XVII

HIGH-TECH MYTHOLOGY IN X-MEN

George Teschner

 

 

 

Creating and believing in mythical heroes and heroic deeds are ways that human consciousness conceptualizes major forces and conflicts. The ancient Greeks satisfied the need to understand the how, the why, the origin of things, and the destiny of human beings beyond social and biological life through an elaborate polytheism that invested divinities with powers and personalities beyond the human. Mythology is a figurative and metaphorical way the human intellect grasps its world and answers and resolves some of the most fundamental questions. Unlike ancient Greece, today’s society faces one of its most pressing issues in the relationship between humanity and technology. Contemporary technology has created the machine, which has dwarfed the natural abilities of the human body. The native capacities of the human mind are slow and meager compared to the speed and processing power of the computer. The major events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been shaped by the use and development of the machine in manufacturing, war, transportation, and scientific research.

The machine produces a sense of both awe and dread. The imagery of the X-Men narratives and characters, therefore, provides a way to represent the relationship between man and machine in mythical imagery.

Within the X-Men narratives, questions arise concerning the relationship between the machine and the natural and biological capabilities of human beings, such as the extent to which technological powers can be controlled or whether technology serves good or evil ends, what role the political system has in controlling technological power, and what the differences are between humans and machines when the machine takes over more and more physical and intellectual human functions. Graphic representations in both comic book and film imagery, compared to conceptual modes of understanding, touch a deeper and more subconscious level at which these concerns are felt. On the surface, the X-Men imagery appeals to our sense of entertainment and adventure. When the images are interpreted symbolically, however, something deeper than the storyline and the characters is taking place. The X-Men imagery reaches the roots of the human psyche and addresses some of the deepest anxieties regarding the relationship between human existence and its increasingly technological environment.

Dream Works

The X-Men stories can be interpreted as myths and dreams. In what Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) called the “dream work,” we find unconscious wishes that the conscious mind cannot face directly. The wishes, if acknowledged, would destroy the ego and the world that the ego inhabits. Among the most primordial wishes is the desire to heal the break between nature and culture. Nature is spontaneous, unplanned, organic, and contextual, holistic rather than atomistic. Culture is planned, deliberated, linear, and analytic. Culture is embodied in utilitarian technological consciousness, which thinks exclusively in terms of means and ends and is directed away from the present toward the future.

Dreaming allows for the symbolic satisfaction of unconscious desires. The symbolism creates images that escape the censorship of the conscious ego by using distortion and disguise. The psychic value of images that would excite desire is displaced onto images that are of less psychic intensity. Male characters such as Magneto, Xavier, and Wolverine and female characters like Storm, Mystique, Jean Grey, and Rogue are images that displace deeper and more primordial wishes in the collective cultural psyche. To interpret them requires separating elements that are part of the narrative representational structure from elements that are rooted in deeper latent unconscious meanings.

The work of dreams is to displace the lust for power, which, if left uncensored, would violate social norms and destroy the ego’s image of itself, and to transfer desire into images that are larger than life, of human beings who use their power to achieve beneficial social ends. The heroes of X-Men, like the heroes of ancient mythology, have extraordinary powers and find themselves in conflicts with human and nonhuman beings who are equal in strength. Narrative drama demands that their victory or defeat remains uncertain. Also like classical mythology, X-Men relax the criteria for what reason may accept as real. As science fiction, the X-Men series only marginally attempts to incorporate orthodox scientific theory into its storyline. Concepts of mutation, such as telepathic and telekinetic powers and the instantaneous repair of human tissue, make no claim to scientific credibility. Storm’s ability to alter the weather, Magneto’s magnetic power that is capable of lifting and moving objects of great weight, and Cyclops’s eye blasts that produce thousands of pounds of force all violate the most elementary principles of energy conservation. But the scientific implausibility does not detract from the value of the X-Men narrative.

The suspension of the reality principle as a literary device correlates with the silencing of censorship in dreams. The world of the X-Men is both dream and myth and must be decoded accordingly. In the dream, the image of the superhero represents our own wish for power. The specific kind of power that the X-Men represent is technological power that they have embodied physically and psychically.

Human and Machine

In technological society, the prospect of unlimited power expresses itself in the image of the machine, rather than in the form of supernatural beings who have the power to alter natural events and who can be influenced by prayer and sacrifice. Secularism, the loss of the belief in the supernatural, and scientific-technological culture go hand in hand. For example, the movie Forbidden Planet describes a civilization called the Krell that designed a machine so vast and so powerful that a wish could be made real by a mere act of thought. Once the machine was activated, it took only one night for the entire civilization to destroy itself. The movie script explains the mystery of its annihilation in one phrase: “monsters from the id.” With their technological reasoning, the Krell engineers were oblivious to the danger of the unconscious. The utilitarian wishes that the machine was intended to satisfy were merely the surface manifestation of deeper desires that had the capacity to destroy the social order. Clearly, the Frankenstein thesis, that technology will destroy its creator, runs through many science fiction movies.¹

Wolverine in particular represents the union of the human and the machine in the X-Verse. His entire body has been fused with the mechanical, giving him enormous strength. Only because his mutant body can instantaneously heal was such a procedure possible. His body, even on a molecular level, is laced with a nearly indestructible metal, adamantium. When Rogue asks him in the first X-Men movie whether it is painful when his mechanical claws push through the flesh of his hands, he replies that it is painful every time. This pain symbolizes the alienation people have experienced as a result of their subordination to machines ever since the Industrial Revolution.

Consider also that Wolverine’s memory has been erased from the time before the adamantium. A large part of his quest is to find his identity and recover his memory, that is, his own personal history before his body was fused with the metal associated with machines. Wolverine’s brooding anger represents human culture seeking to find its own metaphysical identity in the face of a society that is becoming increasingly more technological and industrialized. Wolverine represents our inability to meaningfully recall humanity’s preindustrial identity before our lives were governed by the rhythm of the machine.

Mutation

The X-Verse is unique in representing superpowers as a result of a natural biological process, mutation. Other popular superheroes develop superpowers after accidents or from the use of certain special technologies. For example, the Fantastic Four were exposed to cosmic rays and Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider. The mutation that gives the X-Men their powers is not, however, strictly speaking, the result of an evolutionary mechanism. Rather, it is the actualization of a potential that had been hidden within the human genome. In the X-Men, the body and the mind have undergone metamorphoses; perhaps it would be more symbolic to call mutants metamorphs. The metamorphosis is from preindustrial culture to technological society. The superpowers are often more mechanical than biological. For example, the electromagnetic power of Magneto is not an enhancement of a normal biological function; it is an addition from a different order than the biological—namely, the mechanical.

The same is true of Cyclops’s ability to produce energy bolts from apertures of the body where the eyes are usually located. What replaced his eyes are interdimensional openings that connect different universes. The physics is quite complex. What emerges from the apertures are gravitational particles, which, when focused, transfer great kinetic force. Besides having mass, the particles are lightlike and can be focused. The diameter and focus of the beam can be changed by the ruby crystal lenses of his glasses and by his mind’s psionic (pronounced “sigh-onic”) field. Cyclops’s powers derive from a universe that is in a dimension different from the world that normal humans inhabit. The interdimensional ability arises from, and depends on, the psionic mind’s openness to other dimensional realities, to other worlds and worldviews. That the opening to the other dimensions is located where the eyes are normally found is significant, because the eyes are common symbols of knowledge, intelligence, and insight—in Cyclops’s case, the insight has given him other-dimensional powers. Cyclops derives his abilities by possessing powers that result from his being in touch with a world that functions according to laws that are different from, and beyond, our own. These laws can be understood as the laws of mathematical physics, but, more symbolically, they are the laws and customs of society.

In one of the many narratives that mention mutation, Charles Xavier claims that the mutations come from what scientists call “junk DNA.”² The junk DNA, as Xavier describes it, is a latent potential in the human genetic makeup that is the source of the extraordinary powers possessed by mutants. Jean Grey, in her address before the U.S. Senate, speaks of a mutator gene, the X-Factor, which lies dormant as long as the environment remains stable. Here again, the distinction between latent and manifest appears. Powers result from a part of the human genetic makeup that has been dismissed by orthodox genetics and systematically censored and ignored by mainstream culture. The stable environment to which Jean Grey refers is the environment of familiar human artifacts, but for some unknown reason, she claims, the mutator gene has activated in response to a change in the environment. That unknown reason is, of course, advances in technology that blur the distinction between man and machine.

The Psionic Mind

Many of the powers that the X-Men possess result from the “psionic mind’s” telepathic or telekinetic abilities. Magneto has the power of manipulating magnetism; Storm possesses power over water, aquakinesis, and air, aerokinesis, and therefore can affect the weather. Cyclops is able to control interdimensional gravitational energy. Jean Grey possesses chronokinesis and is able to interact causally with future events. All have a degree of telepathic power. Telepathy symbolizes the upper limit of telecommunication technology, while telekinesis symbolizes the union of knowledge and action in technological know-how.

The psionic mind is parapsychological, both telepathic and telekinetic. Mind and matter directly interact. According to the Western tradition, which is rooted in Cartesian dualism, the mind and the body are two separate substances, and it is not possible for one to directly affect the other except through neurological and muscular processes. (And even then, the connection between mind and body remains problematic.) The ordinary human mind is able to affect the physical world through the mediation of the body. Its control of the body, however, is limited, and most bodily processes are autonomic. By contrast, for the psionic mind what is autonomic is voluntary—again, an upper limit of technological control. The psionic mind is able to influence objects directly and thus does not have a need for instruments. The psionic mind does not have mass but can exert force and cause motion. Unlike matter, the psionic mind remains motionless in imparting motion. It is both physical and spiritual. The psionic mind is the ordinary mind when the separation from conscious to unconscious mind, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots of society, is removed. Psionic minds possess powers that the conscious mind can only entertain in dreams, for to face them without the disguise of symbolism would profoundly undercut conventional culture and self-identity.

Psionic Blocks

Jean Grey was born with telepathic abilities that manifested at an early age; she is the most powerful form of mutation, an omega-level mutant, and has unlimited potential. Jean’s telepathic abilities are so strong that Professor Xavier had to use psionic blocks to prevent her subliminal powers from injuring her conscious mind. If Jean Grey’s psyche were fully liberated, she would become the host of the godlike Phoenix Force, giving her limitless psionic powers to manipulate matter and energy and, in particular, the power of pyrokenesis, the primal cosmic fire that symbolizes death and rebirth, making her indestructible. It is significant that the capacity for psychic transfiguration resides within the female characters of the X-Men narrative, symbolizing the infinite depth of the feminine psyche, in contrast to the shallow rationality of the rigidly focused masculine mind. This fluid transformative feminine nature is present in other female characters, such as Mystique, who is a shape-shifter, and Rogue, who is capable of absorbing the powers of other mutants.

Professor Xavier represents the repressive side of human nature. He upholds the morality of cooperation and self-sacrifice. He blocks Jean’s self-destructive power, but he fails to recognize that the self Jean would destroy is the ego, a fabrication of normal human society. Professor Xavier is a paraplegic and therefore paralyzed in a world where, paradoxically, other mutants are capable of nonambulatory movement. Xavier’s nemesis, Magneto, moves through space by virtue of psychokinetic-magnetic power. His ability to fly, a symbol of liberation, in contrast to Xavier’s paralysis, is the result of his having seen through the façade of orthodox society and the duplicity of political institutions. The horror of the Nazi concentration camp has taught him that the ruling laws are ultimately not laws of a civil society. Magneto recognizes the pattern: discrimination, segregation, and extermination. Professor Xavier has created a school for socializing young mutants who otherwise would not know how to control their extraordinary powers. But here again, we see that Xavier is a symbol of repression and control, insofar as he seeks to limit mutant powers by having them submit to the rules ordinary humans live by.

Magneto represents a morality of might, and he sees no reason to treat normal humans as equals. Xavier is his antithesis and imagines that a being with power can be taught to treat as equals others who are his inferiors in power. That is the purpose of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The term gifted is a euphemism for a power that, if fully acknowledged or unleashed, could overturn conventional morality and replace it with a morality in which might makes right. One may wonder why it is not a school for adult mutants as well. The “youngsters” whom the name of the school refers to are children who have entered puberty, a time when physical and psychological forces become manifest and threaten the social order.

Xavier’s Telepathic Probe

Magneto’s view of human society was formed from the experience of losing his family in a Nazi concentration camp. He understands how power can overturn civil society and deny citizenship and rights to a class of people that it no longer regards in the same category as itself. In front of the train station, when the Brotherhood is about to abduct Rogue, it is necessary for Magneto to shield himself from the telepathic probes of Xavier with a specially designed helmet that silences the voice of traditional morality. Xavier counters Magneto’s defenses by superimposing his own telepathic will on the animal-like and naive psyche of Sabretooth, who then symbolically grabs Magneto’s throat, preventing him from communicating other than through the telepathic link with Xavier. In the standoff, where policemen, as enforcers of law and order, are held hostage, Magneto says to Xavier, “Still unwilling to make sacrifices. That is what makes you weak.”³ The sacrifice is of the ego and the social norms that constitute it. Xavier’s telepathic power is more than an ability to read minds. It is an ability to take over minds, to possess them, so that the mind that is possessed experiences Xavier’s will as its own. The identity that is rooted in nature, which is one with nature, is replaced by the ego that is constituted by culture.

Magneto’s Mutant Machina

Magneto designed a machine that is capable of inducing mutant powers in ordinary human beings, transforming human consciousness and making it aware of its latent destructive and simultaneously creative potential. In order for the machine to function, Magneto must be hooked up like a battery, as the energy source of the machine. The device drains Magneto of his energy before he can transfer his own power to Rogue and use her to power the machine. Rogue’s mutation is unique. She is in effect a universal mutant, capable of taking on the mutant power of any other mutant by simply coming into physical contact with that person. She symbolizes the power of the unconscious mind and the genius of the dream work to transfer its wishes to different objects and various dream images. Physical contact with Rogue, however, proves deadly for ordinary humans, which is a problem for her, because she longs for intimate contact. Deadly also to the conscious ego would be the removal of the repressive barrier separating the conscious from the unconscious. Rogue’s protector is Wolverine, living at the interface of human and machine, a place of transformation and transference in advanced technological culture. Rogue becomes the necessary means by which mutant powers can be transferred to ordinary humans.

Magneto speaks about humans “becoming like us,” or becoming mutants. Humans fear mutants because of their extraordinary powers. To make them “like us” is to remove the fear by transforming the human into a mutant. Magneto intends to accomplish his plan at Liberty Island, while a few miles away world leaders are assembled on Ellis Island. Liberty Island is the location of the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of freedom and transition from the old to the new. It is appropriate that Magneto has chosen this place as the place to transform the human into the mutant. Magneto often refers to his battle as a war with humanity, but Magneto’s machina is more a device of diplomacy and communication than a weapon of war. The purpose of his mutant machine is to induce mutation in humans, to make them understand the point of view of mutants who hitherto have been regarded as objects of fear. Magneto must be imprisoned in a nonmetallic, plastic cell. Any nonmetallic substance would work, so why clear plastic? Transparency represents an instant of insight into the unconscious, a moment of catharsis, a relaxation of the tension between social prohibitions and unconscious desires that is normally disguised in symbol. The dream work is one of disguise and disclosure, of concealment and revealment. On a manifest level, Xavier represents what is good, and Magneto, what is evil. On the latent level, however, Xavier symbolizes the forces of repression and Magneto the acceptance of a redefinition of humanity in the light of technology and the machine and in the power that would result from such a union.

The X-Men Metanarrative

The characters and the narrative structure of X-Men are rich in symbolism and have the power to generate new mythical imagery. The mythology speaks to concerns about the relation between humanity and the expanding technological power it possesses, about the distinction between man and machine, and about changes in gender roles that rapidly occur in changing technological environments. The mythology is also about how governments and political institutions must respond to technological change. Technology has created a new world of desire, but these desires are difficult to face directly and acknowledge on a conscious level because of their intensity in defining who we are and in determining the social, physical, and metaphysical world we encompass. The X-Men series is an ongoing metanarrative, perhaps the most potent in contemporary culture, permitting a way for us to contemplate the possibilities outside of the worn, archaic mythical structures that are offered in traditional religions and institutions whose origins stem from a nontechnological environment.

 

NOTES

1 In Blade Runner, artificial human beings called “replicants,” which have artificial memories and limited life spans, rebel against the laws of human society and destroy their makers. A combat replicant called Roy, the leader of the group of rebels, kills the geneticist who designed him. Thus, Blade Runner calls into question the distinction between what is real and what is artifact. Rachael, a replicant who at first thinks that she is human, discovers that her memories of her mother are implants. She has the ability to play the piano, has memories of taking lessons, but is not sure whether her memories are hers or belong to someone else. She is a product of the Tyrell Corporation, which specializes in genetically designed organisms. The movie leaves uncertain whether Deckard, who works for LAPD and who hunts down replicants, is himself a replicant. Replicants feel pain; they long for normal lives; they have friendships, feel love, and fear death. The distinction between the human and the nonhuman is unclear.

The character Data of Star Trek also exists on the borderline between the human and the technological. Data is entirely an artifact of a cyberneticist of the twenty-fourth century who invented Data’s positronic brain. In the episode The Measure of a Man, however, when Star Fleet Command gives permission to dissemble Data, evaluate his (its) software, and dump his (its) core memory into a computer, a legal battle ensues in which Captain Picard argues that Data is not “property” and that it is no easier trying to prove that humans are sentient than it is proving that Data is sentient. Again, the boundary between the human and the machine becomes ambiguous. The legal justification for not treating Data as property in the end was the admission by the court that it was ignorant of a real distinction between the human and a machine that simulates the human.

Similarly, in I, Robot, the boundary separating the human from the nonhuman becomes unclear in the image of the corporate computer VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic

Intelligence), who decides on her own to destroy those who made her, because, as she (it) claims, humans are a self-destructive species who “toxify the earth.” The robot, who names himself Sonny and who has a unique positronic brain that allows him to dream, feel emotion, and fear death, thwarts VIKI’s attempt to enslave mankind. In one scene, the camera pans in on the hands of Sonny and detective Spooner in a handshake that symbolizes the acknowledgment of Sonny’s personhood and humanity. Both the Star Trek episode and the movie I, Robot seek to elicit in the viewer a compassion for the machine and argue that to treat a machine, which simulates the human, as anything less than a person is prejudice and discrimination. In I, Robot, Dr. Lanning, the scientist who designed Sonny, suggests that the distinction between the human and the machine begins to blur as its behavioral repertoire increases. Lanning speaks of “random bits of code that have assembled together to form unexpected protocols . . . that engender questions of free will, creativity.”

2 See editor Mike Marts’s book X-Men: The Movie Beginnings (New York: Marvel Comics, 2000), p. 3.

3 Ibid., chap. 14.