Magneto, Nietzsche and the Slans
Reader Nate Winchester wrote in to ask my opinion of the latest X Man movie, FIRST CLASS.
The short answer is that I loved it. I am easy to please when it comes to movies. And this is the first time I have ever liked the Banshee or Havoc, who otherwise I always thought were rather second-rate style X-Men.
I am even easier to please if the movie is a 1960’s period piece and the villain is straight out of James Bond films, complete with escape-submarines nestled under yachts when the subs are so high class they have well appointed dining rooms and wine cellars.
I have a friend who simply loathes X-Men, because the idea of superhumans evolved to the next stage of Darwinian evolution is a Nazi idea, which divides the world into übermenschen and untermenschen, superhumans and subhumans (with us poor mortals as subhumans). I have another friend who adores the X-Men because they remind her not just of the Jews suffering persecution under the Nazis, but of the blacks struggling for Civil Rights in the Western Democracies, or any minority seeking the acceptance of a hostile public.
My opinion? I think the power of any story that reaches a mythical stature — and I will politely but firmly hold the field against anyone who claims that comics books do not reach that stature more-so than mainstream novels — the power of myth is that it is like a lamp that illuminates and is reflected back from many of the things in our surrounding mental environment, not just one.
I think my two friends who say opposite things are both right.
In the latest X Man movie, the threat of the mutants to the human beings is made both chilling and explicit: Xavier says that Homo Sapiens were in their day the mutants who wiped out the Neanderthals, and that there is no paleontological record of the Neanderthals ever surviving in a terratory once the H. Sap moved in.
The Christian idea of the Superman, the man glorified above man, the man reborn, also has the ability to read the hearts of men, and sinful man was also afraid of Him, and sought to destroy Him. However, the real superman in real life was superior enough that he did not retaliate by killing his enemies with fire from heaven: instead he granted them eternal life like his own, and healed them with his wounds. He overcame by suffering, not by conquest. (Even those who do not believe in Christ, or who take Him to be a literary invention, should notice that if He is a literary invention, it is great literature, much more striking and insightful and eerie than Nietzsche’s poor parables.)
My own opinion is that my friend has a point, but his is not the only point to be made.
(The real Darwin theory does not say that whatever comes after man will be better in the human sense of better — merely that they will be more adapted to the environmental conditions, whatever they are, of their era and environment, assuming natural selection is allowed by civilization to operate. It was goofy philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche and Marx who took the idea of natural selective speciation and deified it into a principle of eternal upward progress. There is no progress in Darwin, only meaningless and undirected change. Rats are not ‘better’ than Brontosaurs merely because they came later. HG Wells in making the Eloi and Morlocks our descendants was closer to the real Darwin than Nietzsche and his antichristophilic ranting.)
In terms of the movie, the scene where Charles first meets Mystique as a child is one of the most moving I have seen, either in comic books or on screen, of any X-Man story line. Having her be his childhood friend, the bravery and certainty with which he promised her sanctuary, was perfect. A brilliant twist or take on the X-Man mythos.
In the same way that I have always sort of thought that the Green Lantern Corps were the parallels of the Lensmen of E.E. Doc Smith translated to comic book format, I always thought of the X-Men as the comic book parallels of the Slans of A.E. van Vogt. Jommy Cross and Professor Xavier would get along just famously, and so would Magneto and the Tendrilless Slans.
And so this has won all X-Men (except for Forge, who annoys me) a near and dear place in my heart.
POSTSCRIPT: In related comic book movie news, John Nolte over at Big Hollywood reports that the Mouths of Sauron who form our Mainstream Media are already beginning to heap scorn upon the upcoming CAPTAIN AMERICA flick, calling it simplistic and jingoistic. http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2011/07/20/hollywood-reporter-captain-america-sticks-to-simplistic-patriotic-origins/
This is great news! I was so afraid that this would be another castrated version of the American Dream, as was displayed in recent GI JOE “Great International Hero from Brussels.” It is a rule of thumb that whatever the Mouth of Sauron badmouths must have some good to it.
John Nolte puckishly quips: “With the MSM , patriotism is always “simplistic” and/or “jingoistic.” You never read reviews that say, “simplistically angsty” or “simplistically brooding” or “simplistically dark.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
