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 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.

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

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.

That said, point taken. I think there's a big argument to be made against the innocent kid taking revenge and destroying him/herself in the process. Usually when this argument is made, it's someone who's a basically decent person and we know that they will never be able to live with themselves once the heat of the moment has passed. But in this case, Erik's already damaged and he's already a killer. 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. The fact that Xavier can't see this is just more evidence that he's deluded, the same way he can't believe that the humans will try to kill the mutants. And look how true that belief turned out to be.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

Now many folks will only advocate "non-violence" for others, while quickly resorting to violence themselves, e.g., Reagan condemning anti-Apartheid activists, and neo-Conservatives condemning Palestinians for their lack of Gandhian restraint, while lustily calling for war elsewhere. This is hypocritical and contemptible and I condemn it wholeheartedly, but I don't think it's what you're referring to here.

With superheroes, though, there's another dimension, and that's one of lawful authority. Even if we reject pacifism, we can at least accept that the right to kill should be limited by law, and superheroes are self-appointed vigilantes that lack legal sanction. The fact that they beat people up is bad enough, but if they actually executed their enemies it would be too much to tolerate. We may excuse this in extremis (if a villain is vaporizing small cities, I agree it'd be justified to shoot him in the head), but I can understand why it'd be generally discouraged.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

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.)

This is why I prefer Iron Man to Batman as a character. In Dark Knight, the Joker wasn't invulnerable; Batman could have easily put a missile on the Batmobile/Batcycle and blown up the Joker in his truck, saving thousands of lives. Batman can be easily outsmarted because he's unwilling to do what's necessary to protect people (if it costs the villain's life, that is--turning Gotham's cell network into a perfect surveillance system at the cost of everyone's privacy is OK!) And at the end, despite proof that the Gotham PD and prosecutor's office are incompetent to keep the Joker in jail, he captures him and turns him over to the police instead of letting him fall to his death!

In contrast, when terrorist gunmen hold women and children hostage, Iron Man just uses the auto-aim he programmed in to shoot them in the head. Much more effective at saving innocent lives.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

Funny that you and others argue against extra-judicial execution at a time when our legal systems, that should be the ones to do the legal executions, are arguably more vigilante than any superhero character. 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.

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

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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 there's no way you can say they deserve it more. (They deserve it less, honestly. That's the way Godwin's Law works.)

Batman Begins, on the other hand, stated from the beginning that any personal feelings, one way or another, turn Batman into a villain. In his world, though, even common criminals can be turned into saviors--as evidenced by the incredibly good convict who tosses the detonator out the window in The Dark Knight--which somehow automatically makes up for the fact that normal people become raving psychopaths all the time (and the ones who don't are still kind of awful--again, see that boat detonator scenario). It represents, to my mind, the deep divide between DC and Marvel. DC is about the angels and demons of our natures, and the heroes must always be on the side of angels, fighting back the darkness and rescuing people from it so they, too can be paragons of virtue. Marvel is all about accepting that no man is perfect (except maybe Captain America) and that imperfections do not doom us to villainy any more than good intentions make us heroes. DC's is the more hopeful vision; Marvel's is the more realistic (and pragmatic).

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

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...)

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

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

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

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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 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.

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

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

I like the movie, and the more I think about it the more I like it. For instance: I don't think the movie condemns Erik's rage and pain ethically, but instead depicts it as dysfunctional, keeping him from the levels of power and effective methods that clarity might give him (his ultimate direction of that rage at humanity in general rather than Nazis in particular is, however, condemned, rightfully).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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?

I disagree that the film is in favor of and disapproving of Xavier/Magneto in equal measure. Xavier has nothing but the weight of a pithy, foundering idea based on his assumptions of privilege, and he behaves like a skeeze for much of the entire movie. Magneto has gravitas and capability and world view honed by the narrative into a thing of deadly beauty, and all the while Michael Fassbender manages to make him so incredibly vulnerable, you can't help but like him.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

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.

But moreover it's too easy because it's phenomenally naive. This is something that bothered me about Batman, Kenshin, any of the "oh it's non-fatal so it's okay to clobber someone." So Kenshin's sword is backwards. So what? You somehow can't kill someone by whacking them with a crowbar? Or Arkham Asylum -- guards killed by Joker's men are dead, but guys you take out are just "unconscious." No matter how many minutes you take. Even if you leave the room and come back.

Do you know what you have to do to someone, if you're using non-chemical means, to render them unconscious for several minutes on end? These bad guys aren't dead, sure -- we're told they survived. Okay. But they'll probably be paralyzed or severely brain-damaged from that kind of concussion. Far crueler than just killing. Sure, maybe then Batman could be arrested -- as if brutal armed assault wasn't already a crime?

It's a cheap shorthand on the part of the writer that relies on a collective agreement of naivety and willful ignorance to even work as a plot device, without even getting into the necessary moral implications of a "trap-and-release" program for incorrigibly violent sociopaths. By not killing the Joker, Batman is equally responsible, complicit even, in the deaths of thousands.

I'd go back to the movie, but I think we've already said everything worth saying about it. As a thought, though, to the extent that Magneto's goal is separatism -- considering the apparent irresolvable hostility of the rest of the world as an impetus to set up a geographically separate community, membership in which is defined by having a specific targeted/disadvantaged identity? These thoughts are not altogether historically improbable for a Holocaust survivor . . .

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I just wish they'd acknowledge that "not killing" is something far different from a cheap "magically killing just a little bit so that he gets better later."

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Batman is, like, a ninja. He probably learned how to harmlessly unconscious-make people in Nepal. Also, "magic killing just a little bit" is HILARIOUS.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

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.

[kokoinai.livejournal.com]

"By not killing the Joker, Batman is equally responsible, complicit even, in the deaths of thousands."

I disagree with this completely. Suppose someone kidnaps your daughter, and threatens to kill her unless you do X: you refuse. He kills your daughter. Are you then as responsible as the kidnapper for your daughter's death because you could have taken action to prevent it?

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting counter-model. I would argue that intentions make the distinction here.

Presumably you refuse to do X for some good reason, but still go about attempting to ensure your daughter's safety in some other fashion, right? Only it turns out that that other method doesn't work. You failed, but that doesn't make you complicit.

Batman doesn't have that luxury. He has the known ability to resolve the threat. Perhaps the first time, maybe even the second, that he captures Joker, he could argue that turning him over to GCPD / Arkham / The Hypnotherapist or whatever is attempting an alternate method of problem resolution, and if it doesn't work, at least he gave it the old college try -- I can see that, reforming people is a good thing to try. But this has been happening since what, the 1930s? With dozens or hundreds of super-criminals? The excuse gets pretty thin at that point -- it'd be like an elite hostage rescue squad who's inevitably resulted in the death of every hostage they've ever tried to rescue.

On the same grounds, I'd say that if your response to the kidnapper is absolutely nothing whatsoever, or something like "Eh, go ahead, I'll get another", or anything else with no reasonable expectation of working, you would still be complicit.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I would argue that while the film sets up a contrast between Erik & Xavier, it also presents Xavier as very naive and over-privileged to the point of not really having a clue about how the world works. I don't even feel like they set Erik up as that much of a villain, considering that the actual bad guys in the film were Shaw and, uh, Emma Frost.

I'm not hugely familiar with the comics, but aren't there a ton of characters who are morally questionable but still not outright villains? I kind of felt like that's where they were trying to go with this, since I felt like even in the later films Magneto wasn't so much THE BAD GUY as just the antagonist to, specifically, Xavier. It's been a while since I've watched, though.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yes, Magneto is not an outright villain in the better comics of the X-Men. (Then there are the ones where he leads, I shit thee not, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Yeeeaaah.) I have no problem with him being sympathetic, even apparently right. The problem was just that Xavier is entirely a tool. Absent any development in his corner where we get to see how his belief becomes a) not blindly flying in the face of reality and b) something he has any reason to believe besides privilege, it's a lopsided movie in favor of Magneto.