Products of Our Time

Works are, as we've discussed in class, products of their times. How can they be otherwise? But what happens when works exist in multiple times?

The X-Men made their debut in 1963. The comic focuses on a team of mutants being trained to use their powers in ways beneficial to humanity. However, there is a great prejudice against mutants, and because of that, there are mutants who wish to dominate humanity as the "superior" race.

It should be no surprise to learn that these comics about a group facing discrimination, written during one of the most turbulent civil rights movements in American history, touches heavily on themes of racism. The leaders of two of the most prominent mutant groups are Professor Charles Francis Xavier (or "Professor X") and Max "Magneto" Eisenhardt. Professor X wants to advance mutants in society and live peacefully with humans, while Magneto desires a more dramatic change, where mutants are treated as superior. These views are respectively similar to the opinions of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who were both active at the time of the X-Men's publication, and further development of both of these characters has incorporated more of these two civil rights leaders into their representative characters.

Clearly, the X-Men comics were a product of the civil rights movement of the time. However, the X-Men still enjoy a fair amount of popularity today. Racism still exists, naturally, but it is now generally seen as backwards, and the themes of persecution are not nearly as effective today as they would have been when the comics were originally published. So then why are the X-Men so popular?

The answer is that the idea of being persecuted as an outsider is one that will never be restricted to one particular time. The group being persecuted may change, but homogenous groups will always strike out against those who are different.

When the X-Men films brought the franchise more heavily into the public eye in the 2000's, the filmmakers decided that the social commentaries of the X-Men were currently more well-suited to another civil rights movement: that of LGBT rights. X-Men 2 in particular started focusing heavily on these themes and the LGBT rights movement started gaining momentum, and was a deliberate choice on the part of the director, who was himself gay (see this interview). The film is not even particularly subtle, going as far as to include the line "have you tried not being a mutant?"

It's true that all texts are a product of their time. X-Men shows that, as times change, texts can change to reflect them. The overall theme--the persecution of minorities--remains the same because that theme endures in various forms. However, that theme holds a different significance for different generations. In this way, X-Men is able to touch on important themes from both the 1960's and the 2000's without sacrificing what the text is actually about.

If this can hold true for this text, can it hold true for other texts?  Can modern interpretations of older texts maintain the purpose of the text but remain relevant to the modern day? I believe so. Something does not cease to be relevant simply because the era it has written in has passed. While the specific situations may not apply to our lives, there is often, like in X-Men, an broader underlying theme relating the the specific one--a broader theme that is timeless.