Charles Xavier was perhaps
most happy when he had a mansion full of engaged, happy students, moving every
day a further stitch away from their often insanely troubling pasts. But of
course, at least in the movies, it wasn't the like of the robust kid Cyclops
that garnered his most intense interest (in John Byrne's comic version, it was), but rather the students that never
lost the "viper" in them, those who might lash out at him and wound
him emotionally, like Mystique and Wolverine. So perhaps there was a sense that
the other students were mostly a joyous blur that could take his mind off
things -- when he saw them they were a rush of Christmas gifts amply piled up
under a Christmas tree -- while the ones who could get under his skin were the
students who had his interest and respect because they couldn't be distracted
or lead away from recognizing that not all was right with him. In this assessment of the Xavier-school-for-mutants reality, that Charles was
mostly interested in them, didn't show that he was most keenly interested in
the most worse-off of his students, but that he had an admirable nose for those
who saw that he was leading a life which enabled his distractions with mutant
children bon-bons, but which when it lapsed, quietened down, would leave him
open for more confrontational engagements whereby he himself might be helped
out.
In 2027, most other mutants
are dead, but given our sense of Xavier as someone who effused at charming,
smiling, ever-happy children -- "look at the magic I've made of
them! look how grateful they are towards me" -- it would have worked just as well if the movie hadn't chosen a
post-apocalyptic type setting and just gone with a normal advancement of our
current times, and had the students naturally lose interest him as he did most
of them, when they became complicated adults of aging skin and rebuffing, self-assured mien. He
is alone now with Logan, and he's not getting away with the self-presentation
of someone who's more right and good than everyone else, because Logan has seen
him fry the minds of a hundred people and seen his mind lapse away from
remembering this horrible reality. Charles challenges him, saying, "you just
want me to die," and Logan does him the favour of not doing much to
dissuade him of this belief -- he's being cared for because he is loved, but
the way he is now is equally as much a burden. Charles is in a sense here
exposed as someone who requires people to fit preconceptions of them, built out
of a need to supply his own needs and which actually chains them, as even now
he is trying to persuade Logan that he is yet still the young man who could never face up
to how much good is in him, a man who has never really grown an inch because
Charles so enjoys being the empowered advisor who can see the good in one that
ostensibly no one else can. He is exposed in a "senility" -- a
recurring, self-harmful pattern of addressing reality -- he himself had possessed
from his start.
Perhaps out of an
unconscious realization that Charles is to be avoided as just a pest almost out
of the world, the enemies of the world really aren't that keen to nab him --
"he'll drop off at some point; let's just try our best to pretend it's
already happened." Whom they want is an escaped girl who's been enhanced
with mutant abilities. Whom they want is a power they can dispatch at their own
enemies, as a whirlwind of fantastically quick, metallic fury. Later in the film she is discussed,
motioned towards, as someone who, after all, is mostly just a kid. But the way
she is introduced into the narrative -- someone who shows no fear and who
executes her destruction like a fully seasoned pro -- makes it difficult to
understand her as such. Too much prepossession. Too much intelligent
discernment. Too much contained desire to just amply express; have her time. She's closer to
being throughout the patient T2 advanced robot than ever the outwardly petulant
who keeps hidden deep insecurity. In playing with the car lock, activating it and
de-activating it constantly, she seems not really the petulant child Logan sees
her as, nor the playful child Charles sees her as, but merely the sane young adult
providing everyone the much needed feedback -- "awaken out of your
preconceptions!" -- that at this point she is beyond being the one who should actually be steering -- like,
duh! -- the car. When she does so later in the movie, we know how competent she is going to be at it that you're played only as an obtuse fool if you were surprised how readily she took to it.
As they flee their
opponents, Logan, Charles, and the girl form a kind of family. They find
themselves in a long encounter with a real one, a kind-hearted black family
that owns a supply of horses and an affluent ranch. What comes to mind is that
here, Charles is being provided the home and acceptance he once offered
Mystique, and he lapses into sheer gratitude -- a sleeping baby in a warm crib,
saying more than anything else, "mama, me so happy!" He draws Logan to
stay longer than Logan intended, but the film doesn't quite succeed in making
them, this family, seem only those to rally around. Any supporter of Trump
could be imagined offering a stranger who helped them a home, a meal, and a
good rest, if it also served to establish them in the 1950s' sense as the sort
of bedrock suburban family a nation is built on -- if it also secretly
flattered them. But if he found his guests were actually big city liberals...
And so it goes in this film, when Logan, even after saving his host one more
time, is fit only to be dispatched -- shot with a shotgun -- when he is
revealed as, like, an actual "stranger," a mutant. Too much
cognitive dissonance -- "I knew you were strange but not like, strange
strange!" -- for the distraught, overwhelmed host to handle, and you have a sense that
something about the whole idea of natural family seems a dumb idea at this
caution-worthy time, as if it's smart to infiltrate the family you keep with an
overt artificial element to keep it awake to itself as a mental formulation for
the "real" lending only to unconscious narrative role-playing and
dumbness. "Would you like to stay over? We have bed!" -- Yes, we know
what kind of bed you're actually offering us here -- the bed of the unwary: the one you'll ultimately prove victim to.
As legendary, beloved
superheroes die in this film, you keep asking yourself, is this for real -- at
this point on, are we really going on without them? We do this even though the
film does not equivocate in their being absolutely, one hundred percent, dead.
I for one was glad in this confidence. It felt as if what we need today is one
last drawing in of everything that is wise and developed of the past, and then
dispatch them as we set out and inscribe our own future, with them now only active
as a presence in our memories. The painter Degas worked this way; he would
study intensely his subject, and then never return and do his painting all from
memory. This way, the object influences but doesn't take precedence over your
own mind -- you don't only represent, only transplant, but express and transform and thereby
create something new to the world. It felt like a
kind of book-burning, yet one Nazis would never do; for it's not rejecting the
past for it being foul but out of realization that some things can no longer be
kept in site for us to see if we're equal to founding a society that isn't simply a lesser son of greater sires. It's
exhilarating to see this executed, this desire to see who we are once "you're" out of the way, even if it proves to be the
case that we're more the effulgence that comes off from any enterprising eager start than any kind
of steady way.
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