Why I like the X-Men
I saw X-Men 3 with my Dad last night. I thought it was great, my Dad not so much. I used to read my neighbor Arthur Milano’s X-Men collection for hours at a stretch back when we lived on Hemenway Street. I think that gives me a kind of mythical knowledge about the Marvel universe, so my mind fills in gaps and elaborates on subtle cues in the movie. If the movie fails to build up a rapport between the characters and the audience, I wouldn’t know because I already have that relationship.
The X-Men as a comic book in the 70s and 80s had a special appeal to people who feel like mutants in American society. Growing up in a Queer family makes you feel like one of the X-Men, misunderstood and reviled by the government, always under threat of attack by people who discover your secret. The whole part about the homo sapiens coming up a with a cure for mutants, and the mixed reactions that brought out in the mutant community, really resonated. My dad whispered that Magneto reminded him of Queer Nation during one of his speeches.
Today is “Blogging for LGBT Families Day” by the way, so you can see what others are saying on this topic as well. I blog on this topic every now and then, because there is still so much politicking going on around how the government wants to define what is and isn’t a family, that I think it’s important to remember that Queer families (by which I mean families with one or more LGBT parent) already exist, it’s not some new idea. My last post on the topic was around adoption laws.
June 1st, 2006 at 12:07 pm
I was really struck during “X2″ by the scene in which Iceman “came out” to his family — a not-so-subtle social parallel to the difficulty LGBT teens face in being honest with their families. Of course, when I came out to my mom, a SWAT team didn’t show up. She just said, “I know,” and went back to bed.
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:45 am
There’s a similar scene, a bit more disturbing, where the father of the mutant known as ‘Angel’ in the comics busts in on his son in the bathroom frantically trying to scape off the wings that are growing out of his back. It interesting that mutant powers seem to arise at puberty.
And check it out, Batwoman is a lesbian.
June 7th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
I’m not so negative on X-Men as Ben suggests - I thought it had a brilliant script, but lackadaisical direction, particularly of some actors. I didn’t feel as emotionally involved as I wanted to, and sometimes, as when Wolverine reacts to acknowledging his mentor’s death the acting was fine but the blocking and/or camera movement undercut it. As I remarked to Ben, coming out of the theater, why couldn’t Bryan Singer have waited until next year to revive Superman?
It also didn’t help that I was identifying more with Magneto during the first half of the movie, because he reminded me of my Queer Nation days. Of course, QN Boston fell apart because of people like him who wanted to go from defensive/offensive to pre-emptive…