I saw X-Men: The Last Stand over the weekend and was sorely disappointed. I didn’t like the first X-Men movie; it seemed to never really get started. But I thought the second one was really awesome, so I had similarly high hopes for this one. Instead I was treated to a pretty vacuous plot line, some crappy acting and horrible writing. Now okay, it’s a comic, I recognize that. Doesn’t mean it needs to suck though.
But anyway, there was one very interesting thread that I saw winding it’s way through this movie. Perhaps this is common to all the X-Men movies, and maybe even the comic books themselves. I’d have to go back and check. But one of the underlying mythic themes that I saw rearing it’s ugly head the most was an outright fear of the female.
Let’s look at some of the minor threads before unravelling the most obvious one: Jean Grey: Phoenix.
- Mystique - She’s a naked female character who often kills opponents by wrapping her legs around their head or breaking their neck. Pretty obvious. More than that though, she is a shapeshifter. She can become anyone or anything at any moment, and thus there’s no trusting her.
- Rogue - Another female character whose ability - if I’m not mistaken - is that she zaps people (ie, males) of their powers through physical contact. Could almost be seen as a sort of nouveau vagina dentata.
And then of course there is Jean Grey, the star of the show who is barely even fleshed out at all as a character. All she is is an object to be battled over. The troubles start with her as a teenager, going through puberty, coming into an “unimaginable power,” which can only be regulated by two authoritarian male figures: Prof. X and Magneto. Xavier wants to “help” her by enabling her to control the (female sexual) energy coursing through her. He talks later on about how he built psychic walls around her innermost core so that her mind wouldn’t be overwhelmed by what essentially amounts to her libido. As a result, her mind splits into two personalities, the normal Jean Grey and this highly eroticized uncontrollable figure, Phoenix.
Phoenix, of course, runs like a wrecking ball through male characters. She destroys Scott/Cyclops by convincing him to lower his guard (removing his sunglasses, which control his ejaculatory energy release). Scott is then evaporated, leaving only his sunglasses. Later, back at the mutant mansion, Phoenix comes alive by coming onto Wolverine/Logan - who himself is a “caged beast” because of implied psychic patterning laid by Xavier. But Wolverine extricates himself from the situation by keeping his defenses intact and restraining the raging beast of his libido.
We also have the different ways that Xavier and Magneto treat Jean Grey (and the rest of the characters). Xavier takes the Freudian approach of restraining and controlling psychic and sexual energy. While Magneto takes the more 1960’s approach of encouraging his devotees to fully express and release that energy. Both directions lead to control though. And if you’re interested in how this question has played out in history, I highly recommend the BBC documentary, the Century of the Self, which chronicles the push and pull of these philosophies and the control systems that develop around each. Especially relevant since the original X-Men series developed out of the culture at the time most of these issues were being worked out publicly.
Finally, there’s the ending of the movie - the “climax” if you will. [SPOILER ALERT: don’t read any further if you don’t like knowing what happens in movies before you see them.] In it, we see Wolverine and Phoenix paired off again. Actually, before that we see the X-Men hypocritically using the same weapon - the mutant “cure” - that they’ve been railing against earlier in the movie. And Magneto is right that this does indeed tip their hand. Anyway, back to the part where Wolverine approaches Phoenix. He is the only one who can do it because of his mutant healing factor - that is, his extreme life force. Her energy is wholly destructive, and his male life force is the only thing that can stand up to it. But how does he neutralize her threat? Only by penetrating her (with his claws) just after uttering his love for her - that old sex-death connection.
I guess part of the reason I found this movie so unsatisfying, then, is that they are drawing on deep issues of psychology and mythology - but they choose to simply reinforce boring traditionalist male-dominant power fantasies. The whole point of the X-Men, according to the movie itself, is that they are the next evolution of humanity and consequently human consciousness itself. So how is it that the values they espouse are nothing more than a throwback? Psychologically, their mutations are regressive rather than progressive. But perhaps that’s more what the movie is about: people achieving new heights and new possibilities to being human, but not really being ready to fully embrace everything that transformation could and should mean.
