← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 7168 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-06-06
2003-06-06 09:49 | User Profile
Somebody had mentioned the X-MEN films as being notorious among the Queer Nation types as 'our movie'. Not having seen either, I can't say. But I typed X-MEN & GAY into Google and found tons of articles like the following. How is it Falwell & Robertson aren't in a tizzy over this?.
[url=http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/entertain/072400en.htm]http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/ente...in/072400en.htm[/url]
****X-Men: Film Review by John Demetry **
Queer teens get a kick out of X-Men comic books. I know I used to, with its mutant social outcasts hiding their super powers and wearing colorful, tight outfits. The archnemesis, Magneto, was particularly attractive. His righteous fury in response to mutant oppression seemed a direct extension of my own adolescent sexual angst.
Because of this adolescent obsession with the X-Men comics, the prospect of director **Bryan Singer bringing the X-Men to the screen intrigued me. Singer has always made sublimated homosexuality the theme of his interesting, yet confused, films (Public Access, The Usual Suspects, and Apt Pupil). **
Now, the queer press has prepared readers to poke through Singer's X-Men for gay-gay references. The film doesn't disappoint. Just as Singer encourages viewers to locate the X motifs in the set designs, he turns the queer subtext into a game of hide-and-seek.
In my favorite example, an X-Man, Cyclops (James Marsden), shares a series of stares with a little boy who smiles just as his mother angrily shoos him away. Singer poses the question: Is gaydar a superpower? A machine used by Patrick Stewart's psychic Professor X locates other mutants; it visualizes gaydar in a flashy sequence utilizing effects found in Run Lola Run and TV commercials.
But for all his references to the personal and political aspects of queer experience, Singer muddles everything. He returns to the oppressed as oppressor theme of Apt Pupil in his characterization of Magneto (played by Ian McKellan in a gloss on his equally thin but campier, creepier turn as the Nazi in Apt Pupil).
**It opens with the young Magneto in a concentration camp in 1944. A violent separation from his mother triggers his magnetic powers--a startling pop reimagining of both the historical atrocity of the Holocaust and the rupture that occurs between parents and adolescent children. **
A letdown from this promising opening, the older Magneto's genocidal response to mutant persecution is a simplification. Singer uses this to inform his specious concerns, especially with its equation to Malcolm X. Magneto (and Singer) abuses Malcom's famous quote: "By any means necesssary".
The only developed characterization is Rogue, a high school student played by Anna Paquin. While Singer holds onto an adolescent's view of political struggles, the young Paquin displays a mature understanding of adolescent confusions.
Despite his film-school, artsy-fartsy background, Singer lacks the visionary spirit of a great pop director. He fails to deepen the shallow comic book material made meaningful by individual adolescent imagination; the very process that would have been examined by a Brian De Palma (as in his lyrical Carrie and, especially, The Fury).
Singer's skills are limited to gaydar. He lacks the gift to give aesthetic form to the profound truth that the queer experience is the universal experience, the real superpower some people call art. **
[url=http://www.filethirteen.com/reviews/x2/x2.htm]http://www.filethirteen.com/reviews/x2/x2.htm[/url]
**X2 (2003) (AKA X-Men 2, X-2)
"Have you tried not being a mutant?" - Bobby Drake's mother in "X2"
I didn't see the first "X-Men" film until about 4 or 5 days before I saw this sequel. The comic book genre isn't really my bag. I bought a lot of "Archie" comics and stuff like that as a child but not really too many super hero types. The first film had a lot of talent I liked, including director Bryan Singer and openly gay actor Sir Ian McKellan, but I still didn't bite. I didn't really even understand who the X- men were or what they were about.
All of this was brushed aside by the trailer for the second film which made it clear what the true genre of the film was. "X-Men" is a gay film. Anyone who thinks it's about anything else is fooling themselves. Just look at the talent involved in this sequel, at least two actors are openly gay: McKellan and Alan Cumming. If Singer is "openly" gay [[color=purple]he is-IR[/color]], I haven't heard about it, but all the brouhaha over the sexual harassment of teenage boys during the filming of "Apt Pupil" certainly opened the door for speculation. And don't get me started on Patrick Stewart. Regardless of who is in reality, and who isn't, and who is open about it and who isn't, the perception is there that the talent involved here is, if not gay, at least gay friendly.
The trailer for the film highlighted the theme that the "mutants" are perceived as outsiders, problems and unwanted. There is talk of "registering" them and quarantining them. All of this sounds very familiar to any gay person who lived in the 80's during the beginning of the AIDS crisis. This trailer made me want to see this sequel but felt it might be necessary to see the original film first. I headed to my trusty DVD store and picked up the most current release of the first "X-Men" film on DVD (dubbed "X-Men 1.5" to prepare us for sequels and to accent the special added material). I watched the film and was amazed at the storytelling, the characters, the characterizations, and the amazing special effects. The first story hooked me.
The second film made me a true fan. Exploring several characters and storylines introduced in the first film and adding many new and diverse characters, the second film truly creates a futuristic world where evolution has begun in a new direction, where life on planet Earth is changing rapidly and in many frightening ways
The acting is, of course, top notch. McKellan is given a meaty storyline this time and provides a sympathetic villain that truly makes us question the role of right and wrong in ethical situations where war and dissent are at play. McKellan also gets to quip one of the most important lines a gay man has ever uttered in a traditional mainstream movie role. To young Pyro, played by the hunky Aaron Stanford ("Tadpole"), Magneto offers this most wonderful wisdom, "You're a god among insects, don't let anyone tell you otherwise." From masculine and forceful Magneto to youthful and questioning neophyte, the advice takes on a fatherly air, but the real life sexuality of McKellan and the theme of the film provides enough smoldering subtext to further the plots of 100 sequels. Standford may play up the angst of his character to pyrotechnical levels, but that doesn't hinder his performance from being one of the truly most interesting characters to emerge in this sequel. He is definitely an actor and a character to look out for. And his chemistry with McKellan pulsates.
Stewart, like McKellan, is even more well used here as his Charles Xavier character has much to do with evil-doer Bryan Cox's dastardly plans. Halle Berry provides much support as Storm using her super powers much more frequently. Berry, likewise, as an African-American women, is also allowed a bit of the "outsider" subtext here with a chance to provide a strong character whose race is irrelevant to her abilities. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos gets in some good quips while playing into the special effects her character requires while Famke Janssen's character of Dr. Jean Grey is utilized superbly in the film's climactic moments.
Not so perfect here but certainly admirable are James Marsden (as Cyclops), Alan Cumming (as Nightcrawler), Anna Pacquin (as Rogue) and Kelly Hu. Of these, Cumming certainly has the most difficult time of it (there's a joke in there somewhere) as a Bible spouting German oddity who also begins to fall for Storm. There are some hokey moments, but Cumming does the best he can with what he is given. It's much help that he has an excellent cast, a talented director and a hard-working crew behind him to help carry the film along.
But the biggest problem here is Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. I'm sure he does an adequate, if not consummate job of bringing the comic book character to life. But that cigar chomping demeanor, that silly haircut and those ridiculous mutton chop sideburns have got to go. They make Jackman look like a jackass and do not allow his character to ever be taken seriously. Wolverine's confrontation with his amnesia over his past is resolved here. To bad his look is not.
Bryan Singer should be knighted for his work in this film. He not only creates a special effects laden film that is compelling and visually stunning but one that has unique and important messages about tolerance and acceptance. This film has ideal after ideal jumping from the subtext that every child in America should be exposed to. And Singer, along with his awesome cast and amazing scripters, provide one of the most intense and engrossing films to see the light of day in the summer blockbuster rush. **This is a film to stand up and cheer for. This is a film to cherish. **
My hopeful anticipation for "X-Men 3" is palpable. I can only hope that the continuing older man/young charge tension between McKellan and Stanford creates much excitement. I can only hope that Wolverine gets a better haircut. (Surely there's a Edward Scissorhands type mutant out there somewhere with a penchant for hair design and the flair of a gay beautician)! **
[url=http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/07/12/x_men/print.html]http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/..._men/print.html[/url]
**The queer world of the X-Men
OK, Wolverine never built a shrine to Judy Garland, but "the strangest teens" were obviously homo superior -- emphasis on the homo.
By Erik Dussere
July 12, 2000 |
It was all a big mistake, really. I had a flu sometime in the middle of 1979, and when my mother went to the store for more ginger ale and Jell-O, I asked her to pick up a particular comic book for me. I thought I was fairly specific in my instructions. But mothers, as all adolescent boys know, should not be trusted to make minute distinctions among comic books, and what I ended up with was the current X-Men Giant Size Annual No. 3 ("The Awesome Attack of Arkon"). It got me through another day on the couch, and soon after I bought another X-Men comic (issue No. 128, "The Day Reality Went Wild") out of curiosity. The characters and situations were complicated, the art was crisp -- even the lettering seemed lively and engaging. I didn't miss an issue for the next five years.
Comic books get a lot of people through adolescence, and of course, they're mostly people like me: boys, mostly geeks, weirdos, smart kids -- in a word, mutants. And that's the whole point of the X-Men, that they're mutants, genetically different from those around them. By the time I was 12 or so, I had figured out that reading this stuff wasn't exactly going to teach me how to rule the school; it was a marginal, suspect activity, like Dungeons & Dragons, or arson. And although over the years since then I have been mildly interested as the characters popped up in video games and Saturday morning cartoons, I didn't think about them twice.
But when I heard there was going to be a movie, I suddenly began to feel proprietary, like the guys who claim to have loved R.E.M. back when Michael Stipe still had his day job. The symbols of my junior-high loserdom had gone major label on me, and so as the advertisements and press articles began to make X-Men a household word, I dug out my old, neglected boxes of comics to try to figure out what had made them so important to me in the first place.
Even in the angst-friendly world of the comic book, the X-Men have always stood out. They were invented in the '60s by the legendary Stan Lee, who revolutionized the superhero genre with his creations: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and more. In a rare break from the Cold War origins Lee tended to give his heroes, the X-Men were not people who had been bombarded by fallout or bitten by a radioactive trout; they were "mutants," people born with psychic talents or the ability to shoot red power beams from their eyes, not Homo sapiens but homo superior.
Embodying the adolescent feelings of difference and alienation, the original X-Men were also all teenagers: "The Strangest Teens of All!" they were billed. They had been taken in by older mutant Charles Xavier, known as Professor X, at the good professor's "school for gifted youngsters," a prep-school-like haven where they could practice their abilities and fight evil. They even had identical school-uniform-style costumes.
In 1975, at a time of languishing comic sales, the original team was kidnapped and replaced by a new group of students at Xavier's academy, a somewhat older and more individualized group, which incorporated some of the original members. It was this team of X-Men who, under the creative guidance of writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, took the comic book to a new level of sophistication. In its new incarnation, "The X-Men" continued to speak to a teen audience, but its appeal was subtly different; rather than allowing disempowered or alienated kids to identify with superempowered alter egos, the new comic drew attention to the metaphoric possibilities of being a mutant.
Like punk's appropriation of West Indian reggae, the white B-boys with their hip-hop and baggy jeans and the young girls curled up with copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank," the new X-Men made sense of mainstream teen alienation by appropriating the experiences of minority groups coping with much more powerful and genuine forms of discrimination. **Whether deliberately or not, the comics created parallels with African-American, Jewish and, most surprisingly, queer culture. **
The new team was, for a start, much more international and slightly more racially diverse -- the heroes came from Canada, Egypt, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Japan. And although their only black character, the Cairo-born Storm, was not American, the politics of race are vivid in the mutants' struggle for acceptance by humans. The X-Men's most consistent foe is Magneto, who plays a kind of Malcolm X to Professor Xavier's Martin Luther King Jr. Magneto is also a mutant, but while Professor X strives for equality with humans, saving them from world destruction even while they fear and legislate against his kind, Magneto regards mutants as the superior group and advocates war with humanity.
**Magneto is one of the most complex and ambiguous villains in the world of superhero comics. Named Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, he is the sole member of his family to have survived Auschwitz. Scarred by the experience, he has decided that humans, because of their oppression of mutants, are no better than the Nazis and deserve no sympathy. Although he is identified as Gypsy rather than Jew, it seems plain that Magneto is the radical Zionist to the more peace-seeking Professor X. Can it be a coincidence that the two characters first met -- and became friends before becoming enemies -- in Israel shortly after that nation's founding? **
But the most forceful metaphor represented by mutanthood is homosexuality. Homosexuality, like mutancy, is a hidden difference -- gays walk among us, and we never know who might be one. It is a condition that manifests itself in adolescence, and when it does, it frequently causes the confused and scared young person to be ostracized from both community and family.
Professor X is a key part of this construct. He provides these young people with a community, a "safe house" (albeit one with a Danger Room) in which they can learn to use their newfound powers in the company of others like them and with the tutelage of the older, wiser Xavier, a den mother from the pre-Stonewall days. If the earlier X-Men evoked a pleasant prep-school camaraderie, those in the new group are forever referring to themselves as a family, an alternative and in many ways idealized family where those who are feared and misunderstood by the larger society can forge a sense of identity.
The comics also recognize the political and ideological forces that threaten those marked as different. The Sentinels, robots created by the U.S. government to detain or exterminate mutants (so how paranoid does Magneto look now?), are dispatched by certain mutant-hating politicians, notably Sen. Robert Kelly, who also appears in the X-Men film.
Kelly's objections to the mutants have a generalized, Orwellian or McCarthyite vibe about them; one feels that he simply objects to difference as such. But in the 1982 X-Men graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills," the allegory to gay-bashing is more explicit. This story introduces the Rev. William Stryker, a character clearly modeled on the political preachers on the Christian right who flourished in the '80s. The use of religious rhetoric to condemn gay culture and sexuality frequently takes a similar path, and the comic draws a vivid picture of how Stryker's crusade leads to violence against those labeled as deviant.
Of course, this doesn't mean that we will be learning about Wolverine's secret shrine to Judy Garland, or that Storm will be wearing a pink triangle on her costume anytime soon. The point is not that the X-Men are themselves gay, or even that a comic-book reader would necessarily see the parallels I've drawn; it certainly never occurred to me at the time I was reading the comics. Instead, the comics' evocation of the ordeal -- and the hostile rhetoric -- that many gay men and women face allows the adolescent reader to see his or her own alienation in the experiences of these characters.
But perhaps it is not entirely an accident that the first openly gay comic-book character (unlike, say, the "open secret" of Batman and Robin) was Northstar, a member of the Canadian mutant team Alpha Flight. And once the idea presents itself, any number of odd associations come to mind. David Bowie might as well have had the X-Men in mind when, in the '70s, he created his own private rock 'n' roll cosmology in which the old making way for the new and sexually transgressive youth cultures signified the advent of the homo superior -- with the accent firmly on the homo. (See "Oh, You Pretty Things.")
Promotional materials for the X-Men film suggest a recognition of these queer strains in the X-universe. The print advertisements so far have been run as faux-political diatribes about the mutant menace, and promotional Web site Mutant Watch gives a campy spin to this "Blair Witch Project"-style marketing vérité. It even includes a hilarious "Are You a Mutant?" quiz with diagnostic questions like "Do your parents have difficulty understanding you?" If that is the criterion for being a mutant, it isn't hard to see why teens -- or for that matter, adults -- would feel a certain affinity with the X-Men. **
In the early 30s, MGM head Louis B Mayer gave his openly-gay stars a choice: get married to women (or men) and fake being straight - or you're out of pictures. For decades, queers have whined over this 'persecution' but it's obvious what Mayer (and the gentiles pressuring him) were afraid of: this. This scheisskultur where adult males who give small boys come-hither pickup stares are applauded as exemplars of moral instruction that "every child in America should be exposed to".
2003-06-06 11:12 | User Profile
Yeah, I heard about the gay angle of [url=http://us.imdb.com/Title?0290334]X-Men 2[/url] (homos always think [u]everything[/u] is about them). I also think of them as the [url=http://www.geocities.com/avigreen2002/columns05den2902.html]Y(id)-Men[/url]: "Oy vey! Why are we so poisecuted! Why do the humans (goyim) want to destroy us? Could it be they are just jealous of our abilities?" After all, Professor X and Magneto are supposed to be Holocaustâ⢠survivors (though I think it was later revealed that Magneto was a Gypsy, not a Jew), and the X-Men were created by two jews, Stan Lee (Stan Leiber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzburg).
2003-06-06 11:48 | User Profile
Seeing the X-Men movie as pro-fag is a stretch. As for Fag actors, I thought that was the norm in Hollywood these days. If they can see pro-fag in that movie can anyone see pro-White in the Matrix (part 1)? Or at least how Hollywood bumbled it's attempt at an anti-White film.
[url=http://whiteknight.50megs.com/Neo.htm]http://whiteknight.50megs.com/Neo.htm[/url]
2003-06-06 19:14 | User Profile
X-Men could be about -any- outgroup. Heck, even white nationalists (after the wider-scale roundup begins). The universality of it is where the wide appeal of the series comes from.
2003-06-11 04:15 | User Profile
X-men is basically a comic book against discrimination... I had the (un)luck of watching the first part, and got sick in the first minutes when I saw that bullcrap about the "death" Camps and Magnet....