June 09, 2006
x-men: the last stand
Score one for auteur theory.
The effects of massively collaborative for-profit venture, of studio mechanics (and in this case the effects of franchise ) trump the romantic ideal of individual vision with ease; on the rock of this obvious idea, auteur theory ran aground. And yet, while the queer subtext* that Bryan Singer (it would seem) brought to the first two X-Men films isn't entirely obliterated from the Brett Ratner-directed third, its 'momentum is barely enough to generate one rote and irrelevant sub-sub-subplot (and one that's subsumed by oedipality, at that) in the latest and, one hopes, last installment.
In its stead, we get a barely subtextual fear of, and hostility to, women that should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed replacement auteur Ratner's career. One by one, the X-Women are stripped of their powers: by cure, by election, and by death. And foremost among these cases is Jean Gray, the most powerful mutant of them all, whose very superiority and, natch, her inability to handle power must translate into evil, dishonest seduction, sexual destruction, and finally her own execution at the hands of a former lover. We are sure it's pure chance that Ratner's way of imaging the evil Jean is to render Famke Janssen as at once synthetic-looking and haggard, with an awful dye job — sort of like a Beverly Hills matron in costume. Even more tellingly, when her awful power runs amok and threatens to destroy the world, dude, you can see the veins in her face! Nothing as scary as an aging babe. Er, Ex-babe.
Of course, one can't blame Ratner, or accuse him of auteurist vision, for such a concept; one merely notes how, absent Singer, the franchise regresses to the par-for-the-course-tastic. The idea of the aging babe as destroyer of worlds belongs to Hollywood itself, wherein "world" always means market share. Just as the character of the Juggernaut is an imago of the film's imagined summer competition (as has been deftly noted by our colleague), Jean Gray must stand in (barely) allegorical place for the "facts" that doom any franchise based on female characters.
* Here we use the term "subtext" with the barest pretext; perhaps there's a better term for the level of story unstated on the diegetic surface which nonetheless is fully available to and known by the audience, determins the narrative, and provides the entirety of the sense that the movie is "about" something. As Giles said as early as season two, “I believe the subtext here is rapidly becoming the text."
Posted by jane at June 9, 2006 01:34 PM | TrackBack