X-Men First Class: A Psychologist’s Review

Origin stories are about transformation. Superhero origin stories are about the transformation of people (loosely defined: humans, enhanced humans, mutants, aliens) into superheroes. About people who channel their (super)abilities and (super)powers in the service of others. To do good.

X-Men: First Class is a story about multiple transformations of people into superheroes and as such it is a great movie. It shows us not only Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr transforming into Professor X and Magneto, respectively, but also how a range of other mutants transformed into future X-Men or Brotherhood of Mutant members.

From a psychological perspective, the X-Men comic book (and film) stories are psychologically rich material, in which issues about prejudice and discrimination, teamwork, leadership, giftedness (e.g., being "special") and power are explored in ways that are both accessible and thought-provoking. X-Men: First Class continues this fine tradition.

Here are but a few of the "psychological truths" that I saw revealed during the course of the film.

Being Gifted Can be a Lonely Path

As we saw in the first X-Men film, being a mutant can be a lonely path in life. You are different than other people, they don't understand you and in some cases they fear you. In other cases, they want to control you-to use your power for their own ends. The mutants in X-Men: First Class film experience all of this, and because of it, they come to hide their abilities, when possible. Raven (the future Mystique) can change form to appear as other people, but her "self" is blue-skinned. She learns to hide this and expends some effort to shape shift so that she looks normal every waking moment. Angel has wings, hidden behind a harness. These and most other mutants grow up thinking they are each the only ones-that they are alone in being "special." (On one level, of course, they're right, since almost every mutant has a unique set of abilities not replicated by another-the exceptions seem to be telepaths.) But as they discover one another they discover that they share mutated genes that give them special powers and abilities, and the sense of being not "normal." In this sense each of them has trod a lonely path until finding each other.

There is a part of the film when a bunch of teen/young adult mutants are sitting around talking about their powers and abilities, excited to recognize themselves in others, to feel relief at being able to be themselves, not to have to hide. The issue of "hiding one's true nature" has parallels with homosexuality, race, and most any other attribute that leads people to feel different when around "regular" people and thus when people find others like themselves, they feel enormous relief. If each one is a freak, then together they are a band of freaks, no longer alone. Seeing this scene made me think of what it is like for academically gifted children who have hide their talents in order to fit in-to finally find other people like themselves and no longer need to pretend. (Clickhere for more information about gifted children. For readers particularly interested in this topic, I also recommend Ellen Winner's fascinating book on gifted children.)

It's Hard to Look Different

Being gifted-having talents, powers, or abilities significantly above that of the average person-is one way of being different. Another way is to look significantly different, which can range from having a different skin tone, body physique, or facial feature (e.g., "stick-out ears") to an outright physical deformity. People who look different may be stigmatized and experience discrimination. This form of prejudice is intense and western society has become less tolerant of even minor physical differences, like stick-out ears, for which cosmetic surgery in children is now an option. Click here to read some interesting research by Jim Blascovich and colleagues about how people interacting with a stigmatized individual feel threatened when doing so.

In X-Men: First Class, two characters particularly struggle with the difficulty of looking different physically: Raven and Hank (future Beast). Raven's naturally blue skin even has scales. Hank can doesn't have it so bad since his differentness is confined to his feet which are monkey-like. He may be able to hide his feet in shoes, just as Raven can hide her blueness by using her powers to appear "normal." But for most of the film, they share a desire to be normal versus to pass as normal. [Spoiler alert] By the end of the film, they both stop passing as normal, but for different reasons. Hank deals with his physical deformity (which is, after all, what it is) by injecting himself with what he thought would be a cure. Wrong. It amplifies his mutation and turns him into the Beast, a blue-furred ape-appearing person; he has no hope of passing as normal. In contrast, Raven, touched by Erik's belief that mutants should feel proud of their differentness, decides to stop passing.

Their struggles about being physically different highlight real issues about acceptance by others and self-acceptance, and the pressure to conform in order to fit it. Readers interested int his topic can click here to read about Erik Parens's book on this topic: Surgically shaping children: Technology, ethics, and the pursuit of normality.

Optimal Performance Requires Some Arousal

In the film, we learn that Erik was intentionally tortured while growing up because his power only manifested itself when he was either angry or in pain. Thus, to learn more about his abilities his "mentor" Sebastian Shaw inflicts pain on him or makes him angry (mostly the former, it seems). Yet as an adult, Erik is unable to harness his power to move large metal objects: He can't stop Show's submarine from fleeing. Charles Xavier helps Erik harness his power to even greater levels by showing him the sweet spot for maximal power: "between rage and serenity." (That is, the maximal force of Erik's power requires less anger and more calm.)

If you've taken an Introductory Psychology course, this concept may be familiar to you, although with different words. Charles is espousing a variant of the Yerkes-Dodson Law, in which optimal performance on a task occurs with a moderate amount of arousal: not too much arousal will lead you to feel scattered and lose focus, and not enough arousal (because you are understimulated or bored) will cause you to lose focus. (Click here for the original paper.)

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Charles is reframing the Yerkes-Dodson Law so that rage = overarousal and serenity = underarousal. The midpoint between the two is the sweet spot.

The film is full of other psychologically resonant moments about the power of teamwork, how good leaders can persuade, and the importance of belonging. Plus, the film is great fun. If you've seen previous X-Men films, you'll enjoy little prequel connections to the other films (thus allowing viewers to feel a sense of community with the X-Men franchise). If you're an X-Men comic book fan, be prepared for non-canonical stories!

That said, this may be the best X-Men film yet.

Copyright 2011 by Robin S. Rosenberg. All rights reserved.
 Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. Her website is DrRobinRosenberg.com

Megamind: On Being Blue

I got around to seeing Megamind this past weekend; I enjoyed the film and some of the implicit psychological "lessons" it conveyed, but was also uncomfortable with one of the take home messages.

Here's an overview (with no more spoilers than what's included in the film's trailers) to better understand the psychological points I'll make. Basic plot: Two different alien babies (from two different planets) land in the U.S. One baby is superpowered, is adopted by a wealthy family, and goes on to be a Superman-like character named Metro Man; the other baby (who happens to be bald, has a large cranium and blue skin), is supersmart, lands in a penitentiary and is raised by the inmates, and grows up to be a villain named Megamind.

Both children go to the same school for gifted youngsters; the child who will become Metro Man is the teacher's pet and is a popular kid, whereas the child who will become Megamind is ostracized by his peers. Megamind is physically different and intellectually different; he is clearly more intellectually gifted than his peers, which we can tell because we see him inventing various technologically-advanced devices while in elementary school. He is essentially shunned by his peers for being different, and because of the particular ways in which he is different his classmates expect him to be "bad." Their beliefs about him, in concert with his social isolation, led him to develop an "evil" self-image and to behave accordingly.

To me, the take home message from this early part of the film boils down to: how other people treat you affects your self-concept and behavior--in essence, who you become. If you're repeatedly treated as if you've done something wrong, pretty soon you might well start acting the part that people have cast you in, and come to believe it to boot.

This premise is not far-fetched. Megamind's experience was based in part, on evocative interaction, a type of interaction between genes and environment in which an individual's genetically influenced characteristics (in this case, his blue skin and baldness from birth, which were also characteristics of his parents) evoke responses from others. (Click here for an article describes evocative interaction in the first few pages.) In Megamind's case, such responses are mistrust, social distancing, and a predisposition to view Megamind's behavior in a negative light. People had stereotype of Megamind as "other" (in a not good way, in contrast to Metro Man's being a different "other") and treated him accordingly. Megamind was also subject to his microenvironment--the environment created by his very presence; people's characteristics create their own microenvironments (discussed in Kosslyn & Rosenberg, 2001 and in Adam & Marshall, 1996).

The child who becomes Metro Man, by virtue of his alien/genetic athletic superabilities and good looks, creates a microenvironment in which he is looked up to, is popular, and people's behavior toward him elicit his heroic actions. In contrast, the microenvironment of the child who becomes Megamind, by virtue of his own alien/genetic differentness, leads people to behave in ways that create a sense of alienation in him.

Over the course of the film, when Megamind is disguised as a normal looking human, he is treated differently: he's assumed to be a decent person and treated as such, and he is liked by a beautiful woman. Lo and behold, he starts to feel and act like a decent person, and his self-concept and identity transition from villain to hero. To me, the message is clear: if you treat people as villains without cause (as happened to the Megamind child), they'll come to act that way. Treat them with respect and dignity, and there's a better chance that they'll act that way than if you treat them as villains.

Which leads me to the (implicit) message of the film that I wasn't so enthusiastic about: nerds who are marginalized, ignored, or treated poorly may become villains because of such treatment. Implicit in this movie is that villains only = nerds gone bad. In this film, the two villains were nerds (and marginalized) before becoming villains, and they found their solace by becoming evil. Is the moral that people should treat nerds nicely, or to beware of nerds for what they might become (and so marginalize them even more?)

On a lighter note, the film pokes fun of various superhero tropes: the predictability of superhero stories, "destiny," the burden of being a superhero and the "fun" of being the villain. It even parodies the Austin Powers films--with the heroine subjected to the threat of alligator infested waters--and the Godfather!

References:

Adams, G.R. & Marshall, S. (1996). A developmental social psychology of identity: Understanding the person in context. Journal of Adolescence, 19, 1-14.

Edwards, C. P., Tretasco de Guzman, M. R., Brown, J., & Kumru, A. (2006). In X. Chen, D. French, and B. Schneider (Eds.) PEER RELATIONSHIPS IN CULTURAL CONTEXT (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 23-51.

Kosslyn, S. M., & Rosenberg, R. S. (2011). Exploring Psychology (Fourth edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Copyright 2010 by Robin S. Rosenberg. All rights reserved.
Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. Her website is DrRobinRosenberg.com. Click here to take her brief What Is a Superhero? Survey.