Sky K Studios Movie Blog

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

The novelty of the first X-Men movie was that mutants can allegorize social alienation like nobody's business. The novelty of the second X-Men movie was that damn, Wolverine just goes around killing people, doesn't he! With Part Le Troixieme, we have all the metaphorical baggage and body count you could ask for, but no real new elements to make it interesting. Frazier Crane makes an admirable Beast, the evil mutants would have been cooler if they had had more screen time, and Angel never should have been played by whiny little Russell from Six Feet Under. The guy's a handsome, wealthy playboy! What happened to the days when handsome wealthy playboys were played by people like Cary Grant? Not that Cary Grant would have looked good flying around with a pair of bird wings, but still. The X-Men could use a dapper charmer to offset all the mopey metaphorical baggage handling.

Any comics fan knows that boys and girls have slightly different roles to play in comics scenarios. The X-Men series, like Spider-Man, Batman and most superhero movies, offers a lot of Big Character Issues, and notably, most of the female characters' Big Character Issues are about S-E-X.

• Rogue's power is that she absorbs the identity and powers of anyone she touches, traumatically for both her and the victim; this has prevented her from getting it on with her boyfriend Iceman, because no one at Xavier's School for the Gifted can find the URL for Good Vibrations.
• Mystique, presented in true ComiCon form as a really hot, bumpy-blue naked chick, falls out of Magneto's good graces when a de-mutantizing dart leaves her a hot, white depilated naked chick on the floor of a van; the movie wrings a cheap laugh out of how ugly Magneto finds a hot naked white chick who is no longer a mutant, and then Mystique squeals on the Evil Mutants because "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned".
• Most telling, and most central to the plot, Jean Grey returns from the dead as Dark Phoenix, psychically powerful beyond all control. How does she manifest this new unleashed power? By fucking Cyclops out of existence. Back at the ranch, monitored in her (hot) underpants on a shiny hospital table, she tries to do Wolverine into oblivion too, but he gets away from her wily vagina.

This all brings to mind what Twisty over at I Blame The Patriarchy calls "the sex class". (I'm sure someone else thought of it. If you know, let me know.) Under patriarchy, sex is located on and in women's bodies. Men act out of courage, or out of fear, out of fellow-feeling, or for power; women act, or are acted upon, because of sex. It's a useful heuristic for understanding, say, why it's harder than you'd think to tease out a space for non-patriarchal "erotica". Or just imagine Hugh Jackman lying on the hospital table, writhing in his underpants, threatening the world because he's just so fucktastic. Much less giggle-worthy if you just have him stick his claws in people.

Of all the main character mutants in the movie, Storm has the least sexified problems. Her big problem is that she's played by Halle Berry.

posted by Josh K-sky at 1:28 PM