Magneto Was Right, Bub
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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: I come not to bury Magneto, but to praise him.
I’ll admit, from the first, to a quite high level of ignorance: I haven’t read the comics—largely because the lore is so dense, and goes back so far, that even to attempt to broach that dense bolus of culture is intimidating in the extreme. (The Marvel website shows 457 results for comic books featuring Magneto—that’s a lot!) But I’ve watched all the X-Men movies that feature Magneto (even the universally panned Dark Phoenix), and I’d basically watch anything else that featured Magneto in it. Because the legendary archvillain of the X-Men wasn’t dumped into a vat of toxic waste, or born a gigantic blue inexplicably genocidal space alien, or an egomaniacal sorcerer.
Thanks to a retconning of Magneto in the ‘80s, the master of metal has an astounding and daring origin story: born out of the ultimate evil of man, the Holocaust, Magneto came into his powers with a lust for vengeance and a contempt for humanity that came from seeing all he had ever loved stripped away from him out of world-historical cruelty. Abraham Josephine Riesman has an excellent account of how Magneto became Jewish, and it’s ultimately an act of narrative genius: it gives the character bottomless depth, rendering him so iconic that the very first scene of the very first film of X-Men is devoted to it—for good reason.
It’s a hell of a story, and it’s hard—very hard—not to concede that, on some level, Magneto is right.
Of course, in the films he’s portrayed by high-cheekboned Aryans Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender; his Jewishness is referenced glancingly, in one recurrent memory of his mother lighting Chanukah candles, but his desire for revenge on Nazis—and his conviction that genocidal intent towards the other lurks just under the breastbone of every man—comes from hard-won knowledge. Charles Xavier, his “old friend” and perpetual foil, wants to earn acceptance for mutants via a stellar record of heroic deeds; but even Professor X admits that mutants are only “one bad day” away from being hunted and imprisoned at the whims of a threatened humanity.
Magneto could have told you that; in the films, not only is he torn from his birth family, his wife and child are murdered by Polish policemen even after he disappears into a hard-won obscurity. No wonder he thirsts for vengeance; no wonder he thinks that perhaps the vengeance should be performed ahead of the next slaughter. Even the supposed “real name” offered for Magneto in the films, Erik Lehnsherr, is a German pseudonym; only in later arcs of the comics is his true Jewish name, Max Eisenhardt, revealed—that’s how deeply he felt he need to hide, this mutant, this Jew, this magnetic marvel.
He may be a violent man, but that violence comes from a deep, deep well of pain. Survivors are generally not nice people; nice people don’t survive things like the Holocaust. I say this as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors: they were pushed to make choices no one should ever have to make, adapting and surviving across borders and oceans, scarred to the core. If you want a comic-book education in what you have to do to survive cataclysm, read Maus before you read Magneto.
Magneto’s cruelties have their own unwitting echoes in twentieth-century Jewish history. At this particularly fraught moment of bloodshed, even a neon-hued comic-book story of how victims can become oppressors, committed to preemptive annihilation of their enemies, resonates in a different key. Not for nothing has Magneto been compared to violent anti-Palestinian Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane.
Even so, how can I be mad at a Jew who can turn his pursuers’ own guns against them, bury them in metal, pull up train tracks and use them as weapons? There’s an absolutely thrilling sequence in X-Men: First Class that shows Fassbender-as-Magneto hunting down ex-Nazis in Argentina, and I would absolutely watch a four hour long film that explored such retribution. (Call it Inglourious Mutents, seeing as Fassbender had a star turn in Tarantino’s spellbinding revenge fantasy.) There was an X-Men Origins: Magneto planned, but it seems to have died in development hell; call me, O studios, I’ll do a rewrite.
Magneto Bar Scene | X-Men First Class (2011) Movie Clip HD 4K - YouTube
Magneto Bar Scene - Frankenstein's Monster - Argentina Scene - English Subtitles | X-Men: First Class (2011) Movie Clip 4K Ultra HDCast: James McAvoy, Michae...
There’s a lot wrong with X-Men: First Class—it’s big and dumb in the way that all superhero movies are, (sorry Martin Scorsese, love your work, I also deeply enjoy pretty people going biff baff boom in enjoyably dumb contexts for awhile) and features a horrifically miscast Kevin Bacon. That film is particularly frustrating because of moments of greatness like that bar scene, which seem to promise more than the form can give—but it gives Fassbender free rein to embody his powers and growth and wrath, and for that I can only be grateful. Magneto Forever.
McKellen as Magneto has a similar gravitas—it’s a particularly piquant pleasure for me to watch excellent, classically trained actors discuss X-Jets and parcel out ludicrous comic-book science, a delicious frisson of cognitive dissonance—and I’m glad the movies recognized that Magneto is never fully villainous, never fully lost. His way is cruel, but he was born of cruelty; often as not he ultimately teams up with the X-Men when their back is to the wall, when mutantkind faces intolerable odds. (The excellent Days of Future Past, my favorite of the X-Men series so far, has both iterations of Magneto working to save the world).
Also… being able to control metal absolutely whips as a superpower. Look at this magnificent fight scene in an otherwise pretty mediocre movie. Watch Magneto turn a train into a living weapon against, uhh, some malevolent aliens? It doesn’t matter. It’s glorious. It fucking rocks. (Also, given his origin story, turning a prisoner-transport train car to his own ends goes perhaps harder than the writers intended).
Insofar as the mutants in the X-Men universe are always something of a metaphor for racism and intolerance, how fear turns into hate at the turn of a dime, Magneto is the ultimate embodiment of that story. That makes him indispensable. And the fleetness of his combat makes him beautiful. Theodore Adorno famously said there could be no art after Auschwitz. Clearly he underestimated Jewish comic-book writers. (OK, maybe “art” is a stretch, but give me a break; Michael Fassbender’s jawline alone is art). And I’d still like a Magneto movie. Wouldn’t you?
