In each of the X-Men movies so far, the scale of the conflict has been a product of its time.
In the first movie (X-Men, 2000), the danger is terrorism: a radical ideologue threatening a gathering of world leaders with a radiological weapon. It’s interesting to examine X-Men’s sympathetic treatment of terrorism, and its skepticism about the growth of government powers, in light of the War on Terror (fodder for a future post, if anyone wants to submit an article). In the second movie (X2, 2003), the conflict is now over racial identity. Does being a mutant automatically require conflict with established institutions, or can mutants and humans live in peace? By the third movie (X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006), the conflict turns into outright war. Magneto gathers an army of mutants to attack a pharmaceutical company, and the confrontation is public and explosive.
So where does that leave X-Men: First Class?
First Class is set in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is the height of the Cold War, with tensions between the West and the Soviet bloc as hot as they could get without reaching outright bloodshed. The U.S. places ICBMs in Turkey, close enough to destroy Moscow. In return, the U.S.S.R. dispatches ships loaded with ICBMs to Cuba, which will put most of the Eastern seaboard in peril.
(SUBSTANTIAL SPOILERS for First Class follow)
Despite the explosive mutant battle on the shores of Cuba that caps the film, the primary conflict in First Class is espionage. Sebastian Shaw operates behind the scenes to provoke the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the brink of nuclear conflict. He’s an ex-Nazi scientist, but he’s so useful to the Eastern and Western powers that they still take meetings with him. To combat him, Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr team up with the CIA. They recruit a team of special agents from the private sector and turn them into paramilitary operatives.
First Class is a story of the Cold War. While there are established (if not always honored) rules of warfare, a cold war – a war of spies and diplomats – has fewer explicit codes. The question of methods is foremost. Is blackmail acceptable? What about torture? Assassination? If you use immoral means to achieve a moral end, does that leave you on the side of the angels? And if you use moral means but fail to achieve your end, was it worth it to even try?
A Wilderness of Mirrors
While First Class is notionally about Charles Xavier’s first class at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, the teenagers get very little screen time. The movie and the audience are clearly more interested in Xavier and Lensherr. The world’s most powerful mutants, they represent the divergent goals and methods of the mutant rights movement.
When we first meet Erik Lensherr as an adult, he is alone in a hotel room in Switzerland. He glares at a wall covered with pictures of his targets: Sebastian Shaw, Shaw’s contacts, and the bankers who support him. Lensherr visits one of these bankers, interrogating him on Shaw’s whereabouts. He tortures the banker for information by prying out one of his metal fillings and gets a lead: Argentina. On the way out, he reminds the banker that, should anyone else learn about Lensherr’s quest, Lensherr will be back to kill him.
In Argentina, Lensherr confronts two ex-Nazis, former cohorts of Shaw’s. These men, presumably former soldiers, are more competent threats than a hapless Swiss banker. But Lensherr goes in alone anyway. He teases the men for a bit, goading them into attacking him first. Then he pins one to the table with a knife, compels the bartender into shooting the other one with his magnetic powers, and gets another lead before finishing his work.
What do these incidents tell us about Lensherr? He’s cold-blooded. He has no qualms against torturing or killing in order to complete his mission. In fact, he even seems to like it. Lensherr yanks the filling out of the banker’s mouth after being told of Shaw’s location. And he lets the Nazis in Argentina know that he’s an Auschwitz survivor by showing off his forearm tattoo.
We also know that he operates alone. This might not strike most folks as odd. As a moviegoing audience, we’re used to our heroes being bold men of will who operate without allies. But it’s hardly a requirement, and it’s especially odd in historical context. There was no shortage of well-heeled Jewish survivors in 1962 looking to bring Nazis to justice (q.v. the Mossad operation to capture Adolf Eichmann, for instance). Lensherr could have tagged along with any of those. For all we know, maybe he did off-camera. But the movie depicts him as a lone wolf. He acquires his intel solo and operates solo.
When we first meet Charles Xavier as an adult, he’s picking up a co-ed in a bar in Oxford. As the world’s most powerful telepath, he could use his powers to bed her in minutes. But he limits his mind-reading to determining her favorite drink. Instead, he spins a charming line about heterochromia and mutations. He ends his spiel with a toast – “Mutant and Proud” – that clearly has the girl intrigued.
Of course, Xavier didn’t come to Oxford alone: he brought his adopted sister, Raven, with him. Raven also wants broader acceptance of mutants, even if she’s cynical where Xavier is optimistic. But wherever Xavier goes, Raven goes, too. This extends not just to Oxford but also to Washington, when agent Moira McTaggart recruits Xavier to brief the CIA on the nature of mutants. Raven has no qualifications in genetic science beyond being a mutant, but Xavier wants her along anyway. And she proves useful, too.
Xavier is warm-hearted and affable. He has lots of friends at Oxford, as evidenced by the party thrown for him when he gets his doctorate. He wants to make the world safer for mutants by spreading awareness at a grass-roots level. By getting the “Mutant and Proud” slogan to catch on, he hopes that the rest of society will realize that mind readers and shape changers are not necessarily worse than people with different-colored eyes.
Xavier is also more willing to work with a team. When McTaggart approaches him, he picks up the gravity of her request by peering into her brain. But instead of heading off solo to deal with Shaw and his cohort, he teams up with the CIA instead. This isn’t his only choice. The world’s most powerful telepath probably had as good a chance as anyone of taking down a trio of mutants single-handed. But he wants the resources, manpower and the goodwill that working with a government agency will generate.
Two powerful men. Two different methods. One common goal: making the world a safer place for mutants.
Shaken, Not Stirred
First Class is a story of the Cold War. It’s a story about espionage: secret meetings, influence exerted behind the scenes, states brought to the brink of violence and the fallout of World War II. When people in the Sixties thought about espionage – or when people today think about espionage in the Sixties – they thought of spies. Two spies in particular.
On one hand you had James Bond. The creation of Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming, Bond was a Commander in Great Britain’s navy who became an officer in the SIS. Bond has “00-status”, a government sanction to use lethal force in the completion of his assignments. When depicted in novels, Bond doesn’t enjoy killing: he approaches it with the cool detachment of a surgeon. On film, however, Bond is a different character. He often punctuates a kill with a post-mortem one liner (e.g., “I think he got the point”) and can transition from murder to loveplay with little rest in between.
Bond was a spy in search of adventure. He traveled to the most glamorous spots in the world: Jamaica, Istanbul, the Bahamas. He acted alone, faced down overwhelming odds, and emerged triumphant and unruffled. Though he was an agent of a massive bureaucracy, he only checked in with them at the beginning and end of his assignments. And not even at the end, if he had a pretty girl to seduce in the meantime.
On the other hand you had Harry Palmer. Harry Palmer was first introduced in the Len Deighton novel The IPCRESS File in 1962, just after the first Bond film, Dr. No, was released. Palmer is a former Army Intelligence officer transferred to an unnamed intelligence department. He works closely with other officers in his department. He harangues his superiors for reimbursements that are owed to him and raises in pay. He lives in a small flat. He has a rather modest education, which he supplements by reading up on military history.
Harry Palmer was such an unglamorous personality that, in the Deighton novels, he was never even named. It took the 1965 film adaptation of The IPCRESS File, starring Michael Caine, to give Deighton’s protagonist a name and an accent. Caine portrayed Palmer as snippy with superiors but congenial with his peers. He was hindered by bureaucracy, particularly the squabbles between departments. He wasn’t a martial arts master or a crack shot, but he was clever. In the end, that was all he needed.
(Ironically, the Bond films and the Palmer films were both produced by Harry Saltzmann and scored by John Barry. Now that’s horizontal integration!)
Two powerful men. Two different methods. One common goal: peace in the West and the security of the British Empire.
A License to Kill
We have two archetypes for what a spy should look like in the Sixties. One is a cold, glamorous man of action. One is a convivial, clever bureaucrat. If First Class is a movie about espionage in the Sixties, which of its protagonist goes into which role?
Lensherr is clearly modeled after James Bond. In the first act, he does the most traveling: from Switzerland to Argentina to Miami. He operates without a network and extracts information from his targets by the most direct and painful means available. He’s not a psychopath, but he gets a frisson of pleasure out of seeing Nazis and Nazi collaborators squirm. And he always dresses the part: tight polo shirt in the pampas of Argentina, crisp grey suit in Switzerland.
(I have to credit Double-0 Section for the above image, as well as pointing out its parallel to Connery’s attire in From Russia With Love. The author touts Fassbender as a replacement for Daniel Craig in the Bond franchise. I say why not? And give James Bond magnetic powers while we’re at it)
While Xavier isn’t as obviously a parallel to Harry Palmer, the shoe still fits. Xavier is a clear antithesis to the obsessed Lensherr, and Palmer was designed as an antithesis to Bond. Xavier makes friends: the co-ed in the bar, his adopted sister Raven, Moira McTaggart and (later) the rest of the first class at the Xavier School. Xavier also plays well with a bureaucracy, putting the fears of the CIA directors at ease and bringing his recruited mutants to the Agency’s secret facility. He prefers not to use force, even shying away from killing Shaw in the end. He’s not a torturer or a fighter like Lensherr is.
Both Xavier and Lensherr operate outside the usual rules of engagement. They are spies and, insofar as they train the next generation, spymasters. And they have the same end goal in mind. This similarity of purpose enables them to be friends. But the difference in their methods means there’s only so far they can travel together.
So is Lensherr the mutant James Bond and Xavier the mutant Harry Palmer? That’s the closest analog available, though it’s not quite perfect. For one, Palmer is distinctly of lower class than Bond: Cockney accent, cheap flat, common concerns about paycheck. In First Class, we’re reminded several times that Xavier is of higher wealth and class than Lensherr. Xavier was raised in palatial comfort while Lensherr was being experimented on in Auschwitz.
But that’s clearly what Vaughn wants us to see. Lensherr is a cold man of action. Xavier is a friendly agent who gets by on his wits. They fit into the same Bond / Palmer dichotomy that shaped spy fiction in the Sixties.
However, James Bond and Harry Palmer never crossed paths. They operated in distinct fictional universes. So First Class presents us with a rare opportunity. The two archetypes of spy fiction are, for the first time, pitted head to head. They share the same goals – a world where mutants can live without fear of persecution – but differ on methods. Xavier wants to blend in to the social order, while Lensherr wants to give mutants the power to negotiate as equals.
The two differing methods of espionage are set against each other. Who wins?
Technically, neither of them.
The Mutant Who Came in From the Cold
There were actually three popular conceptions of spies in the Sixties: Ian Fleming’s, Len Deighton’s and John le Carre’s.
le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwall, a former Army Intelligence officer who joined MI6 in the earliest days of the Cold War. Though he started off writing simple detective fiction, his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was a moodier and more contemplative piece about the moral costs of espionage. It was a critical and commercial smash, enabling Cornwall to retire from the Foreign Office and write full time.
The le Carré novels since then have largely revolved around similar themes: how espionage, and the statecraft that requires it, chews up and spits out innocent lives. In his “Karla Trilogy” (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People), veteran spymaster George Smiley pursues his rival in the U.S.S.R. with a grinding obsession that leaves him feeling hollow in the end. The Little Drummer Girl and The Russia House depict civilians who get swept up in the games between states and the resulting wreckage of their lives.
For le Carré, the question of ends is almost irrelevant. The means themselves are bad enough.
How does X-Men: First Class end? (REPEATED WARNING ABOUT SPOILERS)
Xavier is lying on the beach, crippled from the waist down by a deflected bullet. Lensherr has gone from an optimistic partner in the battle for mutant rights to a nascent supervillain. Raven sides with Lensherr, abandoning the only family she’s ever had. Agent McTaggart is about to be all but disavowed by her agency. And the two greatest powers in the world now know about, and have explicit reason to fear, mutants.
But hey – those American and Russian navies are intact!
As far as endings go, that could come straight out of a le Carré novel. A group of civilians got swept up in a secret war between the East and the West. They advanced the interests of both sides, but got chewed up and spit out in the process. The fact that they survive as mere cripples and megalomaniacs is downright optimistic.
Xavier may be Harry Palmer and Lensherr may be James Bond. But both of those characters, despite their differing tones, are largely optimistic spies. They suffer and struggle, but they win in the end and emerge healthier for it. The protagonists of a le Carré novel – Alec Leamas, George Smiley and the rest – have no such happy ending. They are profoundly damaged by the energies that the West channels through them. Possibly because they’re not mutants.
X-Men: First Class combines the thesis and antithesis of popular spies in the Sixties to form a synthesis of deconstructed spy fiction. It puts two fictional archetypes in service of a real battle (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and a relatable, if fictional cause (mutant civil rights). The story that results suggests that this will be a war without any real heroes. Mutants will fight and die on both sides, either serving the interests of a state that fears them or giving up normal lives to live as villains. And the Cold War will press on.
