Mutated Revolution: X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, Identity Politics, and Hegemony

The X-MEN franchise's recent iteration, DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, is an absurd mess to try to acknowledge as a film.  There are so many plot holes and discontinuities that it operates more as a dis-connected montage of comic book adventures, which is perhaps the best way to think about it.  However, and without hyperbole, this analogy is helpful because the film series and the comic books historically have fulfilled a similar role in the American culture, providing a litmus test for mainstream tolerance in regards to varying social causes in the spectrum of identity politics.  The comic book has been published now monthly by Marvel Comics since September 1963, two months prior to the death of John F. Kennedy.  In popular discourse, most are prone to see the era of the 'Camelot 1960's' as different from the years that included LBJ, Vietnam, and ended with Watergate (regardless of the truth, court historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. did effectively create this ideological farce of historiography as his magnum opus).  As such, X-MEN has some merit, in this sense.  The procession of X-Men team line-ups has been a parade of the identities of the worldwide spectrum that have become notable in discourse in the past fifty years.  When the book began, it was in  the days of newly-integrated public schools and the opposition between Professor Xavier and Magneto quickly took on the characterization of the contrasts between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  The variety of characters in the book's history have been emblematic of Feminism, gay rights, Asian-American rights, a whole plethora ranging from Native American to even animal rights.  This can be attributed to the original created, Stan Lee, whose grasp of pathos in graphic storytelling were influential in the greater graphic novel tradition.  Indeed, the classic of the genre, WATCHMEN, could be seen as a greater conclusion of the sort of persecution and discrimination that X-MEN first was addressing.
In the films, the obvious parallels have been between the identities related to homosexuality and gender.  For example, the third film, borrowing the plot from writer Joss Whedon's work in the ASTONISHING X-MEN title, juxtaposes the 'choice' of having a medically available cure to the mutant condition with the contemporary women's choice debate.  The second film, based on the 1982 novel GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, includes a rather hilarious coming out scene featuring Ice Man that is topped of with the mother's question "Have you ever tried not being a Mutant?"  While the film does transform Striker from a televangelist in the novel into a cinematic military scientist clearly modeled on Iraqi weapon contractors, the malice towards homosexuality generated in the 1980's by the Religious Right is quite akin to the hatred of Mutants.  The coming out scene is ended when one of the family members reacts by calling the police, not unlike how the families of gay men with AIDS in the 1980's scorned their kin and left them for dead.  The opening scene in the first film, where Senator Kelly takes the floor to call for a registry of mutants, is modeled on the Wheeling speech by Joseph McCarthy in 1950, saying he holds in his hands a list of known Mutants.  Of course, the undercurrent of homophobia in the McCarthy Era, embodied by Roy Cohn, is a running part of the film.  In a sense, Magneto's effort to transform the Mutant-phobic Senator into a Mutant with artificial means is derived from the discourse on power relations and sex seen in the writings of Michel Foucault, especially in terms of bio-politics.
Interestingly, in this sense, the film also functions to adequately enforce the dominant neo-liberal coordinates of American discourse relating to identity as an ideological state apparatus.  The analogues to identity discourses are presented in a fashion that discourage legitimate emancipatory politics and instead suggest a political correctness shaped not by interest in people but capital.   Magneto, whose militancy is akin to Malcolm X, is a villain, Charles Xavier ventriloquizes a fantastical and petty spoof of the real thinking of Martin Luther King not unlike the writings seen on the websites of the Koch Brothers.