Hey, everyone!
As I'm sure you've noticed, this doesn't look like one of our regular videos, and it's not going up on one of our regular upload days.
That's because it's not a regular video.
Today, we're gonna be diving into one marvelous scene from "X-Men: First Class," and talking about why it's so good.
You might remember seeing something like this last year, when youtuber and all-around cool dude Nando v Movies organized a whole bunch of YouTubers,
and they all picked scenes from the MCU and analyzed why they were awesome.
This is like that, only with X-Men.
So, once you're done with this one, make sure to keep an eye out for the others. Blue's got one on Deadpool that's really fun,
and hop over to Hello Future Me's channel to see what he has to say about another relevant scene from this movie.
So, with no further ado, let's begin.
So, "X-Men: First Class" was the first X-Men movie that took place a generation before the original trio of movies.
It featured none of the younger A-listers we were familiar with,
and put most of the focus on Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, AKA Professor X and Magneto,
way back before their decades-long conflict, when they were just too young mutants finding their way in the world (and each other).
While there are a lot of other characters in this movie,
most of the focus is put on these two, and how their highly complex mortal-frenemies-soulmate situation developed over time.
The immediate context the audience had for this movie is the dynamic
we see in the first three X-Men movies, where Xavier and Magneto are that
fascinating combination of old friends and arch-rivals. And really, they kind of give off that vibe of two people who've been broken up for years,
but stayed friends,
but the reason they broke up is still very much present,
and every once in a while,
one of them is like, "We should give it another try," and the other one's like,
"Are you still going to try to orchestrate the downfall of humanity?"
And the other one's like, "I knew you'd bring that up," and it's just a whole mess.
So, the viewers went into this movie knowing where Erik and Charles were going to end up, but not certain of how they were going to get there.
Now, the other immediate context from those original movies is Magneto's origin story,
which is shown in horrifically historical detail in the opening scene of the first movie,
where we see a young Erik separated from his mother in a Nazi death camp,
and in a panic, his latent abilities lash out and bend the gates. The next time we see him,
He's much older, much more composed, and much more powerful.
But if we think about it for a minute, we can infer that this power has to be a more recent development,
and he couldn't have gotten that much control over his abilities while he was still in prison in the camp, because he evidently
didn't escape, something his current power level would have made easy. So we know he was stuck in one of the most nightmarish situations imaginable
for years, and it definitely left an impression on him, judging by how militant he is against the atrocities of humanity. From this first movie alone,
we know a lot of things about Erik. We know he's Jewish,
he lost his family to the Nazis at a young age, and he decided that humans were never going to hurt his people like that again.
It's a very understandable villain origin, and it puts him in diametric opposition with Xavier,
who believes it's much more important to nurture the good in humanity than it is to punish the evil, while Erik believes they can't afford to take that kind of risk.
So, when "First Class" takes us back in time, we see Erik and Charles's origins in more detail.
We get confirmation that Erik didn't have control over his powers at that age and couldn't use them at will,
and his mother was killed by the main villain of this movie, Shaw, while attempting to motivate him to use them.
Sure enough, this kicks off a devastating display of power, and both Erik and Shaw conclude that Erik's abilities are fueled by rage and pain.
Years later, an adult Erik is using that rage fueled power to hunt down Nazis in hiding and take revenge on them, as well as trying to track down Shaw.
This is when he first meets Charles, whose cushy life and telepathic ability to see the good in everyone have given him a much more optimistic
outlook on life and the future of human-mutant relations than Erik's much more jaded perspective.
However, while Charles and Erik have very different outlooks on life,
Charles understands Erik (one of the perks of being psychic), and while they do argue about the best way to handle Shaw,
Charles does get where Erik is coming from, though he tries to convince him to take a less murdery option.
After collecting a handful of mutants with barely written characters, and then losing a couple to an attack from the bad guy, Erik suggests a training montage
suggests a training montage to turn these mutants into an army. Charles is a bit reluctant,
but if there's one thing we know these two agree on later in life, its armies of mutants working for them,
so the montage begins. And after all that preamble,
this is where we find our marvelous scene.
Charles has consistently been frustrated and alarmed by Erik's self-destructive, borderline suicidal anger, and this scene kicks off with another display of it.
Erik wants to train his abilities by deflecting a point-blank bullet to the head, and Charles is very uncomfortable being the one pulling the trigger.
He tells Erik he's not pushing himself if he's just doing theoretically dangerous stuff
he already knows he can handle, and he turns his attention to the huge satellite dish on his property, and suggests he tries using his
powers on that instead. Right now, this seems impossible.
We've seen him move heavy anchors and stop bullets, but the last time he tried anything on this scale,
he nearly drowned. But we also know, from the original movies, that Magneto can eventually move the entire Golden Gate Bridge without apparent effort,
so we know he's got it in him, we just don't know how he's gonna get there.
Charles watches him try and fail to move the satellite,
and this is where the scene starts getting really good. In a provisory tone,
he suggests that maybe Erik needs focus, and that he finds focus in the point between rage and serenity.
He indicates he'd like to root around in Erik's mind a little, and Erik's expression shifts as a memory begins to play out.
Young Erik and his mother stand in a darkened room and share a slightly worried glance as they light a menorah together.
Judging by his age, this can't have been more than a year or two before his mother was killed.
But while they both look a bit tired and scared, they smile at each other and she gently strokes his cheek. When the memory fades,
both Charles and Erik are close to tears.
It's been established that Erik does not like how casually Charles gets into his head.
In fact, up to this point in the movie, Erik has been an incredibly guarded person. The most positive expression
we've seen him show was a half-hearted smile when Charles sided with him against the CIA. And he's clearly uncomfortable with how much Charles knows
about him and how much familiarity he treats him with.
So Erik's first reaction to this memory is low and dangerous, but Charles rallying pretty quickly,
explains that he just accessed Erik's brightest, happiest memory, hoping it'll let him balance out the rage
he's been fueling his powers with. Erik is still shaken, and says, "I didn't know I still had that."
Because all that rage and pain shaped him into a weapon and a tool of revenge,
he genuinely didn't think he still had the capacity to hold such a soft, sweet memory.
Charles assures him that there's more to him than he thinks, a capacity for good, and when he can tap into all of that,
his power will be unrivaled.
And we, the audience, know that Charles is right,
but he's gonna wish he weren't.
Erik turns back to the dish, still clearly shaken from the memory, and, this time with only one hand, he turns it to face them.
And for the first time in the movie, we see him laugh. Now, there is a lot of nuance in this scene,
but let's start with the memory, and why it's so important that his brightest moment is rooted in his Jewish heritage and his relationship with
his mother, and thus inextricably linked with so many things we know caused him pain. And to talk about that,
let's bring up something a lot of people talk about when discussing these movies:
Mutant as Allegory.
The X-Men are largely defined by how they work to live peacefully in a world that unjustly hates and fears them, and thus they've
been seen and written as allegories for many marginalized or oppressed groups over the years. Early on, they were running parallel to the Civil Rights
movement; some people have compared Xavier to Martin Luther King, and Magneto to Malcolm X. Later,
they became a little more mapped to marginalized orientations and gender identities, with such lines as, "Have
you tried not being a mutant?" making that parallel rather overt. In "First Class," Hank outright says, "You didn't ask, so I didn't tell," when
his superior asks him why he never told him he was a mutant.
So, suffice to say that the allegorical implications are recognized both by the authors and the audience. Overall, mutants
make an easy allegory for oppression. They're hated and feared,
some of them look just like us while others don't have passing privilege, and almost any historically marginalized
group can be parallel to them. Of course, many have also pointed out that while mutants make an easy allegory,
they're also kind of a bad allegory, because some of them are genuinely incredibly dangerous.
Real-world persecution is irrational and baseless, with all
justifications retroactively applied, while in the world of the X-Men being a mutant gives you even odds of having weird feet, or horrifically
and uncontrollably dissolving all organic matter within a 500 yard radius.
When mutants are used as allegories for the benefit of the audience, this discrepancy can cause problems in cognitive dissonance.
This is where Magneto comes in, because Magneto doesn't embody the allegory for the benefit of the audience;
he draws the allegorical connection himself in the actual story, as he has lived
both experiences. Magneto is a mutant and he's Jewish. He was young during World War Two,
his powers hadn't fully come in yet, and he suffered through the Holocaust and the loss of his family just because he was Jewish;
his mutation played basically no part in that as far as we can tell,
but it was still because of something he was born with that wasn't his fault.
And after he was freed, he clearly decided, "What has happened to me must never happen again."
Once he found a community of mutants like him,
He applied his Jewish experience to his mutant identity, and became militant in his defense of mutant kind against the too-familiar
persecutions of humanity. With Magneto, "Mutant as Allegory" is diegetically what he believes;
He actively parallels his Jewish experience with his mutant experience very openly.
Magneto doesn't care if there's disparities or if the experiences don't line up perfectly. They're still much too close for him to abide.
He's not interested in being precisely analytical about the exact comparison between his identities. He's focusing on preventing another genocide.
It doesn't matter why people might hate him; his defining motivation is, "Never again."
This is why it is very
important and interesting that his brightest happiest moment is just as rooted in his Jewish identity as his absolute worst,
most painful one that we see in the first scene of the movie.
Both memories are part of him in very similar ways;
Magneto finds his power in the point between rage and serenity, and both his rage and his serenity are rooted in his upbringing, his Jewish
heritage, and his mother. Showing us this memory is brilliant, because it grounds us back into Magneto's character in an incredibly strong way. We already
know why he's angry. We already totally understand the pain humanity caused him.
But this memory, this memory all by itself,
shows us that his existence is more than just pain, and his dual core identities are both about more than just the suffering they've caused
him. His Jewish upbringing brought him comfort and happiness, even if he was hurt for it later.
And when he says, "I didn't know I still had that," it's just as shocking to him as it is to us to learn that
he's more than just rage and vengeance personified. His core motivation was forged in the Holocaust, yes,
but there's more to him than the pain he's lived through, and there's more to both his Jewish identity and his mutant one than just
the ways he suffered for them. Throughout the movie,
he's occasionally described himself as Frankenstein's monster, a weapon created by Shaw,
but this is the first scene where he realizes that Shaw couldn't take this away from him, and that there's more to himself than just
how he was made to suffer. And when he
recognizes that there more to himself than pain, he can finally tap into his full power.
It makes it clear that Shaw didn't create him. He was holding him back. The suffering was overwhelming, yes,
but the joy is still a part of himself, so much so that it's what allows him to finally use his mutant power to the
fullest. With just one final piece, his character comes together.
And because we consistently see him pulling out this kind of power in the later movies,
this tells us that we can assume that, even during his most classic supervillain moments,
he's still maintaining that balance between rage and serenity, that little core of happiness and hope that makes his powers actually
work, that little light that couldn't be put out. Which,
actually makes the fact that it's a menorah in his memory even more brilliant,
because the whole Hanukkah celebration is about a light that miraculously refused to go out.
I actually didn't even put that together before. Wow. But also, it's interesting to note that due to the closeness of this
happy memory to his incredibly painful and traumatic ones, it's unlikely he can really separate them completely.
Even this happy memory's inextricably bound up with his sad painful ones: his mother, their Jewish identity, even the time frame it took place in.
His brightest moment is still tinged with sorrow.
He lives in the tipping point between rage and serenity.
This scene also makes us see why Xavier never loses sight of Erik's capacity for good, even decades in the future, when they've been nemeses
for years. The rage and pain is what drives him to attack humanity,
but it's his capacity for good that allows him to use his powers on that scale. This scene turns Erik into a being of
dualities, and his complex relationship with heroism is just one facet of this. While the original trilogy frames him is a fairly cut-and-dry
supervillain with a sympathetic motivation who occasionally helps out the good guys,
this one scene reframes him as a dual figure who always walks the line between rage and serenity, and draws on both in equal measure.
And that's not even touching on the acting, which is just brilliant. Both Charles and Erik are generally very composed when dealing with the other
mutants, with Charles taking a gentle, compassionate
approach, and Erik playing bad cop to motivate them past their comfort zones and get them to explore their abilities.
But when Erik's the one who needs training, there's no one to play bad cop,
So Charles has to gently ease him out of his comfort zone (although, for Erik,
it's more of a discomfort zone, since he's been drawing his motivation from his darkest, most painful memories). In this scene,
we see Erik vulnerable for the first time in his adult life, and this is when he and Charles really click, and he stops being quite so guarded
around him, until, of course, he gets the helmet to keep Charles out of his head permanently.
What's especially interesting about this scene is that this is the tipping point where Erik learns how to best maximize his potential. Rage and revenge won't do it.
He needs happiness and hope too. And when you compare his motivation in this movie to the original trilogy,
His later motives are rather more... well, not evil.
He's still being a total supervillain, but he's doing it because he wants to save mutants from humans,
not out of personal anger or revenge.
In the first movie, Erik only acts because the government is trying to force all mutants to publicly out themselves; in the second,
he only does anything because Stryker tries to use Xavier to kill all the mutants; and in the third, it's because they developed a mutant
cure, and he's not about that. When he's older, Erik only really responds to direct threats, and he's normally quite serene. And we see exactly
when he develops this serene attitude.
It's late in "First Class" after he kills Shaw. And even though Charles tells him that getting revenge won't bring him
peace, It honestly seems to be just what he needed to clear his head and start looking at the bigger picture.
It's definitely what he needed to finally start doing his classic Magneto float maneuver, indicating that he's finally gotten the hang of his powers completely.
While Charles sees the tipping point between rage and serenity as proof that Erik has good in him,
it's clear to us that Erik's serene,
pragmatic attitude towards the rest of the world and the dangers they're facing is exactly what makes him such a threat later on.
He's not motivated by pure rage after this movie,
but he's just as dangerous, maybe more so, and it all began right here when he found his inner peace.
This one scene, despite its hopeful, triumphant tone, is the birth of the supervillain Magneto.
It's what takes him from a standard vengeance-motivated loose cannon to a cold,
calculating chess master. Despite what Charles believed, Erik's potential for serenity is not the same as his potential for good. Now,
obviously I could keep talking about the scene for basically hours, but I am trying to keep this under 20 minutes,
so let's call it here.
Be sure to check out the other marvelous scenes, rewatch the movie if it's been a while, and have a nice day!