The Coming Post-Racial Genocide

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X-Men: Days of Future Past proves Bryan Singer’s genius as a director. You wouldn’t think that racial genocide could be boring, but Singer manages to make it so. Partially he does it through the standard repertoire of tedium; lax dialogue; a convoluted plot that goes nowhere in particular before flopping over and giving up; a style that leaves even moderately talented actors like Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence adrift and disconnected from any recognizable plot arc or emotion. The narrative calls for Jackman’s Wolverine to be mellow lest he zap out of the past into the future; he responds by alternating between bland-face and stressed-face throughout the film; you can hear the audible click as Singer asks him to switch them.

The central failure of the movie, though, is that it systematically tries to erase the thing it should be about. The storyline is about a future in which the X-Men are hunted down and killed by an inimical human race. It’s a movie about genocide. And yet, the mechanics of genocide figure nowhere in the film. Not a single person expresses hatred or prejudice towards mutants; even the evil scientist Trask, who builds the killer Sentinels, seems to have no particular dislike of mutants; instead he seems to see them as a convenient bonding moment for humanity; a way to unite the human species against a common foe. Trask is Ozymandias and he has no more ill-feeling towards the X-Men than Ozymandias had towards his giant squid. The closest anyone in the movie comes to an expression of racialized disgust at mutants is a nurse who comments to a disguised Mystique that having blue skin might make you feel bad about your appearance. Hardly the stuff of Nazi propaganda, there.

Just in case you missed the point that the genocide is really nothing personal, the script goes out of its way, over and over, to let you know that there were lots of good humans who fought with the mutants against the killer Sentinels. Also, to let said regular humans were thought to to be likely to have mutant kids. This then is a mutant genocide in which humans neither hate mutants nor really single them out for harm. And yet, it’s not like the film is especially squeamish in other matters; Wolverine murders several people in casual cold blood. Video game body count death tolls are fine, apparently, just as long as no one really means anything by it.

Over the course of the film you get to see Sentinels murder various X-Men multiple times. Each murder is then erased by mucking about in the past, so you get the visceral rush of seeing folks dismembered without having to worry overly about the consequences. That seems to be the movie’s whole purpose; to enjoy genocide unmixed with any historical or ideological resonance — to turn the Holocaust into an inoffensive special effects extravaganza. In the future, the movie promises, the past won’t matter, and superpowers will reign down death divorced from animus, or even really from brain functioning. Drones will watch drones blow up without hate, or apology. Or interest.

23 thoughts on “The Coming Post-Racial Genocide

  1. The X-Men films, while entertaining, were never gonna properly tackle the racial and minority themes the books try to.

  2. Noah, I’m surprised that this piece didn’t comment on X-Men: DoFP‘s display of racial minority superheroes … as cannon fodder before the unstoppable Sentinel onslaught. But I accept the overall premise that this film refused to grapple with genocide effectively. Then again, anything stamped with “X-Men” almost certainly fails to handle identity politics with nuance or realism or historical perspective.

    Though I think the real problem here involves Hollywood’s assumption that superhero fans cannot handle realistic updates of their cherished franchises. A year ago or so I wrote for a group comic/ pop culture blog where my perspectives on comics clashed with fanboys who only desired superhero media to be cool, not necessarily interesting. I do not wish to denigrate their enjoyment of the material, but the ‘cool’ factor isn’t exactly my jumping on point. I might enjoy X-Men: Hotel Westchester, were it serious about illustrating genocide, but Apparently Hollywood believes that many comic fans are not interested in failed states and group hatreds enough to respect films that offer unsentimental views on human depravity, even with superpowers.

    It just seems to me that all the reasons people are bored by superhero movies are essentially the same reason: superhero movies simplify narratives past what reasonable adults can tolerate. X-Men: DoFP is no different. They may as well have written that script in Crayola.

  3. I disagree that it wasn’t entertaining. I found it to be so. The fact that Bishop and Storm said and did nothing before dying did appall however.

  4. J., I mentioned Storm and Bishop being cannon fodder I think…?

    Donovan, mileage differs I guess. It seemed interminable and pointless to me. And they actually had Xavier say. “So. Much. Pain!!!!” Sheesh.

  5. I totally agree, this movie was terrible. No heart, no stakes. The people I saw it with thought it was really entertaining, though. You could make a movie of the X-Men painting my living room and at least half the population would like it.

  6. Noah, I just meant that racial difference among the X-Men in this film mattered. We watch future watch mutants of color being dismembered, impaled, and otherwise murdered to protect the important mutants of European decent as they fought to keep Wolverine tethered to the past. And that’s ‘important’ as important to the plot, though obviously multiple meanings abound.

    But really — it was a bad movie for many of the reasons you stated. Fixing that would mean altering the filmmakers’ target audience conception. Makes me appreciate the Dark Knight Trilogy that much more.

  7. I’m no celeb worshiper, but Jennifer Lawrence is more than moderately talented… I haven’t seen her X-Men flicks, though. I can imagine they don’t use her very well.

  8. I haven’t seen many of her films; I was giving her the benefit of the doubt based on her performance here. She has a couple nice moments, but it’s mostly pretty dreary.

  9. I really felt kind of bad for Hugh Jackman. I know he’s a thespian, and he’s just stuck the whole time being gruff and wooden.

    He gets paid well, I’m sure. And probably it was less painful to perform than to watch. But still.

  10. Is Ninja from Metal Gear Solid about to stab Storm in the neck in that picture? Because if this is an MGS crossover I’m kind of interested in seeing it now. Damn it, Berlatsky! You played right into their hands!

  11. I just realized! James, I mentioned the cannon fodder aspect in the TNR piece (just in one sentence.) I was thinking that was in here, but it isn’t; sorry about that! I got confused about which I said where….

  12. Haven’t seen the film, so can’t comment on specifics, but on the general point – I don’t know if the villain for whom genocide is nothing personal is such a bad idea.
    Isn’t it precisely the technocrats, managers etc who don’t necessarily hate who make genocide possible? The use of lunatic bigots as villains has tended to obscure this (and let those people of the hook!)
    Not that I’d expect much from an X-Men flick – the couple I’ve seen started me wondering if Chris Claremont was really that bad after all! – but, you know, in theory an Ozymandias type villain could be a worthwhile approach.

  13. “Isn’t it precisely the technocrats, managers etc who don’t necessarily hate who make genocide possible?”

    I think the short answer to that is “no.”

    The longer answer is that we’ve sort of gotten this meme around the Holocaust that it was about small time bureaucrats and people who stood by and did nothing, etc. But the fact is that all the major Nazi figures were committed, vicious, ideological anti-Semites, and that hatred of the Jews was really the central tenet of the entire regime. Hatred, and the manipulation of hatred, are central to every genocide I’ve read about. So…the idea that managers are let off the hook seems to me kind of the opposite of the truth. We tend to construct genocides as having little to do with hate in order to not have to think about hate and prejudice, it seems to me.

  14. Just to elaborate slightly; the idea of faceless bureaucrats following orders is supposed to come from Hannah Arendt — but Eichmann in Jerusalem doesn’t really say, “Eichmann wasn’t an anti-Semite.” It says, “Eichmann was a good, decent upstanding German, which during the Nazi era meant he was a maniacal anti-Semite committed to genocide.” Her book isn’t so much about, “bureaucrats have no ideology and are evil,” as it was about how being a “normal, good” person can in a particular social milieu mean committing horrible violence and subscribing to evil.

  15. Well, I’m not suggesting anyone sat round and did nothing!

    Anti-Semitism was big in Europe for a long time before the thirties, so you need to explain how it suddenly made a leap into organized industrial mass killing. The idea that the Nazis seized power on the basis of a wave of enthusiasm for their “ideas” is a myth – they were handed power by a state unable to solve its crisis through orthodox means.
    Don’t think that means there wasn’t any hate or you don’t have to think about it. Quite the opposite, actually, as Nazi Germany wasn’t the lunatic aberration some people like to make out, but entirely consistent with the history of Europe.

  16. As a corollary to Sean’s point, I really found Robert Lifton’s Nazi Doctors book very interesting about how doctors could do what they did at the camps. It has been probably 15 years at least since I read it but the impressions stayed with me and I don’t have a great memory.

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