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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: August 12, 2004 at 2:31 am by Eve Tushnet

2004-08-12T02:31:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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SECONDARY MUTATIONS: This is my big post about Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. Spoilers, of course, abound.

“WOLVERINE. I THINK YOU CAN STOP DOING THAT NOW.” Perhaps the most obvious feature of NXM, by the time it ended, was the way it took every single reader expectation and rubbed its face in the dirt. Every single kind of X-Men story was warped and molded to the NXM framework: Shi’ar aliens, Sentinels, Phoenix, everything is recycled. The line that summarizes the most obvious feature of NXM is Emma Frost’s sardonic, sympathetic-but-unrelenting reference to “these reruns of your grief.” Morrison is clearly trying to shake something loose just by hitting the old X-Men motifs hard enough.

And I almost like that approach. I love how Morrison suckered me into preferring ferocity to sense, and then let his storylines show how sense was really the better path. I love how he made me want Magneto to be right, and then showed me how that only works as a slogan on teenage t-shirts.

And I love the metafictional premise. I love the assumption that every kind of story can be made a story about Grant Morrison’s personal obsessions. Murder mysteries (“Murder at the Mansion”), space operas (“Imperial”), schooldays fiction (“Riot at Xavier’s”)–it is all available for whatever meaning you, the creator, choose to impose. I expect I identified too heavily with the writer for this to have much impact. What you want to know is how people who don’t think of themselves as the writers view this kind of blatant manipulation. I loved it; but then, I would. It heightened my sense of my own power: my author’s sense that I can draw my own preferred meaning out of any situation.

YOUR FUTURE LIES IN GENOCIDE: One of the most impressive things about Morrison’s work is the fact that he never forced his interpretations on the characters. Instead, he drew out the aspects of characters that had been neglected for decades. Morrison has a pitch-perfect sense of what Emma, Henry (“C’est moi! La Bete! …Emma, it’s Henry…”), Scott (“Insurance takes care of everything”), and Jean would say. I’m especially impressed that although Jean’s temper is a strong undercurrent pushing the action, she never comes across as a motiveless bitch. We sympathize with her (“Doesn’t everything seem mildly traumatized?”) and we want her husband to come home, even though I think as presented Emma is much better for Scott than Jean is.

Morrison pushes his fingerprints into the clay of the X-Men while still making sure that they take their expected places on the chessboard. He gives fans what we want. And then he shows us that what we want isn’t what we really want. Oh, you want the return of Magneto? Come on. The guy by this point has got to be a ramshackle maniac barely held together by your faith in his competence.

NXM is an extended exercise in giving the people what they want, in the hopes that Courtney Love was right, and once they get what they want they’ll never want it again.

Well, it’s not quite that bad. I do think that’s the biggest thing happening in NXM, and it’s kind of embarrassing and unfortunate since really it’s not that big at all. Just as Cassandra Nova collapses the whole universe into her struggle with her twin brother Charles, so the entire series pretty much collapses into metafictional commentary in which little exists outside the womb of Marvel comics. I wish that weren’t my ultimate verdict, since I like Marvel comics a lot but really don’t think they’re worth the effort here expended.

There are other tendrils, though. There’s the pacifist tendril: violence as capitulation to our worst tendencies. There’s the tendril that explores the attractiveness of evil–everything from Cassandra’s Richard III-like speech to Mr. Trask (“Forget your dental practice. Your future lies in genocide”) to readers’ cruel desire to see Wolverine wreck ass at the very end. We want the X-Men to blow stuff up, and Morrison plays nicely on that desire.

There’s the tendril that explores deception, and forced self-revelation. This is the most complex subtheme, I think, and the one that is least-resolved at the end of the series. There are deep layers of deception: the beautiful, Christie-worthy Xorn deception (“When X Is Not X”–oh yeah, you think?); the deception of Slick, which Quentin Quire blasts through; the deception of Quentin himself, which the Stepford Cuckoos decide to plow through for reasons far removed from Xavier’s dream; the psychic affair, which I really do think is the heart of the series, and which begins because of the self-revelation forced on Scott by En Sabah Nur (I think this is a fair characterization even if you think, as I do, that he’s using his possession as an excuse); the Beast’s lying to the press about his sexual orientation. And there’s the constant deception in which Charles Xavier pretends he’s not a mutant running a school for mutants, and the deeply ambiguous circumstances in which that particular pretense is shattered.

These deceptions allow Morrison to set up lovely parallels. The Special Class parallels the original X-Men (superstrength, eyeblasts, telepathy, wings–c’mon man, do you need an ice mutant before you see the connection?), but they become Magneto’s first and key recruits. Quentin Quire’s gang also parallels the X-Men–they’re the ones that say, “We’re the new X-Men!”, after all. But the Special Class are far more important in the end. Their storyline emphasizes the imperfection of the Xavier School (where kids mock Angel and Beak–have I mentioned that “Some Angels Falling” is my favorite issue of the entire Morrison run?) and the heroism of the students who defend the school that almost rejected them. (“Xavier School is the best school!”)

Oh, there are so many nice character moments. There’s that teachers’ conference where Scott and Emma call for greater order in the school, even though, with their affair just starting, they are the most obvious representatives of disorder. There’s the fact that Scott’s relationships finally almost make sense. There’s the sweet courtship of Angel and Beak, where she’s striving for plausible deniability and he is just in abandoned bliss until she turns up pregnant. There’s the focus on the little guys: the Special Class, sure, but also the duct-tape-and-chewing-gum team of X-Men in the final battle against Magneto, including a random human NYC cop. There are the U-Men, who I think show a much more nuanced, envious, hateful yet needy perspective on the old standard “X-Men as racial minorities” trope. The U-Men are complicated in the way that the real world is complicated.

AND THEN WHAT? AND THEN WHAT? New X-Men is more reactionary than revolutionary. It consistently shows human revolutions as prompted by personal weakness (I’d like to smack GM for the “Afterschool Special” denouement of the Riot at Xavier’s storyline). The final scenes, in which the world breaks out of its rut and moves into a new and better path, are only made possible by the intervention of a superhuman freakazoid force. I truly hope I am not the only one who growled and sighed at this development.

Don’t get me wrong: If we have to have the Phoenix–and Morrison’s modus operandi, twisting every canonical or played-out X-storyline to fit his own themes, suggests we must–then I guess this might be the way to do it. Maybe.

But it still left a really sour taste in my mouth. All the prior issues had shown a rather lovely balance between keeping the X-Men in character and using their typical storylines to express Morrison’s personal themes of generational conflict, rejection of violence, and the difficulty of knowing who one is and what one is to do.

And then at the end the Phoenix comes and slaps Scott Summers upside the head until he says, OK, I will mess with Emma after all. Grrrrr. Maybe it is my unusually depressive mindset, but I would really prefer something that would not require The Intervention Of The Phoenix!!! If you’d asked me what was most likely, based on what we knew of his character, I would have predicted that he would reject Emma even though she was obviously very, very good for him. Scott is not good at making the right choices about his romantic life. To have the Phoenix yank him into the right choice because otherwise the future will suck! seemed really, really cheap to me, and a basic denial of the importance that Morrison had placed on minor characters’ choices throughout the rest of the series. I mean, if the Phoenix just fixes everything she doesn’t like, why does it matter what Beak decides to do?

So. Morrison’s run was challenging–it zeroed in on the biggest problem for any mainstream superhero comic, the inevitable bathos of these “reruns of your grief”–and it was often beautiful, especially towards the end. (Although I still think “Some Angels Falling” is the perfect marriage–eek, bad metaphor–of art and storyline. But I accept that I read this story at a time when it had a deep, harsh, personal resonance, and I probably can’t convince anyone who read the story without that resonance, nor do I especially want to.) But in the end I think there was less here than met the eye.

I mean, I could talk about a lot of stuff. There are fairly obvious Gnostic notes in NXM. And anti-Gnostic notes: It’s pretty clear that the people trying to escape contamination by the material world are the bad guys. There are lovely reflections and echoes (I think “Teaching Children About Fractals” is the best-named issue of the series). The conceit of the series–that one could create a coherent X-Men narrative while undermining every previous standard X-Men stock plot–is awesome and I still laugh just thinking about it. So audacious!

But it didn’t, I think, quite come off. NXM should have been important in its own right, but I think in the end it is only important as The Last X-Men Story. I really dig the X-Men, so I’m okay with that–and the truly sweet grasp Morrison has on the characters makes every page a rewarding read–but I can’t help feeling that this series should have been something bigger.

Prove me wrong?

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