Running head: THE MUTANT METAPHOR 1

The Mutant Metaphor

Wilson McMillan

Wheaton College
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The presence of the mutant metaphor for the 60’s U.S Civil Rights movement in the X-Men

franchise has been clear since the publishing of their first comic book in 1963. Roughly forty

years later, with the advent of the first films in the X-Men film franchise, we see this metaphor

maintained and as apparent as ever. In the X-Men films, characters such as Magento and

Professor X. are clearly made to symbolize specific historical individuals from the U.S Civil

Rights movement, and thus, double down on the previously established mutant metaphor. In

maintaining this metaphor, however, the filmmakers behind the X-Men movie franchise have

perpetuated the flaws and errancies of past X-Men properties. The metaphor placed within the

X-Men universe is employed with a level of inaccuracy that mars the memory of the historical

movement it was made to represent. This flawed representation has misinformed the public, as

the X-Men’s audience accesses the Civil Rights movement through the franchise without

recognizing its distortion.

In September of 1963, the first X-Men comic book was published. A month prior, in

August of 1963, more than a quarter-million people marched on Washington D.C. From this very

first X-Men issue, the characters within the comic made themselves distinct from their

contemporary superheroes, as they brought with them the metaphor of the mutant. This genesis

of the X-Men taking place during the height of the U.S civil rights movement had clear

influences; influences that have remained within the mutated DNA of the X-Men franchise to the

present day. The metaphor found within the X-Men cinematic universe is distinctly one meant to

symbolize the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 60s. And the purpose of this metaphor, as with

all metaphors, is to contextualize one thing in terms of another, highlighting the similarity
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between them. As a way to describe the completely unfamiliar world of the X-Men, the creators

of the comic, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made it a metaphor for something their audience would

be very familiar with, the Civil Rights movement. In theory, this attempt at metaphor is tactful

and even admirable, but in practice, it runs into a problem that plagues many metaphors,

murkiness and lack of clarity. This problem is a prolific thwarter of successful metaphor, and it is

only exacerbated by the onset of postmodern fragmentation. This lack of precision will always

be a dilemma with metaphor, as the nature of the tool is to conform one thing into the terms of

another thing, but Lee and Kirby attempt to navigate this problem regardless. In this analysis of

the X-Men cinematic universe, we will attempt to unearth the symbolic intentions of the

filmmakers by performing a close examination of how the characters of Magneto and Professor

X are made into an explicit allegory for the historical figures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther

King Jr.

Many may claim that the metaphor identified within this essay is one that has more to do

with my reading into the text than it does the original X-Men creators intentional placement of it,

but I refute this claim. In his essay titled, The Craving for Meaning: Explicit Allegory in the

Non-Implicit Age, Purdue University English professor, Roger C Schoblin, makes the case that

most times when a subtextual allegory is found within a text it is intentionally instilled by the

author. A key claim Schoblin makes within his essay is that fantasy authors, be they superhero

film writers or otherwise, are writing allegories deliberately. What he calls “explicit allegory” is

to be both expected in works of fiction and fantasy, and viewed as an intentional piece of subtext

placed within that text by the author. Moving forward with this assumption that the creators both

of the original comic book and of the recent film adaptations have thoughtfully crafted their story
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to fit the mutant metaphor for the civil rights movement, we may examine it without being

hindered by the idea that it is merely the product of narrative coincidence.

However, while this understanding of “explicit allegory” makes clear to what movement

Lee and Kirby are metaphorizing, their execution may still not be clear in portraying an accurate

history and message of that movement. And so, while a text, such as the X-Men films, can be

influenced and inspired by historical context, it does not mean that it succeeds in doing justice to

those influences by, in this case, creating a beneficial metaphor. A beneficial metaphor being

distinct from a perfect metaphor, as no metaphor is flawless, but it must be at the very least not

damaging to the thing it is metaphorizing. Damage here being defined as historical inaccuracy

and message distortion. Specifically, this damage occurs when one thing metaphorizes another in

a revisionist manner; a manner that tarnishes the memory of, and/or miscommunicates the

message of, some person, event, movement, or whatever it may be. This danger of detrimental

metaphor is not simply that one thing was metaphorized in an ethically unjust manner, but rather

that regardless of the ethical questionability, metaphors have a paramount place in shaping our

lives.

Communication researchers Lakoff & Johnson claim that metaphors are something we

live by and constitute our lives with, they even named their revered 1980 book on metaphor after

this claim. Metaphor is the primary way that we interact with and understand the world,

especially aspects of the world that are somewhat unfamiliar or abstract, and thus metaphors are

the chief influence on how we perceive that which we don’t yet understand. Being aware of this

important role of metaphors in our understanding of and interaction with the world, these

dangers of a deeply flawed or clumsy metaphor become all the more apparent. It is on the basis
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of this danger that I claim that within the X-Men cinematic universe, and specifically with the

characters of Magento and Professor X, the mutant metaphor employed by the filmmakers is

deeply flawed and thus presents a distorted representation of the figures of the civil rights

movement as a whole, and the figures of Malcolm X and MLK Jr. as individuals.

At the time of the X-Men’s creation, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby sought to employ their

audience's direct social experience with the Civil Rights Movement to make tangible and

understandable the abstract world of the X-Men. Lee and Kirby used the tense relationship

between the black and white communities to frame the relationship between mutants and

humans. Now, nearly 60 years later, the public interacts in the reverse. The pop-culture franchise

staple of the X-Men, which has cemented itself in cultural discourse via a regular release of

films, comics, and other forms of media for decades, is the tangible and understood lens through

which we view the removed abstract artifact that is the 60s Civil Rights Movement. It is this

understanding of how our culture has allowed entertainment to rewrite our history that

legitimizes the severity of my claim that this franchise that has now come to be a primary pop

cultural touchstone with which the Civil Rights Movement is perceived, has a disingenuous,

distorted, and dangerous metaphor at its core.

Within this analysis, my texts of select scenes of dialogue between the characters of

Magento and Professor X. found within the X-Men film franchise serve as fertile ground for

examination on the use of metaphor, specifically in a mainstream pop culture context. This

discussion will begin by performing metaphor criticism in the standard procedure of better

understanding the metaphor(s) used in a text and why, while also examining how the flaws and

of a metaphor are exacerbated when placed on a billion-dollar franchise that’s capable of

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influencing the masses. One way this essay distinguishes itself from other analyses of metaphor

within pop culture texts is in its addressing a commonly held misconception. The erroneous

notion that a subtextual metaphor that highlights injustice is inherently edifying the movement,

ideology, or event that the text is made to be a metaphor for. This is similar to the phenomenon

noted by Ono and Sloop in their 1995 Critique of Vernacular Discourse. They discuss how

simply because a vernacular discourse is such, and thus was created by and for a minority people

group, it does not mean that this vernacular discourse diverged from the damaging elements

found in the dominant narrative, saying “vernacular discourse will not, by virtue of their being

vernacular, lead to broad-based liberatory affects.” Ono and Sloop disavow the misconception

that subjects with surface-level support for ending injustices are always supporting the same

sentiment on the structural level. I believe that similarly, the X-Men franchise has been the

benefactor of the same cultural misconception. This isn’t to say that the X-Men franchise itself is

a vernacular discourse, but rather that the way its mutant metaphor is perceived is with an

automatic presumption that it is beneficial, in the same way that vernacular discourses are often

automatically assumed to be liberatory. In the X-Men films the creators have intentionally placed

a metaphor for the 60s U.S. Civil Rights Movement, but they have done so in a way that

damages the reputation of certain historical figures from that movement and misinforms the

public to which they entertain.

As we’ll see later in this essay, the mutant metaphor within the X-Men film franchise is

overt and clear, but even as blatant as it is, does that metaphor alter anything in the minds of the

viewers, either in terms of their view on the X-Men or the Civil Rights Movement? I maintain

that the metaphor within the films is flawed, but that doesn’t matter if we don’t first answer the
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question: does metaphor have the ability to influence and alter cultural perception? In the essay,

“The Atom According to Disney,” Elizabeth and Jay Mechling answer this question with a

resounding yes. They discussed how metaphors in popular entertainment have the ability to

legitimize and pave the way for a shift in cultural perception, saying that Disney’s, Our Friend

The Atom, was “a key moment in the history of the naturalization and domestication of the

atom.” They highlight how this moment of cultural education was made possible via the

metaphors the program used, saying, “With the genie metaphor at the center of its engine of

meaning, the 1957 film reached backward to earlier Disney films and other cultural narratives to

naturalize the bomb in two senses: making it a more natural, taken-for-granted part of our lives,

and making it more like nature.” This is just one instance of metaphor serving as the impetus for

a cultural shift in perception, but it is a powerful one, and I believe that parallels to this instance

are found in the X-Men franchise’s use of the mutant metaphor.

Across the entirety of the X-Men franchise this mutant metaphor can be found, be it in

comic books, television shows, or films, but for the sake of brevity and specificity, I am

narrowing down my analysis of how this metaphor was handled to the films. Specifically, we

will be examining scenes of interaction between the characters of Magento and Professor X,

primarily in the films of X Men (2000) and X-Men: Days of Future Past. The first of these films,

X-Men (2000), coming out almost forty years after the first X-Men comic book, contextualizes

this discussion as we look at how the mutant metaphor has evolved, changed, or maintained over

the years. Beginning with this first film we will examine its fifth scene in which we see the

characters of Magneto and Prof. X arguing about their different philosophies in terms of

mutant-human relations. The metaphor of the Civil Rights movement is as apparent as ever in
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this scene, as the characters of Professor X. and Magento serve as symbols of MLK Jr. and

Malcolm X respectively, through both their costume design and dialogue. First, I’ll discuss this

visual component of the characters’

costume design. In this scene we see

Magneto and Professor X facing each

other, having a heated discussion alone in a

hallway. Professor X is wearing a tidy

buttoned-up black suit, the common attire

of preachers of the era, and the frequent

uniform of the 60s Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. This is a clear intention on the part

of the filmmakers to use wardrobe to draw visual symbolism between the character of Prof. X

and MLK. This wardrobe parallel doesn’t stop with Prof. X, however. In this scene we see

Magneto donning a black fedora, white collared shirt, thin black tie, and a black woolen

overcoat. This was attire regularly worn by the Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. To the degree

that this blacked-out hat and overcoat

combination became synonymous with

the visual symbol of Malcolm X. This

outfit became inextricably linked to him,

becoming an essential part of any

portrayal of Malcolm X moving forward,

as seen in various media such as Spike

Lee’s 1992 film, Malcolm X.

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Some may dismiss this intentional costume design as merely a subtle nod to the

characters’ inspirations, but I maintain the imperative that we dig deeper and further mine these

visual components for insight. In this scene, we see the mutant metaphor for the Civil Rights

movement visually cemented, as the wardrobe subliminally primes the audience to read the

connection between these fictional characters and their historical counterparts. This reading of

the X-Men films as an explicit civil rights allegory is perfectly fine, even admirable if the

accurate memory of these historical figures is upheld, but that is not how the filmmakers

executed their allegorical vision. Instead, the X-Men films provide a portrayal of Malcolm X and

MLK Jr. in which the story needs of the fictional characters take precedence over the veracity

needs of the historical figures. As Magneto and Professor X visually don the symbolic mantle of

their respective historical leaders, it is not their own appearance that is being altered to

accommodate this metaphor, but rather the symbol of what these figures stood for being mapped

onto and altered to fit these fictional mutant characters.

Moving on from this specific scene, the character parallel doesn’t end with the visual

component, but in the dialogue between Magento and Prof. X throughout the film franchise the

mutant metaphor for the civil rights movement is reinforced as well. In these scenes of dialogue

exchange we see each character dig deeper into their own ideology, and in so doing, reveal more

and more of their respective parallels to Malcolm X and MLK. Beginning with the character of

Prof. X, we see in X-Men (2000) the Professor say, “mankind isn’t evil, just uninformed.” This

conviction that the oppressors are not fundamentally evil, and thus peace and unity with them is

not a lost cause is one shared explicitly by MLK. Who said in a 1964 speech in St. Louis, “I want

to be the white man’s brother, not his brother in law.” Another implicit facet of Professor X’s
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quote is his refute of the generalized notion that “mankind” is innately evil. He believes that

while there may be some humans that are evil, it is wrong to dismiss the entirety of humanity

with an assumption of generalized evil. MLK shares this line of thought as well, distinguishing

different kinds of “white man,” by saying in a 1965 interview with Playboy magazine, “The

unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat

with the Negro… Together, they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all

people for the good of all.” While an early Malcolm X and Magneto would perceive this belief in

peace with the oppressor group as naive and fruitless.

In the character of Magneto, we see his parallel with the historical figure of Malcolm X

vividly in his dialogue. One of the chief ways this is seen is in lines where he admonishes

Professor X’s support of their mutant brothers and sisters. In X-Men Days of Future Past, there is

a scene on a plane where the tension between the two characters boils over. The scene begins

with Professor X. challenging Magneto, which leads Magneto to tear down Professor X, saying

“Maybe you should’ve fought harder for them… where were you when your own people needed

you?… You abandoned us all.” Magneto is challenging Professor X’s impact and lamenting his

absence in their people’s fight for freedom from human oppression. This perspective is one

shared by Malcolm X, who sees MLK’s approach to social reform as lacking, saying in a 1963

interview with Louis Lomax, “The white man subsidizes Rev. Martin Luther King, so that Rev.

King can continue to teach the negroes to be defenseless. That’s what you mean by non-violent.

To be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken people into

captivity.” Malcolm X is convinced that MLK’s non-violent activism is doing nothing for the

black community, and believes that his actions are more in union with “the white man” than they
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are the black oppressed. Malcolm’s feelings towards this division that he believes MLK to be

advancing can not be underplayed, as one of the key tenets of Malcolm’s mission is unity

amongst the black community. In his March 1964 speech, A Declaration of Independence,

Malcolm X says, “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.”

Malcolm believes Dr. King to have put the cart before the horse in this sense, as he has,

according to Malcolm X, prioritized black-white unity and peace with the white man over unity

within the black community. Within this context, the earlier quote from Magneto admonishing

Professor X’s absence when his people were in need can be seen for what it is, one mutant leader

lamenting the fact that another mutant leader failed to join the fight as a united front. Magneto

believed, just as Malcolm X did, that non-violence and maintaining of peace were hindrances to

the fight for civil rights. These examples of dialogue parallels between Magneto and Malcolm X

continue in the final scene of X-Men (2000), where Magneto says to Professor X, or “Charles” as

he refers to him here, “The war is still coming Charles and I intend to fight it by any means

necessary.” During a speech at the founding of the Organization of Afro-American unity in 1964,

Malcolm said, “We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a

human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day,

which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." Magneto in this scene is

likening the fight for mutant rights to war, and by virtue of his quoting Malcolm X, he is tying

mutant oppression to black oppression, clarifying that this “war” is over the mutant right to be

treated as a human being.

This presence of the civil rights metaphor in the dialogue of Magneto and Prof. X is

extremely effective in forming their characters into a new pop-cultural manifestation of these
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historical figures. Novelist and political activist, Anne Lamott, supports this level of

effectiveness in her book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, saying “One line

of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.” The

filmmakers of the X-Men franchise have realized this potency, and thus have utilized their

dialogue to establish the mutant metaphor as the foundation of their characters.

In their employing of this mutant metaphor, the filmmakers are unintentionally reshaping

the memory of Malcolm and Martin, giving the X-Men franchise’s mass pop cultural audience a

warped perspective on the truth. This lack of veracity fosters a collective memory loss that places

everything these influential activists stood for through the lens of their comic book. Now, this

memory adaptation may immediately not strike home as a pressing issue. Why does present-day

people’s understanding of the past matter? Isn’t the mere fact that the X-Men franchise is

bringing important events of the past back into cultural awareness a good thing regardless.

Rhetorical scholars Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano refute this assumption, suggesting,

“contemporary representations of the civil rights movement can have a powerful influence on

how people understand not only the past but the present as well.” One of the key ways that this

memory is altered is by how the X-Men film franchise portrays Malcolm X as overtly violent

and entirely separatist. Through this mutant metaphor, the films represent Malcolm X through

the character of Magneto, who lest we forget, is the primary supervillain within the series. He is

evil, dangerous, and operates as a “super-terrorist” on all non-mutants. This representation posits

that Malcolm advocated for violence against oppressors in every circumstance, an idea that

differs largely from Malcolm X’s true stance on violence, which viewed it as a necessary tool for

self-defense. He saw the ability to use violence in self-defense as a human right that had been
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previously withheld from the black man, and so he promoted the idea that the black community

should reclaim it. Also, the representation of Malcolm X through Magneto assumes that

Malcolm X, who for a time maintained a sort of reverse-racist separatist stance, did not grow and

evolve his beliefs. Under the tutelage of Elijah Muhammed, he did view white people with

disdain, but as his career in activism went on he adapted his convictions to a more neutral stance.

In actuality, Malcolm X grew to work alongside both white and black civil rights activists, but

this piece of Malcolm’s journey and our previous memory of what he stood for is erased from the

record and ignored entirely with his portrayal through Magneto. And so with these two major

flaws within the mutant metaphor, psychologist Lyubansky in his essay, Prejudice Lessons from

the Xavier Institute, makes the claim that “This supposed representation of Malcolm X is not

only historically inaccurate but actually serves to reinforce many White fears and stereotypes

about African Americans in general and Black Muslims in particular.” When we think about how

these errancies can manifest themselves, as Raiford and Romano reminded us earlier, not just in

the past but in the present, the dangerous influence they can have on the continued fight against

racial injustice becomes apparent.

Malcolm X’s representation within the films is not the only metaphoric tragedy, however.

I’ve also noted the representation of Martin Luther King Jr. through the character of Prof. X.

This representation is just as, if not more flawed and inaccurate than the film’s representation of

Malcolm X. The character of Prof. X within the films is consistently shown to value and

advocate for peace between the mutant and human communities, and desire for peace between

people groups is absolutely one shared by Dr. King, but the Professor goes beyond King’s desire

for peace, in favor of a need for it. This need for peace manifests itself in a character whose
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primary motivation is maintaining the status quo at whatever cost. This ideology is a far cry from

the fire-baptized reverend who espoused revolutionary proclamations such as, “…the price that

America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro and other minority groups is the

price of its own destruction.” (The American Dream: July 4, 1965). The primary role of

Professor X is to defuse the tension between mutants and humans; a role that forgoes any

activism or bold advocation for mutant rights. This representation of MLK through Prof. X is, I

believe, a large contributor to the recent taming of Dr. King’s image and memory since his death.

Martin Luther King Jr. has become a figure that America loves to herald as their non-violent

arbiter of wholesome reform, but in doing so they all but eliminate the image of a fiery

revolutionary. We have, as Michael Greene writes in A Way Out of No Way, “ended up with an

utterly domesticated King—a King stripped of his radicalness and rendered harmless.” One of

the ways this domestication of King came to be was through an over-emphasis on MLK placing

responsibility for freedom from oppression in the hands of the black community, and by proxy,

doling out less blame on the white community. MLK did call the black community to action, but

primarily he placed the onus on White America to truly motivate change. This is distinct from

the character of Prof. X who more often than not blames his own mutant brothers and sisters over

blaming human leaders. In the X-Men films, Prof. X is shown to be an almost naive supporter of

human leaders, and by using this character to represent the figure of MLK, the filmmakers are

warping the image of Martin into a man on bended knee extending an olive branch to America.

This overwrites the true image of Dr. King. In actuality, Dr. King was a man who stood up and

demanded the olive branch be extended to his people, demanding that, as he wrote in “Where Do
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We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, “A society that has done something special against the

Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”

The mutant metaphor for the Civil Rights movement found within the X-Men film

franchise, and specifically viewed in the characters of Professor X. and Magneto, is one that is

primarily flawed, and thus does more harm than good. A metaphor is never going to be entirely

accurate, but especially when a text employs a metaphor for a movement or ideology that had

such a vital role in fighting injustice and inequality, there is a responsibility for a metaphor to at

the very least not tarnish the subject(s) to which it is a metaphor for. The X-Men films set a

dangerous precedent for creators of entertainment being given full agency to reshape the memory

of important historical events in the name of metaphorizing it. If this sort of rampant

manipulation of truth is allowed to continue, then we will have a country whose history is

informed by its entertainment, and whose entertainment is informed by other entertainment.

Hollywood has already unintentionally re-educated the masses through films and tv that claim to

be the depiction of true events (Selma, Green Book, looking at you) but how much more

potential for warped re-education of history is possible when films don’t even have to claim they

are “based on true events.” Films like the X-Men are able to don metaphors without a

requirement that they hold to the accuracy of what they are metaphorizing, and thus they are

capable of delivering subliminal messages that cause an unconscious inaccurate catechism in the

minds of their audience.

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