Petrosian said:
Well, back when i read Xmen it was about 'gay" or at least that seemed to be the message. if you had any doubts what particular "group of outsiders" the mutants were being colered by, the legacy virus pretty much nailed it down.
prejudice... yes, in general... but homophobia was the paint brush used to give it the impact and familiarity and sense of currency.
In the movie, the drake family scene and the stryker characterization were absolutely dead spot on targets using homophobic scenes.
Now, frankly, the coke bottle, xavier and magneto being single men, and the ignoring of cyclops reference to the bedroom shaking (and implication that he knows what goes on in her bedroom) are way out there and to me anyone drawing them into the gay subtext is nuts. Also, troubles such as love triangles and teenagers not being able to have sex as easily as they like have nothing per se to do with homosexuality... just sexuality in general.
So, yeah, he is way overboard... but i would not let this drive away from the clear use of homophobia by the wirters of the XMEN as a tool to give mutant-phobia a very real sense to it.
yes the legacy virus storyline was heavily based on the aids hysteria at the time, but I wouldn't say the X men represented homosexuality. The X men represent being outsiders, they touch on lots of outsider stories and problems, that storyline was definatly taken from the aids scare, but all that means is that they were keeping the comic relevant with events in the modern world.
I have no problem that homophobia is worked into the X Men, but with a little work I could make a statement that the first movie was a statement about World War 2 concentration camps because of the movie having the Mutant Registration act in it. X men comics (and through them the movies based on them) take their influence from a variety of different sources, it's one reason they have remaned hip and fresh and cutting edge, there is always a real life story about people being different and misunderstood out there. Professor X being a super hero in a wheel chair was a huge statement about the handicapped for instance but the X Men stories are not about the plight of the handicapped. Magneto was a Jew in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, that is a huge statement but the X Men are not about anti-sematism. You have to look at the big overall picture here.
My problem with the statement on the movie is that it is factually incorrect. The movies are directly based on the comic book, many of the character interactions are based on the comic book. If you don't research the x men property as a whole then you can't make these blanket statements. The Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey love triangle came from the comics. The reason it was in the movie was that it is in the comics. Maybe Scott and Jean have different bed rooms because they are just dating, or maybe it's because they live in a school full of children, did the movie ever state that they couldn't consumate their relationship? They could of been all over each other like deranged rabbits in scenes that were not shown in the movie. In the comics Scott and Jean had a child (who was older than them, and much bigger than them, and really didn't resemble them at all, but that's X Men continuity for you). The point is that just because they didn't show graphic lovemaking in the movie doesn't mean that they were not a "hot item" or that Jean was uncomfortable with her sexuality or that Cyclops and Wolverine wanted to get it on with each other. The love triangle in the movie is based on the love triangle in the comic and the comic love triangle had no homosexual overtones at all.
Professor X and Magneto are childless? Well actually they both have children and they both have had girlfriends and quite possibly wives (I don't think either ever had a boyfriend though). Just because they were not shown in the movie doesn't mean that they don't have children, it just means children were not mentioned in the movie. And besides that how does not having children make you homosexual, that's sort of a stretch to start with.
The underground society persicuted due to what group they were born into, gee did I mention the Nazi concentration camp angle already. You didn't have to read the comic to make that connection, you just had to watch the first movie. The same goes for the Stryker character, a military man who wants to commit genocide on a whole group of people, that sort of sounds familiar. How about the radical band of neo-terroist, you mean sort of like the Black Panthers of the Civil Rights movement? This isn't a homosexual overtone of the movie, it's his personal interpretation of what he saw, he's confusing opinion with fact.
The Iceman, Rogue, Pyro love triangle? what love triangle, just because three people appear on the screen together it doesn't make it a love triangle, and even if it was how is this a homosexual overtone?
The Dr Pepper bottle is the best though, talk about reading something into a scene (which was obviously only in the movie because Dr Pepper paid for the add placement.) So was the homosexual overtone that somebody forgot to put the Dr Pepper in the fridge or that Ice Man has the super power to freeze things. Once again he is confusing his own interpetation with the directors intent. Could it of been a homosexual overtone, well sure but he states it like it was a fact and compliments them for putting it in there, maybe it was all staged to keep the Dr Pepper bottle on camera long enough for us to get a close up and read the label. Did he contact anybody to confirm his view? Besides a young boy and a grizzled old guy and phallic symbol, well that brings up a NAMBLA interpretation doesn't it, and I really don't think that anybody intended that.
His most profound statement was Rogue's inability to touch people, and I won't even coment on how silly his point was there but suffice it to say that once again maybe he should of done some research into the character, or even watched the first movie. Likewise on the globe showing Mutants live all over the world, that is such a goof ball leap that it defies logic. Many different groups of people live all over the world, heck many different species of dogs live all over the world, there is no stretch of logic here that works. There is no way you can even percieve a homosexual overtone to this unless you have convinced yourself that the whole movie is a homosexual overtone, so there is no way to use it as a point to prove your interpretation.
If the guy had written a article on how scenes in the movie could be percieved it would be different but he didn't he wrote a article on what the movie is, did he talk to Bryan Singer, did he confirm any of this? Just because he infered a homosexual reference doesn't mean that it was factually one, and many of his finer points fall completely apart with the slightest bit of research. He is a professional writer he should have done the research and checked his facts before he published the article.
I just saw the one. But hey, if this guy wants to see undercurrents of homosexuality all over the movie, so be it as that is his right. He makes some decent points based soley on X2 alone which isn't a movie that is meant to be seen on it's own, it needs its preface, X1 as a reference. I think the author of that article wouldn't see so much "homo-mutantism" if he had proper reference points, as others have said.
