It's May in about ten hours and you know what that means -- the end of the cruelest month in the calendar, the start of the summer blockbuster season. First up for frittering away your stimulus packet is a film about a hairy foreigner with a terrific immune system, strong bones, and indestructible claws (interestingly enough, this is also the description of an aged Irish uncle of mine). Hugh Jackman embodies Wolverine in what promises by its very title to be the first in a long line of prequels to the immensely popular X-Men series. Lord knows Jackman can use all the career assistance he can get after last appearing in a critically and commercially reviled epic about Crocodile Dundee at the Moulin Rouge in World War II. Or something.
Grady Hendrix at Slate recounts the long, overwrought origins of the primal scream mutant, and makes the rather obvious point that characters such as Wolverine are thinly disguised social archetypes:
The genius of Chris Claremont was that he made mutants a generic stand-in for all minorities and made Wolverine their Malcolm X. Black, gay, disabled, and Jewish readers could project their own experiences onto the trials and tribulations of the X-Men, but so could misunderstood teenagers, nerds (who only started being cool once the 2000 X-Men movie raked in big bucks), fat kids, skinny kids, kids with braces, kids with glasses, and anyone who ever felt persecuted (read: everyone). Wolverine refused to apologize for his identity, he refused to compromise, he refused to hide.
Except that, with the possible exception of Elton John, people who feel persecuted don't get to fly around in supersonic jets and wear yellow spandex. That said, I think Hendrix's point here about feral furball exceptionalism is little more than the beneficiary of a news peg because the real mutant of interest in the X-Men catalogue is the bad guy, Magneto. I have no idea what his authentic comic book provenance is, but in the movies Magneto, who has the eminently Wolverine-susceptible power of being able to manipulate metal, is a Holocaust survivor turned militant mutant nationalist seeking enfranchisement for his genetically outre brethren by any means necessary. In other words, he's the Vladimir Jabotinsky of the Marvel imprint, or a reason for Caryl Churchill to feel relevant.
The Jewish subtheme of comic books is of course very well explored in our culture now that hardly anybody reads books without pictures in them. And you can easily see Lower East Side wish fulfillment of the 1930's made manifest in this distinctly American form of mythology. In Michael Chabon's excellent novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the two Jewish cousins who write and art comics for a living get into a witty discussion about the Semitic tropes of their trade: "What, they're all Jewish, superheros," one tells the other. "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself." (As it happens, a different uncle of mine -- this one on my father's side, now long dead -- changed his name from Weiss to Kent when he married a rich West Coast heiress.)
Then again, as Ben Plotinsky recently elaborated in a fascinating essay for City Journal, the latterday Superman, envisioned by Bryan Singer, who also directed the first two X-Men installments, is played as an altogether different kind of nice Jewish boy:
In one scene, as Superman floats above the Earth, we hear his alien father in a voiceover. Human beings “can be a great people,” Jor-El says. “They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all—their capacity for good—I have sent them you, my only son.” The line, of course, echoes John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” When Marlon Brando first spoke it in Superman (1978), it was the earlier movie’s only explicit Christian reference.
The recent installment not only resurrects the line; it piles on further biblical allusions. “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior,” Superman himself tells Lois, “but every day I hear people crying for one.” Isaiah 19:20: “When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior.” Later, as Superman tries to save the world from Luthor, the villain plunges a Kryptonite dagger into his side. John 19:34: “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear.” And then, after saving the day by hurling Luthor’s death machine—a rapidly expanding new continent that threatens to destroy the United States—into outer space, a poisoned and exhausted Superman plummets to earth, his arms outspread at right angles to his body and legs, a crucified figure lacking only a cross. He remains in a coma until his son (Lois Lane is the unwed mother in this updated Superman: don’t ask) restores him to life. He leaves his hospital room empty until a nurse discovers it, just as Mary and Mary Magdalene find Jesus’s empty tomb.
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