Impalement: Race Gender in Bryan Singer's
2011; Issue: 85 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Feminism, and Media
ResumoWhy does the political content of a comic book movie matter? responses to (Bryan Singer, 2000) that have been posted by viewers on the popular website, Internet Movie Database (IMOB), underscore that many young comic book fans are deeply invested in the principles that comics extol. They rely on these narratives to enact models of selflessness and heroism that they can, however modestly, emulate in their own lives. (1) Over 1,300 viewer comments have been posted since the film was first released, and this passionate response is largely fueled by loyalty to the comics. In a sample of one hundred recent viewer comments, thirty-one demonstrate knowledge of the comics, cartoons, and video games or specifically mention that they are fans of X-Men. Among those who attempt to explain their enthusiasm for the comics, several stress their sense of the humanity of its narrative. An American viewer writes, X-Men is about family through friendship, loyalty, betrayal, being an outcast and finding your place, death, overcoming, sorrow [sic], happiness, anger, bitterness, love, and how our experiences shape us. It is about human beings. This sense of the power of the story is often associated with what viewers perceive to be its political theme of embracing diversity. A viewer from Australia writes, think that my attraction to 'X-Men' lay in the comic's story. ... story was about acceptance of all people, regardless of race, religion, social class etc. For many viewers it is the extension of this political message from page to screen that inclines them favorably toward the film. Yet even among those who do not identify themselves as fans of the comic book, many explicitly respond to the film's vision regarding prejudice. Overall, fifteen percent of the responses specifically understand the film to celebrate the idea of social tolerance. Some, however, perceive contradictions in the narrative regarding race. One viewer from England challenges the film's propaganda and politically correct doctrine. viewer writes, The mutants are going to replace us? And I am supposed to be happy about this, to cheer for them? Forget it. A second viewer from the U.S. muses that, while Senator Kelly, the arch-enemy of the mutants, is meant to be understood as wrong-minded, viewers of the film are also clearly supposed to feel sympathy for Kelly after he is tortured and killed by them. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While these comments register ambivalence in the film's message about race, equally striking is the absence of any significant commentary about gender. In her recent study of contemporary Hollywood film, Sharon Willis asserts, If cultural studies wants to continue privileging ambivalence and we need to be specific about what is being negotiated and what is as not up for as having been already negotiated. (2) I will argue that in gender is the form of difference that is presented as not up for negotiation, and it is the construction of gendered identity that becomes pivotal to its ambivalent treatment of race. Despite its superficial gestures toward tolerance, the film recoils from any significant embrace of racial difference by deploying a Freudian narrative of masculine subject formation--a narrative so commonplace and seamless as to be invisible to most viewers. It is ultimately this conventional narrative of masculine empowerment that secures the protagonist within a symbolic order associated with heterosexuality and racial assimilation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Malcolm X-Men? As many of the viewers' comments suggest, can be understood to privilege mutual understanding and tolerance over hatred and bigotry. Such politics are evident in the film's repeated portraits of the pain and loneliness that those categorized as different suffer--images ranging from the alienation Rogue/Anna Paquin suffers as a runaway, to the plaintive explanation Storm/Halle Berry offers to Senator Kelly that she sometimes hates humans because she is afraid of them, to the angry lament of Mystique/Rebecca Romijn-Stamos to the same senator that, It's people like you who made me afraid to go to school as a child. …
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