X-Men Character Meta
Jun. 11th, 2011 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiCharacter thoughts sparked by X-Men: First Class...
X-Men has long been typified by excellent character development, well beyond my expectation for superhero comic fantasy. This was true in the cartoon (my first introduction) and truer in the (good) movies. But X-Men: First Class has raised the standard for me and prompted meta.
Beneath the cut, some character thoughts on Charles and Erik (respectively; I'll do relationship meta in the next installment). Spoilers for X-Men: First Class and potentially the first three movies, though I hereby decanonize the third, which I can only explain as Jean telepathically infecting everybody with a horrible, horrible dream.
Charles
Charles has always been presented as morally dubious. It’s easy to overlook this because a) his dubiousness is so vastly overshadowed by Erik’s and others’ and b) because he’s so darn nice and nigh universally loved. He is nice, kind, friendly, mature, well-intentioned, courageous, upstanding, etc.
But he is also inventing telepathic--and mutant--ethics from scratch, with something of the childlike blundering of Gilgamesh confronting death as ‘twere for the first time. Charles, it goes without saying, is an extremely powerful mutant, and he uses his telepathic powers with a liberty that would make a Jedi or a Betazoid or an Auron cringe. He routinely uses his skills to read minds without permission, to confuse and mislead people; in X2, he uses them to infiltrate the Oval Office in a way that rather undercuts his basic thesis that mutants and humans should have the same rights and responsibilities: show me a non-mutant human who can just bring a posse into the Oval Office at will. X-Men: FC shows this more extensively than the prior movies, including his psyching people into doing his will (in the short term) with no evident concern for their own free will.
Of course, he has strong and admirable inner restraints. He is not given to threats or large-scale/long-term manipulation. (His manipulations generally cease at moving the right person to the right place for a conversation, escaping from the building, etc.) Nonetheless, his practice raises moral and ethical questions of which he seems blissfully unaware. And this is not surprising given that he is the first telepath he’s ever known and is well into his adult life before he meets another. He has nothing to teach him telepathic ethics except science fiction, and even science fiction wasn’t much exploring it at the time he had to start creating his system.
His rather righteous belief in his own moral exactitude extends to, well, just about everything. In his way, he’s as dogmatic as Erik in his belief that has all the answers, and while his answers are more amicable, his certainty can be unsettling. Take, for example, his pronouncement to Erik that one optimizes one’s powers at the point between rage and serenity. Nice thought--which, as far as I can tell, is based on nothing but his own personal experience. It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not up to the standard of generations of trial, error, and refinement that produced the notion of following one’s dharma or “loving one another as I have loved you” or even the idea that fear leads to the Dark Side. Charles is making it up as he goes along.
Being right at the start of the existence of mutants as a society, he doesn’t have a lot choice, but his particular philosophy will inevitably be imperfect. One imagines mutant culture looking back across the centuries to his originary ethics and considering him something of a cave man--but an inspired one, for Charles is thoughtful and moral and doing his best, setting an impressive standard. The fact that it is not an unimpeachable standard only serves to make his character more realistic and sympathetic, and an interestingly flawed foil for the clearly more flawed Erik.
Erik
The fleshed out backstory we get for Erik in XM:FC sheds new light on his trajectory. His dominating preoccupation is fear for his people’s safety, expressed as a drive to protect them from the oppressors. This drive is liberally mixed with revenge, and it’s clear that for some years, revenge was all he thought he could attain to.
We learn in XM:FC that until he was about thirty Erik had no idea other mutants existed. He doubtless regarded himself as some weird freak of nature, an experience of absolute isolation that contextualizes his likening himself to Frankenstein’s monster. But Erik, fundamentally, is someone who thinks in terms of group affiliation. He was raised this way as a Jew, and his native personality, which is sociable and interpersonally confident, makes this framework all the more natural.
His life is defined by belonging to an in-group, and for the first thirty-odd years of his life, since he wasn’t aware of mutants as a population, this group had to be the Jewish nation. His experiences in the Holocaust, of course, solidified his belief in the group’s vulnerability and persecution. But for all his identification with their victimization, he does not reintegrate into Jewish society; rather, it seems, he becomes a loner. This makes sense given not only his personal goal of revenge but also the inevitability that his freakish powers would either make him an outcast or force him into a life of hiding in most any human community. A solitary, transient life is the easier option. Then, he meets Charles and other mutants, and while his paradigm of oppression and persecution remains the same, its object switches from primary affiliation with Jews to primary affiliation with mutants, i.e. people he can be himself around.
However, this presents Erik with a moral conundrum because, in his sincere belief that normal humans are/will be the oppressor and that mutants will/must defeat them or be exterminated, he makes an enemy of the Jewish nation, the vast majority of Jews being normal humans. This doesn’t come up in the movies, and I expect that Erik really, really doesn’t want to think about it. Given his early experiences, his attachment to the Jewish people and his empathy for their suffering cannot fail to be deep and enduring. That he has placed himself in the position of one of their potential exterminators must be incredibly hard to face, and it raises a host of concomitant questions about the value of “human” history, society, religion in a world--as he sees it--to be inherited by mutants.
His shift in loyalties exposes the strain of hypocrisy in his belief system. He hates oppression yet would be an oppressor of the very group whose oppression taught him to hate oppression. I suspect that the course of Erik’s moral development must be strongly related to how ably he negotiates this problem. The first two (I discount no. 3) movies suggest that he doesn’t ultimately negotiate it with very much insight. But that’s what fan fic is for...
X-Men has long been typified by excellent character development, well beyond my expectation for superhero comic fantasy. This was true in the cartoon (my first introduction) and truer in the (good) movies. But X-Men: First Class has raised the standard for me and prompted meta.
Beneath the cut, some character thoughts on Charles and Erik (respectively; I'll do relationship meta in the next installment). Spoilers for X-Men: First Class and potentially the first three movies, though I hereby decanonize the third, which I can only explain as Jean telepathically infecting everybody with a horrible, horrible dream.
Charles
Charles has always been presented as morally dubious. It’s easy to overlook this because a) his dubiousness is so vastly overshadowed by Erik’s and others’ and b) because he’s so darn nice and nigh universally loved. He is nice, kind, friendly, mature, well-intentioned, courageous, upstanding, etc.
But he is also inventing telepathic--and mutant--ethics from scratch, with something of the childlike blundering of Gilgamesh confronting death as ‘twere for the first time. Charles, it goes without saying, is an extremely powerful mutant, and he uses his telepathic powers with a liberty that would make a Jedi or a Betazoid or an Auron cringe. He routinely uses his skills to read minds without permission, to confuse and mislead people; in X2, he uses them to infiltrate the Oval Office in a way that rather undercuts his basic thesis that mutants and humans should have the same rights and responsibilities: show me a non-mutant human who can just bring a posse into the Oval Office at will. X-Men: FC shows this more extensively than the prior movies, including his psyching people into doing his will (in the short term) with no evident concern for their own free will.
Of course, he has strong and admirable inner restraints. He is not given to threats or large-scale/long-term manipulation. (His manipulations generally cease at moving the right person to the right place for a conversation, escaping from the building, etc.) Nonetheless, his practice raises moral and ethical questions of which he seems blissfully unaware. And this is not surprising given that he is the first telepath he’s ever known and is well into his adult life before he meets another. He has nothing to teach him telepathic ethics except science fiction, and even science fiction wasn’t much exploring it at the time he had to start creating his system.
His rather righteous belief in his own moral exactitude extends to, well, just about everything. In his way, he’s as dogmatic as Erik in his belief that has all the answers, and while his answers are more amicable, his certainty can be unsettling. Take, for example, his pronouncement to Erik that one optimizes one’s powers at the point between rage and serenity. Nice thought--which, as far as I can tell, is based on nothing but his own personal experience. It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not up to the standard of generations of trial, error, and refinement that produced the notion of following one’s dharma or “loving one another as I have loved you” or even the idea that fear leads to the Dark Side. Charles is making it up as he goes along.
Being right at the start of the existence of mutants as a society, he doesn’t have a lot choice, but his particular philosophy will inevitably be imperfect. One imagines mutant culture looking back across the centuries to his originary ethics and considering him something of a cave man--but an inspired one, for Charles is thoughtful and moral and doing his best, setting an impressive standard. The fact that it is not an unimpeachable standard only serves to make his character more realistic and sympathetic, and an interestingly flawed foil for the clearly more flawed Erik.
Erik
The fleshed out backstory we get for Erik in XM:FC sheds new light on his trajectory. His dominating preoccupation is fear for his people’s safety, expressed as a drive to protect them from the oppressors. This drive is liberally mixed with revenge, and it’s clear that for some years, revenge was all he thought he could attain to.
We learn in XM:FC that until he was about thirty Erik had no idea other mutants existed. He doubtless regarded himself as some weird freak of nature, an experience of absolute isolation that contextualizes his likening himself to Frankenstein’s monster. But Erik, fundamentally, is someone who thinks in terms of group affiliation. He was raised this way as a Jew, and his native personality, which is sociable and interpersonally confident, makes this framework all the more natural.
His life is defined by belonging to an in-group, and for the first thirty-odd years of his life, since he wasn’t aware of mutants as a population, this group had to be the Jewish nation. His experiences in the Holocaust, of course, solidified his belief in the group’s vulnerability and persecution. But for all his identification with their victimization, he does not reintegrate into Jewish society; rather, it seems, he becomes a loner. This makes sense given not only his personal goal of revenge but also the inevitability that his freakish powers would either make him an outcast or force him into a life of hiding in most any human community. A solitary, transient life is the easier option. Then, he meets Charles and other mutants, and while his paradigm of oppression and persecution remains the same, its object switches from primary affiliation with Jews to primary affiliation with mutants, i.e. people he can be himself around.
However, this presents Erik with a moral conundrum because, in his sincere belief that normal humans are/will be the oppressor and that mutants will/must defeat them or be exterminated, he makes an enemy of the Jewish nation, the vast majority of Jews being normal humans. This doesn’t come up in the movies, and I expect that Erik really, really doesn’t want to think about it. Given his early experiences, his attachment to the Jewish people and his empathy for their suffering cannot fail to be deep and enduring. That he has placed himself in the position of one of their potential exterminators must be incredibly hard to face, and it raises a host of concomitant questions about the value of “human” history, society, religion in a world--as he sees it--to be inherited by mutants.
His shift in loyalties exposes the strain of hypocrisy in his belief system. He hates oppression yet would be an oppressor of the very group whose oppression taught him to hate oppression. I suspect that the course of Erik’s moral development must be strongly related to how ably he negotiates this problem. The first two (I discount no. 3) movies suggest that he doesn’t ultimately negotiate it with very much insight. But that’s what fan fic is for...
no subject
Date: 2011-06-12 06:40 am (UTC)However, this presents Erik with a moral conundrum because, in his sincere belief that normal humans are/will be the oppressor and that mutants will/must defeat them or be exterminated, he makes an enemy of the Jewish nation, the vast majority of Jews being normal humans.
Indeed. Also, by making Sebastian Shaw identical with the doctor experimenting on Erik in the concentration camp, the film points out that mutants can be Nazis as well. To me, Erik's point of going from tragic hero to future villain isn't when he kills Shaw, or when he attempts to dump the rockets on the Russian-American fleet (both very understandable actions, especially in context); it's when he tells Shaw: "I agree with everything you said - but you killed my mother." Both because that is the moment where he accepts the explicitly fascist ideology, and because of the implication (though I doubt Erik ever lets him think this through) - that if Shaw had NOT killed Erik's mother (but otherwise had still been the same man, with the same Nazi past, killing someone else's mother instead), Erik would have been on his side.
Re: Charles and making up telepath ethics: I found it interesting that he does place restraints on himself re: reading other people's thoughts at this early stage, but they are determined by personal relationships rather than general ethics, i.e. he doesn't read Raven's thoughts because he has promised her not to, and he asks Erik for permission during the satelite conversation before accessing his memories. While otoh he has no compunction reading everyone else's thoughts, so the difference at this point is that he cares about Raven and Erik on a deeper level so has an feeling that he should ask/respect the request not to if given.
Otoh I alwas thought that one reason why Charles is so determinedly optimistic about human nature and clings to his choice of co-existence rather than warfare between normals and mutants is that he's afraid of what he might do if he ever saw things exactly as Erik does. Precisely because it would be so incredibly easy for him. He can control people. He can, as X2 demonstrates, kill them literally with a thought.
Speaking of killing: I found it fascinating that Charles keeps holding Shaw still after Erik put on the helmet. IMO there are layers there. There is some hubris/optimism - that Erik will stop at the last moment, as he did with Emma, and that he needs to make this Erik's choice. And maybe some pragmatism - Shaw is incredibly dangerous, and has powered himself up to be a bomb, and if Charles lets him go, Shaw might gain the upper hand again, defeat Erik and start WW III. And maybe also acknowledgment - Erik during their last chess game SAID - "I'll kill him; do you have it in you to let me" - and part of Charles does because he's seen what Shaw did to Erik (and in general), and feels Erik has the right to. But at the same time he hates that. The way the scene is staged Charles doesn't just hold Shaw at telepathic standstill but is in full contact with him while Erik kills him, which is an awesomely messed up telepathic self-punishment for letting Erik do this.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 03:48 am (UTC)Is there a difference between tragic hero and villain (besides the story's POV)? I do see Erik as a tragic hero, but an odd one in that his principal fall happens several decades before his demise, and the rest of career is, morally speaking, a slow, sad descent.
In any case, I agree with your assessment of Erik's fall, and I think he is aware its a fall on some level, hence the tears. Erik is absolutely a fascist, but his fascism has one characteristic that somewhat sets it apart from other ideologies based on bigotry: the difference he perceives between mutants and normal humans is real and objectively measurable. Even Charles accepts it as profound. This makes his case for the inevitability of conflict between the two groups hard to dismiss. I may post more on this later. (I feel like I did a post on it years ago, but alas, I don't think I properly tagged it.)
I love your assessment of Charles. I have nothing to add; you've given me lots of food for thought:)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 07:46 pm (UTC)