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X-Men
Directed by Bryan Singer
Starring Bruce Davison, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Anna Paquin, Brett Morris.
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At first it looks like film-at-six footage of another Jesse Helms rant on the floor of Congress as Senator Robert Jefferson Kelly (R-KS) (Bruce Davison) thunders away: "Do we want these people teaching our children in schools?" The American people demand that all of these people be placed on a national registry. We want to know who they are and where they are." Who are these folks? Sadomasochists? People with AIDS? Boy-lovers? No-- they're mutants: people with various extraordinary powers who look just like everyone else but have extrasensory or extra-physical abilities, such as reading minds, controlling weather, sending out deadly X-rays from their eyes, or being able to drain another person's energy through simple touch. They are, in the title and plot of the film, X-Men.

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Bryan Singer's X-Men is a huge summer hit, and while largely a failure as art or entertainment, it has enough-- probably unintentional-- perversity to garner attention. It used to be that queer themes would be hidden in mainstream movies, that it was possible to do a "queer reading" of a film and find a subtext to which a gay audience might relate: is Frankenstein really about the loneliness of the outsider freak? Are Auntie Mame and Blanche DuBois really drag queens? What was the real relationship between James Dean and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause? Such speculations were 1) good dinner-party talk and 2) one of the few ways that gay people could find gay content in movies. But X-Men does something very curious. Rather then hiding the "gay subtext" in the plot, it foregrounds it so much that it almost is the plot. When Davidson's right-wing demagogue insinuates that mutants are a threat to American values, families, and national security, any thinking viewer is reminded of contemporary anti-queer rhetoric. This isn't simply intentional, it's in your face.

The problem is that Singer goes nowhere with his main idea. Based on the Marvel comics series and written by Tom DeSanto and David Hayter, X-Men is an odd mixture of super-special F/X laced through a story that keeps threatening to be about something but never quite gets there. And disconcertingly, when it does (sort of) get there, you have to wonder what is going on in director Singer's head. The plot is-- more or less-- out of the comics, with all of the narrative boldness and silliness that that implies.

Somewhere in the near future, the mutant phenomenon becomes widely known and hot media (like the old Time magazine covers stories about "The New Homosexuals") and this stirs a backlash against mutants. Two older, ex-best friends, mutants have taken opposing sides. Professor Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X (Patrick Stewart), runs an institute for "gifted children" that helps young mutants deal with and use their powers for good. He wants mutants to be accepted for their gifts and be like everyone else. But evil Eric Magnus Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto (Ian McKellen), is vengeful about anti-mutant sentiment and fearful of the backlash is planning on making all humans mutants by subjecting them to incredible amounts of electrical energy (unfortunately such a trick would kill him). So to carry this out Magneto wants to kidnap Marie, a.k.a. Rogue (Anna Paquin), a young woman who is able to take on the powers of other mutants and use her to electrify the world with his own magnetic powers. Rogue finds a protector in Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a mutant whose power involves self-healing and regeneration, but who has, inexplicably, been forced to undergo an operation that allows razor sharp metal blades to come out of his hands.

But all this is just filler-- the real plot here is the fights between Professor X and Magneto that comes to a crisis when the latter attempts to mutantize all of the worlds leaders-- with magnetic rays shooting out of the head of the Stature of Liberty-- as they meet for a summit meeting on Ellis Island. Now, if Singer had had the nerve, or the intelligence, to follow though the political implications of his basic idea-- assimilationist versus a more aggressively minority politic-- X-Men might have been wildly interesting and audacious. Alas, it is not.

The basic problem here is that Singer makes Magneto a complete villain. His plan to convert-- or is it "recruit"?-- regular humans to mutants is portrayed as imminently crackpot and dangerous (he does not realize that the human will quickly die). So after setting up an interesting conflict, Singer pulls the plug on it by refusing to play fair: there is no real moral or political edge here because Magneto is simply a bad guy and Dr. X is a good guy. This is bad enough, but what makes the film even odder-- or whatever-- is that Singer takes great pains to make Magneto Jewish, and a Holocaust survivor. The film opens with the young, teenage Eric Magnus Lehnsherr (Brett Morris) being herded into a concentration camp with his parents. He fights with the Nazi guards and discovers that in anger he can bend metal-- the camp fence-- with his powers. This is all interesting, but what pans out later in the plot is that this experience has made Magneto so paranoidly determined to resist all mainstream political power that he'd rather destroy it than work with it. But locating this so clearly in a Jewish context, the film cannot help but resemble classic anti-Semitic fears of a Jewish plot to obtain world power: The Protocols of the Elders of Mutant.

This is not the first time that Singer has brought together oddly juxtaposed homosexual and Jewish themes. In his 1998 Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen played a former Nazi concentration camp officer hiding out in suburban America who becomes the object of intense homo-obsession of a cute teenage boy who discovers who he really is. The film was not very good, but compellingly fascinating and disquieting because Singer's point of view-- were all Nazi's homosexuals? were homosexuals attracted to Nazi uniforms?-- was so elliptical. Unfortunately nothing that interesting happens here-- so much of the film is just snazzy, though obvious computer generated effects-- but we are still left with the confusions and odd politics of Singer's bringing together homosexuality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and politics.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com