping the results of Xavier's arrogance in assuming that he knew better than Jean did what was best for her? And that this monumental repression of herself, turning her into a "good girl" (as the girl in the prologue definitely isn't), is not merely good but unquestionable.

This is what patriarchs do to their daughters, this movie suggests: they take girls like the twelve-year-old Jean--bright, independent-minded, supremely confident of themselves--and turn them into Jean/Phoenix, a colorless, obedient pawn on the conscious side and nothing but "hunger, rebellion, and rage"--to use Matthew Arnold's infamous remark about Jane Eyre--on the other, along with a terrifying amount of power. And if the pawn can't control the phoenix ... well, honestly, are we surprised?

So Magneto may be the Bad Father, but Xavier is the Worse.

Comments

[necessaryspace.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's ... a chilling analysis (and I mean that in a good way). You've made me think. :)

But in terms of the medical profession analogy -- that's exactly what I'm thinking here. I just read a YA book where one of the characters was a poet who wrote about things women weren't supposed to mention, and her husband threatened to commit her to a mental hospital if she didn't come home and become the traditional wife/mother. This was back in the early 1900s. And now that's how I'm seeing Xavier.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper (http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html)" is the classic depiction. Fiction, but partly based on Gilman's own experience.

Also one of the scariest stories I have ever read.

[meijhen.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah...that story gave me the willies for a really long time.

[burberry-bags.livejournal.com]

I need to share this on my facebook.

[kate_nepveu]

Huh. I agree with this reading. Unfortunately it doesn't make me like the movie any better; I'm inclined to think it's further evidence of its incoherence that it manages to be both anti-patriarchal and anti-/fake-feminist *at the same time*.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. (I agree with your analysis, just as you agree with mine.)

Like I said, I wouldn't even TRY to claim any of the X-Men movies as feminist. Because, no. (Although Kitty Pryde does get to be very cool and heroic in this one, this is negated by the whole Jean Grey Thing, and also by the repeated chick-fights between Storm and Callisto, which are just pointless. And the general nothingness of the adult female characters.) And I think this movie was very muddled on a lot of its issues.

I'm also not claiming that the anti-patriarchal pattern is intentional. (You can also read it as Xavier was right all along, and Wolverine's thinking with his dick, and Jean really is helpless and wussy DESPITE HAVING ALL THIS POWER wtf?) Just that it's there.

[kate_nepveu]

I can't quite come to an opinion on Xavier's correctness because I did not understand the Phoenix exposition speech. But there's so many Father Issues in the prior movies that I think it's reasonable to think that the pattern is intentional.

Hmmm. I've noted that the prior two movies made a point of taking Xavier out of the action, and figured that was because he was overpowered; but I think that's thematically relevant as well.

(I am more doubtful that the white middle-class-ness of the School is meant to reflect on the Professor's decisions specifically; I suspect the people casting the film said "right, got Halle Berry, why does any other major character need to be non-white?")

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And I would have thought the same EXCEPT for the contrast with Magneto's army, which makes it explicit that lower-class and/or non-white people also have mutant powers, so why aren't they showing up at the school?

The race issue may very well be Hollywoodism, but the class issue seems deliberately engaged--although possibly not to the purpose which I have ascribed. Magneto and his followers being "the bad guys," we may be supposed to see them simply as the requisite group of Others.

And yet, that deliberate invocation of Magneto's concentration camp tattoo ...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the movie is ambiguous.

Sometimes it is merely confused.

Sometimes it's very hard to tell the difference.

[kate_nepveu]

Now that you remind me of the tattoo, I think you're right that the class issue was deliberately raised. Race was also deliberately invoked as a parallel to mutation via Storm's immediate objection to the cure and Magneto's followers [*]--I just didn't quite see the contrast with Xavier's students before now. So it doesn't really matter what the original intent was behind the casting of Xavier's students, for the contrast to be picked up and run with here.

[*] You identified the "you people" moment as Worthington's attempt to parent, I identified it as invoking race both concretely and as a metaphor. Of course they're not mutually exclusive.

Also, if I haven't explicitly said so before, I agree that the movie focuses on Wolverine, which is one of its structural problems: neither the cure nor Phoenix, as set up, properly centers on him.

I swear, this movie makes me want to write fanfic to *fix* it. Fortunately for all I might inflict such a thing on, I know that I'm not capable of doing so. But it's so frustrating.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh very much so. Mutation is definitely being used as a parallel to race--Worthington is trying to assume the White Man's Burden toward the mutants, which is, of course, an offensively quasi-paternal stance.

I was talking about patriarchy and fathers because it seemed to me that that was a pattern the movie actually sustained. Other potential patterns--race issues, class issues, gender issues--fall apart because they would require actual THOUGHT to make them make sense.

I would actually argue that the coherence of the pattern wrt fathers is largely accidental, and some of it stuff they probably wouldn't have done if they'd realized what it was implying.

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent point about the class and race implications of the Morlocks* in the movie. And there's potentially an even more troubling layer there than just Xavier's handpicking. Callisto tells Magneto that all the Morlock mutants are lower class mutants in terms of power, which would be another explanation for why they didn't get chosen for the school and raises all sorts of issues. Like why there'd be so many more powerful white middle-class mutants and so many lower-powered mutants of other races and more disadvantaged economic classes (who are apparently not worth finding and training, worse). (And btw, that class thing makes no sense; apparently the difference between 4 and 5 is HUGE. Anyway... ) Since the filmmakers changed so many of the mutant characters they included in this one, in terms of race, powers, good or bad, etc., if it's unintentional subtext it's troubling as hell and if it's intentional I'm either frightened or confused (the point was?) by it.

Of course, this is especially odd given the whole thrust of the X-Men universe and the fact that the comic has been so recognized for taking on tough societal issues AND for featuring so many non-American characters.

*Although I don't think all Magneto's army are Morlocks, I assumed that's who most of them were meant to be since Callisto was their leader and don't even get me started on why a bunch of characters who were X-Men in the comics are suddenly working for the dark side and have way different powers -- Oh, Kid Omega, why did they turn you into an evil porcupine boy, that power stinks!.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Since this movie is the first time (in movie canon--as I said above, I don't know anything about the comic books beyond what one inevitably gets from cultural osmosis and Saturday morning cartoons) we've heard anything about there being a rating system for mutants ... I, as an audience member, have NO FREAKING WAY to judge the import of Callisto's statement. The only triangulation point we get is that Jean is a 5, and she's the only one. And that's not very helpful.

I was assuming that the mass of Xavier's students are about like the mass of Magneto's army--only, you know, clean and polite and without the tattoos. And white.

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

I honestly can't remember if there was a mutant rating system in the comics (and neither could any of the comic book nerds and nerdettes I saw it with). I haven't seen the movie since Wiscon, but I remember Callisto's phrasing providing a little bit of context... doesn't she say something to Magneto and co. along the lines of, "What are you class four mutants doing here where there's none of us above a class three?" Since Pyro's with Magneto at this point, that makes me infer that Xavier's kids are probably in that class four range rather than the lower numbers. Perhaps I'm just reading in too much.

(Ah, a quick look at Wikipedia seems to confirm -- as much as Wikipedia ever does -- that the 1-5 classification system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-level_mutant) is unique to this movie. It's amazing how much looking up that kind of stuff makes me happy.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ah, a quick look at Wikipedia seems to confirm -- as much as Wikipedia ever does -- that the 1-5 classification system is unique to this movie.

No wonder it doesn't make any sense then.

I know Callisto says something about there being "nobody above a class 3," but I'm not sure why she herself wouldn't be a class 4--considering her capabilities--if Pyro is.

Since they don't explain their rating system, who the heck can tell?

[amurana.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why they've monochromed Xavier's school in the movie. Without getting rambly and specific, there ARE lots of races/backgrounds in the comics on both sides. The directors/writers of X3 are not the same as the first two movies, and I blame them for the lack of focus in the movie, and every other crap thing that happened. Like sudden nightfall. The sun is setting... NIGHT. I've studied theatre/movies/television too long to be okay with the movie. Now I've got more reasons to be irritated at it.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

And yet, that deliberate invocation of Magneto's concentration camp tattoo ...

One of the details where I thought the movie was weaker than its source material is that Kitty used to be Jewish. Your analysis makes me even more aware of how much it bugged me that that no longer seems to be the case.

Fascinating argument about the recurrent Bad Fathers, too. To which I'll toss in that Xavier's whole history of adopting vulnerable and confused kids, and then sending them out to face homicidal maniacs is Not Good Parenting.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

To give them some credit, the chick fights are a nod to the comics. Storm and Callisto are required to try to kill each other every other time they meet. (When they first met, Storm beat her up and took her job, but then left her in charge. Callisto tries to beat Storm every so often just as a matter of principle.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Also, of course, bad fathering has nothing to do with the gender of the offspring.

Wolverine is just as much an example of what patriarchy does to its children as Jean is.

[db2305.livejournal.com]

You know I rejected this movie as boring, the one I took my son and his friends to on his birthday? And although I did notice some of this, you make me rethink so much more of it and I like it much more in hindsight...Thank you!

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Actually, your points hold for the comics themselves, too, way back when Chris Claremont was writing them and they were at their most popular--which is what I've read of them. I haven't seen either later series or the movie yet, but your ID of the father issues and the differences in the ethnicity of the kids in the two different camps still, I think, holds true. There were some other ethnicities specifically included among the kids at Xavier's school, and more often among the younger mutants (there was a another batch who go their own comic, all younger than Kitty Pryde) but what you saw the most were the white kids.
As best I recall, Magento's army tended to be anonymous adult monsters of various kinds, not such an obvious parellel to Xavier's school, but I didn't see the story arcs where they went into more detail about his side of things.
It may not be the movie holding true to the story, it may be just parellel Hollywoodism going on, I don't know. But it's very interesting to see, just from your movie review here, how similar it is to what I remember reading.

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

The movie you saw was much more interesting than the movie I saw. I love your crunchy brains.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

I suppose I was so irked by the clear fear of women running through the film, emphasized by the fact that two women with the strongest powers either have to give them up or die by the end of the film, while the ethnic chicks just happen to have to fight each other every time they meet, that I lost any deeper analysis. So thank you for this.

I was deeply disturbed that Xavier had transformed Jean into a psychopath rather than focusing on other methodologies, and had kept her from reaching her full potential, whatever that was. And I thought one thing that needed more exploration was the troubled relationship between Xavier and Wolverine -- since Wolverine could hardly be called Xavier's student, and thus, was one of the few who could fully and legitimately challenge Xavier's ethics.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think--because talking with kate_nepveu clarified my thinking (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/445788.html?thread=2994268#t2994268)--that actually the movie isn't primarily interested in Jean. As all these movies have been, it's interested in Wolverine. (The projected next movie admits this openly: Wolverine (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458525/).)

And there is a very strong sense in which Wolverine is looking for a/his father. And not finding one. (The part of the second movie that didn't suck was all about Wolverine Looking For Daddy.) So Jean's arc, like Mystique's, may be an externalization/projection/exploration of Wolverine's attempts to build a father/son relationship with Xavier (Magneto serving, as always, as Xavier's shadow).

(He also draws attention to and rejects the Beast's paternalistic language: "Did he just call me son?")

But to continue your critique, and Kate's, notice that Wolverine isn't Looking For Mommy.* These movies have no interest in mothers. (Angel doesn't seem to have one. The scientist "mother" to Jimmy gets uncomplicatedly offed--unlike Worthington, who has to be rescued.) There are no female mutants of Xavier's and Magneto's generation making their presence felt, and the women we do see--Storm, Jean, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, the poor doomed girls of Magneto's cadre--have bildungsroman or romance arcs. (Okay, yes, motherhood isn't sexy, in the Hollywood sense, but what we're shown over and over again is women who have no family being taken into the created, motherless families of Xavier and Magneto--never a woman trying to form a family of her own.) Storm may take Xavier's leadership position, but it's Xavier's shoes she's stepping into, and she's a Daddy's Girl every bit as much as the "good" Jean Grey is.

And the movie's interest is with Wolverine, who consistently refuses to be a father--explicitly when talking to Rogue, but also in the Danger Room scenario at the beginning, where he rejects responsibility as a teacher, and after Xavier's "death," when he very clearly DOES NOT step forward to become the leader of the school. He's willing to lead the team of X-Men, to go after Jean (and to block Magneto, because resisting the Bad Father is ALWAYS important), but there are no quasi-paternal overtones--even if he does have to drop character for the St. Crispin's Day speech.

These movies don't know what to do with women. Girls, they've got arcs for, but not women. It's deeply frustrating.

---
*I should mention that I have a bullet-proof kink for Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, so there's a certain extent to which I'm willing to be implicated in Wolverine Looking For Daddy as a plot. As long as it gets me plenty of Wolverine screen-time. But that's a different problem.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm going to refer back to the comics here, which is a little rough since they started out much less socially conscious than they have become.

Mommies in the comics

Mystique eventually becomes the mother figure running the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and she is easily as screwed up as Magneto (the founder of the Brotherhood.)

Kitty Pryde gets a lot of empowerment moments in the comics, mostly clashing with Xavier's paternalism. (She thinks of him as a father, loves him like a father, but god damnit I'm an adult now, treat me like one. She is the only member of the Xmen from the books I've read who can tell off Xavier without leaving the group or being Wolverine.)

Storm flirts with the motherhood themes as the leader of the Morlocs, something that should really have been included in at least one movie.

Rogue is really more interesting as a reformed villian (with Mystique as a mother figure) than she was in the movies.

I know there are others, but my reading has been both sketchy and in the distantish past.

I think, as much as anything, the biggest filter making the X-men mostly white is that middle class white americans seem to be the only people who are willing to put up with Xavier's shit over the long run. That said, I'm not sure why Wolverine stays around. Of course, he doesn't really put up with Xavier so much as ignore him when he is being particularly annoying.

[amurana.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that in the comics Storm had whole cults worshiping her as a goddess.

And Mystique being Nightcrawler's heartless mommy.

And the most boring character ever and Jean have a child in the future (or another dimension, pick a story) who comes into play.

What am I doing knowing all of this Marvel stuff? I'm a DC fan! I feel dirty! :runs off to shower and hide her Nightcrawler and Deadpool things:

[wolf-nd-shadows.livejournal.com]

This kind of reminds me of one of the criticisms I had of the first movie. The female characters were largely chosen for their looks, not their personae. I thought Halle Barry was an insult to Storm who was supposed to be a very powerful female character (mother figure) in the comics, not the frightened girl she portrayed in the first movie, who's only show of strength came after getting her ass kicked by toad. I really felt other actresses would have been better for the part and would have made for a better mocie. Top of the list was Angela Basset.

[amurana.livejournal.com]

Between her butchering Catwoman and running Storm into the ground, I've lost respect for Halle as an actress.

[whapnoggin.livejournal.com]

Wow. You know, I hadn't thought about the movie in quite this light (especially the racialized split between Magneto's allies and Xavier's choices), but it does explain perfectly my gut reaction to Xavier's self-righteous confession that he had wilfully given Jean a psychic lobotomy before she'd even reached maturity or the age of consent--and this despite the fact that Jean in the flashback showed no signs of being out of control or harming anyone. He's justified unethical behavior on the grounds of knowing the most. Great post.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's a much more sympathetic reading of the movie than I had, which was that the characters were just written and played all wrong from the perspective of the rest of the series. Magneto in particular is much more of a Bad Father to his metaphorical children here than he was in the other two, and it's kind of jarring.

I did think the question of Xavier's manipulation of Jean Grey was a fascinating and chilling one, and i think it would have gotten much more screen time in the Phoenix-centered movie that this should have been.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I assumed Xavier's gang was mostly white because they were white in the comics. Did anyone's race get changed from what they were in print on either side?

If not, then I would assume that we were dealing with decades-old attitudes to only write about white middle-class kids because white middle-class kids were reading the comics.

The choice to move some of the later X-Men over to Magneto's side, of course, is annoying. I assume it was because the creators said, "It's the last one, let's get in all these cool X-Men, but we can't put them all on the good side... I know! We'll put them with Magneto!"

The same way Xavier's nonsense speech about dividing Jean Grey's consciousness was a clever way to dance around the supernatural nature of the Phoenix in the comics (as I recall, it's more like possession than suppressed natural power, and there's an alien race involved). I know WHY they did it - it was way too complicated and requires far too much suspension of disbelief to bring in the full explanation. But it's frustrating that they chose something that makes so little sense, because Bryan Singer did such an excellent job of setting up for the Phoenix in the last movie.

Interesting thought, though - the "bad dads" theme is not what I noticed at first, rather the "mutant=gay" theme that's practically overt in the second movie. ("Have you tried not being a mutant?") And the arguments in the third movie reflect the "ex-gay" movement and the occasional declaration that Science Could Cure Them!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

he rejects his daughter/lover Mystique without a second thought (or, literally, a backwards glance) when she gets the dose of the "cure" meant for him.

I read that as rather ruthless planning on the fly rather than straight rejection; the effective result of her being abandoned and picked up by the security forces was to direct a bunch of people to a camp in the woods that no longer had anyone but the multiple guy in it. For improvised counter-intelligence, not bad.

Also, when I heard the mention of powers and classes, Magneto being described as a 3, and Phoenix as a 5, it seemed obviously exponential. Though mind you, that Phoenix really didn't have the Planetary Level Threat feel to her.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um, yes, but from Mystique's point of view, it still looks like betrayal.

[athousanderrors.livejournal.com]

this is a wonderful essay; do you mind if I link it in my LJ?

I've never liked Xavier, either in the comics or the films, for exactly the reasons you've described above. You said it a lot more eloquently than I could, however. :)

[notrafficlights.livejournal.com]

*two thumbs up* Hi, just random commentor who found this from When Fangirls Attack, and I totally agree with you, and add that I don't particularly see Mystique as Magneto's daughter-figure, but Jean, as she is fought over by the two father figures in the movie. And that this parallels the relationship depicted in HoM between Mags and Wanda (who they drew on heavily for Jean's character, IMO).

Which leads to the interesting facet of the "depowering" of the fathers in the end. One wasn't really caused by Jean and is revealed to be temporary (Mags) but the other is also "just a severe setback" in Xavier's terms after his transferrence to another body. Which isn't quite as severe as being stripped of all power as comic!Mags, but y'know, still interesting.

But yeah, great point on Jean's personality being a metaphor for the social feminine dichotomy.