Category Archives: Blog

Bewitched: About That Premise

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Many people know of, if they do not remember, the classic 1960s television show Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery.  However, for those of you who don’t remember it, here is a quick refresher on the premise: Montgomery plays Samantha, who is highly independent.  Her husband, Darrin, bids Samantha to hide her superior self-sufficiency, and for the most part, Samantha complies.  Sometimes she doesn’t, and wacky hijinks ensue.

The premise is laid out in the very first episode.  On their wedding night, Samantha reveals to Darrin her cosmopolitan background.  With her mother, Samantha has lived in a bohemian style that differs from many women of the early 1960s.  She’s used to supporting herself, and has a college degree.  She’s willing to give it all up to be married to Darrin, but Darrin is disturbed.  Soon his attraction to Samantha overwhelms his qualms, but after the wedding night, he warns Samantha, “It won’t be easy.  It’s tough enough being married to an advertising man if you’re normal.  [. . .] I mean you’re going to have to learn to be a suburban housewife.  [. . .]  You’ll have to learn to cook, and keep house, and go to my mother’s house for dinner every Friday night” (1×01, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha”).

“Darling, it sounds wonderful!” Samantha tells him.  “And soon we’ll be a normal, happy couple with no problems, just like everybody else.  And then my mother can come and visit for a while and—”  At this point Samantha stops, seeing the look on Darrin’s face.  Realizing her mother is the very person who instilled her with the fiery independence Darrin so loathes, Samantha backs down.

In the second half of the episode, an old flame of Darrin’s—Sheila Summers—learns that he is recently married.  Sheila knows how to keep house, cook, and act as hostess—which she proves by inviting Darrin and Samantha to a dinner party.  At the party, she attempts to outclass Samantha.  Her experience in entertaining is obvious, she flirts with Darrin, and she continues to let fly clumsy verbal barbs in Samantha’s direction.  At last, unable to contain herself, Samantha lets loose against Sheila, delivering such an articulate dressing-down that the entire table remains stunned and incredulous in the face of Samantha’s lingual acumen and wit. Darrin, however, reprimands her she promised to give up that “stuff.”

Not only does he ask her to hide her intelligence, but he is appalled even when she uses it in the privacy of her own home.  He is not just asking that she give up the trappings of her former life: a career or any life she might have had outside of caring for him.  Housewifery, indeed, can be a career, and Samantha would make it an intriguing one.  He is asking instead that she give up something more intrinsic: the very power and abilities that would give her the means to live without him.  The message is clear: she is meant to exist only as an accessory to Darrin.

Darrin appears to desire this because it is “normal.”  Again and again, Bewitched tells us that it is “normal” that a woman should exist as a mere ornament to cook and clean for her husband, and make him look good at parties.  When Samantha acts outside of these parameters, Darrin reprimands her.  When she acts within them, but uses special skill or intelligence to solve problems, Darrin again reprimands her.

The subtext—at times, explicitly made text—is that Darrin resents the fact that his wife is more savvy and talented than he is.  While Darrin makes it clear that he finds Samantha’s ability to fend for herself unnatural, it also becomes evident that he asks her to hide her skills less because they are strange in and of themselves, and more because the fact that she is, in effect, more powerful than he is damages his ego.

The “unnaturalness” of Samantha’s abilities is fundamental to the central premise.  At one point Darrin tells Samantha that he loves her for herself, and doesn’t need any of the “extra,” revealing that he does not regard anything that makes Samantha strong as a part of who she is.  He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the various factors which may have informed Samantha’s character.

No doubt Samantha’s self-sufficiency is related to her socioeconomic status.  While the focus of Bewitched is on Samantha’s powers of intellect, we are given hints that she also may be powerful due to wealth.  Wealth gives Samantha a financial autonomy that Darrin demands she forsake.  In fact, there is an episode in which Darrin receives the benefit of Samantha’s wealth: he is laid up from a sprained ankle; Samantha buys him everything he requires, including a nurse to see to all of his needs.  While Darrin obviously enjoys being pampered, by the end of the episode he decides he would rather work in order to earn what he wants, and Samantha takes back everything she purchased.  Again, this is what is considered “normal” (1×17, “A is for Aardvark”).

Samantha’s socioeconomic status may be related to her culture, though obviously the latter is not causal to the former.  Bewitched suggests that Samantha and her mother may be of a different ethnicity or religion.  Samantha is attempting to “pass,” whereas her mother demands that she embrace her heritage.  Darrin, in typical fashion, requests that Samantha hide all evidence of her background, and sometimes is outright bigoted toward her culture.  In “The Witches Are Out,” Darrin’s art for an ad-campaign portrays the very stereotype that has been applied to Samantha in the past (1×07).  He doesn’t understand why she finds his ad offensive.  In the same episode, Darrin suffers a nightmarish vision in which all of his children take after Samantha, demonstrating the more stereotypical behaviors of someone of her background.

Although Samantha is frequently offended or angered by Darrin’s prejudices, she submits to the ultimatum that she refrain from using her superior intellect or skills, and that she hide her background from other people.  Not only does Samantha submit, she seems eager to participate in this form of indentured servitude.  When she uses her powers to solve a problem, give people their just due, or enjoy herself a little, she seems apologetic, often admitting she shouldn’t have done so.  Her ultimate goal, she claims, is to be a normal wife, which apparently means cooking and cleaning without bringing any of the creativity or flare to it that her heightened intellect might warrant.

A prime example of Samantha’s desire to submit is the episode, “Witch Or Wife” (1×08).  Samantha goes to Paris with her mother (again, a reference to her wealthy background) without informing her husband first.  He is upset, but Samantha going to Paris causes him not only to reflect on her behavior, but the entire circumstances of their marriage.  At last he concludes that he is standing in her way: “You can’t expect to snatch an eagle out of the sky, tie it to the ground, clip its wings, and expect it to walk around with a smile on its beak.”

Samantha tries to apologize, but Darrin goes on to say that no one could blame her for her behavior.  It’s one of the only times that Darrin seems to understand that his terms for their marriage dictate that she behave in a way that is not natural to her.  “This is a poor swap for Europe, glamor, and gaiety,” he says (again referencing Samantha’s rich—and cosmopolitan—background).

But Samantha replies by saying, “All I want is the normal life of a normal housewife.”

“I’m saying I’m not going to stand in the way of your freedom,” Darrin goes on, “and that’s obviously what you want.”

“That’s not true,” Samantha says, making it very clear that Darrin standing in the way of her freedom is precisely what she does want.

Samantha, as an intelligent an independent woman, has obviously made this decision of her own accord.  She claims she wishes to give up her intelligence and skill because she loves Darrin.  The implication that love demands submission and sacrifice of our assets and skills is upsetting, but this is Samantha’s individual choice.

More unsettling is the sense from the show that Darrin’s expectation that she make that choice—that she accept the clipping of her wings—is perfectly normal.  There are very few moments where the audience is given to question why Darrin would want her to be less than she is; instead, the premise seems to be just a given.  The idea that what they both want is “normal” is never called into question.  A “normal” household in the 1960s, Bewitched suggests, is one in which wives, if they are more intelligent or skilled than their husbands, hide their abilities such that their husbands are shone in the best light, and their egos don’t get bruised.

The only one who questions this situation is Endora, Samantha’s mother.  Endora, rather than rejecting her freedom as Samantha does, embraces it.  In doing so, she makes use of her considerable intelligence and wealth.  She also does not seem to care if she appears “unnatural,” almost always appearing in eccentric dress (possibly culturally influenced).  Over and over again Endora tries to point out to Samantha that she is enslaved; Darrin is denying her her freedom.  Samantha, however, thinks her mother is wrong, as does Darrin.

The text of the show itself seems to suggest that Endora is wrong.  Her frequent protests are met with the sound of a laugh track, and the characters react to her with a typical, “this is how mothers-in-law will be!” attitude.  And yet, on some level the writers of the show seem cognizant of the indignity of Samantha’s situation, and Darrin’s unreasonableness in demanding that she submit to it.  Darrin’s speech about the eagle in “Witch or Wife” is evidence of that.

Yet the premise of the show must be maintained; Samantha must refrain from using her powers and pretend she does not have them, and Darrin must continue to ask that she do so.  By the end of every episode, we are returned to the status quo: a world in which it is normal to request that a woman never be more powerful than a man, and to forsake her intelligence, wit, and talent in order to cook and clean.

Bewitched could have been a metaphor for many different things.  It could have been a very insightful show about a woman who has to keep elements of her background a secret, and the partner who has to help keep that secret.  But because the secret that has to be kept is the fact that Samantha is more powerful than her husband, it is instead a show about gender politics, and repression in the 1960s.

I was watching Bewitched with a man approaching sixty years of age the other day.  As we incredulously viewed the spectacular amount of sexism unfolding before our eyes, he said, “Just think: I was raised on this.”

The series itself is charming: Elizabeth Montgomery is as bewitching as the title suggests; her intelligence and wit truly sparkle, and Darrin is a bumbling fool who is amusing to watch.  It would be possible to view this program, even today, and forget what the show is really about.  But as magical as our media is these days, it is important to consider the true implications of what our symbolism and metaphors mean.


Empty Shells

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A little while back, Anja Flower wrote about gender identity in Ghost in the Shell. At the conclusion of zir essay, Anja argues that Ghost in the Shell, in its multiple marketing iterations and incoherence, can be read as undermining the idea of an essential gender.

Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

I hadn’t ever read Ghost in the Shell, but Anja’s essay intrigured me. My wife happened to have bought the manga, so I thought I’d read it and see what I thought.

And what I thought was…well, to be honest, I kind of felt weird thinking anything about it. Here’s an example of why.

And here’s another:

Or here’s one more:

Just looking at those panels, you might conclude that they were utterly anonymous genre fodder. The crusty but tough team leader fulminating hard-assedly; the ultra-competent fighter grieving through bluster hard-assedly; the sexy-tough couple bantering sexily but hard-assedly. You might think that there is nothing going on in this manga that you haven’t seen before; that character, plot, and atmosphere are little more than a half-hearted scrambling of tediously familiar topes.

You might think that. And you would, in fact, be right. Ghost in the Shell is, from beginning to end, an uninspired, barely stirred sludge of half-digested clichés. The plot is complicated, twisting, and aggressively irrelevant, bearing the characters along in a rush of technobabble from one uninvolving violent set-piece to another. The hyper-competent Major Motoko Kusanagi is a medical miracle, managing to fight, wise-crack, switch brains, and flash cheesecake without ever acquiring even the hint of a discernible idiosyncratic personality. When the mysterious, artificially generated Puppeteer merges with Kusanagi’s consciousness at the end of the volume, you wonder how on earth anyone is supposed to tell the difference. I guess Puppeteer/Kusanagi makes more speeches than Kusanagi alone did? That’s something I guess.


Kusanagi/Puppeteer — Still talking tough, still saying nothing.

The thing is, the fact that Ghost in the Shell is kind of lousy doesn’t necessarily undermine the points Anja makes. In fact, it’s lameness can in some ways be seen as thematic. The book, as Anja notes, is about the fracturing and fluidity of human identity; the characters are a mix of human, robot, cyborg, and combinations thereof. The page below from the manga (reprinted by Anja) lays out the theme — how can you tell whether you’re human or not? What does it mean to be human, anyway?

“what if all that’s left of the real you is a couple of lonely brain cells, huh?” Kusanagi asks.

The irony is that there aren’t even a couple of lonely brain cells here. No brain activity at all appears to have been expended on creating these characters. They speak and interact, but they have no real history or personality; they’re just sci-fi cyberpunk cyphers, mechanically running through their tropes. They wonder whether they’re real in the most artificial manner possible. Are they pasteboard cliches dreaming that they’re robots, or robots dreaming that they’re pasteboard cliches?

Genre’s inherent emptiness can often be an excellent way to look at the way the world doesn’t work. This happens in Gantz, where the incoherence of the genre elements fits into a supposedly cynical, but arguably terrified nihilism. It happens in Moto Hagio’s story A Drunken Dream, where the standard narrative warps and fractures before an underlying trauma.

For Anja, I think something analogous happens with Ghost in the Shell. The fact that Kusanagi is a blank slate emphasizes the narrative’s half-denied intimations of open identities. The book claims that inside every body, of whatever sort, there is a ghost or essence. But despite this, Kusanagi is, for practical purposes, no one — the Puppeteer takes over an empty puppet. The self is not a fixed core nailed to a single gender; it’s a series of shards that come together in this way and that. For Anja, that lack of essence is (at least potentially) freeing.

For me, though — I mostly find the implications of Ghost in the Shell depressing. I don’t have anything in principle against fluid identities…but in Ghost in the Shell, those fluid identities seem to be not so much liberating as claustrophobic. You can be anyone you want…as long as the person you want to be is a stereotypical tough-talking government agent, scrambling blandly through some bone-headed plot. To give up your essence in this context doesn’t open up infinite possibilities. It just makes you generic. Abandoning your self doesn’t let you escape social conventions and expectations; on the contrary, it means you have no choice but to embody them.

Liturgy of Blut

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This first appeared on Splice Today. I’ve been talking about black metal and Christianity in comments recently, so I thought I’d reprint it.
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“The images of art,” theologian Caroline Pickstock asserts, “offer us visions of the good, new possibilities of human self-realization that lie, as it were, just out of sight.” Pickstock, writing in the collection Paul’s New Moment, is thinking here specifically of liturgical art. But the ease with which she generalizes suggests strongly that — safely ensconced in the swaddling ivory of Cambridge — she has not heard a lot of black metal. Because, I have to say, when I listen to 777-Sect(s), the latest album from French avant-black-metallers Blut Aus Nord, I am not exactly seeing new possibilities of human self-realization lying just out of site. Unless new possibilities of human realization lying just out of site include charred corpses being pulled across jagged metal by slowly decaying ungulates.

Obviously, black metal, is not into “visions of the good”. If there’s any liturgy here, it’s the Black Mass. 777-Sect(s) is a single, 6 part suite of bleak, dissonant hammering. The music staggers and lurches between black metal fury and despairing trudge, veering back and forth as the quasi-industrial drumming lands repetitive robotic blows on its oozing cranium. The album never reaches the pure pagan fury of old-school Scandinavia, but it doesn’t descend into pleasant tripped-out trance the way the contemporary American scene sometimes does. Instead, Blud Aus Nord draaaaagggggssss, all minor scraping and abject failure — the hapless, despised hero crawling out of the pit only to be pulled back again and again by the inexorable, shapeless talon. At the very beginning of the album, in fact, the rough distant screaming/vomiting almost sounds like you can hear our hero being devoured by the stinking maelstrom.

So…black metal is not uplifting. No one is surpised. Though philosopher Slavoj Zizek, also writing in Paul’s New Moment, does actually find something liturgical in the horror movies for which 777-Sect(s) seems to want to serve as a soundtrack. According to Zizek:

the good guys think they’ve destroyed the possessing alien, but some slimy residue of the alien is left lying around. Then comes the standard shot, where the camera slowly approaches the residue, and what we thought was just a bit of squashed alien starts to move and organize itself. We leave the film with the alien organizing itself. This is the divine element. I think horror movies are the negative theology of today…. It is as if the good guys in such horror movies are like Roman soldiers: they thought they had destroyed everything in Chirst, but that little bit of alien residue remained and started to organize itself into the community of believers.

In this reading, you could see the way 777-Sect(s) is pinned between anger and dissolution as a long struggle for becoming, an effort to pull together its bloody gobbets into a shambolic whole, the better to parasitically feed upon the body of the state/hegemony/pop music. Blut aus Nord will possess Britney as the spirit of Christ will possess the world. The apocalypse will come when Rihanna’s head turns around and she starts spitting metal bile.

I love Zizek’s unkillable Terminator as unkillable Christ analogy…but I have to admit that if you think about it too long, it starts to seem a little unsatifying. Reading Jason or Freddy back from the dead as the miraculously risen community of believers — I don’t know. It seems a little too cheery, doesn’t it? Is The Thing really more enjoyable if you read it as It’s a Wonderful Life? Is Blut Aus Nord really just Perotin for the 2010s?

The thing Zizek seems to be missing here is the Thingness. As an atheist, he’s eager to metaphorically transubstantiate that risen body into a supposedly materialist, but actually more foofily non-present spirit of lovingness and community. Which is clever, but doesn’t really map onto Blut Aus Nord. Blut Aus Nord does not do lovingness and community. The physical bodies of these musicians excrete, not spiritual bliss, but ropy tendrils of hate.

Which brings us back to Caroline Pickstock:

…liturgy fulfills the purposes of art as imaging according to the modern Russian filmmaker and photographer Andrei Tarkovsky. The image should displace the original because the original thereby becomes more itself, if what a created thing and especially the human creature is, is after all “image,” the image of God. So when in the course of liturgy we are transformed into a wholly signifying — because worshiping — body, we are at that moment closest to our fulfillment as human beings.

Art as liturgy does not provide a metaphor of the dead God becoming the human community. Instead it shows the body as created thing; self as manufactured cyborg, which rises only because its putrefying husk is dragged upwards by an insistent and alien power. Art shows us ourselves as the image of God. And in this case that image is the brutalized Christ on the Cross — God as dead body as Thing. Blut Aus Nord figures us as struggling, debased monstrosities: a kind of human self-realization that even Caroline Pickstock would have to admit is eminently Christian.

Brave New World

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This was supposed to run at Comixology as my monthly column, but given their partnership with DC, they felt it was too mean-spirited. So I’m running it here instead.
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As everyone knows (and by “everyone” I mean “the 12 people who still read DC comics and the 350 or so who still comment about said comics on blogs,”) DC released a map of their alternate reality Flashpoint universe last month. Here it is:

Part of the map is dedicated to the kind of fanboy-tease insider “surprises” that always suggests someone’s mother’s basement and dim, sad, lurching figures dressed only in sweatpants and stale cheetos. Oooh…Project S! In Metropolis! What oh what could that mean! And a time anomaly in Central City huh? Chuckle, wooo! What won’t they think of next! And Green Arrow has a whole island from which he can resist the Man! Fight the fight, Ollie! I bet you got just the one arm, same as you did in Dark Knight!

So, yes, it’s the sort of tired property-scrambling that makes you want to dash your brains out against the nearest wall in the vague hope that your carefully horded nerd-knowledge will dribble out with your cranial fluid and that, while you’re lying there in the hospital with a feeding tube down your throat and man-diapers on your shitter, you at least will no longer have the embarrassment of knowing about Flash’s cosmic treadmill, and/or about the necessary impurities in Dan DiDio’s ethical system.

But hey, that’s comics. You interact with DC, you expect to be humiliated and to crave for death. You’re going to ask comics fans to get angry at something like that, you might as well ask them to stop stabbing themselves in the eye with the blunt end of a compass. I mean, if they could find the sharp end, they would have done it years ago, right?

But! This map is not satisfied to just be another example of shitty superhero comics ephemera! This map has dreams, baby. This map wants to climb out of that basement; it wants to emerge into the light of the great American continent, blink twice, and retch up its vile id like a glorious fountain of rancid Atlantean fish-heads.

It’s fascinating, really. What is buried there, deep in the collective doddering hindbrain of the swollen fanboys who call themselves (in delightful self-parody) the “creative minds” at DC? Look! Over here! They have vague memories that some Nazis ended up in South America, and someone told them that Brazil is in South America…and so they put the two together! Isn’t that cute? And they know that Tibet is mysterious, so they’ve made it the home of the Secret Seven! Get it? Secret! And…Asia! It’s out there somewhere, like the truth, but less differentiated. Surely it has a capital. Probably called something clever like, oh I don’t know — “Asian Capital?”

And then there’s Africa which, as you will observe, is “ape-controlled”. If you are in the know, you of course realize instantly that “ape-controlled” means that Gorilla Grodd, the giant psychic ape, has conquered the entire darn continent. It can’t have been too difficult for him, since Grodd has effectively been the only inhabitant of Africa in the DC universe for the past 30 or 40 years. Which is why, if you’re a DC comics fan, it’s natural to think “ape” whenever you think “Africa,” the same way you think “pneumatic ta-tas” whenever you think “woman.” How can you say that’s offensive? They don’t mean anything by it. And if they did, well, it’s only comics. If racism was good enough for Winsor McCay and Herge, why shouldn’t it be good enough for DC? (This is in no way meant to imply that anyone in charge at DC has heard of McCay or Herge.)

All of which ignores the main point, which is that there are zombies in Alaska. Zombies are hip and happening and cool, and, of course, in Alaska they will be even cooler — sub-zero even. It’s comforting to know that DC is paying attention as the world changes around them. Zombies. That’s progress.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Surfin’ and Drivin’

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Little bit country, little bit bleached-out pop. Download Surfin’ and Drivin’ here.

The playlist is below.

1. Still With You — Caroline Peyton
2. Sweet Dreams of You — Emmylou Harris
3. Smoke Along the Track — Dwight Yoakum
4. When Being Who You Are Is Not Enough — Patty Loveless (and Emmylou)
5. Tumbling Dice — Linda Ronstadt
6. Surfin’ and Drivin’ — Walter Egan
7. Rock’n Me — Steve Miller Band
8. Trying to Get Over You — Danni Leigh
9. All the Words — Bridges
10. Tracks of My Tears — Linda Ronstadt
11. Complicated Girl — Bangles
12. Got a Hold on Me — Christine McVie
13. Rainbows — Dennis Wilson
14. This Whole World — Beach Boys
15. Trouble — Lindsey Buckingham
16. Second Hand News — Fleetwood Mac
17. Black Rose — Waylon Jennings
18. Do It Again — Steely Dan

X-Men: First Class Grades on a Curve

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X-Men: First Class
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Starring…
James McAvoy (Prof. Charles Xavier)
Michael Fassbender (Magneto)
Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw)
January Jones (Emma Frost)
Rose Byrne (Moira MacTaggert)
Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique)

[Spoilers ahead, you have been warned]

Another weekend, another superhero movie. No magic hammers or wishing rings in this one. Instead, there are mutants, Soviets, and Kevin Bacon. The story is a jumble of three loosely related plots: the origin story of Prof. Xavier and the X-Men, the efforts by Xavier and company to foil Sebastian Shaw’s genocidal plans, and (by far the best storyline) Magneto’s quest for vengeance against Shaw (a Nazi collaborator). All that, plus a sexist homage to the Forgetfulness Kiss from Superman 2.

I’ll note that X-Men: First Class (XMFC) was better than Thor, though that’s setting the bar fairly low. And it was better than X-men Last Stand, though that’s setting the bar so low one has to be careful not to trip over it. Thor had a tedious moral about humility, but at the end of the day the movie was about nothing more complicated than Chris Hemsworth’s abs. XMFC is a movie that wants to express an opinion on important topics, including vengeance, intolerance, and minority rights. Like the comic it was based on, XMFC explores these topics through metaphor, but the results leave much to be desired.

Since it’s introduction, the X-Men comic has relied upon metaphor to imbue the concept of mutants with social relevance. In the early 60’s, the X-Men were a metaphor for the civil rights movement. Mutants were “hated and feared” by the rest of the world, but the X-Men fought to protect humanity and demonstrate that mutants could be loyal, tax-paying citizens. Mutants were black people … except that all the mutants were white. The comic celebrated tolerance, equality, and the loftier goals of the civil rights movement, but without ever acknowledging the movement’s existence. I’ll revisit this problem below.

Over the course of the 80’s and 90’s, the mutant metaphor shifted from race to queerness (this change was most evident in the Legacy Virus storyline, an HIV-like disease that only targeted mutants). The change may have been driven in part by a genuine commitment to LGBT rights, even at a time when public hostility to queerness was overt and widespread. But the shift was also necessitated by the success of the civil rights movement. In popular media, black characters were no longer relegated to the role of servant or comic relief. Even in the backwoods that is superhero comics, black heroes were becoming more numerous and prominent. The most prominent of all was the X-Men’s Storm, who led the team for nearly a decade. In a world with black heroes, addressing race issues primarily through metaphor is difficult to justify.*

The X-Men have always been a metaphor for teen alienation. While all teenagers occasionally feel hated or oppressed, most comic readers are nerds (also, geeks, dweebs, and dorks) who feel especially awkward and unappreciated. So what better escapist fantasy than a world where all the misfits have superpowers that they use to save the world? Plus, they get to hang out with their fellow (improbably attractive) misfits at a posh school called Hogwarts Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The makers of XMFC clearly understood the teen alienation metaphor, which was why all the mutants bitched and moaned about being freaks and outcasts. Then they went to the School for Gifted Youngsters, and they suddenly realized that they’re young, beautiful, and have awesome superpowers.

Yet for a film that’s set in the 60’s, there were surprisingly few references to the civil rights movement. Perhaps acknowledging the African American struggle for equal rights would raise too many questions, such as how would the emergence of a superhuman race affect relations between normal blacks and whites? Would race relations improve when faced with a common evolutionary threat? Or would ancient prejudices persist even within the mutant community? These are interesting questions to explore, but that would require a very different kind of movie (one where fewer things blow up).**

While it largely ignores race, XMFC takes full advantage of the queerness metaphor. Because mutants are hated and feared, they must find ways to blend in with the “norms,” though they do so only by denying who they truly are. Mystique’s character arc is largely an “out and proud” storyline. As a shapeshifter, she can easily blend in, but only by constantly hiding her natural, blue form. By the end of the film, she’s embraced her gorgeous blue self. There’s also a moment where Prof. Xavier accidentally “outs” another mutant who works for the CIA, which leads to a humorous dig at “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And there’s an obvious overlap of the queerness metaphor with the teen metaphor. After all, what subset of teens feels more hated and misunderstood than those struggling with their sexual identity?

But metaphor only goes so far. As I mentioned above, the X-Men comic largely abandoned the civil rights metaphor as broader cultural attitudes changed and black characters entered the mainstream. Similarly, attitudes regarding the LGBT community have changed enormously over the past few decades. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will (probably, eventually, hopefully?) be repealed, and a majority of Americans now support gay marriage. So instead of veiled references to queerness, why not include an actual queer character in the ensemble cast? Hell, the film could have gone the safe route by including a lipstick lesbian. Not exactly freaking out the norms, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll also point out that  filmmakers can’t fall back on the excuse that the source material gives them nothing to work with. There are at least a handful of queer X-Men that I can name off the top of my head. Why not use Northstar? He’s gay … and Canadian! Who doesn’t like Canadians? But just as blacks were nonexistent in the early X-Men comics, so queers are nonexistent in XMFC. In all likelihood queer characters were excluded because of the fear that a sizable minority of consumers would refuse to see a movie that promoted “alternative lifestyles.” So the (presumably liberal) filmmakers expressed their support for LGBT rights, but only in a way that wouldn’t hurt profits. Using the mutant-as-queer metaphor seems less a subversive or daring act than a cowardly one.

X-Men: First Class reveals the limits of political expression in the current crop of big, summer blockbusters. Movies can toy with political views, but even the least controversial opinions must be expressed in a vague or indirect manner. It’s far safer, and more profitable, to pretend that you have no opinion at all.

 

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* There are thoughtful ways to use the mutant-as-minority race metaphor in the 21st century, and Grant Morrison did so during his X-Men run. But it requires an intelligent writer with an appreciation for how racial identity and race relations have evolved since the 60s.

** Even if the metaphor was present, it’s hard to overlook that, of the two mutants of color, one gets killed and the other goes evil. Celebrating racial equality in the abstract doesn’t mean much when characters of color are still thrown under the bus.