1.
The story of every mutant, up to a certain point and with some exceptions, is the same. For the first 12 years or so of his life he identifies as a human being. During his pubescence he manifests powers that make him more interesting than his peers. He can turn his body into iron, control weather patterns, walk through walls, read minds, or fly. He’s still technically a member of the human race. He can still mate with humans and reproduce. Yet he is also something apart, a homo superior. Some mutants can hide their identity. Others — those who develop blue skin or amphibious features, phenotypes that sometimes appear at birth — are not able to pass.
Homo sapiens see in the mutant all that they fear in themselves. Some see in the mutant a possible slave or a creature that must be annihilated. The mutant withstands waves of oppression. One year is more brutal than another. Through it all, he learns to hate himself, then to humble himself before others and sometimes to hurt himself. Some mutants find their way to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, located in Westchester County outside New York, where they learn to respect the culture of the human race, even though it seeks to either destroy or control their very being. They master their powers and transform their bodies into novel instruments.
Other mutants find themselves in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants — later simply known as the Brotherhood – where they adhere to an ideology of mutant separatism. Faced with the threat of homo sapiens supremacy and even outright genocide, they become terrorists, though, as the cliché goes, you could just as easily call them freedom fighters.
Every persecuted minority protects itself with the same litany. They hurt us. They hate us. But we have powers — our own music, religion, humor, language — they can’t take away from us. If we honor our beautiful bodies, the names the majority gives us have no power to kill us. On this score, the mutants in the X-Men and the mutants in the Brotherhood agree.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in 1963, and during their run the X-Men, like the other heroes in the Marvel Universe, were Mad Men-WASPy. In 1975 Len Wein introduced a new roster that would reflect something closer to the mess of human society. The writer Chris Claremont took over the title and continued the trend throughout his very long run. Colossus, née Piotr Rasputin, is Russian. Storm, née Ororo Munroe, is Kenyan. Rogue, née Anna Marie, is from the South. Wolverine is Canadian. More minorities kept showing up in the X-Men through the years and in the early 1990s Northstar of the Canadian team Alpha Flight came out, in an issue written by Scott Lobdell. But they are all mutants first. The ethnic, social, sexual, gender, political, or religious markers are secondary identities the larger society imposed upon them before they established their mutanthood. There are good reasons for these markers. They signal the sources for the comics’ metaphors and draw distinctions between those who humiliate and those who are humiliated.
For a long time the ethnic background of Magneto, the master of magnetism, the head of the Brotherhood and the X-Men’s arch-nemesis, was unknown. Then in 1981 Claremont invented his backstory. Magneto was a Holocaust survivor. At first, the comics hinted he was a Romani. Some years later, after a bit of narrative wavering, it was established that Magneto was a Jew.
2.
The moral universe of the X-Men was always complicated, but Claremont upset the Manichean balance of the superhero world. The rosters of both the X-Men and the Brotherhood have changed and continue to change dramatically. Members of the X-Men have left to join the Brotherhood. Members of the Brotherhood have left to join the X-Men. Some have left to form their own third or fourth groups. Everyone has a different take on what it means to be a mutant in a non-mutant world. Sometimes they work with the U.S. government and sometimes against it. Sometimes they work in groups indifferent to the functioning of homo sapiens politics. And no one is ever entirely a child of either Martin or Malcolm. When I first got into the X-Men in the 1980s, Magneto had taken off his metal helmet and had joined the X-Men. Within a few years, he had returned to his life as a separatist.
The moral balance always tips in favor of the X-Men, but an intelligent reader never really knows which side he wants to join. The members of the X-Men are better-looking. They live in a dream mansion. They are comrades. Yet there are always problems within their ranks, jealousies, difficult romances. In the movies, Patrick Stewart plays Xavier with a Picard-ian paternalism, but in the comics he’s a strange man — Lee and Kirby looked to Yul Brynner for Xavier’s exoticism — constantly living within his own and others’ heads. His students suspect the telepath of controlling their minds. The good professor demands of them a strict adherence to an ideology only he seems to fully understand and, against all their instincts, he asks them to be what liberal humans want them to be, the mutant equivalents of “respectable Negros.” “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent,” Orwell said of Gandhi.
Magneto, blue-eyed and silver-haired, is a more charismatic figure, a man who tells you exactly what you want to believe about yourself. “You’re a god among insects,” Ian Mckellen’s Magneto tells a young protégé in X-Men 2. He meets homo sapien supremacy with mutant supremacy. The X-Men have their freaks, the Beast and Nightcrawler, but the Brotherhood is an uglier group, closer to the way the rest of us actually look. Magneto makes deals with supervilllains and he constantly hatches plots of mass murder, but always with one aim in mind, the survival of mutantkind.
Charles Xavier maintains a steady faith in the world into which he is born. In The Uncanny X-Men #141 (January 1981), Xavier sits in a senate hearing alongside his fellow pro-mutant activist Moira MacTaggert as they listen to Senator Kelly debate the possibility of mutant registration. MacTaggert makes the right call. “Registration of mutants today, gas chambers tomorrow.” Xavier answers, “[Kelly is] scared. We must teach him that his fear is unfounded.” Charles Xavier’s optimism is rooted in his powers. He can read the minds of all humans and can see, somewhere beneath the riot of their synapses, something that bends towards decency. He is a mutant Mencius.
Still, one wonders what Xavier hears when he listens to other people’s thoughts. Does he believe Kelly is incapable of creating camps because he is essentially a good man or because, when he senses the senator’s darker thoughts, he can’t believe them and simply ignores them? Magneto serves as Xavier’s counterbalance. Though the comics cast him as something close to but not entirely a supervillain, he’s not always wrong. He is unable to read the thoughts of human beings, but he knows a Nazi when he sees one.
3.
It wasn’t until 2008, in Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s Magneto: Testament, that Marvel fully described Magneto’s childhood. Magneto, née Max Eisenhardt, grew up in 1930s Germany, the son of a Jewish watchmaker. In an attempt to impress a young Romani girl named Magda he enters and wins a javelin competition using his powers over metal against a group of Aryan youth. Tensions rise and the family escapes to Poland. Eventually Max finds himself in Auschwitz, staring across the fence at Magda, who is interned in the Gypsy section of the camp.
The book answers the most pressing question about Magneto’s life: How could a young man with god-like powers over metal not kill every single Nazi in Auschwitz and liberate his fellow inmates? To answer the question, Pak’s story pointed to the machinery of the camp, the divide-and-conquer strategy that the Nazis employed against their inmates. He also points to the fear that any uprising would have led to the deaths of more Jews. Throughout the book, his fellow inmates warn Max that for every Nazi he kills thousands of Jews and Romanis would die in retaliation. The Max Eisenhardt in Pak and Di Giandomenico’s book is a sweet, loving boy, a young romantic. And he maintains a gentility all the way to the end of his tenure as a sonderkommando who shoves old men and young boys together in ovens because they burn more quickly.
That sweet boy dies within a few years after the book’s conclusion and is replaced by a cynical man bent on survival by any means necessary. His attempts at revenge change from one crisis to the next, but they always lean towards some form of violence. Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies depict the extent he’s willing to go to protect his own kind.
At the end of X-Men, Xavier’s team foils Magneto’s plot to transform all the world’s humans into mutants. Magneto’s process is deadly, an unfortunate fact the X-Men know and he doesn’t. If he had succeeded he would have committed, albeit inadvertently, mass murder one thousand times greater than Hitler’s.
At the end of X-Men 2, the X-Men and Magneto foil a plot by a rogue fanatic who attempts to use Cerebro, a machine Xavier and Magneto co-invented, to kill every mutant on earth. Magneto then attempts to use Cerebro to murder, this time with clear intention, every human on the planet. He does not succeed.
4.
The Holocaust victim, in our popular imagination, is a man of goodwill. He is the figure who tells you never to accept bigotry, that life is worth living, that violence is evil and that survival is a blessing. He is Elie Wiesel standing up for the victims of Darfur and the Khmer Rouge and teaching the lessons of his life story to Oprah Winfrey’s audience. He is a Jew laying a stone on Oskar Schindler’s grave in living color. He is Roberto Benigni clown-marching to the gas chambers, comforting his son. She is Anne Frank believing in the essential goodness of humankind even when faced with all evidence to the contrary.
These stories all carry the sheen of political correctness and they all ignore the mess of post-1945 politics. Wiesel may have called for Israel to take in refugees from Darfur, but he’s also one of the more prominent apologists for the Israeli right wing. It’s amazing how many monuments quote Frank without acknowledging her famous line’s horrible irony. The stone-laying scene at the end of Schindler’s List is a happy summation to the world’s greatest tragedy, but on some level — the level at which we are watching actual survivors honor the man responsible for their survival — we can accept it. Benigni’s march, however, is a lie. There were stories of teachers and grandmothers who comforted children marked for death, but Benigni’s martyred clown is incapable of tears. He’s an insult to the many millions who went to the chambers without idiot smiles on their faces.
These myths ignore the suicides among survivors, the depressive rage among children of survivors. Far more people read these myths than open The Immortal Bartfuss or Kaddish for a Child Not Born. Our attachment to these myths form the basis of an indictment. No one believes in Auschwitz because no one wants to believe in Auschwitz.
The many storytellers who have handled Magneto have then, in their own way, and through accident and emendation, achieved something remarkable. They have given mainstream popular culture a Holocaust survivor who understands exactly what was murdered in Auschwitz and who refuses to accept any sentimental definitions of survival.
By turning a Jewish Holocaust survivor into a mass murderer, these writers and artists ignore some terrible implications. The myths in Marvel Comics, half-formed and always more outlined than fully examined, lend themselves to an open reading on the part of fans. How do you read Magneto in a world in which the Holocaust is cited by cheap commentators in every human conflict?
You can read Magneto as the fantasy of every post-1945 anti-Semite. He is the Jew who will exert his powers to the absolute degree necessary and then even further, in order to gain his rightful pound of flesh. He is the Jew who screams “Auschwitz” whenever you question the bombings in Lebanon or Gaza, the Jew who will murder and burn his way to safety, ignoring all the children he may incinerate on the way.
You can read Magneto as the nightmare of every post-1945 Jewish humanist. He is the Jew who lost the soulful liberalism of the Yiddishkeit, and who has allowed the Holocaust to turn him into everything he despises. He is the Jew who will bomb Gaza and say, with some credibility, that it is for defense while privately acknowledging a pleasure in revenge. He is the Jew who has allowed the Holocaust to instill in him a debilitating paranoia, an inability to love or trust anyone who is not a Jew, as well as an inability to love or trust most of his fellow Jews.
The two caricatures have a lot in common.
There are other readings as well. Magneto is a wailing child demanding a return of his family and his culture, who now dresses up in metal armor to protect him from the anger of the world as well as his own. He’s a boy who saw God gassed alive and sees no difference anymore between writing “God” and writing “G-d”. He’s also something that none of the writers or artists who have handled him and none of the X-Men readers can know, something only the devil can name.
5.
I’m a fan of the X-Men, but I also believe that superhero comics and superhero movies have no business standing anywhere near the gates of Auschwitz, and the X-Men movies and comics have done nothing to correct this claim. Chris Claremont was and is a miserable writer. His monotonous, somber narration can’t differentiate between Magneto’s experiences during World War II and a fight scrimmage at Xavier’s school. Di Giandomenico’s painterly strokes make his Auschwitz Jews a little too beautiful and his book too easy to look at. Bryan Singer’s depiction of the gates of Auschwitz at the beginning of X-Men is no more menacing than the criminal lairs in The Usual Suspects, a movie he made five years prior. A superhero movie, which treats the threat of apocalypse as an opportunity for adventure, has an unsolvable problem when faced with an actual historical case of mass death. It should avoid this problem.
Still the X-Men movies and comics do something that the more respectable Holocaust movies of mass culture don’t do. At the end of Schindler’s List, the black-and-white of the distant Holocaust past turns to color as the elderly Schindler Jews emerge to plant stones on their savior’s grave. The scene provides closure and catharsis. Spielberg concentrates his camera only on the Jews who live happily forward all the way to the end of the 20th century and buries the Holocaust safely in the past where it can’t hurt anyone after 1945.
Magneto stands as a rebuke to that burial and as a rebuke to everyone who wishes to contain the lessons of the Holocaust, to everyone who has a simple explanation for its occurrence, to everyone who wishes to valorize victimhood, to everyone who believes that survival is an unmitigated blessing. The X-Men movies and the comics tell you things you don’t want to hear, that Hitler won World War II, that the Holocaust never stopped happening, that it continues to happen and that it will keep happening. They tell you these things even if their action narratives, their melodrama, their wit, and their fascination with lithe bodies don’t allow you to feel them. The writers and artists behind the X-Men don’t believe in Auschwitz, not only because they don’t wish to believe in Auschwitz, but also because they can’t believe the very things they are telling themselves.
Caps For Sale tells the story of a Russian peddler whose entire stock of pageboy caps is stolen by a troop of insouciant monkeys. The man shakes his fists, making impotent demands (“You must give me back my caps!”) as the thieves grin down from their tree, taunting his frantic need. (“Tsz, tsz, tsz!”) They seem to know that they control him, can gut him as cleanly as Maggiorani in The Bicycle Thief. Ultimately, however, they lose their nerve and fling down the caps—and while this brings the incident to a close, it’s where the real trouble begins. The peddler balances his wares upon his head and returns to town, eager to unload caps that were just worn by monkeys. The steady spread of head lice and untold ape-mites throughout his drab little village seems a given: once again, craven business interests trump the health of unwitting consumers. He may have reclaimed his caps, but the peddler has lost his integrity—with his own neighbors paying a tragic price.
In a 2000 New York Times Magazine essay, A.O. Scott called Horton Hears a Who! “a response to the atom bomb,” and the book, written in 1954, carries a warm dedication to a “Great Friend” from Japan. These days, however, Seuss’ tale reads as an invitation to stateside revolt: if the residents of Who-ville will only scream loudly enough, their Nool Jungle overlords will have no choice but to recognize them. The Who-hero, Jo-Jo, lives “in the Fairfax Apartments”—presumably not far from the Fairfax County, VA bases of DynCorp, General Dynamics, and the CIA. Is his initial “shirking” merely subterfuge as he works to destroy the system from within?
Blueberries For Sal follows a young girl and her mother as they pick blueberries, an activity that will allow them, somewhat disconcertingly, to “have food for winter.” (A sequel, Anemia For Sal, was rejected by Viking Press in 1951.) After a few pages of berry-picking antics, we learn that a hungry mother bear and her cub are on the opposite side of the hill. A storybook mix-up ensues, with Sal trailing the female bear and the cub following Sal’s mother. When the bear—and the woman—realize what’s happened, their reactions are bizarrely muted: “That is not my child”; “You are not little Sal.” And that’s that. Soon enough, each species is breezily reunited, with none of the lung-shredding gore that would ordinarily be expected.
I’m all for keeping kids as far away as possible from the world’s raging horror, but there’s a clear line between sensible protection and willful dubiousness—a line crossed in Blueberries For Sal, and again in Ferdinand. Ferdinand is a fey young bull who’d rather sit beneath a tree, listening to The xx, than scrap with his mates. It’s a nice portrait of youthful otherness, a bovine Freaks and Geeks. But after Ferdinand is carted to the Plaza de Toros—and he lazes in the center of the ring, too blithe to charge—he’s chauffered right back to his meadow, free to sniff the daisies and ponder Egon Schiele. I’ve been to a bullfight and seen what happens to those that survive the toreros: they’re dragged outside to have their throats slit. Perhaps Leaf could’ve avoided the bullfighting angle altogether, and simply jumped to the bulls’ 15-year high school reunion. There, his former peers, all of them now alcoholic financial advisers, mutter resentfully by the bar about Ferdinand’s thriving fruit-bouquet franchise.
I don’t have any philosophical argument against Curious George Flies a Kite. My complaint is more basic: the book is unrepentantly, almost diabolically, boring; it’s the sort of thing Jigsaw might read to his victims as they writhe in a maggoty pit. This is the first book I read to Conor, choosing it out of lazy brand loyalty, I suppose—because what’s more fun than Curious George? As it turns out, there are a few things: being jabbed in the armpit with a rusty sewing needle. Vomiting wing sauce into a concert-lot Port-a-John. Watching Elizabethtown with a corpse on your lap. I’d eagerly choose any of these before again entering the episodic, joy-killing world of that insipid little chimp. I’d try to explain the plot, but that would only make me exhale sadly and rest my head against the wall.
Finally someone blows the whistle on the sinister side of children’s literature. Dr. Seuss may never recover. Another very funny piece from Jacob Lambert. My only regret is that he didn’t discuss Pippi Longstocking or any of the Moomin books.
“Watching Elizabethtown with a corpse on your lap.” Wow, that last paragraph rocked.
Laughed, laughed, laughed!
A fun essay to read, Jacob! Perhaps, it’s not the literal story lines so much as the reading memories that make these so universally treasured, despite their absurdities. Then again, isn’t that the essence of childhood–believing in the unbelievable? That a bull would want to smell daisies instead of fight; that there are tiny worlds floating right under our noses. Technical details of reality be damned! ;)
Thanks for the end-of-the-week giggle!
P.S. I agree with Edan, that last paragraph was clutch! Hilarious.
It’s all true! I mean, Hop on Pop is virtually a call for government overthrow!
And we don’t even want to get into the nefarious food-inspired plots behind Green Eggs and Ham and The Very Hungry Caterpillar….
As a lover and advocate of picture books, I am appalled at your disrespect and disdain for some of America’s finest classics.
As a human being with a sense of humor, I find your article to be absolutely hilarious! Yeah, I agree… some of those beloved childhood treasures sure read differently now!
I agree with a previous poster that there’s plenty more fodder out there; with that in mind, I’m looking forward to part two!
Curious George *groans*. How is it that all the originals are rambling and mostly plotless (or maybe I should say overly full of plot)? It takes a valiant effort to read these to my son, who, it goes without saying, adores them. And, it kind of always irks me that all George gets for his naughtiness is a wink, a nod, and typically a medal or a bunny.
This is why librarians have far more evil powers than ordinary mortals. If picture books are this subversive, imagine the tips we get from middle grade novels!
My deepest apologies for reading all of those books to you in your impressionable years, Jay. Had that bear made mincemeat of you in 2000, I would never have realized it was my fault for having read to you Blueberries for Sal. Glad you survived!
Love you, Mom
LOL
I love your take on Caps for Sale!!! Ha ha ha!
I’m sorry, I have a sense of humor just like anyone else, but you need to relax. I too am appalled at the sheer disrespect you have shown these classic books. If you look hard enough you can find subversive messages in anything. And if you think Curious George has a simplified plot line – just be glad we’ve moved on from Dick and Jane. Courtesy of Dr. Seuss.
Subversive plots can be found in anything even a cereal box. Dr. Seuss did write with political twists for sure and Curious George books are boring- yet kids do adore the wee little monkey. I’m just mad at the man with the yellow hat for stealing George from the jungle! Good thing we teach children the difference between fiction and nonfiction as Blueberries for Sal is most definetely in the first category…can’t blame the book for your own innocence about hiking around bears!!
If we continue to let kids read these books, we will soon be steeped in a society that thinks nothing of unnatural and unhealthy colored Eggs and Ham. Soon, our entire society will be tripping on mold spore food and having itself a Wild Rumpus Romp!
For a while I took my granddaughter to the library while waiting for her brother to have his piano lesson. I looked at so many books that had nothing to do with her lifestyle and everything to do with alternative lifestyles or about potty talk (kids need no help with that) or left wing endings that are not helpful in raising a child to be responsible for herself, to accept results for an action and to have a good work ethic and most importantly to have fun in life. So I wrote my own book called Up In Smoke. It is about a loving, multi-generational family who gets together to harvest oats using the antique steam tractor. They have lots of fun and make great memories. It is a true story based on an event in my husbands family. If you want to pick it apart and say Oh, this is so dangerous or that is not good for you, I will say true but you cannot shield your child from everything that may hurt them but you can teach them to take care of themselves.
I agree with your point about “Blueberries for Sal.” Children should not absorb dangerously unrealistic notions about our relationship with other animal predators. As for “Caps for Sale” I am willing to believe that in the world of picture books monkeys do not have lice. When the book takes a fantastical tone we have to make allowances for a different set of natural laws. I did lose my taste for “Curious George” as I gained some critical thinking skills but “Horton Hears a Who” remains on my favorites list. Horton is a hero, a voice for the voiceless. The world needs more Hortons. And Ferdinand? A fantasy true – but also a vision for a better world where peace-loving bulls are not slaughtered and put into flower-covered meadows. Who’s to say the upcoming generation will not change the rules to save the bulls?