Origin Stories: X-Men First Class & Cave of Forgotten Dreams

On a hot summer day, we saw X-Men: First Class. I really enjoyed the X-Men franchise, with the exception of the the third movie, which was awful. Wisely, Brian Singer is back at the helm for this one, and they’ve finally decided to focus on the history between Professor X and Magneto. The movie was at its best when it delves into the the storyline of young (mobile) Charles Xavier and young (tortured) Erik Lensherr. The script for their scenes is tight, the acting pretty stellar, and the metaphor of mutants as the new Jews -- heading for the tragedy of registration, segregation, and ultimately annihilation -- hovers over the plot like a dark cloud. The plot of the movie is a reworking of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the primary motivation is not human world domination on the part of nations, but a single mutant’s mad plan to change the course of mutant evolution.


Briefly, it’s 1962. The mutants Charles and Erik (with a normal-looking young Mystique in tow -- turns out she’s Charles’ adopted sister!) agree to work with a covert covert branch of the CIA, headed by one of my favorite character actors (Oliver Platt). They have to use their powers in order to stop the Russians, who are being manipulated by Erik’s childhood nemesis, Sebastian Shaw, who is the movie’s Big Bad. He’s tricking Russia into putting nukes on Cuba and starting off World War III. Shaw is flanked by the icy but dull Emma Frost, a bizarro-world version of Nightcrawler, and a guy who makes tornadoes (the Hellfire Club is name-dropped but never explained), Shaw wants to start World War III. He hopes that an atomic disaster will speed the creation of more mutants, or that the fallout will kill all the humans but leave the mutants unharmed -- needless to say, Shaw is a poor scientist, but no one points out the flaw in his reasoning, even those on his side. The Americans and the good-guy mutants just try to stop him, sparking off a number of fight scenes in which people get to show off their “magic tricks,” as the mutant powers are referred to.

Where the movie stumbles is when it succumbs to montage. As soon as Charles and Erik start to find and recruit new mutants to join their team -- kind of an inverse pogrom -- the movie slows, devolving into a string of similar scenes filled with predictable dialogue and action. Aside from one beautiful cameo, each scene is the same. A young actor demonstrates a mutant power, and then summarizes his or her philosophy towards humans in a high school debate format. After that montage, they sit around CIA HQ doing not much of anything, since the older (and frankly more powerful) Charles and Erik do the real work of defeating Shaw and the Russians.

The action is still pretty snappy, and there are enough one-liners and comic geek references to satisfy fans, but I was a little annoyed by the lack of retconning from the first two movies. The original X-Men described Charles and Erik as building Cerebro; in First Class, the adorably geeky Hank McCoy is the sole creator of the machine, which he designed before ever meeting a telepath. Similarly, the relationship between Charles and Raven (Mystique) is a major thread in First Class, which must be a new thing, since it was never even hinted at in previous movies. Even the way Mystique is portrayed in this installment makes her seem like an all-new character. Rebecca Romijn’s blue girl is calculating, sexy, and rather punk rock in her attitude towards the establishment. Jennifer Lawrence’s blue girl is a follower, desperate for validation from the men in her life. For an origin story, it doesn’t do much to explain the shift, other than to lay the groundwork for her transfer of position from Charles to Erik -- in an exchange that seemed bizarrely like a marriage ceremony. Charles more or less shoves her into Erik’s path; she doesn’t appear to exercise autonomy at all.

It should be easy to follow the threads of X-Men’s mythology. After all, the story has only been around a few decades, and we can see every bit of it, and still ask the creators what this story means. So it’s a bit hard to fathom how there can be discrepancies and variations in tone in a story that’s barely begun. Maybe it’s a case of many voices all having a say, or the fact that X-Men is a special kind of story. Comics welcome change, after all. Characters can appear, vanish, die, and be reborn without shaking the overall believability of the tale. These people are different -- they’re supposed to do what we can’t.

Another origin story altogether is the subject of Werner Herzog’s new documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. If X-Men got confusing after forty years, imagine how hard it is to figure out the plot of a story from 30,000 years ago. Like many myths, the subject of this film is alien and freaky and unexplainable. The oldest cave painting ever discovered -- possibly the oldest art ever discovered -- was found by cavers in southern France in 1995. The find is unquestionably awesome, in the Old Testament meaning of the word. It inspires awe. No crude pictograms, these images of animals are gorgeous, flowing, and as sophisticated as any modernist work. The zoological details are so clear that scientists were able to to answer questions about ice age fauna that remained mysterious until now. The few experts allowed to work the find (it’s been severely restricted and guarded by the French government) have been using marvelous, non-invasive techniques to study and map the cave, recreating the images and even identifying a single individual’s handprint -- revealing that one person might be responsible for the finest pictures.

All fascinating points, and they only raise more questions. But Herzog doesn’t allow anyone to ask or answer them. Herzog has always thrown himself into his documentaries, never content to simply observe and record. But where his quirky, participatory style worked in the past (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World), is frustrates here. His narration becomes solipsistic and declamatory. He asserts that the cave is a place of “forgotten dreams”, without explaining what that actually means, or bothering to find out what the scientists might call the cave, or what the cave was actually used for before becoming the set of his documentary. Was it a ritual site? Did the images represent hoped-for game? Animal spirits? The record of a single mighty hunter? Was it an elaborate marriage proposal, akin to flashing “Will you marry me, Uggette?” on a stadium billboard, stunning the girl into acceptance? Herzog doesn’t ask.

Instead, he trails the scientists as they perform their research -- one gets the impression that they’re too polite to tell him he’s kinda in the way. As always,he’s more interested in the living -- he grills one scientist on his circus performer background when it’s clear the poor guy would rather talk about the cave. The last ten or so minutes finally focuses on the painting themselves, as the camera lingers on a few main images and then pans slowly, slowly over dozens of animals. The montage s accompanied by a weird cello/flute/wailing dirge that does nothing to illuminate the art. For a short documentary, it sure begins to drag at this point, and it’s a relief when Herzog resumes his trademark, wackadoo narration. But his final questions reveal that he is still more obsessed with today’s world than the past. He asks: did the painter wonder if his images would be viewed by men over 30,000 years in the future? What would he think of our opinions? He leaves the question unanswered. So I’ll answer it. HE WOULDN’T CARE. I’ll bet that Mr. Painter didn’t even consider whether his images would be considered by art critics millennia, generations upon generations, beyond his own lifetime. He might have pondered his family’s reaction. Or his tribe’s. Or his gods’. But not Herzog’s.

Herzog proposes that based on the flowing beauty of the paintings, it is as if “the birth of the modern soul” took place here 30,000 years ago. That conclusion is as pithy and false as the idea that superpowered mutants will emerge from the human race in the industrial age, prompting a Neanderthal/Sapiens-style smack-down. What works for comic book mythology doesn’t wash for real anthropology.

Not all beginnings are tidy, and when those beginnings are hidden away for thousands of years, they get even messier. It’s tempting to wonder about the motivations of the artist in the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But it’s another thing to assume you know exactly what those motivations are. Unless, of course, Herzog’s some kind of mind-reader, and how silly is that?