Entertainment

MOVIES: 'X-Men' series a social issues battleground

05:29 PM CDT on Thursday, May 25, 2006

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

The X-Men sagas are all about living as an oppressed minority. No, wait; they form a 20th-century adaptation of Ovid's epic poem The Metamorphosis. Hold on, they're actually a study in the phenomenon of something called transhumanism.

These are just a few of the ideas floated in The Unauthorized X-Men , a collection of scholarly essays recently published by Dallas-based Benbella Books. The level of analysis may seem excessive for a bunch of guys (and gals) in funny costumes, but X-Men fans know it's nothing new. With the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand , opening Friday, we're reminded again that the series serves as a sort of catchall for social issues and theoretical musings.

The X-Men premise, developed through 33 years and countless iterations of comic books, graphic novels and TV cartoons (and three movies), yields a doctoral program's worth of issues to explore and incorporates such heady topics as racism, genocide, bioethics, civil war, McCarthyism and terrorism.

And you thought they were just superheroes.

"It's a subgroup of humanity, and as such, you can use them as a parallel to all sorts of stories," says Len Wein, editor of The Unauthorized X-Men and a former writer and editor for Marvel Comics who helped create the most popular X-Man, Wolverine (played in the movies by Hugh Jackman). "The fact that they're mutants, the fact that they're an oppressed minority, gives you a starting place that you can't get to with most superhero groups."

The X-Men were born in 1963 to Marvel kingpins Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Unlike many superheroes who acquired their powers through such external forces as radioactive insects (Spider-Man) or gamma rays (The Fantastic Four), the X-Men were born with genetic mutations and taught by wheelchair-bound Charles Xavier to use their various powers on humanity's behalf.

But it seems humanity doesn't always appreciate the gesture. In fact, humanity can be downright hostile to the mutants, and vice versa. Some of them, led by a mutant concentration camp survivor called Magneto (Ian McKellen), would rather start a master race of "homo superiors" than try to play nice with regular folks.

Zak Penn, who co-wrote the second and third X-Men movies, says the X stories can pack in so many ideas only by weaving them into the entertainment value. He points to another recent pop culture phenomenon, The Matrix, as an example.

"Anything that's overtly trying to make a point to you is not going to make for very good art or storytelling," says Mr. Penn. " The Matrix is like a quick lesson in all sorts of philosophical points of view and a lot of different writings, wrapped up in the package of something you want to watch over and over again. So there's no question that you can raise issues in an entertaining manner in a movie like this."

So what are some of the issues at stake in the X-Men cycle and the new movie in particular? Let us scratch our chins and ponder.

The mutants are the ultimate Other, persecuted because they're different. "You have the obvious analogy to any minority or outcast group," says Mr. Penn. "It was a pretty strong metaphor for being Jewish when Stan Lee wrote it, or for being black, although a lot of the comic book creators were Jewish. That's been mined over and over again."

The connection is made forcefully, and hauntingly, in the first pages of the 1982 X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. A team of mutant hunters corner and kill two mutant children who also happen to be black. As the bodies are hung from a swing set, the lynching parallel is obvious.

But the racism analogy gets more complicated. The benevolent Xavier has no interest in attacking mankind for its intolerance. The combative Magneto wants to violently stick it to the man. "There were overt discussions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on every chapter of the franchise," says Mr. Penn. "It's not subtext. It's text. They are two different approaches to being a minority. One is assimilation. The other is violent protest. It's about responding to the same sense of injustice with two separate means."

Of course, race isn't the only kind of otherness. In the second X-Men movie, a mutant named Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) "comes out" to his parents in a scene that plays off the common scenario of a teen telling his parents that he's gay. ("Have you ever tried not being a mutant?" asks his mother).

Then there's the metaphor that helps explain the X-Men's perpetual popularity. In his Unauthorized essay, Joe Casey, who wrote the "Children of the Atom" series, argues that the outcast X-men stand for comic book fans.

"When I was a kid, if you read comic books religiously like I did, you were labeled a geek," Mr. Casey writes. "A nerd. A spaz. A weirdo. You were both hated and feared by those around you. Basically, you were a mutant."

The mutants live under the constant threat of annihilation at the hands of those who see them as a threat. In the aforementioned graphic novel, the anti-mutant crusade is led by an evangelist named Stryker. In the second X-Men movie, that name belongs to a military scientist hellbent on eliminating the mutants.

The new movie revolves around an antibody designed to "cure" mutations – to which Storm (Halle Berry), a mutant with the power to control weather, responds: "Since when did we become a disease?"

"There are days lately when I'd much rather live in the X-Men's world than in the so-called real world," says Mr. Wein. "You look at Darfur and various other places around the world, and that's what's going on, but in a more horrible way. The so-called cure in the film seems to be relatively benign by comparison."

But the genocide sword cuts both ways. Magneto, the militant mutant, wants to wipe out humans and pave the way for a mutant master race. Here we have a bit of X-Men irony: The series' Holocaust survivor seems to have picked up the ideology of his former persecutors.

As Magneto flexes his muscle in the new movie and strikes terror in the government by relocating part of the Golden Gate Bridge, the president ponders his options for attack. "You're on a slippery slope, Mr. President," advises a cabinet member. "What do you do when there's a man who can move cities with his mind?"

"It raises a lot of the issues that you see our government dealing with," says Mr. Penn. "When is it necessary to toss aside our principles because of the power of your opponents?"

But the militant mutants engage in more precise attacks as well. At Magneto's request, Pyro (Aaron Stanford) firebombs a clinic that offers the mutant cure. Magneto then takes to the airwaves to claim responsibility for the attack, like the head of a terrorist organization dropping off a tape for Al-Jazeera.

These sorts of connections have their limitations, of course. For one, if taken too seriously, they can belittle the real-life issues and phenomena on which they're based. "The habit of ignoring the actual in favor of an imagined 'true reality' distorts lived experience – evidence that contradicts the allegorical reading is ignored, and trivial orts and scraps that appear to support it are exaggerated beyond all significance," writes Adam Roberts in The Unauthorized X-Men . (This coming from the guy with the Metamorphosis theory. But we digress).

For Kelsey Grammer, new to the franchise as the diplomatic Beast (under three hours' worth of blue fur and makeup), the X-Men message is more universal.

"The X-men stand for making good choices and fighting for what's right," he says. "They stand for embracing your uniqueness and being comfortable in your own skin. Big ideas about tolerance and freedom and brotherhood."

This broader interpretation should work for those who don't want to overthink a superhero franchise, or who just want to have a good time and dig the action.

"The fact that we can make points that may make you think about things a little bit is great," says Mr. Wein. "But I never want it to get to the point where that supersedes entertainment value. Once you start preaching, there's a tendency in the audience to step back: We're here to have a good time, not to go to school."

But it's not an either-or proposition. Entertainment has a long history of incorporating provocative subject matter into action thrillers and comedies alike. You don't want a sermon, but certain franchises, including The X-Men, lend themselves to matters more significant than catching the bad guys.

In other words, some franchises ask you to think. And that's a super power we can all take advantage of.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com