So there’s this thing called the internet, and people use it to write stuff. Strangely, neither my bosses nor my three year old feel that it’s a priority for me to be one of those people. They have compelling arguments, involving words like “salary” and “moral responsibility” and “raising the next generation of hopefully enlightened fanboys.” However, due to a gift of time from some relatives, I was able to take a look at what other people have been writing on the internet while I’ve been away. Et voila, link post. Hopefully this will tide you over until Captain America.
Obviously, a bunch of people wrote about X-Men: First Class. A lot of comments here, a lot of posts everywhere else. I absolutely agreed with the commenters here who saw Xavier and his crew as the privileged, and Magneto’s team as the ones who didn’t have anything to gain playing by the rich white guy rulebook. When Angel and then Mystique defected, I couldn’t even argue with their individual decisions given the treatment they were receiving. But while Xavier is utterly clueless, Erik basically thinks the Nazis’ only mistake was misjudging who was the superior race. There’s separatism, and even separatism enforced with violence, which doesn’t bother me at all – and then there’s enslavement, mass murder, and genocide as self-defense and I get a little queasy on that side of the line. A friend who has not read the comics, but saw the film, thought I was perhaps reading too much of comics-Magneto onto film-Magneto, and he may be right. But “we are the better men” doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Here are some of my favorite pieces about the film, there may be a few in here you didn’t come across:
- Is ‘X-Men: First Class’ the Love Story of Professor X and Magneto? by Sarah Jaffe at Alternet
- Genocide and bubblegum – X-Men: First Class review by David Larsen at the New Zealand Listener
- The Best and Worst of ‘X-Men: First Class’ — Moral Complexity and Depressing Racial Politics by David Brothers at Comics Alliance
- Because it’s on Tumblr, a platform apparently built to obscure the origins of intellectual property, I literally cannot tell how to properly attribute any of this, but here’s an interesting discussion on a Tumblr called Sometimes the line walks you.
- A few belated thoughts on X-Men: First Class … at Chicks Who Kill Things
- You Left Out the Part About … by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times
- X-Women: First Class? at Comicbookgrrrl
- X-Men First Class: We Don’t Need No Stinking Allegories at Retconning My Brain
- And an old post that still rings true: Marvel, I Am Disappoint at Golden Coat Hanger
I saw Green Lantern, but didn’t end up reviewing it due to the lack of any female ass-kicking. Here’s some folks who did write about it:
- Green Lantern at Pointless Anecdotes
- Green Lantern: The Movie by Neo-Prodigy at Ars Marginal
- In Whitest Day, In Blackest Night: Race and the Green Lantern Movie on Black Comix
And everything else, some new, some older:
- Movies That Hate You: Terminator 2 – Judgment Day at Loose Cannon (You know I am a happy woman when another Movies That Hate You post comes out. If you’ve seen the film, you can skip the summary and go straight to the analysis.)
- Audiences Won’t Go to See an Action Movie That Stars Women by Robert J. Elisberg at HuffPo (really good numbers in this one)
- Bitchslap: A Column About Women and Fighting – Column 28: Princesses by Susan Schorn at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- Don’t Half-Ass Your Racism: Deconstructing Priest by Noah Berlatsky at SpliceToday
- Token female characters in ensemble action movies at new blog The Sounds of Distant Earth
- The Cowboys & Aliens Movie That Never Was by Charlie Jane Anders at io9 (the title of the post, and the first picture, and for HC that says it all)
- Catwoman: The Hyper-Sexualization of a Sexual Woman at Comicbookgrrrl (movie stuff towards the end)
- Why I Love Ass-Kicking Women on Our Turn: Feminism for Newbies
- A Largely Incoherent Rant about Gender in Fantasy Parodies at Pretty, Fizzy Paradise
- Form Follows Function: Dressing Your Video Game Characters, and Other Concerns by Becky Chambers at The Mary Sue
This post was originally published on Heroine Content, a feminist and anti-racist movie blog that ran from July 2006 to May 2012.