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!

Comments

[atpotch.livejournal.com]

Plus, call me superficial, but anyone who calls Vinnie Jones a dickhead can't be all bad... ;-)

TCH

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Not that he was typecast or anything...

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Well said.

I have read the Phoenix saga in the comics, and I thought it worked far better there for the reasons you mention.

It also wasn't, there, set against a wholesale devaluing of female power in which women get killed, canceled or (in the case of Storm) paid lipservice to their authority even though it is Wolverine running the show.

And you're quite right to point out how the friendship between Storm and Jean was completely lost. It reminds me that all of the female characters in this movie were seen through how they related to and were related to males. More than anything it suggested to me that this was written by males who couldn't see women as human beings somehow.

I did like how they handled Kitty Pryde. Forex, she actually got to fight, something they never let Rogue do, being fixated on the 50s high school 'better to give up my X to get a date because that is more important than anything else in the whole wide world'. And I say that having liked how they handled her character in the first two movies. I think Rogue's decision would have worked if she had been a major character, not a shallow "add-on" to the main plot.

But clearly this triggered a lot of my "issues" - given the time I grew up, I really came to love X-Men just because it had strong women in it as well as some apprehension of psychological depth, and those qualities just seemed to me dropped from the movie (as they were not in the first two) in favor of a far more shallow approach that actually seemed retrogressive to me.