X-Men 3: The Women

[shewhomust]

aireon comments that she quite disliked X-3, despite liking the two earlier films, for its (probably unconscious) subtext in which women are consistently disempowered.

It's a fair point. Indeed, you could summarise the Phoenix strand of the plot as saying that a powerful woman must be contained, and if she can't be contained, she must be destroyed - she'll thank us for it in the end. I can see two reasons for this, one of them external to the film (the history of the character) and the other internal (paradoxically, it's the decision to make a "grown-up" movie with psychology in it, rather than an adolescent SF and superpowers extravaganza).

Jean Grey was one of the original X-Men, making her first appearance back in 1963, in the days when a superhero team had to have a token woman, but she couldn't be allowed to do anything so unfeminine as hit people - super-powered yet disempowered. The Fantastic Four's Sue Storm was Invisible Girl, which sums it up. Jean Grey's code name was Marvel Girl, the name of the company plus "girl" - which is as good as a label reading TOKEN WOMAN (Peter Bradshaw, reviwing X-Men 3 for the Guardian comments that Jean Grey is "the only X-Person who does not have a campy, Gladiator-ish handle", unaware that her handle is so embarrassing that it cannot even be spoken). Her powers are telekinetic, all in the mind - she can fight as a full member of the team and never risk breaking a fingernail. Yet, when the time came to modernise the team, it became obvious that mental powers would be easy to increase - if they are all in the mind, they are limited only by our belief and imagination: and we were willing to do a lot of believing, a lot of imagining. All that was needed was an explanation of why Jean's powers were now so much greater than they had been in the past: was the Phoenix an external force, an effect of the cosmic radiation which triggered the transformation, or was it a hitherto suppressed part of Jean herself?

As I was saying, The Last Stand takes the decision to avoid grand SF effects in favour of psychological drama: inevitably, it makes the Phoenix force part of Jean's own psyche, powerful, amoral, thwarted by Professor X's containment. Throughout the X-Men's history, the Professor frequently appears as a faintly sinister presence, gathering a team of adolescents and sending them into battle, propelled by his mental commands. His particular relationship with Jean, the other telepath on the team, may appear, shall we say, unprofessional? But The Last Stand is unambiguous in laying the blame for the disaster at the Professor's door. Its version of the Phoenix saga is a tale of female disempowerment, but it is a cautionary tale: a powerful female, capable of great good, becomes a destructive force because two men who should be her mentors instead squabble over who is to control her.

The emphasis on psychological angst over fist fights similarly weakens the character of Rogue. Her power - to mimic the powers of any mutant she touches - is an effective weapon in combat. She can neutralise her opponent, and then turn their powers against their team-mates (always a seductive theme for those readers who want to know who is the stronger of two heros who do not fight it out because they are on the same side). It might be a little inconvenient in daily life, but as long as Rogue was an evil mutant, one of the enemy, we were not concerned with her daily life. The X-Men films have consistently played down Rogue's combat power, and played up her romantic disability - and this has an emotional power of its own. But it is the weakness which results from a strength, and that strength is downplayed to the extent that it passed by one of the friends I saw the movie with.

I won't comment on the treatment of Storm, because I found it confused: she is given rank, but little personality. In particular, I was sorry that her long friendship with Jean seemed to have vanished.

On the plus side, there's Kitty Pryde: young, uncertain, with another of those feminine, intangible powers. And didn't she use to be Jewish? But in the grand finale, Kitty saves the day!