Good Criticism is NEVER Dated
July 11th 2007 -
Two not-particularly-recent but still damn good articles on the X-Men:
In X-Men’s Last Stand: One for Patriarchy, Mekani Themba Nixon criticizes “the disempowerment and basic all around ‘girlification’ of X-Men leader Storm,” voicing many of my own misgivings about the movie version of the character.
In Beyond Children of the Atom: Black Politics, White Minds and the X-Men, Morpheus Reloaded examines the idea of X-Men as a metaphor for the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, in which Charles Xavier serves as an analog for Martin Luther King, and Magneto, for Malcolm X. He extends the metaphor further, as well, looking at characters and situations in X-Men as reflections of a frustratingly narrow white perspective on black people and politics in America.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:09 am
I’ve got some issues with the Malcolm X = Magneto comparison, the biggest of which boils down to the problems I see in comparing a Civil Rights Movement leader to a mass murderer.
I went into more detail here, but I think part of it boils down to a profound misunderstanding of “by any means necessary.” The full quote from Malcolm was “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” It’s a reactionary creed– the necessary indicates that violence will be met with violence, peace with peace. He spoke it not too long before he died, when his family was under physical attack.
Malcolm X has been kind of stereotyped as the “bad” half of the MLK/X dichotomy. He was the one who talked trash, at least before he traveled to Mecca. He’s got the edgy reputation, to put it lightly, and he isn’t really taught like MLK often is. He’s admitted that he screwed up early in his career, so to speak, and did his best to make amends and explain where he was coming from, but the bulk of speech about him boils down to “Malcolm X hates white people.”
Magneto is a separatist, war criminal, and supremacist at best, neither of which apply to Malcolm. The separatism can be tied to Marcus Garvey with little trouble (and you could easily do an interesting story with Magneto playing the Garvey role in a Black Star Line/Back-to-Africa story featuring mutants in willing exile), but it’s a stretch to relate Magneto to Malcolm on anything but the barest of surface levels.
Sorry. Pet peeve.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Well, I think that’s what the original poster’s point was - white liberal writers and fans went “Malcom X = Magneto” without considering Black nationalism or pride as anything but threatening and violent. So X-men doesn’t say so much about the Civil Rights Movement as it displays popular white misconceptions of that movement’s leaders and their variant philosophies and goals.
July 12th, 2007 at 2:54 am
Sorry, yeah– I was agreeing with him and adding my own POV/thoughts to it. I meant to make that more clear, but I’m pretty tired after a long day.
There’s also another interesting bit of subtext– the X-Men spend a whole lot of time fighting other mutants… and never really get anywhere with that “society that fears and hates them” thing. They’ve been treading water, pretty much, since the ’60s. Even better– Magneto, when he blew up New York during Planet X, set the mutant movement back to the old-school status quo.
There is something there, I think. Not intentionally, but it’s another interesting parallel.