Actually, I would argue that it wasn’t even going that far—the government wasn’t spraying The Cure over cities with cropdusters, it had “weaponized” it in the form of dart guns, and used against mutants who were actively attacking unpowered people. I’d liken it more to “using a rifle against a knight in plate armor charging you with a broadsword.”
Even Worthington’s producing and releasing The Cure wasn’t done maliciously, or high-handedly. They weren’t influencing the government to make it mandatory, or dumping it in the water, or making it secretly lethal or the only antidote for a plague they’d released. It was an elective medical procedure, administered to paying customers. We don’t even know if it was covered by anyone’s insurance.
And yeah, erasing your amazing superpowers just because of prejudice or self-hatred would be lousy, but not everyone gets to be Superman. There are people like Rogue, who have powers that are uncontrollable, dangerous, have significant unpleasant side effects, and (in the movies’ version) not even particularly combat effective. Even aside from the issues of personal choice—it wouldn’t be my place to tell anyone what they could or couldn’t do with their life and their body, as long as they weren’t hurting anyone—it’s less like someone wanting to be “cured” of being gay, it’d be more like me wanting to be “cured” of being white, so my fishbelly pale Irish skin wouldn’t burn red and start peeling off, and possibly get cancerous, any time I went out in the sun.
Well, the whole X-Men dynamic, and the call for the Sentinel program, isn’t really allegory. It’s speculative fiction with a horror element. Imagine you have paranormal powers! Wow! Great! Now imagine it gets you hunted down by even more powerful giant robots built by your own government!
The mobs of protesters, and “Anti-Mutant Hysteria,” while a little silly, were kind of modeled on anti-abortion and anti-gay protesters, among others. But it’s not an allegory, no.
Bullshit. Just straight bullshit. The very thought process you are describing is bigotry. You are seeing all mutants as one, and using the worst attributes of one to condemn all.
Mutants are sapient beings. They should have the same rights as all other sapient beings. You don’t get to kill all Africans because one African guy is dangerous. You don’t get to even kill just the dangerous guy if he’s not doing anything wrong.
A world that would attack all mutants because of one is a bigoted world. And being against bigotry is exactly what the story is supposed to be about.
I completely missed the allegory in X-Men (probably among many others) but the District 9 one hit me like a ton of bricks. I was on a flight and I remember the exact feeling as it panned out.
I’m conflicted because I’m annoyed in general by message movies that bang you over the head with their moral, like it’s an after school special. Then you can’t criticize the movie for sucking because it “means something.” If you hate the movie that’s anti-child slavery, what are ya, pro-child slavery? Or worse, so called intellectual movies that try to make some grand point about human nature, like they’re going to come up with anything new. Or how about all those movies of the 2000s trying to make political metaphors with the war on terror. There’s a difference between not being able to escape your own milieu and diving in head first.
On the other hand, the OP is racist against prawns, which is funny since I thought the movie was trying to get audiences to confront their own racism, even among well meaning libs who look down on the poor benighted creatures and want to help them. Slums are dirty and violent places.
A lot of people get way too caught up in surface level details when talking about stories. How does this work, why did this happen, why is the world letting South Africa treat the technologically superior aliens like shit, do they have a death wish, how will they explain their behavior if the rest of their race comes to pick them up, etc. Nitpicking is fun, but it shouldn’t really matter. The details are just window dressing.
X-Men 2 came out in 2003, when perception of gay people in America was much worse and was even a major topic of the 2004 election. It’s hard to tell the effect lines like “Have you tried not being a mutant?” may have had, but it’s worth a golf clap I guess. No rule says political indoctrination, uh, I mean conscience raising, has to be boring.
I grew up with and love the Marvel comics universe. My first comic I recall buying was X-Men #95 - the second regular issue of the new X-Men that would eventually Take Over. I also happened to enjoy D-9, a movie I wish the director could live up to.
About this topic, I have to ask: doesn’t this boil down to “a metaphor works…until it doesn’t.” ?
The “difference” that fundamentally defines the mutants in the world of the X-Men has been put to use to fit any number of narratives. As a 13yo kid reading this stuff, I related to the mutants as teenagers going through puberty and not feeling understood or attractive/normal, but full of new power.
All good sci-fi/speculative fiction creates a world with differences - they are physical manifestations that are used to illustrate ideas and concepts. I am not surprised that the congruance is not 100%
I don’t know much about X-Men, but I’m (barely) old enough to remember the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. I assume you’re not, but at the time there was a lot of ignorance and misinformation about how HIV is spread and how common it was among gay men. There were people who believed that if a man was gay he was probably HIV positive, and further that this meant that even shaking hands with a gay man put one at risk of contracting a horrific, deadly disease.
The analogy worked better in the early days of X-Men when the powers displayed were relatively limited. With Paul-Bunyan-type-inflation, though, especially as presented in the films, I can’t see any plausible reason why someone like Magneto isn’t on a shoot-on-sight list. Heck, why was he even kept alive for years in a Pentagon sub-basement?
Seems to me a big step toward gaining acceptance would be to wait until some hurricane threatens the east coast, then have Storm mitigate it or redirect it out to sea. Right off the bat, she’d be demonstrating the ability to save the U.S. billions of dollars per year just by reducing the effect of weather-related natural disasters. The X-Men should be selling their powers and the market will embrace them for it.
But how do we know “They” would not get around to* that* sooner or later? It is sort of implicit in-universe that is a very real and even very highly likely danger – Magneto’s Holocaust survivor background serves as a reminder.
When X3 came out I thought that the storyline of Rogue being treated sympathetically as a character who understandably comes to feel her mutation is a disability that she wants to fix would raise more debate, but it pretty much got buried under everything else.
The larger theme in these stories also involves not just those elements of equal protection and coexistence, but the notion of opression or disenfranchisement becoming an incitement to subversion and crime, when if ever is it justified, and how do you avoid that becoming a self-reinforcing spiral. It also speaks to a fear among the former ruling groups that if the opressed are liberated or the outsiders become dominant, then they will seek to turn the tables and settle scores harshly (or at the very least seek to exact massive reparations) against the people who are mere descendants, or even just look like, those who once committed the opression.
But if every black man in America had a submachine-gun magically embedded in his forearm… Yes, it would still be wrong to exterminate them all on that basis, but we would definitely need to address the matter under the law.
It’s easy to see how registration would appeal, especially if there is a significant crime-wave of people getting mowed down in the streets by mutant zap-powers.
“Just treat them as equals” is hard to justify when they have that much individual power. We already have serious problems in our society between men and women, as men are bigger and stronger (on the average.) What do we do if the rape statistics of mutant-against-non-mutant rape start to approach the current rates of man-against-women rape? When mind-readers start stealing passwords. When mind-controllers start enslaving people. When teleporters take people and leave them stranded on mountaintops…
We’re fighting as hard as we can to ask women to be treated equally (and we are falling short of that pretty damn badly.) If a minority of people had really awesome powers, equality would be so much harder to defend.
Hell, once you bring up the Holocaust as a precedent, anything is a very real or even likely danger. Technically, a bunch of guys with machetes are just as much a enabling tool for genocide as a mutant “cure.”
But the point is that most mutants don’t have any power - they just look funny. It’s condemning all black men when only every 10th one has a gun-arm
You deal with each crime on an individual level. You don’t institute a genetic pre-crime policy.
I would think that would be when we’d want equality the most - when we’re the ones who actually need it. If mutants that powerful exist, we’d be crazy to treat them the way mutants are treated in the X-Men world. Because they’d be right to replace us. If we treated them as equals, they wouldn’t have a moral leg to stand on, and some of them would take our side. But in a world where they were not equal, I don’t actually see a Professor X gaining much traction. I know I’d be on Team Magneto … hell, I’d be there even if I were just a normal human.
…do we actually have any hard statistics on the harmless-to-impressive mutation ratio? I mean, the sampling we’d normally see would probably be skewed, surely, seeing as Can Mix a Highball Really Really Well Man and Big Knees And Stammer Lass probably aren’t going to be headlining any X-Men teams.
Actually, the gun-arm analogy might be more like “Fifty percent have a cap gun embedded in their arm, thirty percent have a flintlock (i.e. something that’s potentially dangerous, but inherently limited in some way), fifteen percent have the submachine gun, and the last five percent have a Davy Crockett.”
I don’t know that we have numbers, but when large populations of ordinary mutants are shown, like the Morlocks, most of them seem to be pretty useless in a fight (which is why they live in the sewers, I guess.) But hell, even the X-Men have fielded useless mutants(I don’t agree all those choices are useless, but c’mon, some of them are just disabled)
Except that homosexuals, males specifically, were singled out for HIV/AIDS when it was erroneously thought that it was a “gay disease.” When the public found out straight people could get it you had ignorance continuing to be spread like Eddie Murphy’s routine about how women can give AIDS too because they hang out /mess around with gay men.
Then you have white supremacists saying that gay’s will destroy the country. I think Nixon said homosexuality destroyed the Roman Empire.
Then there’s the religious people who go on about it being a sin, bringing God’s wrath, etc.
In regards to the racism allegory that’s somewhat comparable to what was going on in the 60s, 70s. Some people saw Blacks rioting, or murdering police officers and blamed an entire group on the actions of certain individuals.
Except you forget that mutants are the next step in evolution and THAT’S why the people in the Marvel Universe also fear them. They don’t want to be replaced. No one started a superhero registration act, or super powers registration act, to reign in Spider-man, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, even The Hulk. But mutants…that’s a different story.
I agree that considering the amount of damage they can do, registration or fear does sound sane until you compare it to the other stuff the citizens of the Marvel Universe put up without resorting to prejudice, registration, and robot police.
Yeah it does because they see it as changing their way of life. MU bigots don’t have a problem with The Avengers enlisting the help of The Hulk who is not even in control of himself, and they don’t have a problem the guys who can turn themselves into flames, etc. For whatever reason they’re okay with that because they’re still all homo-sapiens. But homo-superior? That’s obviously not them.
Same goes for gays. Some heterosexual bigots don’t have a problem with Blacks having equal rights (not anymore at least), or people making a mockery of marriage (Who wants to marry a millionaire, quickie Las Vegas style weddings, etc) because all those people are straight. But gays wanting to get married? No way, because they’re homosexuals.
Bigoted, ignorant people believe things like “gays are destroying our country”, but we, as enlightened people, know this not to be true.
People who say “mutants are destroying our country” in X-men are painted as bigoted and ignorant in the same way, but the difference is that mutants actually are causing harm.
This is the whole point I’m getting at. Allegories for ignorant/bigoted fear don’t work when the fictional analog for the harmless oppressed group is *is not actually harmless at all and is legitimately dangerous *
Wait, so are you saying that normal humans should step aside and die off because they’re being replaced by the “next step in evolution”, and if they reject or fear or fight against that, they’re being ignorant or bigoted? Is that the analogy you see in this case? if in the real world gays somehow considered themselves the “next step of evolution” and the replacement for humanity (and that sounds dangerously eugenics/genocide oriented already), I think we would be justifiably wary of such people.
