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| Erik Lensherr revenges his mother's death in Argentina |
A Review of X-Men: First Class by S. Linwick
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Written by Ashley Miller, Zack Stenz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn, Sheldon Turner, Bryan Singer
Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, and Jennifer Lawrence
Score: ☆☆☆☆
Even the title of this film cleverly invites its audience to examine the construction of class. (Here I employ a sense of “class” synonymous with “category.”) Perhaps the most salient question it poses is, “How does society decide when and where a species—a kind of class—ends or begins?” Or more specifically, “Are Professor Xavier’s X-Men necessarily ex-men (i.e., ex-humans)?” So although “first class” conventionally denotes a specific socioeconomic station, in this particular flick, the term remains productively ambiguous; “first class” may refer to an originary group (the founding members of the X-Men), a superhuman—or a paradoxically inhuman—division of humankind, a superlative set of individuals, or all of the above. Indeed, throughout the film the characters themselves struggle to determine whether they actually belong to any class and—if they do belong to a class—how they ought to conceptualize the nature of that class.
Erik Lensherr—who eventually assumes the moniker “Magneto”—proves the most problematic character in the throes of this existential class crisis. At some moments, I find Erik profoundly compelling, but at other moments I find him utterly unconvincing. Michael Fassbender deserves most of the credit for Erik’s magnetic appeal. His exchanges with Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Raven Darkholme (Jennifer Lawrence) are more often than not quite moving. Erik’s rationale for parting with Charles, however, seems tenuous at best, which—given Erik’s obvious intelligence—strikes me as one of the script’s most serious flaws.[1]
But the questions that X-Men: First Class raises, not the answers it offers are what—aside from the awesome action sequences and special effects—truly distinguish it. Suffice it to say that when I described this film to a friend as “the best movie of the year,” I was only being slightly facetious. Who knows? It very well could be. Mutatis mutandis.
[1] Because of his childhood experiences as a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II, Erik knows the genocidal horrors that humans are capable of committing. In fact, a Nazi eugenicist—Dr. Klaus Schmidt—who is convinced that Erik possesses superhuman magnetic power attempts to tap that power by torturing Erik and his mother. After Erik fails to comply with Schmidt’s injunction to move a coin with his magnetic power, Schmidt has Erik’s mother escorted into the room. Schmidt then explains that he will count to three, and if Erik cannot move the coin within that space of time, he will shoot her. By the count of three, none of Erik’s efforts prove successful, and Schmidt keeps his promise. Enraged by his mother’s murder, Erik discovers that he can access his powers through his rage, and he promptly demolishes Schmidt’s quarters.
But this delights Schmidt, who is no mere Nazi. In actuality, Schmidt is none other than Sebastian Shaw, a “mutant” with the ability to absorb, radiate, and generally manipulate energy. Shaw’s grand plan in X-Men: First Class is to trigger a nuclear war that will wipe out all but the strongest living organisms—in his view, to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff—and thereby to accelerate the evolutionary process. Somewhat surprisingly, just before Erik revenges himself on Shaw, he admits that he endorses Shaw’s program—he “agree[s] with everything [Shaw] said.” “But you killed my mother,” he adds as he forces the same coin that he could not move in time to prevent his mother’s murder through Shaw’s skull. Like Shaw, Erik wishes to rid the earth of non-mutants—in other words, those conventionally classified as “normal.” Yet if he truly agrees with Shaw, he would have to concede that his own mother was one of those basically normal and unspectacular humans who, at the end of the day, didn’t really matter. Shaw is motivated by his passion for eugenics. Erik, in contrast, is motivated by a desire to protect forms of life that society deems “abnormal.” I can’t help but think, then, that because Erik’s concerns are essentially ideological, he might do well to spend more time grinding an ideological axe with Professor Charles Xavier and less time playing with magnets.
