magneto is the best villain of all time. any media. magneto is the villain you write papers about, the one you dissect over and over. he is the pinnacle of a sympathetic villain because he isn’t a villain. to mutants, to those ostracized, he is the hero, not the villain. he is made of the same violent revolution the haitian revolution, the american revolution, the french revolution all exemplify. he is an allegory for change, villified but sympathetic, and magneto is one of, if not the best, fictional characters ever created
I love Magneto because he is one of the only examples we have of a very particular type of Jewish representation, which is Jewish rage. I’ve met a lot of Holocaust survivors in my life and they’ve come to a place where they can tell their stories and have joy for their lives, which is obviously the healthiest route in the aftermath of that trauma, but it ends up really glossing over a whole range of emotions that were very real and very impactful.
Most Jewish representation we get in media is along three lines: 1) really shitty antisemitic stereotypes ranging from subtle to obnoxious, 2) white people with a quirk, and 3) black-and-white victims in Holocaust movies who are very often the object to be saved by a Good Goy™. The Holocaust happens to us in movies, but often if a WWII-era film isn’t explicitly about that, then it just glosses over us completely. We’re either victims, or we’re nothing. Furthermore, I think a lot of American attitudes towards Jews comes from knowing us as the assimilated, very often white-passing folks we are now, and they don’t realize that we’re still shaking from the generational trauma of losing an entire way of life. There were once whole villages in Europe where basically everyone was Jewish; Fiddler on the Roof is based in reality. That’s the type of background I come from. And between the pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the Holocaust, those towns were wiped out completely. 6 million is a number that gets thrown around, but to give it some context, it’s estimated that that was one-third to one-half of all Jews on the planet. Gone.
In the collective memory that is pop culture, there’s this gap between us suffering as victim objects in WWII and us being white-passing minorities who navigate the waters of American society. But that’s not how it happened, and this cultural portrayal of Jews harms us because it dismisses the very real fallout from the trauma of the Holocaust, and it erases the fact that our assimilation was a survival tactic, and that we have never, ever regained what we lost, nor will we be able to. It makes people very hostile to us when we point out injustices or feel angry. It imbues WWII with this slimy sense of American exceptionalism, where the Good Goyim came in and saved us because we were passive cattle to the slaughter, and we should be thankful.
Erik is a Holocaust survivor, and he’s not okay. He is angry, he is traumatized, he is overwhelmed with grief. He buried his memories so deep because he lost everything. He is one of the few Holocaust survivors on screen whose reaction feels real and honest and true.
I never stop thinking about this scene from First Class, because it shows a Jew who is traumatized but not a victim. He is struggling to reconcile who he was with who he is. He still has a good memory but it’s trapped beneath layers of anguish, and when he allows himself to remember, he finds a sense of strength. And even though he’s often the bad guy, his motivations partly stem from the fact that he survived the fucking Holocaust. And now, again, the oppressive majority group wants to fuck with him just because of who he is. Wouldn’t you be enraged? Wouldn’t you dismiss the notion of mercy, having seen exactly what evil men are capable of? Wouldn’t you want to rise up and take back your power with your own two hands? I fucking would.
That’s why I love Magneto.
What I love about First Class that it is also very European, and given where Erik is from in that film (Düsseldorf) and who his father was in some comics (Iron Cross decorated WW 1 vet, a brutal trench war the Americans only fought the last few months of, and that was well rested and well supplied, not as part of the exhausted Kaiser’s Army fighting on two fronts) - they were assimilated. They were deeply assimilated bourgeois German-first Jews. Erik was not from a shtetl. He may not have been taught Yiddish as a boy. There was a very strong effort to found a Jewish Bürgertum, more than a century of assimilation into Austrian and German intellectual upper middle class values, and young Erik is a paragon of that -
And it ended in Auschwitz.
For all Charles’ efforts, all the renewed Jewish American assimilation, he’d have a point if he’d said: been there, done that, bought the whole wardrobe and even ate the pork sausage as not to offend and I am telling you, it is worth nothing. There is no protection to be had in assimilation, or my people would not have been rounded up and annihilated. You have never been targeted and it blinds you, my friend.
