X-Men: First Class

The odd history of the mutants and their debt to America’s civil rights movement

Comic strip characters like the X-Men who float around in history are dicey customers. They live in varied time and geographical zones and interact with chronological periods ranging, in this edition, from Nazi-occupied Poland to the Cold War nuclear stand-off of 1962. But since they are virtual characters, they engage themselves  with ether. Nothing they say or do changes history, and so in this prequel, when the younger X-Men deal with the Cuban missile crisis, we get to see a unique, action-packed narrative that has no bearing on recorded events.

The movie begins with the boy Eric Lehnsherr in a concentration camp in 1944. The Holocaust  has already exterminated a large portion of the European Jewish population, yet his ability to bend metal with his mind has no impact on events and cannot even alter the whimsical execution of his mother by a Nazi officer. Or later in 1962, when Soviet ships steam towards Cuba, no twisting Lensherr does to the heavy metal of war alters the process of last-minute diplomacy that actually averted the crisis.

Sometimes, the creators insert metaphorical meaning to fill the vacuum, such as the idea that the relationship between Professor Charles Xavier, or Professor X (McAvoy), the founder of the X-Men, and Lensherr, or Magneto (Fassbender), is actually a reference to two of the central characters associated with the Black Civil Rights Movement, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X; that in fact the ‘Brotherhood of Mutants’ founded by Magneto refers to the more radical and militant political approach of Malcolm X.

Yet, deconstruction cannot explain why grown men and women sit in awe of these cardboard figures, laugh at their wit and repeat their lines in obvious enjoyment. It is an addiction, a compulsion that drives one audience to distraction and another to bemusement. But for both, this narrative is clearly an upgrade in the series.

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