Alef: The NEXT Conversation

On Being Magneto

By Rafi Samuels-Schwartz

I’m 14 and I’ve just spent the last 5 hours on a school bus, driving home from from the strange bubble that is Jewish summer camp.  I’m exhausted (no one sleeps the last night of camp), a little nauseous, and all I want is to see X-Men.

Let me explain.

One of the distinguishing features of summer camp is the desperation with which campers seek any sort of reassurance that yes, there is life outside of camp.  That summer reassurance came in the form of the much-hyped release of Bryan Singer’s movie adaptation of the popular Marvel comics dynasty - X-Men.   Whether through magazines mailed by sympathetic parents, or snippets of conversations overheard between Counselors planing to see it on their coveted day off,   X-Men was quickly becoming the lifeline to the outside world for the nearly 500 kids locked away in the north woods of Wisconsin.

I’d been a fan of Marvel Comic’s most recognizable franchise since I was 8 or 9, having followed their adventures on their long running Saturday morning cartoon.  I knew that the virtuous (but often conflicted!) mutant  X-Men fought against evil supervillains and human prejudice alike.  Also, they fought giant robots, which, for an 8 or 9 year old, carries a lot of cache.   And, most importantly, I knew that their worst enemy was the evil Magneto, mutant master of magnetism, whose “Mutants First” ethos put him fundamentally at odds with the kumbaya equality the X-Men embodied.

The afternoon I returned home, I called my best friend, and the two of us made plans  to see X-Men that night.  Having sufficiently placated my parents with a few morsels of “Yes, camp was great” and “Yes, I’ll call my grandmother tonight, I promise!”  I was out the door, and off to the local theater to finally collect on what had felt like the unachievable goal of the summer.   As I settled into the plush theater seats, and waited for the lights to dim, there was a palpable tremor of excitement that ran through the entire auditorium.  This was it!  The moment we’d all been waiting for!  After years of comics and cartoons,  and a summer of rumors and snippets, I was finally going to see the worlds most famous mutants on the big screen!

This was not the X-Men I was expecting.   This was the Holocaust.  And not a Holocaust where brightly colored superheros swoop down to rescue the helpless victims of the Third Reich.  As I watched, a terrified child is torn from his mothers hands and dragged away, only to miraculously drag the iron bars of the adjacent gates with him.  My mind was entirely blown.  This is Magneto?  Scourge of mankind and archenemy of the virtuous X-Men?  Bullshit.  This wasn’t a villain, this was Anne Frank!  This was the Warsaw ghetto uprising!  This was…  interesting.   Suddenly Magneto’s mutant superiority wasn’t baseless supervillainy,  it was Holocaust trauma.  And, suddenly, X-Men wasn’t about superheros who lived in some abstract fantasy land, it was real, and so were the characters.  They had depth, they had history, and the worst of the worst had gone through the exact same thing my own cousins had.

Ok, maybe my 14 year old brain was a little addled by sleep deprivation, and overwhelmed by flashy special effects.   After 2 months locked away it’s not surprising that most things would remind me of summer camp.  And yet here I am, over a decade later, and every time I watch the opening scene of X-Men I think of about that first night home from camp – wired, exhausted, and about to have my ideas of super-good, and super-evil totally scrambled by the one thing I’d counted on getting me back into the real world.

Magneto was still a villain, and still capable of terrible things, but in 3 minutes of gritty, unexpectedly realistic exposition, Magneto was transformed from two-dimensional caricature into a three-dimensional character.  And, after two months of living in the bubble of summer camp, it only took those same 3 minutes to snap me back into the real world.

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Photos provided by ZacharyTirrell,Thomas Duchnicki :: Location Scout, and Mrs. Gemstone licensed under Creative Commons

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Read more from Issue 17: People of the (comic)Book.

Tags: Comic books, Comics

Posted by Rafi, Saturday, July 24th, 2010, 11:45 am, People of the (comic)Book.