'War Stories'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Have you seen the Morlocks? Angel? Beast?
Basically the drag queens of the mutantverse. Disinterested in passing.
I mean, really, that is the Morlocks function in their first appearance in the X-Men - to challenge the notion that mutants can/should assimilate.
Basically the drag queens of the mutantverse. Disinterested in passing.
Er, more like physically incapable of passing.
Er, more like physically incapable of passing.
Except Mystique.
I think the biggest difference between being gay and being black (as far as what mutancy is a metaphor for) is that most parents aren't surprised and disappointed to find out their kid is black.
The correlation to race is explicitly stated by writers, as is the Malcolm/Martin Luther thing. And since the positions of methods (by any means neccessary, etc) were designed to (and to me succeed in doing so) map to the civil liberties movements, I don't put homosexuality first.
I defintely see the MLK/Malcolm X thing. I think the movie can be both. To me the scene with Angel and the shears is all about trying to keep your parents from knowing the truth about you. Trying to cut away that part of you that doesn't fit in with society.
I have just printed out tickets for tomorrow for Ratatouille at the El Cap.
I love the digital age.
Well, I didn't mean that it wasn't used as a metaphor for anything else. But Bobby's conversation with his parents in X2, for example, strikes me as far more a gay metaphor than a racial one. And though it's more subtle, likewise Rogue's discovery of her power as a sexually awakening teen, the resultant shame and issues about romantic interaction, and the trope of fleeing home to build a new family among friends.
Other SF movies:
Play It Again, Sam. One of the few Woody Allen films of the period shot outside of the NYC area, because the NY film crew was on strike.
I'd say a movie (or any artwork) is a "blank" movie if it speaks to the experience of "blanks" as "blanks." X-Men (and the Marvel Universe generally) definitely speaks to the gay experience, and I'll defer to ita as to the black experience.
In a broader context, I'd say there are similarities between the two, but I wouldn't want to stretch the analogy too far. Both groups have been/are treated by society as "other" and "lesser," with that status reinforced by laws. On the other hand, there was never any debate as to whether people "choose" to be black, as opposed to the debate over gay.