I feel better when I distract myself.
Jun. 13th, 2011 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenA link on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 attitude that I've been noticing more and more often in Western, and particularly American, popular culture as it struggles with the topic of genocide and national trauma--a crucial failure of empathy, imagination, and, finally, perspective, that leads to a blanket condemnation of anger. I saw this in Battlestar Galactica when human characters who refused to make peace with the Cylons--the people who had destroyed their civilization--were made into villains. I noticed it a few weeks ago when I watched an old Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Jetrel," in which Neelix is urged, and eventually agrees, to forgive the person who designed the weapon that depopulated Neelix's home colony and killed his entire family. And I see it in the increasing prevalence of vengeful victim characters, who are condemned not for the choices they make in pursuit of revenge, but simply for feeling anger. There is in stories like this a small-mindedness that prioritizes the almighty psychiatric holy grail of "healing"--letting go of one's anger for the sake of inner peace--over justified, even necessary moral outrage. First Class condemns Erik not for targeting innocents and embracing the same prejudiced mentality as his Nazi tormentors, but for wanting to kill Shaw. It places two choices before him: either he takes the life of the person who killed his family and tortured him, in which case he's a villain, or he relinquishes not only his quest for revenge but the anger driving it
I love this. I absolutely agree. As we have started to rebound from stories where it is perfectly acceptable to have the successful prosecution of revenge be the climax of the story, we may have gone too far the other way. Anyone who has the desire to kill somebody, even in perfectly justifiable rage, is the bad guy. Obviously, this does not apply to the odd revenge-fantasy movie that still gets made. But if you want to have "nuance," people are not allowed to be angry, much less be allowed to kill, without becoming the bad guy.
And that is horse shit. It's a problem especially for heroes who never kill, like Batman. After a while, all sensible people would think, "Gee, it's nice that you see murder as the defining line that separates all good people from bad, but the Joker has just killed hundreds of thousands of people and I think it's time to stop playing nice." I don't advocate murder or summary execution of villains, but the self-righteousness of the psychology against ever killing is, well, self-righteous.
It's also not even close to what the X-Men are about. One of the things I love best about the team is that it routinely recruits thieves and murderers. And those people are recruited on purpose, not just to reform them but because they are, to paraphrase Wolverine, the best at doing things that aren't very nice. Storm once ripped the heart out of an enemy rather than let her destroy people with a bomb. STORM did this, Ms. Serenity Now Weather Goddess. One of the best X-Men stories I read in the past ten years was one in which a kid's power vaporized people around him. He ran off, after realizing what he had done, to hide in the mountains, when Wolverine caught up with him to calm him down. They share a beer, relate to each other, commiserate. The last panels show Wolverine emerging from the cave and walking off. He is very much alone. Do you think Wolverine took it upon himself to be that kid's mercy angel? No. He was sent. You better believe he was. It's kind of sad that that history is not embraced in cinema. The movie would be better for it.
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 attitude that I've been noticing more and more often in Western, and particularly American, popular culture as it struggles with the topic of genocide and national trauma--a crucial failure of empathy, imagination, and, finally, perspective, that leads to a blanket condemnation of anger. I saw this in Battlestar Galactica when human characters who refused to make peace with the Cylons--the people who had destroyed their civilization--were made into villains. I noticed it a few weeks ago when I watched an old Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Jetrel," in which Neelix is urged, and eventually agrees, to forgive the person who designed the weapon that depopulated Neelix's home colony and killed his entire family. And I see it in the increasing prevalence of vengeful victim characters, who are condemned not for the choices they make in pursuit of revenge, but simply for feeling anger. There is in stories like this a small-mindedness that prioritizes the almighty psychiatric holy grail of "healing"--letting go of one's anger for the sake of inner peace--over justified, even necessary moral outrage. First Class condemns Erik not for targeting innocents and embracing the same prejudiced mentality as his Nazi tormentors, but for wanting to kill Shaw. It places two choices before him: either he takes the life of the person who killed his family and tortured him, in which case he's a villain, or he relinquishes not only his quest for revenge but the anger driving it
I love this. I absolutely agree. As we have started to rebound from stories where it is perfectly acceptable to have the successful prosecution of revenge be the climax of the story, we may have gone too far the other way. Anyone who has the desire to kill somebody, even in perfectly justifiable rage, is the bad guy. Obviously, this does not apply to the odd revenge-fantasy movie that still gets made. But if you want to have "nuance," people are not allowed to be angry, much less be allowed to kill, without becoming the bad guy.
And that is horse shit. It's a problem especially for heroes who never kill, like Batman. After a while, all sensible people would think, "Gee, it's nice that you see murder as the defining line that separates all good people from bad, but the Joker has just killed hundreds of thousands of people and I think it's time to stop playing nice." I don't advocate murder or summary execution of villains, but the self-righteousness of the psychology against ever killing is, well, self-righteous.
It's also not even close to what the X-Men are about. One of the things I love best about the team is that it routinely recruits thieves and murderers. And those people are recruited on purpose, not just to reform them but because they are, to paraphrase Wolverine, the best at doing things that aren't very nice. Storm once ripped the heart out of an enemy rather than let her destroy people with a bomb. STORM did this, Ms. Serenity Now Weather Goddess. One of the best X-Men stories I read in the past ten years was one in which a kid's power vaporized people around him. He ran off, after realizing what he had done, to hide in the mountains, when Wolverine caught up with him to calm him down. They share a beer, relate to each other, commiserate. The last panels show Wolverine emerging from the cave and walking off. He is very much alone. Do you think Wolverine took it upon himself to be that kid's mercy angel? No. He was sent. You better believe he was. It's kind of sad that that history is not embraced in cinema. The movie would be better for it.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 04:33 pm (UTC)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.
I'd also point out that Xavier tacitly accepts Erik's right to kill Shaw by dint of the fact that he doesn't let go of Shaw's mind, which isn't something the movie seemed to have realized it was doing. Had Xavier let go of Shaw, he would have prevented Shaw's murder. Whatever his reasons, Xavier did not. Magneto is a still a villain for "not letting go" as Xavier exhorts him to do, but Xavier is already playing that hand that he will have to play, many times over, in the future, where he must, for the greater good, compromise his sanctimonious insistence on life and forgiveness over the odd fit of completely justifiable rage.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 05:30 pm (UTC)The question of whether or not Xavier is at all right or just a hopeless fool is a major problem. You're right in that he could have let go of Shaw. Was that on purpose or not?
The deeply problematic relationships with racial issues, gender issues, and Jews have the same problem. There are excellent reasons why in the 1960s, black mutants would not even perceive the government as the good guys. And I feel like they almost tried to address that, and then backed away in favor of more longing looks from their leading men. But the fact that they have all the whites on the side of the blindly, stupidly idealists who almost ended the world is deeply problematic. Were they oblivious, or were they trying to make a point that they didn't take far enough?
Likewise, there are a couple nasty little cracks about women's places which are clearly intended to indict 60s attitudes towards gender. But the fact that all the women are heavily sexualized and minor characters at that undercuts their argument.
And, of course, they're trying to be sensitive about the Holocaust and using it as a summer blockbuster.
Are they smart? Are they stupid? Are they so stupid they're smart by accident? It's really hard to tell how much is intentional and how much is ignorant.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 06:42 pm (UTC)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 mostly all-white movie with entirely all-white heroes would do to prove the shallowness of their engagement with issues of race. (There's a great op-ed in The New York Times by Ta-Nehisi Coates about this great whitening of the 1960s in this movie (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/opinion/09coates.html), if you can spare the page view on your NYT quota.)
The issue of exploiting the Holocaust intrigues me, too, although I might even be able to forgive it more than the other oversights/willful blindnesses. Most movies involving the Holocaust are, unfortunately, exploitative despite the tenderness of care they use with the subject. It's just so tenuous. The fact that they use it in this movie to make it a background to a revenge tale is exploitative, don't get me wrong. I just don't know what to do with the information. Is it worse that they keep harping on Nazi symbols, using them as shortcuts in 20-foot-high neon letters to signify people who are evil? Or would it have been worse to drop that bomb at the beginning and not go back to it? I cannot say.