X Men III v2.0

An old friend mentioned to me recently that he’d read my rant about X Men III (which was very gratifying, because I’m such a mong I have never been able to get the comments function on this blog to work and I didn’t know anyone was reading it). Anyway, the inflation to my ego was rapidly reversed when I realised that he had an intelligent question for me about it, and I’m not used to those, I usually need advance notice in writing.

Ian’s question was, is there not a point early on in the film when Magneto is not simply interested in controlling and exploiting Jean Gray, but instead is genuinely supportive of her more chaotic, subversive qualities?

Well, the first thing to say is that it’s ages since I saw X Men III and frankly I can’t remember much about it because my brain’s full of other things, like Britney’s breakdown and the new series of Battlestar Galactica. From what I recall, Magneto is attracted to her subversive, anarchic powers initially, until he realises the extent of her power.

And that made me realise that I’ve missed the whole archetypal point. X Men III is not (only)about difficulty with the feminine, it’s about difficulty with the ultimate Other, God. Jean has to be a woman because it represents the otherness, the unknowability, of God; and the central conflict of the film is between temporal structures of power that confer status, provide narrative cycles, and support the notions of progress and control that our epoch is so committed to – versus the atemporal, ineffable and transcendental qualities associated with divinity. Charles Xavier and Magneto are both furiously trying to deny and hold back a power from outside time and control and visibility and knowledge that can knock their plans awry, refute and destroy the systems of meaning (ideology, morality, order, goals, beliefs) that have enabled them to live their lives (consciously).

This interests me in all sorts of ways. The struggle with the idea of God preoccupies not only our society but our relationships with other societies also wrestling the same difficulties. Is a religious society a good or bad thing? Is God a fantasy that is no longer helpful to a more advanced age? Rebellion against God is a story as old as religion itself; for Christianity, at least, discussion of rebellion and submission is at the very core of the faith. X Men III expresses this archetypal struggle, the fury of the non believer in response to faith and religious practice.

So then in re reading Jung’s Answer to Job, I find that Jung related very closely the archetype of God and that of the unconscious (our own unknown, transcendent, subversive nature) and with the archetype of the Self. So another facet of this might be X Men III as the expression of the rebellion against, or struggle for power with, our own unconscious and the attempt to deny, contain or eradicate its power – the questionable motive for many analysands in the psychoanalytic process, I should think, and who can blame them. An intriguing light to cast on the more common notion of struggling with ourselves.

Clever Ian. Stupid me.

Please note: Clever Ian shown may not be actual Clever Ian.

Carl says: we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities… Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self… We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. On the contrary it only helps us to separate man from God… Faith is certainly right when it impresses upon man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God it; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence…