I agree, but---johncwrightOctober 31 2006, 17:06:40 UTC
There is certainly an unpleasing whiff of eugenics hovering over the X-Men concept, as you point out in your essay, but I suggest that there might be something more innocent going on: the mythic archetype of the hated or despised outcast who fights to save the very people who oppress him is an ancient one, the prince in disguise, the ugly duckling, the Zorro, the youngest son.
Let me propose a theory opposite of yours: the X-Men are the Jews. The suffering and persecution they know, the unreasoning hatred, are the comic book version of anti-Semitism. If Mutant Registration were simply something like Gun Control, only NRA members (like me!) would object to the government knowing where all the people who can blow up a city with their mind-powers might be. It is not very dramatic. If Mutant Registration is something like sumptuary laws requiring Jew to wear yellow, the idea is so repulsive that even the terror violence of Magneto starts to become oddly appealing. There is real drama.
Magneto, in my personal opinion, is a much more interesting character if he has an understandable, even sympathetic, motive behind his crimes. Don't get me wrong: I like Dr. Doom as much as the next fellow, who lusts for power for powers' sake, and is scarred body and soul by hate and ambition. But Magneto as the violent 'activist' who wants to protect the mutants from oppression, but gives in to the temptation to kill those he fears--the concept has innate drama.
If you go along with my X-Men are Jews idea, Magneto becomes something Jews historically have feared: the militant who claims to be the messiah: a "savior" whose antics will get them all killed. Recall, for example, in the Dreyfuss affair in France, it was the Jews who wished to let the matter rest, the Left who wish to press for justice and victory--with the result that Jews were killed in rioting in French and Algerian cities.
I think both Claremont, and yes, Seigel and Shuster, merely used genetics and supermen and the race-after-man as ideas that were floating around in the public atmosphere, the Zeitgeist, not proposing a serious philosophy. The concept of the Kree and the Skrull being doomed is a dramatic concept because it has the Norse flavor of the Twilight of the Gods hanging over it. As the Titans were with the younger Olympian Gods, they fight the younger, finer, race destined to supplant them. The fact that the doom is because "they are genetic dead-ends" is a meaningless bit of technobabble, used here because no one believes in fate and destiny in a science fiction background, unless you use the word "genetics".
To be sure, X-Men can bear the interpretation you put on it. The facts line up nicely under your theory, and Claremont comes across as a sinister figure. On the other hand, what most readers of the comic will come away with, and what most viewers in America will come away with, is a strong sense that race-prejudice is wrong. That is the moral of the X-Men drowning out all other messages. The conflict between Mutant and Humans is never presented as anything other than an unmitigated tragedy: a comic book form of anti-Semitism.
The idea is also not unreasonable that X-Men represent a minority whose oppression in America has always been much more visible, historically, than any anti-Semitism: Professor X is Martin Luther King and Magneto is Malcolm X. Americans are famous for being philosemitic
But I personally would say that the idea of the futures timelines where Sentinels herd mutants into 'camps', smacks more of death-camps, a recent and highly dramatic sign of antisemitism, something burned into the eyes and memories of WWII generation, than of plantation-slavery, a remote and therefore less dramatic sign of American anti-negro measures, something no one in living memory seen except in the movie GONE WITH THE WIND.
Having said all that, I'd agree with you that Claremont starting losing his artistic genius after the apotheosis of Jean Gray, and lost it after her death. I stopped reading about the time that Storm got a Mohawk-'do.
Let me propose a theory opposite of yours: the X-Men are the Jews. The suffering and persecution they know, the unreasoning hatred, are the comic book version of anti-Semitism. If Mutant Registration were simply something like Gun Control, only NRA members (like me!) would object to the government knowing where all the people who can blow up a city with their mind-powers might be. It is not very dramatic. If Mutant Registration is something like sumptuary laws requiring Jew to wear yellow, the idea is so repulsive that even the terror violence of Magneto starts to become oddly appealing. There is real drama.
Magneto, in my personal opinion, is a much more interesting character if he has an understandable, even sympathetic, motive behind his crimes. Don't get me wrong: I like Dr. Doom as much as the next fellow, who lusts for power for powers' sake, and is scarred body and soul by hate and ambition. But Magneto as the violent 'activist' who wants to protect the mutants from oppression, but gives in to the temptation to kill those he fears--the concept has innate drama.
If you go along with my X-Men are Jews idea, Magneto becomes something Jews historically have feared: the militant who claims to be the messiah: a "savior" whose antics will get them all killed. Recall, for example, in the Dreyfuss affair in France, it was the Jews who wished to let the matter rest, the Left who wish to press for justice and victory--with the result that Jews were killed in rioting in French and Algerian cities.
I think both Claremont, and yes, Seigel and Shuster, merely used genetics and supermen and the race-after-man as ideas that were floating around in the public atmosphere, the Zeitgeist, not proposing a serious philosophy. The concept of the Kree and the Skrull being doomed is a dramatic concept because it has the Norse flavor of the Twilight of the Gods hanging over it. As the Titans were with the younger Olympian Gods, they fight the younger, finer, race destined to supplant them. The fact that the doom is because "they are genetic dead-ends" is a meaningless bit of technobabble, used here because no one believes in fate and destiny in a science fiction background, unless you use the word "genetics".
To be sure, X-Men can bear the interpretation you put on it. The facts line up nicely under your theory, and Claremont comes across as a sinister figure. On the other hand, what most readers of the comic will come away with, and what most viewers in America will come away with, is a strong sense that race-prejudice is wrong. That is the moral of the X-Men drowning out all other messages. The conflict between Mutant and Humans is never presented as anything other than an unmitigated tragedy: a comic book form of anti-Semitism.
The idea is also not unreasonable that X-Men represent a minority whose oppression in America has always been much more visible, historically, than any anti-Semitism: Professor X is Martin Luther King and Magneto is Malcolm X. Americans are famous for being philosemitic
But I personally would say that the idea of the futures timelines where Sentinels herd mutants into 'camps', smacks more of death-camps, a recent and highly dramatic sign of antisemitism, something burned into the eyes and memories of WWII generation, than of plantation-slavery, a remote and therefore less dramatic sign of American anti-negro measures, something no one in living memory seen except in the movie GONE WITH THE WIND.
Having said all that, I'd agree with you that Claremont starting losing his artistic genius after the apotheosis of Jean Gray, and lost it after her death. I stopped reading about the time that Storm got a Mohawk-'do.
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