Allegories for racism/homophobia/etc. like X-Men or District 9 don't work

Cafe Society
1

A lot of what’s in the X-Men stories are an allegory for society’s unwillingness to accept homosexuality, of individual struggles to hide their secret and learn to live it, etc. The not-terribly-subtle allegory tries to get us to empathize with those who are different and are rejected by society and need to hide their true selves, to be ashamed of who they are. District 9 is a rather heavy handed obvious allegory about why segregation is bad. There are plenty of stories like these, but I decided to use those as two obvious examples.

Here’s the thing: homosexuals aren’t destroying society. They aren’t plotting against heterosexuals. They aren’t some unknown threat of potentially great power with unknown limitations and unknown intentions. They’re just people who like to suck on genitals that match their own. Big deal. It’s not the sort of difference that justifies hatred, shame, oppression, etc. That’s all there is to it. Homosexuals are just other people who are trying to get by in life, same as us. They have the same range of personalities and qualities as any other person. That’s why hatred towards them is unjustifiable and only causes harm.

X-Men Mutants, however, are fucking incredibly dangerous, hard to control, and could very well destroy society. If I lived in the X-Men world, and every other week some mutant or another is assassinating people, destroying a city, causing some sort of terrorist act, fighting amongst each other with tons of collateral damage, I damn well would want them to be controlled.

We’re supposed to believe the guys who want to identify, track, and control mutants are evil hateful bigots. The villains of the stories. But those stories are all about mutant factions that see non-mutants as inferior beings who should be destroyed, or at least ruled over. Often more well-meaning mutants are still losing control of their power and causing untold harm. New powers manifest regularly that completely render our traditional methods of law enforcement and security ineffective. Yes, the protagonists in the story are the “good” mutants, but they don’t represent or control the entirety of the mutant population. The existence of mutants is extremely damaging and de-stabilizing to society. Wanting to be able to keep that shit under control so your civilization doesn’t collapse isn’t bigoted, it’s the only sane option.

So trying to make an analogy that fear/desire to control mutants is equivalent to hating gay people just doesn’t make any sense. The allegorical elements are juvenile and don’t apply on anything but the most superficial “see, he has to hide and be ashamed of his true identity, like a gay person!” level.

If gay people could destroy cities at will, assassinate and terrorize whoever they wanted, felt like heterosexuals are an outdated species that should be slaughtered so the new master race can arise unhindered, I’d be pretty fucking afraid of gay people too.

Basically, you can’t make a story where the real world lesson is “don’t be afraid or hate people, they’re just like you” with the lesson of “don’t be afraid or hate people even though they’re not like you at all and they cause untold damage and completely destabilize our society and they can blend in among us and have unknown abilities and some of them want to commit genocide against you” - it’s absurd.

Same deal with District 9 in place of racism/segregation. It’s been a while so I’m forgetting details, but those aliens couldn’t communicate with people, they were at times hostile to people, they’d eat people’s pets, they couldn’t really live in the same areas as people, they were utterly foreign and alien. They should be segregated off somewhere. They shouldn’t be scattered randomly among people’s neighborhoods. They’re not cute and cuddly like Alf, they’re fucking aliens. “Oh see how we’re segregating these creatures that can’t communicate with you and just ate your cat? That’s the same way you feel about black people! See, black people are just normal people, we shouldn’t segregate them from us. And … walking alien prawn creatures are just like normal people too! See the error in your racist ways!?”

So yeah, if I were to ever take a lesson from these stories, it would have to be the opposite of what’s intended. “Oh, shit, this story makes me worry that gays might have some sort of secret powers that they will use to terrorize and genocide heterosexuals one day!” or “This segregation thing sounds pretty good if the alternative is to have a walking prawn gesticulate at me and eat my cat!”

2

I agree. Magneto alone is more of a threat to humanity than the threat of nuclear Armageddon was at the height of the Cold War.

From Wikipedia: His character’s early history has been compared with the civil rights leader Malcolm X and Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane. Magneto resents the pacifist attitude of Professor X and pushes for a more aggressive approach to achieving civil rights.

If Malcom X had the ability to create wholesale destruction with only his mind power while being impervious to attack, the Civil Rights movement might have turned out a bit differently…

3

A similar bad example is the alien analogies to the Nazis. Specifically, I am thinking of the '70s miniseries V and its remake. The problem is that these stories show the evil of Nazism as far outside the human experience, when in fact genocide is an all too human failing.

4

I tend to agree though in District nines case they could have separated the aliens from the genpop and still treat them well, which they didn’t. The problem was well exemplified in the newest X-men movie. The heroes are scrambling to prevent the murder of one man that will somehow turn people against the mutants. The murder is prevented but Magneto dropped a stadium on the Whitehouse. Mystique preventing the death of the guy makes the government decide, for some reason, to not develop the sentinels even though the entire world now knows of people that can lift stadiums with their minds and kill you by ripping the calcium from your bones.

5

The other problem is that Professor X is simply, objectively wrong if he’s supposed to be the MLK type (to Magneto’s Malcom X)

Professor X isn’t pushing integration and equal rights, he’s preaching cowering in cellars and hiding. It’d be as if MLK said “Don’t try to ride in the front of the busses, just hide in your basement and if you MUST go out, for God’s sake, wear white-face makeup. Hide yourself!”

If he really wanted equal rights, he’d be suing the shit out of the government for operating Josef Mengele style concentration camps, having 20-foot tall robots running around randomly killing citizens without a trial, etc, not hiding in his “danger room”. Why isn’t he teaming up with the NRA and the ACLU to sue the government back to the stone-age? Going to the UN? etc.

It’s a terrible message: Don’t demand your rights, just hide and pretend to be “normal”. Jew, black, gay, or other minority–what an awful idea for a so-called good guy to push.

6

X-Men/mutants only works as a gay allegory to an extent. Part of the popularity of them is they’re also an allegory for anyone who has felt judged, excluded or picked on, which is probably most kids at some point.

The super powers are every kid’s dream too. Any kid who has felt powerless or picked on has probably fantasized about having power and control and being able to do whatever they want and defend themselves against the mean kids.

The dangerous mutants I think are more of an allegory for blacks and Muslims, for instance. They get hated and feared for the actions of a minority of them. The moral is that most of them aren’t bad or dangerous.

7

As the OP points out, the super powers make the analogy… strained, at best. People who can bench-press tanks or walk through walls or project destructive force beams are different from the rest of us in ways that raise concerns that can’t be reasonably dismissed as mere bigotry.

8

I’ve made the same point when True Blood made the bizarre vampire=gay analogy, complete with anvil dropping dialogue.

Except gays don’t need to kill heterosexuals to survive!

9

There was a thread once, asking if you would support the Mutant Registration Act, assuming that you are a normal unpowered person in the Marvel Universe. Many of us said, yep, we certainly would.

It’s not bigotry to be afraid of someone who is literally a walking, breathing engine of destruction. You would have to be an idiot not to fear such people.

10

I think the comic book superheros are more an analogy for intelligence. Their super powers benefit them and make them special but they also set them apart. They are joining together with other similarly able people and trying to improve society while combating the feeling of being left out and different. To a young intelligent person who feels different that can be comforting.
Changing the analogy to being gay for the movies really made the movies worse. Most mutants can decide at any time to stop using their powers, blend into society and have just as fulfilling a life as the average person. Plus mutants really are a danger to society as the OP says.
District 9 on the other hand may not be a anti- racism movie at all but a reaction to mass Zimbabwean immigration to South Africa.

11

Analogies don’t have to have one-to-one correspondence to real events to work. X-men works as an analogy to various prejudices (anti-gay, anti-semitic, nativist all fit), and the fact that it isn’t a complete match has nothing to do with the issue. The X-Men represent any group that’s discriminated against unfairly and the broad brush is more important than the tiny details.

The concept predates Marvel comics – look at A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan from 1940, which has all of the same factors.

12

Exactly. There is a common recurring motif in X-Men comics, when a teenager suddenly develops a mutant power that is minor, trivial, even benign – and people all about lose their cool and start shouting bigotry. In one case, a young girl had the power to change the color of flowers…and was thrown out of her home by her parents and had to live on the street.

The depiction is of people reacting to their fears, and generalizing improperly. In that, it is allegorical to sexual orientation, race, religious views, and other class distinctions that are basic to bigotry.

I never thought of that. It’s pretty; it fits nicely with the comics and stories. You have a good case there. It’s certainly intrinsic to the superhero genre that heroes are smarter than average. Good superhero writing involves the hero outthinking the villain, at least as often as just smashing them or zapping them. Spider-Man and Captain America have, many times, simply persuaded bad guys to give up.

13

My recollection of what seemed like EVERY episode of Star Trek Voyager until Seven of Nine arrived was that there would be a painfully literal transposition of the treatment of the Hologram Doctor and the historic treatment of Black Slaves.

It was so heavy handed it made me want to spew my ring.

TCMF-2L

14

Did the comics or movies ever make that point, that taking reasonable precautions against dangerous people was bigotry? Most people don’t have a problem with containing the truly dangerous. The problem is when fear leads to barcoding innocent children.

15

There are a lot of non-mutants in the Marvel-verse who could potentially destroy the planet. Plus, the vast majority of mutants have powers that are entirely harmless. This guy’s mutant power is that he looks like a chicken. Meanwhile, folks like Doctor Strange, Thor, and Reed Richards are allowed to walk around more-or-less unmolested, despite having the powers and/or skills to level cities. Magneto is a dangerous villain, sure. But so is Dr. Doom, and nobody argues that really smart people need to be registered in case they try to fire a skyscraper into space.

So, the X-Men work as a metaphor for prejudice on some level, as they are routinely treated differently than other super-powered individuals, solely based on the way they came by their superpowers.

District 9 works even better in this regard, as most of the aliens aren’t dangerous at all, just really, really foreign. FTR, they can communicate just fine with humans, although most aren’t very good at it. They look different, they have weird customs, they don’t understand our customs, and a lot of them don’t speak our language. But there’s no particular reason why they couldn’t be integrated into human society - or at the very least, no good reason why they should be forced to live in shanty towns where they’re routinely victimized by both the government and the local gangs. Which makes them a pretty good fit for a lot of immigrant groups throughout history.

16

Miller points out the real problem with Marvel’s mutants allegory: there’s no way to distinguish between superpowered humans bitten by spiders and superpowered humans just born that way.

However, the allegory used to work much better – because the fear of Other (racism, homophobia, whatever) used to be much more demonized. Look at the way gay people were portrayed in popular culture in the 60s when the X-Men were first published. Gay people were regarded as an active danger to society and to people. Much easier to draw that allegory then, than it is now when gay people are not as ostracized and are being presented as normal members of society.

17

Well, part of the issue is probably that the allegory to homosexuality wasn’t the intent of X-Men.

The series was started in the early 60’s, before there was really any sort of movement for the recognition of gay rights, and owes its origin to the fact that its creators were tired of coming up with elaborate explanations for superpowers and so just said “screw it, let’s just have them born that way.” Such allegory as was intended at the time was almost certainly related to RACE, not sexual orientation, as one would expect from American creators in 1963, when race was absolutely the #1 dominant issue of the time. The allegory to LGBT became popular well after the introduction of the X-Men to the Marvel universe.

There is really little sense at all to the Marvel universe which, as many others have pointed out, includes a lot of people who AREN’T mutants and yet have similarly awesome and potentially dangerous powers and yet are regarded as heroes. So you kinda have to accept a bit of suspension of logic to enjoy the stories.

18

The same logic applies whether it be racism or homosexuality. Hating and separating people based on a racial group is shitty because we’re all fundamentally the same, but mutants fail as an analogy since they aren’t the same at all, and should be treated differently.

The allegory does match more closely for homosexuality, though, since a big part of the mutant drama of the X-Men series (at least from the 90s TV show and the movies, I’m not familiar with the comics) is hiding what makes you unique because it would alienate those around you if they knew, being ashamed of your hidden secret, etc. That stuff wouldn’t really make sense in relation to race.

19

No, they shouldn’t be treated differently just because they’re born different. They are still ostensibly human. If an individual proves to be a threat, then that individual should be dealt with, individually, not his entire community.

As a black child growing up in the '70’s-'80’s the X-Men spoke deeply to me. Overt racism was still very common then and being treated differently for reasons other than your own, personal, actions was something we dealt with a lot.

20

X-Men certainly spoke to me of race in early 80s South Africa. In fact, how the Morlocks Massacre storyline made it past the censors, I’ll never know. Then again, they never censored 2000AD neither, and their SD/Mutie and Nemesis The Warlock storylines were even more obvious allegories.