Hate the Different
Watched X2 at a matinee today. I expected a great movie and was not disappointed, but the level of political timeliness surprised me a bit.
After being pounded with 24/7 rah-rah reporting from the FoxMSNBCNNetal media clones for the last several months, it was nice to see something, even a work of fiction, blatantly portraying a big, intrusive, government as somehow wrong. Was it just me or did the Stryker character look uncannily like Attorney General Ashcroft? Or at least what I remember Ashcroft looking like. Haven’t seen him around as much recently now that destroying the terrorist networks isn’t newsworthy.
I still keep wondering when we’ll get back to the war on terror. You remember the terrorists? A motley crew of amoral slugs with no ethics who terrorized millions of American families through their greed…left the hammer of financial ruin hanging over countless heads…looted and stole and when nothing was left, destroyed the files. I was really looking forward to seeing Martha in prison orange, almost as much as I was looking forward to seeing Osama’s head on a spike and Saddam in the dock for crimes against humanity. I guess I’ll have to keep waiting; a guy needs to have dreams after all.
Thanks for allowing me the rant, now back to the movie. Just as in the first, the use of the fictional mutants as the oppressed/maligned/oft-hated minority allowed them to put a thin veil on some thick political issues. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but rounding people up based on their membership in a group just to question them (not to punish, of course) plays big. One of my favorite lines comes when someone asks Mystique why she keeps her dark blue scaled form when she can look like anyone she chooses to. She responds, quite appropriately, why should I have to change? Using a large electronic system to identify all the mutants once and for all sounds eerily like Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness, and the potential for misuse was illustrated quite well.
Hating the different is easy in America. Nice neat labels make for easy compartmentalization and the ability to to an us and them thing. If it wasn’t for them, things would be better. Always.
