Revisiting X-Men: Days of Future Past

Like many others, I saw the latest X-Men movie in theaters, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I left the theater feeling like I had finally seen the bonafide, all out, sentinels-infused X-Men movie that had, at best, only been hinted at before in good, but muted outings like X2: X-Men United. On top of making more money than its predecessors, Days of Future Past beat out the previous best franchise Rotten Tomatoes score by five percentage points.

So when it showed up on iTunes recently, five or so months after its theatrical release, I thought I'd give it a rent and have some more fun with my favorite X-Men movie. The problem is, upon second viewing, I realized that it actually sort of sucks.

A big reason is that there's just no chance for it to be a movie and let us meaningfully hang out with these allegedly beloved characters. It is a finely tuned plot delivering machine. The intense focus on plot suggests how insecure the franchise is about its characters, and how unsure Bryan Singer, returning to the franchise after a ten year hiatus, is about how to make these characters relate to each other. The characters in Days of Future Past are functions of plot only, and briskly entering scenes to charge the story into its next phase. I can't think of a single scene that isn't maniacally intent on thrusting the story forward. I can watch any movie to get a nice dose of tight story--I watch X-Men movies to, you know, hang out with the X-Men. 

The only characters who make more than cameos are the ones on the Blu-Ray cover. Actually, Future Professor X and Future Magneto are on the cover, and they are barely more than cameos. We get little to no sense of the wider mutant community. The whole point of making an X-Men movie is to explore as many mutants with obscure abilities as possible, to build a rich world where the reality of mutancy delights, fascinates, and sometimes terrifies us. 

Look, Singer's enthusiasm for his version of the X-Men universe is admirable. He has excelled, as many have noted, at treating the idea of mutancy as an allegory for the gay experience. That is a big, important part of what makes the X-Men interesting. But it is only part of it. Teamwork is the other. The real focus of an X-Men movie should be showing them coming together as a team to use their strange powers to help themselves grow and to fight evil.

The emphasis on star power in this franchise makes that difficult. (The other characters literally exist inside of Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence's bodies in the main theatrical poster). It's also tough to showcase teamwork when you've used the leader of the X-Men, Cyclops, so poorly, or cut him out entirely, as the two New Universe movies have done. It is nuts that Beast is the only classic X-Men character in Professor X's orbit when Wolverine goes back in time --that absolutely would have been Cyclops. 

And the movie would have been better for it. Constantly butting heads due to their opposing styles, Cyclops and Wolverine have a naturally interesting dynamic between them, which Wolverine and Beast kind of don't. There's little reason for Beast to have been one of the, like, four mutants with any kind of real screen time, other than as cynical fan service. (And maybe also that Nicholas Hoult has become a fairly popular actor, whose fame was boosted no doubt by his long relationship with Jennifer Lawrence). This movie isn't about allowing characters to interact in ways that don't shove the story forward. When Wolvie tells Young Beast that in the future they would be good friends, you wonder what those relationship building experiences were and when we'd ever get to see them.

But what about the sentinels! Yes, it's true, we finally got sentinels. The whole plot is about them, and we finally get to see them in action threatening mutants and challenging them to push the limits of their powers. But like Beast, this is a case of throwing in fan favorite characters without really understanding what's cool about them.

We don't get to see the actual sentinels that X-Men fans think of when they think of sentinels. We get to see plenty of weird, cybernetic future sentinels and a couple 1973 prototypes in limited, brief scenes. We don't get to see the big purple sentinels that chase Wolverine around, forcing him to he has to claw his way up to their heads and stab out their cranial circuitry like we all want. 

The sentinels were cool because they were an everyday looming threat to the X-Men. We got used to them battling our heroes, and dug them as cool foes between boss fights against Mr. Sinister or Apocalypse. The movies didn't give them a chance to become cool. In their rush to appease fans, they just immediately made less cool versions of them into boss battles.

But what about that awesome slo-mo Quicksilver scene! Yes--Quicksilver breaking Magneto out of prison was a truly memorable set piece. The audience I saw it with broke into three separate applause breaks during the prison break. This is a capital M Moment that feels like it was intentionally stuck there to offset the lack of moments in the rest of the film. A film without moments needs to have a Moment. A film that can't generate its own moments between characters, since it has little room for characters in the headlong story rush, needs to construct a scene that compensates for that lack. If audiences remembered anything about the movie, it was probably that scene.

The cynicism of the production behind Days of Future Past isn't surprising, and it certainly led to a successful project. "Let's just throw sentinels and Jennifer Lawrence and Hugh Jackman at it and stick to a tight script, book-ended by action scenes from the original cast members." Done and Done!

Lawrence is great as Mystique, as she is in everything. But having the film be so focused on her and Hugh Jackman, albeit understandably so considering how hugely famous and popular they both are, makes this not an X-Men movie. They should both star in a big budget action movie together and it will make a bunch of money. Let Hugh Jackman make the talk show rounds and discuss how fit he is to promote that movie. But they've tried to make that and call it an X-Men movie.

Fox lucked into getting a huge star out of the material in Jackman, and got new life a decade later by having Jennifer Lawrence involved in the franchise just before she got super duper big. (Not to mention getting in on the ground floor of Michael Fassbender). These are all just star vehicles, not real X-Men movies. The very idea of Cyclops baffles that studio--they can't get the most important X-Men team member right. That would be like The Avengers movie leaving out Iron Man. 

It was too perfect that the biggest, most emotionally charged scene in the film, the impending violent death of the remaining X-Men at the hands of the unbeatable future sentinels, evaporates entirely when Young Mystique decides not to assassinate Bolivar Trask, the creator of the sentinels. That unbearably tense moment vanishes into thin air, like it never happened. That's basically how I feel about this cynical movie.

Stephen King's A Good Marriage

I love Stephen King. Salem's Lot was the first book that really scared me. Desperation was an amazing, dense, twisted ride that my 7th grade self went giddy over. On Writing taught me more about writing than probably any other single book. I very much dig the indie horror VOD boom, which has almost single-handedly kind of made iTunes cool. I also love serial killer stories, and this one was allegedly inspired by the true story of the BTK killer. So I had high hopes for Stephen King's A Good Marriage.

I was a a bit less than enthused that Anthony LaPaglia was starring as the serial killing husband Bob, but he was great, maybe the best thing about the movie. In an early sex scene with his wife, he really nails the detached, joyless coital expressions of a psychopath who engages in spousal intimacy only to keep his cover. In the later scenes, after his wife Darcy (Joan Allen) finds out he's a notorious serial killer, Bob really cuts loose and is very entertaining. You can see how liberated he is to finally share this secret with his wife, who he does actually love, and let someone see who he really is. He's really happily sleazy and seems to finally be a whole person.

But that's a tiny part of the movie, and limited to a few quick scenes of him drunkenly dancing and stumbling around the house. There is an engagingly creepy scene where he stalks a potential victim in a late night coffee shop, but that doesn't lead to anything, and is intercut with Darcy investigating his computer for clues, so it doesn't really develop as a scene unto itself. We don't see Bob freak out into a psychotic blood-rage or anything, which is fine, because this isn't that kind of movie. The complete focus is on the fallout of a wife finding out her husband of many years has been living a total double life. 

I watch movies to see things happen, not to see characters who deal with the consequences of things that happened before the events of the film. I want to see the movie of Bob actually living his double life, not simply the fallout of being discovered. That would be fine at the end of a movie, after it's been at least somewhat established that these characters are worth caring about. But A Good Marriage starts with an ending, stretching and stretching it into a feature length running time.


This is becoming a trend in movies and TV, and I don't think it's good. We're given stories dealing with the fallout of interesting events that happened before the movies starts, or we're shown origin stories of characters who will be interesting later. It seems increasingly rare to be right in the thick of things.

This is very much Joan Allen's movie, which is great. I'm all for the Joan Allen resurgence, and think she deserves an Emmy for her role in Netflix's final season of The Killing. And she is very good here. But we just don't know enough about her Darcy to be all that invested in her journey of discovering her husband's crimes. Even Bob feels slightly drawn, little more than a recurring cameo.

The title comes from a speech their daughter Petra (Kristen Connolly) gives at their 25th anniversary party that starts things off, that they achieved the rarest thing in the world--a good marriage. We're told that they had one, of course, not shown. Is that too much to ask?

Kristen Connolly's involvement was what tipped me into Yes for renting this (along with the similarly enchanting Cara Buono). Kristen Connolly and Cara Buono, the two TV actresses that possibly more than any others in recent years stole everyone's hearts as Christina Gallagher and Dr. Faye Miller, in the same indie horror movie? Sign me up.

Unfortunately, this is where another disappointing movie trend  kicks in--having appealing actors and actresses credited in the film, but who make little more than extended cameos. Connolly and Buono have a combined five minutes of screen time between them--maybe. There's simply no room for them when we have to watch Darcy shuffle around her house in a catatonic daze in scene after scene. I actually missed the ascendent Mike O'Malley's name in the credits and was pleasantly surprised when he made a very brief speech at the opening anniversary party. Of course--we never see him again.

Stephen King's A Good Marriage might make for a perfectly fine short story, but it doesn't feel like much of a movie.

Bravely Making the World Safe for the Post-Employment Economy

What is the post-employment economy? That the phrase seems a bit obscure and overly dismal is itself a prime example of how deeply entrenched in self-delusion we are, and must be in capitalism's current form.

At the root of the countless reports, polls, and articles about how people born between the late 1980s and early 2000s are more likely than ever to either be unemployed, underemployed, or left out of the labor force entirely, is the specter of permanent post-employment. This economic reality, which we are in the thick of and is very much the new normal, has, like any other aspect of capitalism, created the need for radical, exotic new ideologies. Post-employment capitalism has spawned an ideology of the making sanguine of an economy without employees (other than de facto oligarchs and the thoroughly impoverished, of course.)

The alarmingly high rate of unemployment (which factors out the underemployed and those not even in the labor force) among "millennials" is rationalized in a variety of ways. People of the generations just prior to the millennial one (or Generation Y, as it used to be called), who could often kind of fall into decent work and not have to be a cutthroat, gleaming assassin of perfectly optimized employability just to simply be considered worthy of gaining access to the lower ranks of the middle class, rationalize the truly insane statistics as merely evidence that enormous swaths of American citizens born during a span of over twenty years are lazy. The power structure thrives on citizens having the worst possible opinions of each other.

The exceptionally eager adoption of the term 'millennial' by the media to describe every person born in a position to pay unprecedentedly high college tuition in a shrinking economy, with fewer jobs and stagnant wage growth, and little expectation of anything beyond temp work, seems a transparent enough attempt to casually dismiss the inheritors of this country as a massive outgroup. Who cares if the economy barely exists anymore? It's just a bunch of those icky millennials paying the price anyway. Perhaps a new term had to be found to replace Generation Y, as it was too similar to Generation X, and reminded those born between 1960 and 1980 that we, too, are human beings.

At best, the very real crisis of millions of people in their 20s and 30s, people who not too long ago used to start families, buy homes, and plant roots, not being permitted to start their lives is accepted as a legitimate issue because it may threaten the wider economy. Crises in human dignity, which is what millions of Americans not being granted the privilege of starting their lives really is, only flirt with non-triviality when they threaten the self-interest of people who have been able to effectively barricade themselves from experiencing them directly on a first-hand, daily level.

This shouldn't be a surprise--non-elite people aren't important, capital is. The Left lost, the world is safe for capitalism, thank God! Nothing new here. But people are still around. Ugh. Not only that, but there are more than ever! If only there were a way to remove those pesky humans from the picture entirely, while still generating capital. Oh wait, Foxconn built a fleet of thousands of robots to replace their already peerlessly debased workers? Enter the Foxbots!

That Foxconn, a company that built its power on supplying Apple with millions of human resources that could be bent, abused, whacked, and sapped to an extent impossible (as of now!) in America, is rapidly transitioning to cost-saving automated labor, is somehow both coldly unsurprising and shockingly brazen.

In the rapidly approaching mass automation of work, when robots do nearly everything, let's not forget what a robot is. It is a slave. ('Robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor."') It is an ideal slave, beyond the wildest dreams of 19th century slave-owners. Our mad rush into robonomics shows how little our outlook on labor has actually changed since the days when human slavery generated much of the West's wealth--we still want slave labor more than anything. We have not even tried to begin imagining a different set of economic values, in which human life counted for more than as little as possible.

The column "Are Millennials Underemployed--Or Just Lazy?" by Kelly Clay is a compelling example of the self-delusion needed to keep marching headlong into our increasingly inevitable post-employment economy.

First, the obvious: Kelly Clay is a millennial, and presumably has experienced how mightily the deck is stacked against people who had the poor taste to be born anywhere close to that time. Second, her entire "thesis" is an exhilaratingly absurd exercise in delusion: essentially, "are statistical facts true, or does my hastily drawn opinion negate their existence?" That she was able to develop even a minimal bit of logic to support this absurd premise is a nice example of how even the most irrational thinking can manage to perpetuate itself, and indeed thrive. A frightening situation, indeed.

Another worrisome trend is in the contortions writers are going through to rationalize the marginalization of the silly human part of our economy. Establishment shill Kyle Chayka is bad enough with his fetishization of the schizophrenia, er, I mean, entrepreneurial gusto, the virtue of being sufficiently flexible to scratch out slightly above poverty wages in our exciting catch-as-catch-can permanent post-employee climate. (And yes, if you write for Gawker, and especially produce Gawker hit pieces assaulting open expression, you are about as much of an establishment shill as it's possible to be right now).

This LinkedIn emetic by Daniel Hill is a perhaps even sadder expression of how writers are bending over backwards to portray the systematic erosion of middle class American dignity as a fun challenge to be embraced. Mr. Hill opines: "It doesn’t matter who you are. A CEO, making $50 million dollars a year still has to worry every day that the shareholders may call for their resignation if growth doesn't meet the expected projections. A maintenance worker still has to worry that their position does not become outsourced to a 3rd party company, hiring contractors willing to do the same job for less money and no health benefits."

Viewing this state of affairs as hopelessly absurd is not permitted. A situation in which people feel compelled to maniacally stockpile tens of millions of dollars because of the constant looming fun possibility of going bankrupt, and in which a citizen with minimal economic dignity has to worry about losing what little he has to a fellow citizen desperate enough to accept an even more attractively undignified (from the employer's POV) economic lot in life, is just an opportunity for us to bare our teeth, roll up our sleeves, and dig in. It is not insane or unreasonable--it is our fault for not sufficiently modifying our bodies and minds and souls to the whims of capital. Reason must at no point be permitted to come into contact with the experiences and impressions of one's daily life. Advanced capitalism doesn't ask much of us, but it does ask that.

Anyone familiar with the contemporary job search has gotten used to seeing words like "ideal," "amazing," "perfect fit," etc., in job descriptions for even entry level "roles" in most industries. The right to enter moderate middle class esteem is at best an extreme, rare privilege reserved only for the most savvy, capitalistically conscientious, at worst indistinguishable from playing the lottery.

By no means should the opportunity to live a middle class life be granted to Americans who have the audacity to want to simply try to become decent citizens and start their lives. The middle class lifestyle is reserved for "rock stars" only, thank you very much.

Work is for the Workers

We all know that Apple produces its wondrous products in Chinese factories, where Chinese workers labor under such miserable conditions that nets had to be installed to catch jumpers eager for the sweet embrace of self-imposed death. Research, design, marketing, and other soft endeavors are run out of Cupertino, supplying great jobs to some of the luckiest people on Earth.

But the real work of building the products, of course, is left to Chinese workers, because they don't require pesky things like health insurance, a dignified living wage, and humane working conditions that greedy, spoiled American workers do.

So in the interest of maximizing profits, Apple refuses to allow its amazingly popular products, truly today's equivalent of Ford automobiles of a century earlier, to be made in America. No big deal--it's not like millions of Americans are desperate for work, or that entire, once great cities are rotting away, because nothing is manufactured there anymore. Again, this isn't news.

But here's something you might have missed. Apple compiled nearly $100 billion in cash reserves in the wake of the iPad, the most successful new consumer electronics launch in history. Would it be the worst thing in the world if they didn't have an extra $100 billion that they didn't know what to do with, and American workers could partake of the popularity and success of Apple products? Could entire cities be saved with even a sliver of that extra $100 billion? How many millions of American lives would be spared the desperation, hopelessness, and indignity of trying to scrape together a living by any rough means necessary?

Naturally, it is beyond absurd to expect a successful American company to not hoard massive profits at the direct expense of their fellow citizens. America is not a country, it's a business, and there are no citizens, just competitors.

The point of employment is not to produce great products, to serve customers as best as possible, or even to maximize profits. It is to provide good work for as many employees as possible, to raise the standard of socialization, humanistic intelligence, and dignity for the greatest number. Companies don't exist for customers or shareholders--they are for the workers. Of course, employers are so used to crushing down the spirit of workers, and only accepting them into their precious, vaunted orbits if there is absolutely no doubt that they will contribute to the bottom line. There is no turning back--work is no longer for the workers, and, soon enough, society will no longer be for humans. Capitalism can only culminate in the removal of the human fly in its ointment.

It is more important for $100 billion in pointless, surplus wealth to serve no purpose and be shielded off from the wider world, than to be potentially used to help millions of people survive. A nice companion piece to the Apple cash hoard while American workers languish and Chinese workers get worked to their marrow is this story about huge numbers of apartments in Midtown where apartments are empty for 10 months out of the year, functioning as glorified hotel rooms for the ultra rich when they want a break from their Tuscan villa or whatever it is rich people do. Of course, countless homeless people are literally sleeping, starving, and often dying in the streets below these vacant rooms every night. Neoliberal capital is about hoarding unneeded cash reserves in the billions through extreme cost-cutting measures, and it is about keeping apartments empty in case a millionaire wishes to use it a few weekends a year to store the merchandise they buy on their Fifth Avenue shopping sprees.

American companies, Apple chief among them, need to think of themselves as existing for their workers. That is the reason that businesses exist--so that their workers have something to do with their time. Profits for shareholders, making great products, and satisfying consumer preferences are so obviously less important things for a company to do than to create opportunities for people to go into a place every day, do something there is demand for, and be paid enough to support a moderate lifestyle.

Against Saturday Night Live

Plenty of people have been saying SNL isn't funny for a long time, and indeed saying it isn't funny has itself become an irritatingly obvious observation. Criticism of it is seen as an example of an overabundance of zeal in closing off your mind against potentially imperfect cultural input (a strange tic of our uncertain age, in which habits of cultural consumption are among the most fiercely guarded foundations of moral certitude left to us).

Entertainment consumption as a paramount arena of character formation is such a deeply ingrained moral prejudice now that some commentators, worried about the massive layoffs looming as robotic automation marches through more and more industries, have proposed rewarding wise consumption habits with salaries.

In the post-employment future we all seem very excited to be sprinting towards, the one thing giving a life value will be its buying power, and people love nothing more than buying entertaining cultural experiences. So it does make a certain kind of sense, if dismayingly defeatist capitalistic sense, for people to get madly worked up about their entertainment experiences not measuring up to expectations. Building reputations as wise consumers of entertaining culture products could be the best way to start carving out a livable wage in the new economy.

Like peasants struggling with each other for a piece of bread in the street, you can already almost see the desperation and venom forming on message boards between people accusing a movie of sucking, or denying that one sucks. People will always be needed as receptacles into which culture products can be deposited in return for profit. That is one 'job' that probably won't be going away any time soon.

But to return to SNL, and the volleys of hate it has received for not being as funny as it could be (the worst crime conceivably possible). The discussion should not be outrage at being deprived of weekly experiences of optimal funniness. At a certain point, being funny has nothing to do with anything. The stranglehold that Lorne Michaels has had on the comedy industry is unprecedented, surpassing anything that could have survived the vicissitudes of funniness.

At the very least, SNL is less reliably funny than it was Back When It Was Good, whenever your particular time period on that sliding scale is. So Michaels's durability becomes more puzzling. Why have the NBC suits been so very loyal to him, after decades of everyone saying his show sucked? We get fresh evidence all the time of how short the leashes are at NBC. So why has SNL survived?

SNL cast members are notoriously poorly paid--Will Ferrell, possibly its best and most durably successful product ever, was appropriately its highest paid player ever, earning $375,000 in 2001. For an institution as enduring as SNL, which occupies the same rare air as something like Monday Night Football, $375,000 per year for its brightest star is not much. Even rookie NFL players make more than that.

The low pay is one thing, but the exploitation and ownership was made quite explicit in the draconian contracts instituted fifteen years ago. A main aim of the new contracts was to ensure that any star power generated by SNL was controlled by NBC, after having been burned by the runaway Hollywood success of Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers. (Yes kids, at certain points in the eighties and nineties, both of those people were the most bankable Hollywood comedy actors in the world).

A huge part of the appeal of SNL used to be the promise of achieving this kind of breakout fame. It's an open question, after the narrowing of our cultural and economic horizons caused by the infiltration of Internet 'openness' into all aspects of society, if stratospheric fame on Murphy's level even exists anymore. But in the event that it possibly might, NBC, in true arch-capitalist fashion, has made absolutely sure that any possible earning potential generated under its auspices will be under its viselike grip. It is telling that there has been a definite shift in the SNL development system away from making movie stars to making NBC talk show hosts. Movie stars go on to make money for distributors and production companies that have nothing to do with NBC. Crappy talk show hosts, like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Myers, keep making money hand over fist for NBC for decades.

When SNL started in the seventies, it wasn't very funny. This isn't really news--we all know that nothing ages worse than comedy. Go back and watch some 'classic' John Belushi or Dan Aykroyd sketches and see how many times you laugh. If you can even bear to watch a full sketch, you should be proud. The important thing was how different the format was--live comedy TV really late at night was new and cool. That was forty years ago.

Now it is this endless honeypot attracting bright young talent into its orbit, grinding them down with insanely hectic work schedules and filtering them through the tastes of one old oligarch.

SNL is a shining testament to the risk averse nature of corporate America. Lorne Michaels has been producing the show for such a long time, and been consistently pulling in profits and generating personalities that have done well in other ventures, that they just don't want it to end. So we keep getting game show spoofs, lesser Daily Show jokes from Weekend Update, absurd commercials for fake products, and celebrity coronations (OMG it's Justin Timberlake! He's so talented!).

It's worth contrasting these typical SNL outputs with something like a Kids in the Hall sketch. This sketch has, in addition to its comic mania, real substance and depth, and enough time for the story to stretch out a bit. It couldn't be more different from what you see on SNL nowadays.

What if the next generation of talented, energetic comedic performers and writers agreed to stop letting this corporate comedy monolith drain them and exploit them? If people banded together to start their own thing, to make the next SNL, and let this beast finally die an overdue death? But as long as it exists as a platform that can allow creatives to live in NYC and pay NYC rent, while also giving them unparalleled exposure, it will continue.

SNL needs young talent more than young talent needs it. It is powerful because young people have agreed that it is important and powerful. If young talent could pull together and keep away from its temptations, we would finally be rid of it. Aspirants will keep deluding themselves into believing that having liked a few sketches or recurring characters from 15 or 20 years ago is worth contributing to this greedy, hungry octopus at the center of our culture.

This sketch from the last episode of its 40th season is especially callous. It is little more than an extended mockery of the obscenely dehumanizing and exhausting struggle that countless young actors and comedians go through to get their start. If it was funny, that might be something of a defense, but it really isn't.

SNL is coasting on the goodwill generated by its innovative format (from forty years back), and the memories that everyone between 20-45 have of laughing their asses off when they were kids. Everything good it did happened so long ago, when it did some very real things, like shaking up formats and injecting some inspired unhinged characters into American culture. The sad part is, this can't happen anymore. Why are only things that happened in the past real? This is a necessary part of our era of perpetual stasis, the "end of history"--that all of the true acts have already happened. It's all over but the shouting. When history has ended, the superficial scraps left to us take on fanatical importance.