I feel better when I distract myself.

[trinityvixen]

A link on linaerys 's journal has proved most interesting. I do not necessarily agree that X-Men: First Class plays up the X-Men as the Jewish other, but that's an experience-dictates-impression sort of deal, I suspect. This is the part that I liked the most:

Rather, what troubles me about the film is that it feels like yet another expression of an

Comments

[jethrien]

The thing is, while officially the movie condemns Erik, I feel like everyone in the audience still feels that he is right and Xavier is wrong. There's an extremely strong subtext that presents Professor X as delusional and Magneto as justified, especially given that all of Magneto's predictions are accurate and actions are effective, while Professor X's predictions all turn out to be false and his actions all turn out to be ineffective. Plus, his sympathetically-portrayed little sister choses his rival. I mean, really, who "won" at the end of that movie? The guy in a wheelchair with no remaining family who's bravely trying not to cry because he lost his government position, or the dude who just acquired the gorgeous and incredibly competent telepath along with the gorgeous and incredibly competent shapeshifter? If the movie's actual goal was to show that revenge was bad, they undercut themselves completely

[trinityvixen]

The thing is, while officially the movie condemns Erik, I feel like everyone in the audience still feels that he is right and Xavier is wrong.

Absolutely, but I think that's as much from the writers not really justifying their (and Xavier's) assumption that Magneto is a villain. This is a case that, no matter what they said, the audience knew better. And we did.

Killing Shaw will not haunt his dreams or tarnish his soul any more than has already happened. It might give him closure; it definitely will make sure an evil psycho is safely dead so he can't try to end the world again.Brava, well said. There are some souls you can save, and there are some that would take a lot of work and probably wouldn't appreciate your efforts. If you've got those people, and they can take the burden, it does no good to vilify them if they're not bad, just tainted

[jethrien]

I think part of my problem with this movie is that I'm not entirely sure how much of the subtext is on purpose or not

[trinityvixen]

I think part of my problem with this movie is that I'm not entirely sure how much of the subtext is on purpose or not.

Another brilliant observation, and one that really illuminates why, when my roommates and I were sort-of disagreeing on any one point, we couldn't really agree or disagree because we had to make a lot of assumptions about what the movie thought it was doing, what it knew it was doing, and what it didn't know it was doing. A mystery wrapped in an enigma...

Your points about gender, race, and religion are particularly devastating and clever and teeth-grindingly annoying. With the issue of gender, I think it's pretty clear that the movie has no idea that its attempts to satirize or mock the sexist attitudes of the 1960s are completely undercut by having every woman be either naked or in her panties in the movie. The issues of race are more troubling and harder to pin down. They are clearly aware that black people would have an issue with slavery (hellooooooooo slow pan to Darwin), but not what the effect of having a

[kent_allard_jr]

I haven't seen First Class, so I can't comment on it in any detail, but I'll talk about the issues you've raised

[trinityvixen]

I have great respect for committed pacifists, even if I'm not one myself. As I understand them, they don't deny that anger is justified, and they don't necessarily lack sympathy for the oppressed when they fly into a murderous rage. They do argue, though, that killing corrupts the soul, that it turns you into the creature you destroy.It's one thing to be a sympathetic and understanding pacifist on the microscopic level. If you, the pacifist, are friends with someone who lost a loved one in Iraq, let us say, you might be just the person to rescue that friend from letting reasonable anger spiral into unreasonable and uncontrolled hatred. But there's a difference in that sort of personal interaction and the blanket demand that people who are legitimate victims "get over it." It is to that psychological panacea and not pacifism that I object. That is all

[kent_allard_jr]

I'm not saying you approve, I just think it's interesting that we are starting to see this call for extreme dispassion and opposition to vigilantism when our government is behaving so badly. Is it a response to that? Are we just finally fed up with the Jack Bauer/24 mindset that there's always a ticking time-bomb and therefore everything is legal? I wonder.

Well first of all, I was never a fan of Jack Bauer.

I also think our justice system has always been somewhat lawless.

Nevertheless, even when our system is at its worst, it still has more legitimacy than, say, the Punisher. Even when George W. Bush threw someone in Gitmo for indefinite detention without trail, he was still President of the United States and had more legitimate authority than a random guy in a unitard. At least we elected Bush (the second time, anyway...)

[edgehopper]

I blame Star Wars--though that was even more morally ridiculous (killing millions of Stormtroopers--just fine! Use their heads as drums in your celebration dance! But if you kill the leader, you turn to the Dark Side

We can agree on something! It's a miracle! :D

[trinityvixen]

The Star Wars example you cite gave me chills. I honestly had never thought about it before, and that's just wrong. Because you're so very right: killing one man with rage, to prevent his doing something wrong, is somehow worse than shooting a hundred men without caring at all? That's some bizarre-ass values system right there.

Iron Man is another brilliant example because, in part, it does engage with the moral strangeness of heroes who kill. It has to because Tony Stark, though he had never lifted a hand to kill a man himself, is the author of untold and unimaginable levels of butchery. He is one of the rare vengeful victims who is not a villain. It doesn't come with the weight of being a Holocaust survivor, but Stark's experience in Afghanistan (in the movie; Vietnam in the comics) is one that completely twists and breaks him as a person to the point where not only is his need for revenge understandable, it's righteous. And the people against him are no less cartoonishly evil than Kevin Bacon's character in X-Men: First Class, so

Re: We can agree on something! It's a miracle! :D

[jethrien]

I wonder if that's why Marvel makes more reliably good movies.

Re: We can agree on something! It's a miracle! :D

[trinityvixen]

It's probably part of it. A willingness to engage in more than hero/anti-hero dynamics is a good step in the right direction. Marvel's put out a host of movies so far where the hero isn't even likable. Tony Stark is a prick. Thor's arrogant and occasionally outright stupid. Xavier is something of a privileged cockface at times. (I'm sorry, he outs Hank McCoy as a mutant, thus demonstrating that he read enough of the kid's mind to know that--which is icky enough--but he didn't read far enough/didn't care enough to notice HANK HADN'T TOLD ANYONE?)

The uniting features of these movies seem to be that you start with someone with problems and rebuild them so that their strengths overcome (or at least subjugate) their weaknesses. It's a very relatable story, and one in which the heroes who reform don't get better because of being rich/being an alien, but because they work on it? I can see why that's compelling.

[bigscary]

I think the movie is incredibly pro-Erik. Erik is unquestionably the co-hero of the story, and his killing of Shaw, while problematized, is cathartic for both him and audience, and his first moment of real villainy is depicted through him explicitly, literally, and figuartively taking up Shaw's hat, mantle, mission, and methods.

It is emphatically not the story of Hero Xavier trying to reform Villain Erik -- it's the story of Hero Charles and Hero Erik, the former clearly condemned for his repeated failures of vision and tolerance of hypocrisy in himself and others, the latter repeatedly shown as heroic but tortured. still mentally in that horrible room with Shaw. The film is for and against both of them, crying out for the synthesis of their methods and ideals, said synthesis only partially arriving when Xavier turns against the government to go it alone using the Erik-inspired active means but refusing to adopt Erik's ethos of absolute opposition

[trinityvixen]

his first moment of real villainy is depicted through him explicitly, literally, and figuartively taking up Shaw's hat, mantle, mission, and methods.

You're not wrong. The failure of the movie, as I see it, is that this is supposed to be villainous, but Magneto's kind of entirely justified, even once he becomes mini-Shaw. He says humans suck and they fucking suck. Shaw is unquestionably villainous because he wanted to kill humans unprovoked. Magneto has been nothing but provoked, and in the seminal moment in which he starts to embrace the militant anti-human sentiment, the humans prove him right for doing so by being enormous cocks. Yet he's still the villain

[bigscary]

He's a villain for all of two minutes. He knew very well that 'spolding the two navies would lead to either exactly Shaw's plan or to open human/mutant warfare. Even provoked, his actions were villainous, especially given that he was in no actual danger from the ordinance he had enough control to turn around, but note that even then he's sympathetic. Historically, in comics, Magneto has only been unsympathetic at his very very worst, even as a terrorist hewing to the ETA-style big showy attack rather than cultivating maximum casualties.

[wellgull]

I've long been bothered by that over-easy equation of "not killing" with "being good." For one thing, good is something active -- it's what you actually do, not just what you refrain from doing. Would Joker be good if he just made people insane but never killed a single person? Of course not

[wellgull]

Note -- I took (from the movie) that Magneto's goal is, at this point, just separatism. The line I remember was something like "If society won't accept us, let's build our own" -- i.e. let's go create a place that mutants can be mutant and proud, and will be safe from the unaccepting normals. Not a "let's take over the world mwahahahaha!" sort of thing; far from it. (Maybe that's what's intended, but that was definitely not the message I got from the movie.)

[trinityvixen]

I think that's what he was aiming for. He mucks it up by taking on the likes of Shaw's team and by admitting he agrees with Shaw (thus muddying up the issue of what he agrees with, which part of Shaw's philosophy), but his goal is not yet to destroy all humans. The thing with the bombs is temporary insanity at this point.

[trinityvixen]

Not killing is an easy arbitrary standard to denote the goodness of a character. I get why it pops up so often. We agree, mostly, as a society, that killing is a thing that shouldn't happen as much as possible. So, therefore, people who make this thing happen more often are contrary to society in some way, aka "bad." It's a crutch that more mature stories should not have to use. It's arbitrary and insulting to people who are smart enough to know there are always varying degrees of acceptable, even on the issue of killing.