July 9th, 2012
Last week Santino had a triptych about women in Marvel movies. It’s well worth your time.
Another thing Marvel’s feminist critics are missing is X-Men: First Class, which I’ve argued can reasonably be read as a movie about Mystique. All of which got me thinking about Mystique and women’s issues in movies and X-Men: Last Stand.
Last Stand isn’t a great movie. It uses up three or four major stories from the X-Men universe, one of which is “The Cure” subplot from Astonishing X-Men.
If you haven’t read it, or don’t recall, the Cure is a serum developed to reverse the X-gene mutation, basically turning homo superior back into homo sapiens. In the comics (as in Last Stand) the Cure comes fraught with all sorts of existential angst for the X-Men regarding questions of identity and tribal loyalty. But it also occurs to me that it could easily be read as a parable about abortion.
Both the comics and Last Stand feature conflict between mutants who willingly seek out the Cure and the X-Men, whose position is that the Cure is an abomination and a threat to mutant-kind. The audience is meant to side with the X-Men, of course. But why? The mutants who seek out the Cure for themselves have their own reasons for doing so. They’re not compelling any other mutants to take it. They just want to be allowed to have the choice–to control their own bodies.
The more militant, anti-Cure mutants believe that the fact of its existence damages the dignity of all mutants, whether or not they take it, and that anyone who takes the Cure is committing a grave moral sin. They don’t just argue against the Cure–they seek to destroy it. They wish to deny all mutants the choice of taking it.
This certainly wasn’t the intended reading of the story, but I think it’s a fair one and fits the facts pretty nicely. And Last Stand could be given credit for doing a reasonably grown-up (by comic-book standards) exploration of a “women’s issue.”
Except for one thing: If you read the Cure as being a stand-in for abortion, then the heroic, sympathetic, mutant X-Men are the pro-life nutjobs. And you can’t have that, can you.
Galley Wife July 9, 2012 at 9:06 am
Wait, what?