Jean Grey Is Dangerous. That Doesn’t Explain Why Mutants Are Hated.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day may have given the MCU a reason to fear Jean Grey. It has not, by itself, given the MCU a reason to hate mutants. And that distinction matters enormously.

Warning: This article discusses plot elements from Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

An MSN article recently caught my attention with a provocative claim: Spider-Man: Brand New Day has finally solved a 63-year-old Marvel problem.

The “problem” is a familiar one.

Why, in a universe overflowing with superheroes, are mutants singled out for hatred?

It is a reasonable question.

This is, after all, a world in which people cheer for Captain America, take selfies with Thor, buy Avengers merchandise, paint murals of Iron Man and, depending on what happened last Tuesday, either worship Spider-Man or accuse him of destroying Manhattan.

The Marvel universe contains gods, aliens, sorcerers, super-soldiers, gamma-powered monsters, genetically altered humans, technologically enhanced billionaires and people who acquired astonishing abilities because a radioactive animal bit them.

Yet somehow society is supposed to look at all those people and say:

“Those are superheroes.”

Then look at Cyclops and say:

“MONSTER!”

The MSN article argues that Brand New Day may finally have supplied an explanation.

Jean Grey.

And there is certainly something to the idea.

Jean is enormously powerful. Telepathy in particular is frightening in a way that punching through a concrete wall simply isn't. Someone possessing the ability to enter your mind, manipulate your perceptions or take control of your body violates perhaps the most intimate boundary a human being possesses.

According to coverage of Brand New Day, the MCU's Jean Grey uses her psychic abilities violently while searching for her kidnapped sister, including manipulating people and attacking Damage Control facilities. The movie therefore gives the public a very visible demonstration of just how dangerous a powerful mutant can be.

If I lived in that universe, I would find that terrifying.

I suspect practically everyone would.

But there is a rather enormous logical step between these two propositions:

Jean Grey is dangerous.

and

Mutants are dangerous.

The MSN argument gets us convincingly to the first.

It does not get us to the second.

And, strangely enough, that missing step is where the entire point of the X-Men lives.

Jean Grey Is Not a Species

Suppose Jean Grey walks into Times Square tomorrow and mentally enslaves 5,000 people.

That would be horrifying.

Jean Grey should be stopped.

Jean Grey should probably be arrested.

Governments would quite reasonably begin discussing methods for protecting people against telepathic attack.

Scientists would study psychic phenomena.

Security agencies would have a collective nervous breakdown.

All of that makes perfect sense.

What does not logically follow is:

“My neighbor's fifteen-year-old daughter has blue skin, therefore she may need to be put in a camp.”

Jean Grey is Jean Grey.

She is not a statistical sample.

She is not a representative survey.

She is not “the mutants.”

That distinction becomes especially glaring because the MCU has already spent nearly twenty years demonstrating that incredibly dangerous individuals do not automatically contaminate everyone who happens to resemble them.

Bruce Banner became the Hulk and flattened enormous quantities of real estate.

Nobody proposed registering every nuclear physicist.

Tony Stark created weapons capable of extraordinary destruction and helped create Ultron, an artificial intelligence that nearly exterminated humanity.

Nobody rounded up engineers.

Wanda Maximoff mentally enslaved an entire town.

Nobody declared every magic user an existential threat.

Loki led an alien invasion of New York.

Thor remains a beloved superhero.

Bucky Barnes spent decades as an assassin.

Captain America did not subsequently find signs outside restaurants saying:

NO SUPER-SOLDIERS ALLOWED.

The MCU population has already demonstrated that it understands the concept of individual responsibility.

So Jean Grey doing something terrible cannot, by itself, explain mutant hatred.

Something else has to happen.

Fear Is Not Yet Prejudice

There is an important distinction between fear and prejudice.

Fear can be perfectly rational.

If somebody can shoot lasers from his eyes, I would prefer he not lose his temper while standing behind me at Starbucks.

If somebody can read minds, I would want laws governing when and whether she can use that ability.

If somebody can walk through walls, banks are going to need some interesting conversations with their security departments.

None of that necessarily constitutes hatred.

Mutants create legitimate public-policy questions that Marvel should not pretend don't exist.

And that actually makes the metaphor stronger.

The interesting question isn't whether people have any reason whatsoever to be nervous about superpowered humans.

Of course they do.

The interesting question is how society travels from:

“Some mutants possess dangerous abilities.”

to:

“Mutants are dangerous people.”

That transformation is not a scientific conclusion.

It is a social and political process.

And humanity has had a great deal of practice at it.

Someone Has to Make Jean Grey Representative of Everyone

Jean Grey can provide the incident.

She cannot provide the ideology.

For that, somebody has to take what Jean did and deliberately expand its meaning.

Imagine the television coverage after her rampage.

The same thirty seconds of footage plays continuously for three days.

A terrified civilian staring blankly into space.

Someone screaming.

Cars overturned.

Damage Control personnel being thrown around like toys.

Then comes the chyron:

MUTANT ATTACK IN NEW YORK

Notice what just happened.

Not:

JEAN GREY ATTACKS DAMAGE CONTROL.

Not:

TELEPATHIC TEENAGER RESPONSIBLE FOR INCIDENT.

But:

MUTANT ATTACK.

One individual has quietly become a category.

Then a politician appears on television.

“We simply don't know how many of these people are living among us.”

Another asks:

“What happens when the next Jean Grey walks into your child's school?”

A cable-news host asks:

“Should mutants be required to disclose their abilities?”

Someone else wonders:

“If mutants have nothing to hide, why would they oppose registration?”

An ambitious senator introduces the Mutant Public Safety Act.

Not a ban.

Certainly not discrimination.

Good heavens, no.

Just “common-sense safeguards.”

Perhaps mutants with certain abilities should register.

Perhaps schools should be notified.

Perhaps employers have a right to know.

Perhaps parents should be informed if a mutant child attends their child's classroom.

Perhaps landlords should know whether someone capable of producing fire lives in their building.

Perhaps telepaths should wear identification.

Perhaps mutants should undergo regular testing.

Perhaps the government should maintain a database.

Perhaps, for everyone's safety, certain exceptionally dangerous mutants should be temporarily detained.

And now we have traveled quite a distance from Jean Grey.

But every individual step was packaged as reasonable.

That is how the MCU can make anti-mutant prejudice work.

Not because Jean proved that mutants are monsters.

Because Jean supplied the footage that people who already wanted a monster could use.

The Most Frightening Thing About Mutants Isn't Their Power

There is another important difference between mutants and almost every other category of superhuman in the MCU.

Iron Man had to build his armor.

Captain America underwent an experiment.

Bruce Banner survived an accident.

Spider-Man was bitten.

Doctor Strange studied magic.

Thor came from another world.

But mutants?

Mutants are born.

And, more importantly:

Your child could be one.

That changes everything.

Imagine being a parent in the MCU.

Your daughter reaches puberty and suddenly starts hearing people's thoughts.

Your son gets frightened during an argument and accidentally freezes the kitchen.

A twelve-year-old wakes up one morning with wings.

Another teenager discovers that when somebody touches her skin, that person collapses.

A frightened child throws a tantrum and suddenly every piece of metal in the classroom begins flying through the air.

Most mutant abilities might be harmless.

Some might be absurd.

One kid can change the color of flowers.

Another grows feathers.

Someone else can breathe underwater.

But that's not what makes television.

The television story is the thirteen-year-old whose powers manifested during chemistry class and accidentally killed six people.

And suddenly every parent in America is wondering:

Could that happen at my child's school?

That is the foundation upon which someone can build a movement.

Jean Grey doesn't need to prove that mutants are dangerous.

She only needs to make people afraid enough that someone else can tell them who to blame.

And Then Comes the Demagogue

Marvel already possesses the perfect characters for this.

Senator Robert Kelly.

William Stryker.

Graydon Creed.

Bolivar Trask.

And now, apparently, William Metzger has entered the MCU through Brand New Day, radically reworked from his obscure comic-book origins into a figure connected with Damage Control and Jean's story.

These characters matter because prejudice rarely sustains itself through spontaneous individual fear alone.

It needs organization.

It needs vocabulary.

It needs statistics, preferably misleading ones.

It needs slogans.

It needs institutions.

It needs someone to take a thousand unrelated anxieties and give them one name.

The mutant problem.

Then Jean Grey stops being Jean Grey.

She becomes Exhibit A.

Every crime committed by a mutant becomes evidence about mutants.

Every crime committed by an ordinary human remains evidence about the individual who committed it.

That asymmetry is prejudice operating exactly as designed.

If a mutant robs a convenience store, the headline says “Mutant Robbery Leaves Three Injured.”

If a human robs a convenience store, nobody writes “Human Robbery Leaves Three Injured.”

Nobody asks whether humans can peacefully coexist with society.

Nobody proposes a Human Registration Act.

Human criminals are allowed to be individuals.

Minorities under suspicion are required to be representatives.

That is the leap the MSN article skips.

And that leap is the entire story.

“But the X-Men Have Saved the World”

This is another supposed hole in the mutant concept.

The X-Men have saved humanity repeatedly.

Surely people would love them.

Why wouldn't people be grateful?

Because prejudice isn't an accounting system.

Human beings do not maintain a spreadsheet in which every heroic action performed by a member of a minority group adds +3 tolerance points.

History rather decisively demonstrates otherwise.

Members of despised minorities have served countries that discriminated against them.

They have fought in wars for societies that denied them rights.

They have become doctors, scientists, teachers, artists and soldiers.

They have saved lives.

Prejudice survived.

Because prejudice isn't normally produced by an objective evaluation of the entire population being targeted.

It begins with the category.

Once the category exists, evidence gets filtered through it.

When Cyclops saves Manhattan:

“Not all mutants are bad.”

When Magneto attacks Manhattan:

“See? We warned you about mutants.”

Notice that the good mutant modifies the rule.

The bad mutant confirms it.

That's how prejudice protects itself from contradictory evidence.

The X-Men could save Earth every Thursday and still be hated Friday morning if enough people have been convinced that they are fundamentally other.

This Is What the X-Men Were Built to Talk About

That matters because social prejudice isn't an incidental decoration around the X-Men.

It is the heart of the franchise.

The original X-Men #1 appeared in 1963, directly in the era of the American Civil Rights Movement. Marvel itself has repeatedly discussed race and bigotry as fundamental metaphors running through X-Men history, and Stan Lee later wrote explicitly against the insanity of condemning entire races, nations or religions rather than judging individuals on their own merits.

The metaphor broadened considerably over the decades.

Different generations have seen in the X-Men echoes of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious persecution and practically every circumstance in which society decides that a group of human beings is dangerous because of what they are rather than what they have done.

And that's why the distinction between Jean Grey and mutants matters so much.

If the MCU says:

“People hate mutants because mutants really are extraordinarily dangerous,”

it accidentally destroys much of its own metaphor.

It converts prejudice into risk management.

Suddenly Senator Kelly isn't a bigot.

He's an actuary.

Stryker isn't exploiting fear.

He's performing threat assessment.

The Sentinels aren't instruments of persecution.

They're OSHA regulations with lasers.

That would be an astonishingly bad way to introduce the X-Men.

But Marvel has another option.

A much more interesting one.

Jean Grey Can Be the Spark

Jean can still be enormously important to the creation of anti-mutant sentiment in the MCU.

In fact, I think she should be.

Her actions can frighten people.

They can create political pressure.

They can produce demands for legislation.

They can give opportunists exactly the images they need.

They can make previously abstract discussions about mutants suddenly immediate.

But Jean shouldn't be the explanation.

She should be the excuse.

That distinction changes everything.

“Jean Grey is dangerous” is a statement about Jean Grey.

“Mutants are dangerous” is a statement about millions of people, most of whom Jean Grey has never met.

Somebody has to construct the bridge between those statements.

Politicians.

Media.

Fear merchants.

Conspiracy theorists.

People looking for votes.

People looking for ratings.

People looking for someone to blame.

And, eventually, perfectly ordinary frightened people who don't think of themselves as hateful at all.

That's where Marvel can tell an uncomfortable story.

Because the most dangerous anti-mutant politician shouldn't necessarily introduce himself by screaming:

I HATE MUTANTS.

He should say:

“I have nothing against mutants.”

Then pause.

“However…”

Those are often the words preceding the really interesting part.

“It's About Safety”

The most believable mutant persecution wouldn't begin with Sentinels.

It would begin with paperwork.

Registration.

Disclosure.

Testing.

Licensing.

Background checks.

School notifications.

Employment restrictions.

Insurance classifications.

“Reasonable” limitations on certain abilities.

Every policy would have an explanation.

Every policy would address a real incident.

Every policy would apply only to unusual circumstances.

Every policy would be temporary.

Until it isn't.

And that is where the X-Men metaphor becomes much more powerful than a crowd throwing bottles at Beast because he happens to have blue fur.

The crowd is the endpoint.

The interesting part is how society got there.

Perhaps the first Mutant Registration Act polls at 70% approval.

After all, who could oppose knowing where someone capable of controlling minds lives?

Then another incident happens.

The law expands.

Then another.

Then someone creates a mutant database.

Then the database gets leaked.

Then somebody loses a job.

Someone gets evicted.

A mutant kid is beaten outside school.

A politician condemns the violence while insisting that “both sides need to lower the temperature.”

Then the first Sentinel prototype is announced.

Not as a weapon against mutants, naturally.

As a public-safety platform.

And Professor Xavier watches the press conference knowing exactly where this road goes.

Now we have an X-Men movie worth making.

The Irony Marvel Should Embrace

There is also a beautiful irony available to Marvel.

Humans in the MCU have already tolerated — and frequently celebrated — people considerably more dangerous than the average mutant.

Thor could probably level a city.

Hulk certainly could.

Doctor Strange possesses abilities most governments don't remotely understand.

Captain Marvel can fly through spacecraft.

Spider-Man can casually throw an automobile.

Nobody demands that every Asgardian wear a tracking bracelet because Thor exists.

But mutants are different for one crucial social reason:

They aren't celebrities descending from the sky.

They are the people next door.

They're your coworkers.

Your classmates.

Your children's friends.

And there may be millions of them.

Suddenly superhuman ability isn't reassuringly confined to the Avengers compound.

It's walking around Walmart.

That's psychologically different.

And fear of that difference can easily be exploited.

But Marvel should never confuse the exploitation with the justification.

The Missing Arrow

Ultimately, the problem with the argument that Brand New Day has “solved” Marvel's 63-year-old mutant problem can be reduced to three lines:

Jean Grey is a mutant.

Jean Grey is dangerous.

Therefore mutants are dangerous.

That last line does not follow.

Not logically.

Not statistically.

Not morally.

But socially?

Oh, humanity can absolutely make it follow.

We've been doing variations of it for thousands of years.

And that is the story Marvel should tell.

Don't show us Jean Grey frightening the world and declare the problem solved.

Show us the machinery that takes Jean Grey's actions and transforms them into suspicion of a child whose only crime is being born with an X-gene.

Show us the television hosts.

Show us the frightened parents.

Show us the opportunistic politicians.

Show us the “reasonable” legislation.

Show us the databases.

Show us the euphemisms.

Show us the people insisting that they don't hate mutants while supporting policies that make ordinary mutant lives impossible.

Show us the first bricks being laid in the road toward the Sentinels.

Because Jean Grey being dangerous isn't what makes the X-Men interesting.

The X-Men become interesting when humanity looks at Jean Grey, looks at millions of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong, and decides:

“You're one of them.”

Jean Grey can light the match.

But if Marvel wants the mutant story to mean anything, it has to show us who poured the gasoline.