When I was around 8 years old, my family and I went to go see Bryan Singer’s X-men in theaters. I remember really enjoying because I was also a big fan of the Saturday morning cartoon. For years, I thought of it as a fun action movie. But then I watched it the opening scene years later and it gave the movie a depth that I had never realized that it had.
The main villain of the first X-men movie and the animated series was Magneto, also known Erik Lensherr, was a Holocaust survivor. Magneto was the first leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, which was an extremist group, which was devoted to asserting Mutant superiority. When I was younger, I thought that Magneto was just your run of the mill evil guy who wanted to destroy the human race because that’s simply what bad guys do. But taking into account what had happened to Magneto, I now understood why he felt the way he did. Erik and his entire family were sentenced to die by their government because they were a hated and feared minority. With the Mutant Registration Act in the works, the attempt at mutant genocide could have been a possibility. Magneto didn’t want to see the same thing happen twice and this time he could make things different. Stan Lee, Magneto’s creator said of the character that he "did not think of Magneto as a bad guy. He just wanted to strike back at the people who were so bigoted and racist... he was trying to defend the mutants, and because society was not treating them fairly he was going to teach society a lesson. He was a danger of course... but I never thought of him as a villain”.
The first time I saw X-Men I was 18, so I had a very different experience while watching this film. As a reproductive rights activist, my initial response was that it was a lot like forced sterilization to weed out “undesirables” which has happened in America a number of times—forced Norplant (a now US-banned contraceptive implant) insertions for women on public assistance, for example. I also found Magneto’s back-story to be incredibly interesting. I viewed Magneto as more in the “gray zone” than either villain or victim.
ReplyDeleteI classify Magneto as part of the gray zone because he began as a victim, but slowly took on characteristics of his oppressors, similar to some of the more privileged prisoners in concentration camps. I do not think that his victimization as a child is an excuse for attempting to dominate the world with mutant powers, nor to force every human to become a mutant. I think, however, it is easy to understand where he is coming from considering his past history. Being a hated minority causes bitterness and anger. Then, the majority uses this anger to create threats out of the hated minority, and the cycle continues. We can see this through racism, sexism, classism, and even religious discrimination in America today. There are a number of extremely prevalent stereotypes that display this: the angry African-American, the man-hating feminist, and the Muslim terrorist.
We can also compare Magneto’s mission to that of the Armenians when they acquired power over Turks for a brief period of time during which they attempted genocide on their oppressors. These attempts were crushed—just like Magneto’s through the X-Men series. I have questioned throughout the course whether or not there is such a thing as “reverse genocide,” and I think that Magneto would be an interesting place to start to answer such a question.