X Men III

There are, I suppose, a number of reasons X Men could piss you off. For me it was to do with Jean Grey.

For quite a lot of the film I was quite excited. How progressive, I thought. Looks like it will turn out that a woman will be more powerful than tired old patriarchal ideological conflicts (paternalistic mind controlling bald chap Charles who knows what's best for you, vs evil militaristic masculine dark side Magneto - both to do with control, both to do with power). Jean Grey will become the new paradigm, etc.

But it turns out that, actually, women who are more powerful than men are dangerous aberrations and should die - in fact with their good, compliant selves they beg for death because they know they're an offence against nature. Chaste and compliant Storm knows her place and therefore earns the honour of getting to run Charles Xavier's beneficent moral mind control regime. Shame Jean didn't have the wit to comply and repress too.

Plus there's all the stuff about how you can tell Jean's gone m/bad because she starts liking sex (alarming poor shrinking violet Hugh Jackman. You can see how he'd fear for his purity). But then I should have guessed because she first appears out of the depths of a lake, and I know my Freud - enough to know you can't trust these woman-type people with their wombs and leakages.

So politically this film got right on my tit end. But then from Carl's point of view, I'm taking it all too personally. To kvetch on about the film as misogynist is to literalise; this is a film about the fear of the masculine consciousness of the feminine within the psyche. The feminine resides in every male psyche as the most mysterious, hidden and 'other' aspect of the Self. This feminine aspect of the male is his Anima. Anima represents to the male consciousness the image of that individual’s psyche. Appearing in a man's dreams and fantasies, she also turns up in real life in his in his personal relationships. She can personify a man's problems and confusions, the current emotions of his soul, more generally his sense of his own inner life and its importance; she can also connect consciousness with the imagination (inspiring the love or creation of songs, paintings, novels... any creative product of the psyche). Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities (a witch, a goddess, the one who got away; the femme fatale of noir). She is powerful and frightening and the temptation to repress her unsettling influence - to stab her to death with your adamantine claws - can appear irresistible.

So actually Carl and I aren't poles apart on this one. X Men III is a film about patriarchies being created by, and then sustaining, repression of the feminine. It happens in the psyche of the patriarch in parallel with his acting out of the repression on the world (ie real, actual women) . Still, we can always comfort ourselves with Famke and Halle looking hot in leather. Oh, hang on...

Carl says: 'The anima image, which lends the mother such superhuman glamour in the eyes of the son, gradually becomes tarnished by commonplace reality and sinks back into the unconscious, but without in any way losing its original tension and instinctivity. It is ready to spring out and project itself at the first opportunity, the moment a woman makes an impression that is out of the ordinary.'