Took the stars from our eyes

Why X-Men: First Class has issues

Disclaimer- as anyone subjected to my blog in the last few weeks knows, I love this film. A potentially awkward amount, to be honest. This isn’t about how it’s terrible in all ways or about how you mustn’t like it.

But there are some really problematic elements to it with regards to sexuality, and race, and gender, and all sorts, and they’ve been bugging me. When that happens I figure the best way for me to deal with them is to write them, so here we are.

Now, I don’t think it’s as simple as X-Men being more problematic than most media, though I guess in a way it is. I think it’s actually more that because X-Men willingly surrounds itself in those elements it shows more.

So. Here we go. Fair warning, this is something like two thousand words long, because I am ridiculous.

The first thing that needs to be said is that X-Men is basically an oppression allegory. Right? I mean, that’s kind of the entire point. Specifically, one of the major comparisons it makes is to queer oppression (in a very mainstream way, so maybe more LGBT), to the point where the screenwriters have been totally explicit that yep, that was their aim. Which seems fantastic, because hey, the world definitely needs more films willing to tackle that.

Except that X-Men… doesn’t.

Oh, it has queer subtext. Lots of it. Subtext that everyone makes comments about, up to and including the cast. But while subtext can be a valuable and rich thing, in this case it really does need to be said that it is just that- subtext. We’re looking at a film that is about queer people that does not have any overtly queer-identified people in it. All the people discussing this oppression, they’re presented in a way that the average movie-goer is clearly supposed to be able to read as straight.

But it’s more than just the problem of “straight” (not to discount queer readings here, including my own) mouthpieces being used to make statements on queer people and our treatment. It’s also the way it’s essentially our narrative being used with so little being given back. The subtext is overt enough that when useful it can be used to generate publicity- a comment by an actor here that gets reported, a nudge-nudge-wink-wink moment in a review there. All publicity, all money in their pockets. But see, only from people who are already open to it. It’s also just implicit enough that anyone uncomfortable with it, which is probably mostly going to be the straight people that actually could do with some truth bombs, can ignore it all they like.

So we don’t gain any representation. We don’t gain any of the benefits of said hypothetical representation. And they gain quite a bit. Hell, without us queers you could argue the film as it currently stands wouldn’t exist. They got that entire narrative from marginalized groups (I’m focusing on queerness here but obviously there’s more to it than that, like racism and various other influences I’m not really qualified to talk on extensively) and they couldn’t give us a single piece of cold hard help in return. So that’s a problem.

And the thing is, one of the characters in the film ought to canonically be queer: Mystique. In the comics, she has in a long term relationship with another woman, a full on soulmate-style life-defining relationship from what I’ve been shown. I haven’t read much of it first hand, and it’s certainly not without flaws in how it’s treated, but think about that. A film about oppression that uses mutation as a metaphor. A character that is shown as the one who really concretely feels the effects of that oppression. Said character is canonically queer. And they… absolutely ignored it. Why would you do that?

Having Raven mention being queer would have given us representation. Avoided some of the above problems. Meant that the parallel was completely overt and something difficult to ignore. Been unusual in focusing on female, not male, queerness, and hell, given the main female character a really strong narrative, if done right! The only reason they could really have had to not do it has nothing to do with storytelling and the quality of it:

They didn’t want to be too subversive for a straight audience.

This is a film about queerness and such that doesn’t care as much about queerness as it does its straight audience’s feelings. Yeah. Great.

And First Class has quite a few problems on that front. Xavier’s politics aren’t as put on a pedestal as they could have been (something for which I’m grateful as they are pretty terrible from a queer perspective), primarily because Raven and her rejection of assimilation is shown as something we’re very clearly supposed to sympathize with. But there’s clearly a hell of a lot of narrative pointers towards him Having Good Points and yet there’s a real undercurrent of “push back, but not too hard”.

One of the most obnoxious arguments queer people battling oppression are often presented with is one called the tone argument. Basically, when we’re told that it’s great that we’re trying to stop bigots systematically oppressing us, but we’re upsetting straight cisgender people, so can’t we be more polite about it? Bearing in mind that the trade-off is almost always that it’s harder to fight said oppression, what this does is say that me experiencing regular, threatening bigotry is not as important and worth avoiding as a straight, cisgender person experiencing one-off upsetting rudeness they don’t have to fear. Minor heterosexual cis concerns placed above our major concerns.

And there’s an undercurrent of that running in Xavier’s politics in this film, and throughout the whole damn franchise (it’s less at the surface, actually, than it is elsewhere, where it’s painfully explicit): push back against those humans hurting you, but don’t push back too hard. Wait and they’ll come around eventually. Don’t be too aggressive (which is not the same as violent, for what it’s worth) when trying to stop it all. Because yes, you’re being hunted in the streets, and that’s bad and all, but the humans will get nervous! Stopping that prejudice isn’t worth nervousness!

You know what this feels like? Straight cis people talking about how they want this queer rights stuff to go. Now, being called out on stuff is never fun. I’ve been there. It’s not. I get that. But it’s necessary. It’s necessary that people fight hard and long and with passion and aggressively. And while I kind of understand the desire to write a narrative where it talks about being fair to the enemy and considering their feelings, they have written a narrative that basically says queer people should do so to our own detriment, despite the fact that the cost is so much higher to us.

To tl;dr that little section: First Class says that humans’ feelings (which are easy to recover) are worth giving up fighting chances at halting prejudice to mutants (which are not). Except it’s actually about people that are queer, and it’s people that aren’t queer saying that. Surprise, surprise.

The assimilation stuff in Xavier’s philosophy has been tread a million times now and this film kind of condemns it via Raven, so… I’ll skip that, but don’t think I assume it’s not worth discussing.

OK. So that’s a shitload of queer stuff: appropriating, exploitation, a lack of willingness to help. But there are other problems. There are two characters that are on the good guys’ side and aren’t white in this film: Darwin and Angel. Now, let’s get one thing straight, contrary to what a lot of people have been saying they were not made for the film. Angel Salvadore was mostly rewritten from the character she was in Morrison’s New X-Men, and I don’t know enough about Darwin to say but I think he was changed significantly too? Despite this, however, they are pre-existing characters.

Let’s be frank, they were treated shittily. Darwin dies, for a start. Yeah, yeah, I know. He comes back in the comics. But what if the sequel falls through, what if a load of people don’t bother seeing it, what if they don’t follow that part? Even if he’s eventually brought back have that pervasive image of the black man being the one to die pointlessly stuck with us for a few years, an image that is pretty harmful. Because yes, his death is absolutely narratively pointless. A near-death experience would have been plenty to spark the growing up process, and his death has very little overt impact on the characters beyond that one scene.

Angel, meanwhile, is first sexualized needlessly in the way all the female characters in this film are (and for the record, I’m annoyed at the implication that of course she’d want a job other than being a stripper, good girls never want to be strippers; Charles, shut up). Then she changes sides. With no development, no discussion of why. So she’s a bad guy, and they’re fighting her, and there’s an excuse for her to stop being remotely prominent, and nobody even really pretends to miss her. The hell?

So this all serves to totally silence the characters that aren’t white; marginalized characters. Hey, what do you know? This means that all the characters around at the end to comment on the oppression allegories are white. Privileged. It’s a similar issue to the one I mentioned about straight characters commenting on queer oppression via metaphor. It makes them the centre of a discussion that shouldn’t really be theirs.

And I think it’s worth mentioning how annoying it is that we feel the need to make all these discussions allegories and metaphors as opposed to just fucking talking about it, but I digress. I’d be here alllll day.

And of course does it even need saying that for all Erik is the centre of the narrative, and presented sympathetically, and validated during the climax with regards to having the shit bombed out of them, he does end up the antagonist? The man who said that assimilation is bad when it’s forced on people, the guy who has actually been marginalized (seriously, Xavier, are you even remotely capable of understanding your privilege) and suffered oppression at the hands of other groups, the guy who says some pretty smart shit… is the guy at the end on The Other Side. It’s a sympathetic other side, sure. Still not the side we’re on as the audience. Yes, it would be nigh impossible to write Magneto out of the antagonist role, but all that means is that it’s a problem with the entire foundation of the X-Men franchise, not that it’s entirely fine.

(Not that I’m being all SHOULD HAVE BEEN ERIK ON THAT PEDESTAL, mind you, since he has some shitty stuff himself about being obligated to be willing to do certain things just because you are a marginalized group and all sorts of possible hierarchy issues and, you know, the tendency towards violence to individuals as though they were inherently representatives of the groups they belong to and oh god I may have to do an entire post on Erik at this rate because he’s also really interesting to look at in this context. But no, this is not a Magneto Was Right thing, it’s a Magneto Has Some Fantastic Points thing, I guess.)

This is absurdly long, so I’ll wrap things up. What’s the picture we have of X-Men: First Class as a narrative about oppression, then? One that doesn’t use the voices of the people it wants to represent, one that doesn’t make anything better for them, one which encourages them not to think quite enough of their cause and one which treats a bunch of marginalized characters as unimportant or bad or just plain disposable. It’s… kind of a mess.

I loved this film. I loved Erik/Charles, and Raven (oh did I love Raven, for all the problems there), and some of its points (hey, nice comment on visibility there, Raven! DID I MENTION I LOVE YOU). But… when you get down to it, it’s still a film where the deliberately subtextual queer relationship that is the focal point of the film doesn’t get a single damn kiss or confession- where they edit out the queer woman’s most significant romance and that whole part of her identity just because. And I don’t say that as some shipper. I don’t give a damn about my ships being canon really; I have fic for that. I just want a queer film that actually includes queer people, and films that don’t silence the characters of colour for no reason.

So much to ask? Really?