dimfuture.net

Part One
Part Two

Take our next subject: Agent Smith, who is concerned with preservation of the Matrix. Like Zaius, he proposes that humans are destructive, indeed, a very cancer on the earth. Now, the narrative does not take care to prove his point, as it does in Planet of the Apes; and yet it is hard to look at the world around us and fail to see what he’s getting at. If you’re not a human, humans are clearly bad news. The counterpoint to Smith’s perspective is presumably ‘Freedom,’ and it’s quite a good one, but nobody ever bothers to make it. It is simply never as well-expressed in the story as is Smith’s position. And if the villain has a point, we’re going to be needing a counterpoint. Smith wants to contain a destructive force, and I for one cannot blame him. It is therefore difficult for me to root for his undoing. (This is one of my several problems with The Matrix; perhaps, one day, I shall tell you of the others. Here’s a hint: One of them was also in Constantine, and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.)

More recently, this problem manifested in X3: X-Men Eating Sandwiches or whatever. Here, we already had a villain who was even more compelling than the usual; I mean, Ian McKellan for God’s sake, and plus he is portrayed as defending himself and others from oppression. And it is the feeling of personal oppression, for whatever reason, that leads to the desire to lash out at society that villainy speaks to in the first place. This is really the crux of the matter: Many people feel, at least sometimes, like outsiders, given the short shrift by society, and desirous, therefore, of vengeance. This is why catharsis works. Evil can be the ultimate underdog. Especially when it breaks out of prison like that! God damn!

Still, that doesn’t mean that Magneto should get to murder all humans. Most of them never did nothin’ to him. His righteousness is therefore mitigated by his cruelty; he’s still on the wrong side. X3 demonstrates, unwittingly, what a delicate balance this can be. For those of you fortunate enough to have missed it: A cure for, er, mutancy – the quality that makes its holders unique, and thus, outsiders – is devised; Magneto is concerned that it will be used without the consent of the ‘cured.’ And then, lo and behold, it is. By the goddamned government. And Magneto takes this as a declaration of war on mutantkind. And so he attacks the source of the cure. Which is what I would do in his position. Robbing people, suddenly and without consent, of the things that make them unique? Yeah, let’s put a fuckin’ stop to that! Even if we do have to recruit a bunch of teenagers depicted with an understanding of youth culture which suggests that when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way!

I can forgive The Matrix for having a villain who makes more sense than the hero. The Matrix assumes, probably rightly, that its audience consists of humans, humans who would rather not be enslaved by machines. And my own knee-jerk misanthropy is, I confess, not for everybody. But X3 assumes that its audience consists of people who think it’s okay to rob people of their unique abilities, to violently enforce personal conformity, in the name of safety. An audience of people with more sympathy for normalcy than for outsiders. And of course it found such an audience; conformity wouldn’t be conformity otherwise. But still, as a diehard villain enthusiast, this scares me a whole lot more than being choked to death by the Force.

Being choked to death by the Force would be awesome.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under Movies, The Kessen Run. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.