by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched X-Men: The Last
Stand, third in the X-Men movie sequence — there have been five “group” films
as well as two different versions of the origin of the X-Men’s most popular
character (at least in the modern era), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), he of the
scythe-like claws that emerge between his fingers (not out of
the tips of them, by the way) made of a synthetic metal called “adamantium,”
which make him a super-powerful fighter. The original X-Men comic books were
one series from Marvel I don’t
remember reading when they were new — I do remember Spider-Man, The Mighty Thor, The Fantastic Four,
Namor: The Sub-Mariner, Captain America and
Iron Man from my childhood, but
somehow X-Men eluded me even
though Marvel’s head honcho, Stan Lee, created them in 1963. At the time the
African-American civil rights movement was at its early peak and it was obvious
that in creating a fictitious race of mutants living among ordinary people and
suffering the effects of discrimination, Lee and his co-writers and artists
were creating at least sort of a political parable — but when the Queer-rights
movement emerged at the end of the 1960’s the X-Men themselves became an even
stronger metaphor for anti-Queer discrimination than anti-Black discrimination.
Throughout the original films in this sequence (X-Men from 2000, X2: X-Men United from 2003 and this one from 2006) much is made of
the presumption that if the mutants just stay “in the closet” and don’t reveal
their super-powers to the world, they will be treated just fine. The films are
full of characters asking just why
the mutants feel they have to be “out,” and even more worrisome to the bigots
in the Marvel universe, why they have to be so open and in-your-face about it.
X-Men: The
Last Stand makes the metaphor even more
explicit since the story centers around the discovery by Warren Worthington
(Michael Murphy), CEO of a major pharmaceutical company that has taken over the
island of Alcatraz and turned the former prison into their research lab, of a
serum that can “cure” the mutants once and for all and turn them into normal,
non-superpowerful humans. Even though the federal government has in the
meantime advanced so much in its acceptance of mutants and granting at least
formal civil rights to them that there is a Cabinet-level Department of Mutant
Affairs whose secretary is a mutant, Hank McCoy a.k.a. “Beast” (Kelsey Grammer)
— a mutant whose skin is blue and who therefore would have a hard time staying
in the closet in any case — nonetheless the announcement that a “cure” is
available and will be offered to any mutant who wants it sends the paranoia of
the mutant community into overdrive and has them worried that the so-called
“cure” will be forced on them and will lead to the extermination of the mutant
race. (By coincidence, the night before Charles and I watched this movie I’d
been talking with an old friend about the nature-vs.-nurture theories of what
causes sexual orientation, and I had expressed the same point of view as the
radical mutants in the movie: that I hope they don’t discover a biological basis for homosexuality
because if they can figure out what causes it, they can figure out a way to
eliminate it altogether — and they will.)
The secret to the “cure” is a mutant
who has been squirreled away in the Worthington compound on Alcatraz and whose
mutation is that he can neutralize the powers of any other mutants in the
vicinity (more than any other X-Men
movie I’ve seen this makes it clear what a strong debt Deprivers author Steven-Eliot Altman owed to the X-Men legend); Worthington’s scientists have drawn his
blood and figured out how to replicate his anti-mutant mutant genes but not how to synthesize them, which means they’re
dependent on keeping him alive and in their custody to keep making the “cure.”
As things turn out — we had an intimation of this in a prologue sequence (one
of two) in the beginning of the film in which a 10-year-old boy spends an hour
in the bathroom, much to the consternation of his parents (gee, when I
spent that much time in the bathroom during
my early teen years it meant I was jacking off!), and we cut to the inside of
the bathroom and see a lot of cutting implements, heavily bloodied, and a few
feathers (which makes us wonder what the kid was doing in there, butchering a
chicken?) — and then we see the boy’s back, with two deep scars where his wings
(that’s his mutation) used to be.
Later there’s a beautiful worm-turning scene in which the same character, now
an adult and played by Ben Foster, is revealed to be Worthington’s son, with
his wings (they grew back, of course) encased in a heavy, obviously painful
harness. Worthington père has
Worthington fils strapped to an
operating table and is about to inject him with the “cure” — “So much for it
being ‘voluntary,’” the son grimly replies — when the son musters the strength
to break free from the operating table, push his wings out of the harness and
fly, openly and proudly, out of his dad’s redoubt.
Given that the earlier
sequence seemed all too reminiscent of the stories I’ve heard of boys in early
puberty either trying to cut off their penises or pouring acid or bleach on
them when they realized their sexual attractions were going to run to other
males, the scene in which Worthington, Jr. breaks free and flies, literally and figuratively, in proud, bold assertion of his mutant
status is (at least for me) the most beautiful sequence in the entire movie. Of
course, being a comic-book based movie aimed at the summer blockbuster
audience, X-Men: The Last Stand
also had to have plenty of baroque all-stops-out action scenes, and in order to
tie it in to the rest of the X-men mythos it had to have important starring roles for Professor Charles Xavier
(Patrick Stewart) and Eric “Magneto” Lensherr (Ian McKellen — and yes, I
couldn’t help but wonder how someone who’s Gay in real life feels about
enacting stories so close to the real-life dilemmas Queer people face about
when, where, how and how far to “come out”) as leaders of the good X-men mutant
faction and the bad Brotherhood mutant faction, respectively — though they’re
still seen together in one of the prologue sequences checking out a young girl
who can levitate objects at will and who will turn out to be Jean “Phoenix”
Gray (Famke Janssen), girlfriend of Logan a.k.a. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman,
top-billed) until she was presumably killed at the end of episode two. Not that
that matters because this is a
fantasy, and in a fantasy even people you’ve seen die can always be revived by authorial fiat (I’ve joked that the biggest challenge faced by the
writers who did the Frankenstein
sequelae was how to rescue the Monster from the cataclysm that had apparently
killed him at the end of the immediately previous film). It turns out Jean Gray
avoided being drowned by creating herself an air bubble with her super-powers,
and she’s a “Level Five” mutant — the most powerful one there’s been so far —
whose powers threaten the entire existence of humanity. Naturally there’s a
great struggle for her loyalties and her soul between Xavier and Magneto —
between the mutant who wants to foster mutant-human cooperation and the one who
thinks the sooner mutants exterminate non-mutant humanity and take over the
world for themselves, the better — and it’s complicated by Jean being a
multiple personality, with a “normal” side and a mutant side that are
alternating in control of her body. (According to imdb.com, Janssen did
research into dissociative identity disorder — the current name for what used
to be called multiple personality disorder — to make sure her performance would
be clinically correct.)
These plot lines blend about as well as the strands in
a pot of spaghetti and they don’t get sorted out until the very end of the
film, in a climactic sequence between the surviving mutants from Xavier’s
school (Xavier himself having been killed by Gray in her “Phoenix” identity
about an hour into this 108-minute movie — oddly the running time is not listed on imdb.com — though, once again in line with
the principle that in a fantasy even when you see someone die that doesn’t mean
you won’t see them again, Xavier comes back to life in a post-credits sequence
by inhabiting the body of a comatose patient in a hospital), the mutants of
Magneto’s “Brotherhood” and the U.S. Army, which has devised plastic firearms
(since Magneto’s big superpower is he can neutralize anything made of metal)
that shoot hypodermic needles armed with the “cure.” There’s a spectacular (and
somewhat ridiculous) scene in which, in order to get his crew to Alcatraz,
Magneto lifts the Golden Gate Bridge off its moorings and sends it to Alcatraz
instead, and the final scene delivers the action goods but is an odd ending
indeed to a movie that’s as schizoid as Jean Gray’s personality: half
shoot-’em-up summer superhero action blockbuster, half film of ideas. Charles
and I got the DVD of the most recent X-Men movie, Days of Future Passed (released earlier this year and the much-ballyhooed return of Bryan
Singer, who helmed the first two X-Men movies in the cycle — alas, the real-life civil suit against him by
two young men who claimed that as teenagers they were invited to parties at
Singer’s home, drugged and raped by Singer and his Gay friends led the studio,
20th Century-Fox, to pull Singer from promotional duties for the
film and cast a pall on the project) but chose not to watch it until we’d seen
this one, the only other X-Men
film we hadn’t seen before, first: so many of the Marvel-universe films are
dependent for sheer comprehensibility on what’s happened in the previous
installments you practically have
to watch them in sequence just to make sense of them! At least X-Men:
The Last Stand was written by just two
people, Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn (any relation to Sean and Michael? His
imdb.com page doesn’t say), and effectively directed by Brett Ratner after
Singer bailed on the assignment to direct the mega-flop Superman
Returns instead — and though it neither has
not should be expected to have a coherent plot, the movie still bolsters my
general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely
proportional to its number of writers.
