Review of X-Men: First Class (2011) by Shiira — 22 Jul 2011

Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel is still alive. The eighty-two-year-old author, best known for "Night", a slim novel about his experiences in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is also widely known to be a vocal critic of the way the Nazi genocide of the Jews gets portrayed in the media.

When NBC broadcasted the miniseries "Holocaust" in 1978, he called the television film "morally objectionable and indecent". As an addendum to Wiesel's assertion of television trivializing the six-million dead by filming the unfilmable, cultural historian Neal Gabler in "Imaginary Witness", agrees that the genocide narrative goes "beyond any traditional form," in which any depiction of the pogrom carried out by the Nazis is "a war between narrative and history".

Has Wiesel seen "Inglourious Basterds", the 2009 film where narrative wins the war from the outset, since WWII gets reinvented by a post-modernist who utilizes the Jews as subordinates to a parallel history: movie history, which runs concurrent with their story of persecution, death, and in this case, revenge? Bypassing the iconography of victimization(ghettos, concentration camps) found in all Nazi-themed films, the Jews fight back in Tarantino's alternate take on WWII, as the film instead chooses to focus on a Hebrew commando team that specializes in the capturing and torturing of German POWs with gruesome acts of mutilation.

While all holocaust-driven are largely predicated on large-scale killing and mass suffering, "Inglourious Basterds" has a filmic precedent that goes all the way back to the early-forties, an epoch when a Nazi-sympathizing Hollywood very rarely dealt honestly with the imminent German menace, but Charlie Chaplin directed, produced, and starred in "The Great Dictator", the first film about the imperiled Jews that mentioned them by name.

Playing a barber who returns to the ghetto after a lengthy bout of amnesia, Chaplin fights the stormtroopers with slapstick, where in one scene, he dares to slap a soldier with a paintbrush, whitening the Aryan's face in the process, after the Jew balks at having to reproduce the 'W' in his race's namesake which he smudged off from a storefront window.

Even better, Hannah, the Bear-Jew of her day, rather than swing a bat, whacks Nazis on the head, hard, with a frying pan. After her small victory, she tells the barber, "We should all fight back.

" In "X-Men: First Class", the filmmaker returns to Poland, 1944, where in the 2000 original, Magneto, then just a scared boy named Erik, reduces a gate into an iron heap through the unleashing of his telekinetic powers.

For Wiesel, the comic book is the stuff of juvenilia. But to a younger generation, the comic book is viewed as the novel's equal, in which they would see no difference between "Night" and the Marvel origin story where the concentration camp setting of the scene is based on.

By reappropriating the violence inherent in Nazi Germany through a comic book-based language, the "X-Men" saga challenges the hegemony of traditional film adaptations. A Nazi scientist named Sebastian shoots Eric's mother dead, which is par for the course in any film dealing with the holocaust, but unlike "Schindler's List", the shooting itself isn't the spectacle; it's the preamble to the summer movie pageant of CGI, as the traumatized boy inverts the file cabinet in the office, and sends objects flying around in the adjoining room.

For all its contemporary trappings, in which "X-Men: First Class" borrows a Jewish trope that Tarantino himself pioneered(the holocaust survivor antihero), Erik kills Nazis in a film that's surprisingly reactionary, since it avoids using the word "Jew" to describe the people that he's avenging.

It's coded. Whereas a WWII-era film such as "The Mortal Storm" substituted the racial label with the less-specific term "anti-Semitic", likewise, the "X-Men" saga uses "mutant" in place of the "J"-word in identifying Magneto as a Hebrew, perhaps for the reason that Hollywood wants to distance itself from its complicity in regard to the US government's isolationist stance leading up to the Pearl Harbor bombing.

Interestingly enough, Chaplin wears a bucket which recalls the helmet Magneto is often outfitted with, in a scene where the barber and the SS officer hide themselves on a roof to escape capture. "Strange, I always thought of you as an Aryan," he tells the barber in an earlier scene, where the Nazi puts a stop to a ghetto liquidation already in progress.

In essence, that's what Eric has become, both a Jew and a "great dictator"(Chaplin also plays the Fuhrer). Just before Magneto makes his getaway by helicopter in "X-Men", there's a cutaway to the American flag, a symbol that gains greater significance in the film's climax, where the magnetic field that he creates from the Statue of Liberty, has the potential of turning New York into one great crematorium.