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Jun. 6th, 2014 01:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretX-Men: Days of Future Past was disappointing in all the ways I expected it to be. It was not the follow-up to X-Men First Class I'd desperately and foolishly hoped it would be. It was a story that centered Charles and Charles's vision of the future over Erik's, it was a story that centered Wolverine's struggle over Kitty's, it was a story that prioritized Charles over Mystique.
I will say a few things in its defense before I trash it.
First, the acting was of astounding quality. Patrick Stewart, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, Peter Dinklage, Ellen Page, Ian McKellen... the density of high quality actors turning in excellent performances was tremendous, and they played off each other brilliantly. That has always been the hallmark of these X-Men films, even the bad ones, and this was certainly no exception.
Second, I said tostarlady after XMFC: "I don't think that Charles at the end of the film has yet reached a truly adult ethics of telepathy." To this movie's credit, though I didn't actually believe it would happen, that did turn out to be Charles's arc, and in the movie's climax Charles does appear to finally develop such a formulation. This would be terrific as an arc for the film, except that I don't watch X-Men movies for Charles. Charles sucks.
Third, Mystique in this movie is truly awesome, and there were places where the movie came close to really giving her her due. And the Future scenes were mostly terrific, also. I loved the coordination, the elaborately chained mutant powers that spoke silently and powerfully of years of training and sharing your minds with your best friends against the world.
Time to trash it!
I wrote in my anticipatory post that the original comic DoFP constitutes a clever critique of liberal universalism from within a comic that traditionally has been a standard bearer for such universalism, and I was correct in intuiting that with Charles present, that would no longer be possible. This became yet another X-Men film in which the only thing standing between the world and coexistence was the mutant terrorists. I have no problem with them making X-Men movies about that, since of course that's what X-Men stands for, but I wanted to see them take advantage of the opportunity the source material offered to complicate the narrative. Because liberal universalism is a nice idea and an important one, but it's sometimes just an attractive fantasy. The Holocaust really did happen, and it didn't happen because the Jews were causing trouble and making people hate them, and sometimes if you take Charles's vision of coexistence too simply that's the terrible place where you end up. That's why you need Erik's vision as a counterbalance. That's why "Erik and Charles both sent me back" should mean something more than "Erik has finally realized the error of his ways." The alternative is "If we stopped fighting, suddenly they would stop trying to kill us."
From a storytelling perspective, the worst part of the way "Erik and Charles both sent me back" was handled was that Patrick Stewart!Charles told Logan that Logan would need to teach McAvoy!Charles how to be a grownup, and McKellen!Erik told Logan that Logan would need to fetch Erik out of his Pentagon prison? As if McKellen!Erik thought one of two impossible to believe things about his younger self: that Fassbender!Erik was unteachable, or that Fassbender!Erik would need no teaching to do the right thing. I can't buy either choice. Logan should have been sent back with instructions on how to teach Fassbender!Erik to be a grownup, accumulated wisdom from the hard life that has somehow brought Erik back into alliance with Charles, but this tremendously disturbing storytelling oversight was made because it would have compromised the filmmaker's desire to use Erik's violent impulses as a strawman to be taken down in the film's finale.
Which leads us to Paris. Charles and Erik have traced their dark dystopian future to a moment here: Mystique assassinates Trask, Stryker captures Mystique, the Sentinel program is reactivated and made unstoppable with Mystique's DNA. Stop Mystique, so the original theory goes, and history will be fixed. [This is too naive even for this film, obviously, so the movie litigates two alternate theories of time alteration: Classic Back to the Future, and Ferret's Back to the Future fanfiction. In Classic BTTF, time travellers can make drastic but plausible changes in history by altering the past. There is no chaotic butterfly effect, but there are no fundamental limits to the way we change the past. In Fearful Symmetry, there is a restitution coefficient in the physics of time travel that reflects the tendency of the time stream to correct toward an idealized state. End tangent.]
And then Erik screws everything up according to both theories by shooting Mystique. This is a mindboggling, utterly bizarre moment that all of the talented actors in this scene do a marvelous job of being perplexed by. There are so many ways in which this makes no sense, but the greatest is that it defies Erik as chessmaster IN THE PREVIOUS SCENE. Literally, we just watched Erik playing chess, thinking about how to play the long game, casually outmaneuvering Charles and now... he has Charles in his corner again, he has Mystique and he's stopped Trask from getting her and they can run away and he can wait until he's thought out all the ramifications before making his next move. Maybe he will have to kill Mystique, but it's not necessary that he shoot her at that moment. It reflects a desire for instant gratification that was never Magneto's weakness, for any version of Magneto.
The frustrating paradox is that because X-Men First Class invested me in the idea of Erik as a broken Survivor, seeing him revert toward comic book Magneto made me way more upset than it would have if I'd never gotten Survivor Erik. And every feint toward Survivor Erik in the movie, like the conversation where Logan identifies with Magneto because they're both survivors, is that much more maddening because of how much XMFC deepened that context.
But enough about why I'm angry about Erik. Let's talk about Kate Pryde. In the comics this is her story, and it's a big part of why the story works. DoFP is about someone going back into their younger body, embodying a different person than they were when they were young and foolish and using their wisdom to make different choices. And Hugh Jackman does that! For all that Wolverine is the epitome of narrative stagnation, Jackman actually does play a different Wolverine in this film, an older, wiser Wolverine. And that's kind of awesome. But Wolverine is the epitome of narrative stagnation and Kate Pryde is Sprite/Shadowcat/Kitty, a whirlwind of identity reinvention. For all that Jackman makes from the bad writing choice, Kitty Pryde would have been far better, and she would also have been truer to the source material, if that matters. (It doesn't, really, except that as a writer Chris Claremont knows what the hell he's doing.) At the end of the day, watching a mature Wolverine is boring in a way that watching a mature Kitty Pryde isn't.
And obviously that's not getting into the real source of my frustration. XMFC shocked me by telling American Jewish stories authentically. Erik's journey was a Survivor's journey, the struggle to make sense of a world after the senselessness of the Shoah, the struggle to keep surviving in a world that has strangely decided the threat is over. And I was not expecting that at all to be part of the story. That's not the kind of thing you get in X-Men films, and I was delighted beyond belief to adopt this version of Erik Lehnsherr into my virtual family.
Days of Future Past, the comic source, centers TWO JEWISH MUTANTS. It is the rare comic where both Erik and Kate are heroes, working together. Their Judaism is never mentioned in the story, and ultimately it's not really important to the story, except that knowing that these two characters are Jewish changes the meaning of the story. As I wrote last month
The dark future we see is the Holocaust recapitulated, with Magneto welcomed back into the fold as a vindicated and yet broken man because his prophecies have sadly proven true. His worst fears realized, he serves as a father figure and mentor toward Kitty Pryde. Meanwhile, Kitty is young and visibly Jewish, the person that Magneto and his whole generation had relied upon to transmit his message. It was a message she has failed to learn from, as she mistakenly aligned herself with the naive forces of liberal universalism, but she has learned now, and she has it in her capacity now to make sure that the Holocaust really never repeats itself.
That's not the story Claremont was writing. It's the story underneath the story Claremont was writing. And therefore I didn't need it to be explicit, but I wanted it to be implicit, to quietly continue the deeply personally important narrative throughline of XMFC. Instead, the movie erases the Kate/Magneto relationship entirely. They do not interact and Kate only matters to the movie as a plot device, not a character. She doesn't even get the (problematic, NOT WHAT I WANTED) implicit romantic arc with Bobby Drake that the film weirdly teases- Bobby is with Rogue in the fixed future, and Kate is on her own, happily teaching about Buckminster Fuller (OH MAN, KITTY PRYDE, COULD POSSIBLY I LOVE YOU ANY MORE?)... and look, I'm much happier that Kitty Pryde did not get that romantic arc, especially in the wake of all of the Ellen Page context of recent months it would have been a disaster but even without it it would have diminished Kitty if all she represented was the romantic D plot, but c'mon, give her an arc!!! Have the sacrifices she is shown making mean something within the story, and let me extrapolate the rest.
As I think I've said before, the X-Men series has had a complicated relationship with identity politics. Sometimes with stories about invisible mutations and 'coming out', X-Men has acted out in occasionally effective and occasionally farcical manner a version of the identity crisis of young American homosexuals, and sometimes with stories about fear-driven persecution by neighbors who had formerly been apparently friendly, X-men has acted out in occasionally effective and occasionally farcical manner a version of the assimilation struggle of American Jewry. (I can't even be as charitable as that on the Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X subtext.)
Often this hasn't worked well as allegory. There's too much baggage to the metaphor, after all we know of the differences between mutants and homosexuals or Jews, for the metaphor to hold. In the middle of an allegorical musing on coming out, some feature of mutants that isn't applicable to gays will invariably make the messages and themes of these stories confused. Which is why over the years Storm and Rictus and characters like them have become important parts of the X-mythology... because they let the smarter writers speak to the intersectionality in the metaphor. How to deal with being both black and a mutant, when both identities must speak.
It's rare for writers to do the same with Kitty Pryde (I can't tell you why Claremont originally made Kitty Jewish, other than for a dumb Bat Mitzvah joke, since he otherwise didn't touch her faith at all), but it happened in a recent controversial issue of X-Men (don't read the comments, duh): Kitty Pryde on the M-Word . This is the Kitty I was not expecting to see in the movie, and was nonetheless disappointed to miss, because this Kitty and XMFC Erik in a movie together about what happens if coexistence fails is the movie that X Men: First Class set me up to actually believe was possible.
Sadly it wasn't. X-Men Days of Future Past bows to crass commercialism at every corner, taking every opportunity to use a marketable character over an interesting one, sacrificing appropriate characters and themes to push the tedious and naive thesis that intersectionality is for suckers and if only minorities would stop being angry and stop fighting back, the patriarchy will welcome them into its loving embrace.
Fuck that.
I will say a few things in its defense before I trash it.
First, the acting was of astounding quality. Patrick Stewart, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman, Peter Dinklage, Ellen Page, Ian McKellen... the density of high quality actors turning in excellent performances was tremendous, and they played off each other brilliantly. That has always been the hallmark of these X-Men films, even the bad ones, and this was certainly no exception.
Second, I said to
starlady after XMFC: "I don't think that Charles at the end of the film has yet reached a truly adult ethics of telepathy." To this movie's credit, though I didn't actually believe it would happen, that did turn out to be Charles's arc, and in the movie's climax Charles does appear to finally develop such a formulation. This would be terrific as an arc for the film, except that I don't watch X-Men movies for Charles. Charles sucks.Third, Mystique in this movie is truly awesome, and there were places where the movie came close to really giving her her due. And the Future scenes were mostly terrific, also. I loved the coordination, the elaborately chained mutant powers that spoke silently and powerfully of years of training and sharing your minds with your best friends against the world.
Time to trash it!
I wrote in my anticipatory post that the original comic DoFP constitutes a clever critique of liberal universalism from within a comic that traditionally has been a standard bearer for such universalism, and I was correct in intuiting that with Charles present, that would no longer be possible. This became yet another X-Men film in which the only thing standing between the world and coexistence was the mutant terrorists. I have no problem with them making X-Men movies about that, since of course that's what X-Men stands for, but I wanted to see them take advantage of the opportunity the source material offered to complicate the narrative. Because liberal universalism is a nice idea and an important one, but it's sometimes just an attractive fantasy. The Holocaust really did happen, and it didn't happen because the Jews were causing trouble and making people hate them, and sometimes if you take Charles's vision of coexistence too simply that's the terrible place where you end up. That's why you need Erik's vision as a counterbalance. That's why "Erik and Charles both sent me back" should mean something more than "Erik has finally realized the error of his ways." The alternative is "If we stopped fighting, suddenly they would stop trying to kill us."
From a storytelling perspective, the worst part of the way "Erik and Charles both sent me back" was handled was that Patrick Stewart!Charles told Logan that Logan would need to teach McAvoy!Charles how to be a grownup, and McKellen!Erik told Logan that Logan would need to fetch Erik out of his Pentagon prison? As if McKellen!Erik thought one of two impossible to believe things about his younger self: that Fassbender!Erik was unteachable, or that Fassbender!Erik would need no teaching to do the right thing. I can't buy either choice. Logan should have been sent back with instructions on how to teach Fassbender!Erik to be a grownup, accumulated wisdom from the hard life that has somehow brought Erik back into alliance with Charles, but this tremendously disturbing storytelling oversight was made because it would have compromised the filmmaker's desire to use Erik's violent impulses as a strawman to be taken down in the film's finale.
Which leads us to Paris. Charles and Erik have traced their dark dystopian future to a moment here: Mystique assassinates Trask, Stryker captures Mystique, the Sentinel program is reactivated and made unstoppable with Mystique's DNA. Stop Mystique, so the original theory goes, and history will be fixed. [This is too naive even for this film, obviously, so the movie litigates two alternate theories of time alteration: Classic Back to the Future, and Ferret's Back to the Future fanfiction. In Classic BTTF, time travellers can make drastic but plausible changes in history by altering the past. There is no chaotic butterfly effect, but there are no fundamental limits to the way we change the past. In Fearful Symmetry, there is a restitution coefficient in the physics of time travel that reflects the tendency of the time stream to correct toward an idealized state. End tangent.]
And then Erik screws everything up according to both theories by shooting Mystique. This is a mindboggling, utterly bizarre moment that all of the talented actors in this scene do a marvelous job of being perplexed by. There are so many ways in which this makes no sense, but the greatest is that it defies Erik as chessmaster IN THE PREVIOUS SCENE. Literally, we just watched Erik playing chess, thinking about how to play the long game, casually outmaneuvering Charles and now... he has Charles in his corner again, he has Mystique and he's stopped Trask from getting her and they can run away and he can wait until he's thought out all the ramifications before making his next move. Maybe he will have to kill Mystique, but it's not necessary that he shoot her at that moment. It reflects a desire for instant gratification that was never Magneto's weakness, for any version of Magneto.
The frustrating paradox is that because X-Men First Class invested me in the idea of Erik as a broken Survivor, seeing him revert toward comic book Magneto made me way more upset than it would have if I'd never gotten Survivor Erik. And every feint toward Survivor Erik in the movie, like the conversation where Logan identifies with Magneto because they're both survivors, is that much more maddening because of how much XMFC deepened that context.
But enough about why I'm angry about Erik. Let's talk about Kate Pryde. In the comics this is her story, and it's a big part of why the story works. DoFP is about someone going back into their younger body, embodying a different person than they were when they were young and foolish and using their wisdom to make different choices. And Hugh Jackman does that! For all that Wolverine is the epitome of narrative stagnation, Jackman actually does play a different Wolverine in this film, an older, wiser Wolverine. And that's kind of awesome. But Wolverine is the epitome of narrative stagnation and Kate Pryde is Sprite/Shadowcat/Kitty, a whirlwind of identity reinvention. For all that Jackman makes from the bad writing choice, Kitty Pryde would have been far better, and she would also have been truer to the source material, if that matters. (It doesn't, really, except that as a writer Chris Claremont knows what the hell he's doing.) At the end of the day, watching a mature Wolverine is boring in a way that watching a mature Kitty Pryde isn't.
And obviously that's not getting into the real source of my frustration. XMFC shocked me by telling American Jewish stories authentically. Erik's journey was a Survivor's journey, the struggle to make sense of a world after the senselessness of the Shoah, the struggle to keep surviving in a world that has strangely decided the threat is over. And I was not expecting that at all to be part of the story. That's not the kind of thing you get in X-Men films, and I was delighted beyond belief to adopt this version of Erik Lehnsherr into my virtual family.
Days of Future Past, the comic source, centers TWO JEWISH MUTANTS. It is the rare comic where both Erik and Kate are heroes, working together. Their Judaism is never mentioned in the story, and ultimately it's not really important to the story, except that knowing that these two characters are Jewish changes the meaning of the story. As I wrote last month
The dark future we see is the Holocaust recapitulated, with Magneto welcomed back into the fold as a vindicated and yet broken man because his prophecies have sadly proven true. His worst fears realized, he serves as a father figure and mentor toward Kitty Pryde. Meanwhile, Kitty is young and visibly Jewish, the person that Magneto and his whole generation had relied upon to transmit his message. It was a message she has failed to learn from, as she mistakenly aligned herself with the naive forces of liberal universalism, but she has learned now, and she has it in her capacity now to make sure that the Holocaust really never repeats itself.
That's not the story Claremont was writing. It's the story underneath the story Claremont was writing. And therefore I didn't need it to be explicit, but I wanted it to be implicit, to quietly continue the deeply personally important narrative throughline of XMFC. Instead, the movie erases the Kate/Magneto relationship entirely. They do not interact and Kate only matters to the movie as a plot device, not a character. She doesn't even get the (problematic, NOT WHAT I WANTED) implicit romantic arc with Bobby Drake that the film weirdly teases- Bobby is with Rogue in the fixed future, and Kate is on her own, happily teaching about Buckminster Fuller (OH MAN, KITTY PRYDE, COULD POSSIBLY I LOVE YOU ANY MORE?)... and look, I'm much happier that Kitty Pryde did not get that romantic arc, especially in the wake of all of the Ellen Page context of recent months it would have been a disaster but even without it it would have diminished Kitty if all she represented was the romantic D plot, but c'mon, give her an arc!!! Have the sacrifices she is shown making mean something within the story, and let me extrapolate the rest.
As I think I've said before, the X-Men series has had a complicated relationship with identity politics. Sometimes with stories about invisible mutations and 'coming out', X-Men has acted out in occasionally effective and occasionally farcical manner a version of the identity crisis of young American homosexuals, and sometimes with stories about fear-driven persecution by neighbors who had formerly been apparently friendly, X-men has acted out in occasionally effective and occasionally farcical manner a version of the assimilation struggle of American Jewry. (I can't even be as charitable as that on the Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X subtext.)
Often this hasn't worked well as allegory. There's too much baggage to the metaphor, after all we know of the differences between mutants and homosexuals or Jews, for the metaphor to hold. In the middle of an allegorical musing on coming out, some feature of mutants that isn't applicable to gays will invariably make the messages and themes of these stories confused. Which is why over the years Storm and Rictus and characters like them have become important parts of the X-mythology... because they let the smarter writers speak to the intersectionality in the metaphor. How to deal with being both black and a mutant, when both identities must speak.
It's rare for writers to do the same with Kitty Pryde (I can't tell you why Claremont originally made Kitty Jewish, other than for a dumb Bat Mitzvah joke, since he otherwise didn't touch her faith at all), but it happened in a recent controversial issue of X-Men (don't read the comments, duh): Kitty Pryde on the M-Word . This is the Kitty I was not expecting to see in the movie, and was nonetheless disappointed to miss, because this Kitty and XMFC Erik in a movie together about what happens if coexistence fails is the movie that X Men: First Class set me up to actually believe was possible.
Sadly it wasn't. X-Men Days of Future Past bows to crass commercialism at every corner, taking every opportunity to use a marketable character over an interesting one, sacrificing appropriate characters and themes to push the tedious and naive thesis that intersectionality is for suckers and if only minorities would stop being angry and stop fighting back, the patriarchy will welcome them into its loving embrace.
Fuck that.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-06 10:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-07 11:03 pm (UTC)Well, I mean, they *did* stop fighting for years. Xavier sat in a mansion and Magneto was undeground, and Mystique was mostly just trying to save her friends. They let themselves be drafted into Vietnam and help out the government; meanwhile Trusk conducted his underground experiments with only a shady funding committee between him and the apocalypse.
I thought the point wasn't that they should stop fighting, but that they should fight -- beginning with and including a public relations campaign. Mutant saves president. School reopens. But, also, Xavier lets Magneto go. A tacit admission that they are still similar, and that Magneto being an asshole somewhere out there is the other crucial component. No other X-Men movie that I have seen ends like that.
Though, yes, despite the imagery in the beginning, it was probably not a movie about the Holocaust.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-28 02:12 pm (UTC)This is why even though I was kind of ranted out I shouldn't have left my post this short. I didn't say anywhere near enough about Mystique's role in the film.
Okay, so let's take your argument from the beginning, and read the film as if it is actually saying that stopping fighting, as in the ten years before the film, does not lead to peace. This is not an argument I can laugh out of the room. There is evidence for it. After all, as you said, Erik lies buried under the Pentagon, most of the mutants have gone underground, and Charles and Hank are working as hard as they can to suppress their powers... and STILL, Bolivar Trask is working on weapons to commit genocide against mutants. All of his arguments are specious and bogus, the rantings of a racist madman. So perhaps the mutants do need to defend themselves, maybe bigotry isn't about how the minorities give the majority a reason to hate them. [Although arguably the movie's very premise, that it is Mystique's actions in assassinating Trask that triggers the dark timeline, argues against this claim. But as I said, I'm going to move forward with actual consideration of the theory anyway.]
So if that's the argument the film is advancing, how do you fight against a racist madman? I think that's the question the movie asks in your schematic, with Mystique as the fulcrum for the Charles/Erik argument. After Paris, each of them gets one scene with Mystique to argue their case. The Magneto/Mystique scene in the telephone booth is particularly well-acted, I think, making this argument both personal and intellectual at the same time. Magneto argues that mutants are at war with humanity, and that Paris has, whatever Mystique's intentions, crept the humans closer to the decisive advantage that will result in the extermination of the mutant race. Charles argues that Mystique is not a killer. I think this is a really stupid argument for Charles to advance, and I think the X-Men series is capable of much better defenses of Charles's side than this, but let's pretend the arguments really are fairly balanced. Let's pretend Charles's argument was that sometimes peace requires sacrificing immediate security for long-term security. Let's pretend he's saying that the world will be better off if Trask is allowed to live because it will give the good guys the breathing room that they need to move public sentiment toward mutants, even though it is dangerous to let Trask live. If this movie really were about what you say, then after the two sides had plead their case, we would see Mystique weighing her options. That's not what we see, though. We see the film turn off its intellectual hat and do action-movie from this point on, and the action movie is focused on Charles and Hank and Logan and Erik, because, you know, women's moral struggles aren't very interesting. Or something. The film doesn't return to Mystique's perspective, except for five second snippets, until the very moment in which she has to make her decision. So I think what I would say is that if the movie was the one you were claiming it is and not the one I'm claiming it is, its message is compromised by its misogyny.
One of the things the movie takes in a rather realist, pragmatic way is the fact that Mystique's assassination of Trask justified the Sentinel program's restart. What do I mean by that? Well, consider what would happen if President Obama were assassinated by a Muslim. You would see an outcry and you would have calls for overzealous, disproportionate retaliation against Muslims, but you would also have voices of moderation urging that we attempt to precisely identify our enemy and figure out how to fight them without hurting the innocent Muslims. As we saw after 9/11, the overzealous approach can win out, but Days of Future Past doesn't allow its humans to show that push and pull. It just assumes that the overzealous approach will win out. In a sense this is the flip side of my complaint about the movie's apparent assertion that if the mutants are nonviolent, humanity will learn that they are not a threat. I think I feel this is even further than I'm comfortable going toward the side of the evil of the humanity acting en masse. I mean, I've been claiming that my point is that even if mutants are nonviolent, they'll still have enemies. But this is claiming that if one mutant is violent, all of humanity will be its enemy. That's some serious Magneto-level shit right there. Especially when you consider that XMFC at least had, in Moira MacTaggart and the Oliver Platt character, two human allies, but this movie has none. No human allies whatsoever. Consider that. Trask's military foil in the film is Stryker, of all people! Stryker and Trask are substantially the same as threats to mutants, only differing in their reason. Stryker thinks mutants are monsters who must be eradicated. Trask thinks mutants are a resource to be exploited. Days of Future Past's opening represents a future where Trask's ideology is realized by Stryker: mutants are exploited in order that they can be eradicated more effectively. But that tangent aside, Stryker doesn't actually represent a foil to Trask on moral grounds. Like I said earlier, Trask's theories are marked as the bogus arguments of a bigot. There is no counterpoint as the voice of a moral humanity, no personal reason offered as to why Mystique should trust humanity to have her interests at heart.
Mystique is the most interesting, compelling character in this movie, and Jennifer Lawrence is phenomenal from start to finish, but that doesn't mean that the movie is interested in Mystique. That doesn't mean that the movie is interested in exploring how she passed the last ten decade, how she came to be the person who has this world-shattering choice placed in front of her. But we can think about it anyway. Born a thief, rejected by society, she is taken in by Charles and raised in the American aristocracy: egalitarian in ideology, snobbish and parochial in practice. She progresses into adulthood in the same posture, a hanger-on in circles that make her feel uncomfortable, forced to conceal herself in exchange for comfort and safety. Then she and Charles meet Erik and Moira and her world changes. She learns she is part of something bigger, that there are dozens of mutants in the world, that in the X-Men she has a society that doesn't make her pretend to be what she isn't. Erik and Charles tear that apart, but she remains a true believer in the idea of a Brotherhood [/Sisterhood] of Mutants. She spends the next decade fighting to protect mutants, fighting to rebuild the Brotherhood, fighting for her community. Unlike Erik, Mystique doesn't have the Holocaust as her formative childhood experience. She's not fighting against an existential threat the way Erik is. She isn't fighting to save the lives of her community every minute of every day. She's fighting a battle against institutional discrimination.
Killing Trask isn't actually that momentous for her. It's one of many things she has done and will do to protect mutants, and her bafflement at the appearance of a unified Erik and Charles to oppose her is, I think, bafflement that this specific moment is a fulcrum of history. I don't think she sees killing as a moral event horizon, especially not after the things she's seen. I think for the Mystique we see in the movie, the actual fulcrum is Erik shooting at her. Betrayal by her own kind and betrayal by a man she once trusted to protect her. Suddenly a lot of the things she has been fighting for don't make sense to her anymore, and so she has to rethink them. Let's try this as a theory: That betrayal is the character reason why Mystique is the one who is faced with the momentous choice in the film's finale. Charles's arc, about discovering how to trust his friends and let them out of his control, does not force him to rethink his liberal universalism, and Erik doesn't get a character arc, he just gets to be the villain. But Mystique's version of mutant particularism is threatened by Erik's betrayal, in a similar way to how Erik's particularism was threatened by the Beach scene in XMFC. She has to ask herself if there is truly a difference between humans and mutants that is worth protecting. Why is she rescuing the Havoks of the world if they will turn around and shoot her to save their own skins? In reality, though Charles thinks she's wrestling between Erik's ideology and his own, she is really wrestling with whether to fight for something bigger than herself or not. In the end her decision to stop Erik's plan is perhaps not about the immediate result, but about what comes after: She does not rejoin Charles and Hank, but instead walks away on her own. We don't see her in the future scenes at the end. She has not reconciled with Charles, only decided that Charles's universalism means she owes nothing to her mutant brethren.
So how do you fight against a racist madman? The film's final answer appears to be liberal universalism, in spite of this. The mutant saving the President from the evil mutant on national television creates a new black and white status quo in opposition to the old one. Instead of humans against mutants, it is the liberal paternalist Establishment, personified by Richard Nixon and Charles Xavier, triumphing over armed resistance. They form the alliance Charles has been pushing for since his first meeting with the CIA more than a decade earlier. Particularism, minority identity, individuality,, all of these things are divisive and must be eliminated by waging war against the hearts of humanity. I'm sure I could phrase all of this more optimistically and less sarcastically if I tried. My real point is that as soon as Mystique makes her choice, she stops being relevant to the story the movie is telling.
Okay, let me try the more optimistic reading of the ending. People like Trask move in the shadows, playing at our fears and our doubts and uncertainties. They divide the people of Earth against themselves to reap benefits in power and influence and money, and they will succeed as long as people believe that those who are different are the enemy. But they fail when their evil is revealed: When people realize that the true similarity is not between people who look like us, but people who think like us, the good people of Earth can rise up and overthrow the evil people of Earth. Truth is an anti-septic that destroys fear. Those who saw Mystique in Paris and feared were reconciled when they were finally made to see that Mystique's fight was noble. In this reading, I suppose, Mystique is the agent of change who destroys the racist madman Trask by proving that his game of fears is a lie. In this reading, I suppose, it is by fighting back against evil that evil is destroyed, because fighting back against evil is a powerful truth unto itself.
So yeah, I guess it's possible to read the movie you described, if we ignore Charles and focus on how awesome Mystique is. Which I don't really have a problem with.