Notes from Evil Bender

WARNING: Spoilers below

I saw X-3 tonight, and was unimpressed. The general problem with the movie is that it's cluttered. In less than two hours, the film kills three major characters, and three others lose their powers. Besides that there is a rebirth of sorts, a huge fight, and a significant number of undeveloped threads. It's my view that there was the raw material here for a pretty good movie and less silly script plus a better director would have greatly helped.

But I also have a political complaint about the film. As many have noted, the central metaphor of the X-Men comic, and of the first two movies, is a metaphor of civil rights and tolerance. In this movie Ratner inverts the metaphor in ugly ways.

I knew I was in trouble when Mystique refuses to respond to "Raven Darkholm," which she refers to as her "slave name." The reference is not by accident: even vaguely militant mutants here become terrorists and their position is dismissed without the kind of thought and reflection that characterized Singer's hand in the first two films.

In X-3, the Brotherhood are universally bad and the X-men good. Early on we're led to believe Professor X may have done some unethical things, but this matter is dropped without discussion.

The real problems emerge at the end of the film. Magneto has correctly predicted that the "cure" will be used as a weapon, and it grows increasingly obvious that the government is willing to use the mutant cure as a means of dealing with any "terrorist" mutant–their weapon is to make sure mutants are no longer mutants.

By the end of the film, with the Brotherhood defeated, the human soldiers, apparently thinking all the mutants fighting there are bad guys, indescriminantly turn their weapons even on those who have saved their cure.

Then we're back to a word where the cure exists, and where Rogue is one of the mutants who has used it. So the cure is still out there, the potential for it to be used to de-power every mutant on the planet is still out there, and the X-Men are unquestioningly on the side of the government who has done this.

Ratner seems to think that this is a lesson in tolerance (good X-Men who want to work with humans versus evil Brotherhood who want to exterminate humans), but he doesn't understand his metaphor. The "cure" exists, and the film endorses those mutants who seek it out: simply let the government make you like regular people–that seems to be the metaphor here.

Surely Ratner believes that he's being sypathetic by having most mutants remain mutants, but he most certainly is not. Keeping in mind the mutants-as-oppressed groups metaphor established in the series, and the mutant "cure" becomes a vehicle for normalization, for making mutants like "regular folks."

While early in the film Beast asks if it is weakness to wish to avoid discrimination, that is not the point. The point is that this movie assumes that the majority population–humans–are the "normal" ones, and that mutants can be fixed.

Imagine this metaphor in reverse: say the mutants have a weapon that will turn ordinary humans into mutants: one can chose to become a member of an oppressed group, rather than the majority (oppressing) group. Would this metaphor be more tolerable? Perhaps…but neither is really appropriate.

The powerful message of the first two films is that people, no matter how different, can work together, can be unified. The message of the third (while muddled) seems to be that people can chose to be normal: that is, they can chose to become people of privilige, giving up who they are in order to become what it is more acceptable to be.

I might be accused of reading too far into the film, but I believe I'm addressing it on its own term, and that those terms suggest that such a change is appropriate.

That is not a message of tolerance, it is a message of assimilation.

But what do you think?