Bad Fathers in X-Men: The Last Stand
Jun. 17th, 2006 05:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyYes, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
