Vid: Get Down

[absternr]

Fandom: X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past

Content warnings: physical triggers, major character death, violence against characters of color, sexual objectification/harassment directed towards a sex worker

 

Watch on Vimeo

 

Notes:

The vast majority of the work on this vid happened in 2018. iirc my process started with rewatching First Class for a different potential vid and getting pissed enough about Darwin that I started vidding to Get Down because it was one of the angrier songs I already had on my laptop.¹ It became clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to make a satisfactory 3-minute vid out of his 8 total minutes of screentime. There wasn’t space in the vid for every mutant of color in the franchise, but I knew if I was going to include anything else it needed to be Days of Future Past because 1) it’s the direct sequel to First Class, 2) it rivals XMFC for most wasted potential in its characters of color, and 3) it reveals the fate of XMFC’s other character of color, Zoe Kravitz’s Angel Salvadore.

So, a quick run-down of these two movies:

Everyone knows about XMFC, right? The 2011 reboot of the X-Men movie franchise, most notable for launching a massive wave of Xavier/Magneto shipping and for having one of the most egregious examples of “black guy dies first” in recent media. Darwin’s mutant superpower is that he can adapt to survive any situation and then he’s killed by the villain almost immediately with no explanation. It’s bullshit! The one other character of color, Angel, is less talked about. We meet her working in a strip club, where Charles and Erik recruit her to the X-Men. She hangs out with the team for a bit, and then chooses to join the villain (a literal Nazi), and then she’s basically absent from the rest of the movie other than showing up to fight the heroes in the final battle.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the direct sequel to XMFC and *also* the sequel to the original X-Men trilogy. It’s a time travel movie, so there’s a dystopian future framing device and then the bulk of the movie takes place in the 70s, some time after the events of First Class. There are no significant characters of color in the past;² Darwin is already dead and Angel, we find out, was killed in between movies. We don’t see her on screen, but we do see her wing, a part of her body, on display next to Magneto’s helmet and Havok’s…shirt…thing. DOFP did add some new characters of color in the future time period, namely Bishop, Blink and Warpath, and brought back Halle Berry as Storm. Unfortunately, the main plot function all of these characters serve is to be part of the team that dies protecting the white characters who are attempting to change the timeline. It’s pretty rough.

My goal in making this vid was to balance my love and affection for these characters with my anger at their wasted potential and the violence they universally experience. Despite their limited screentime and sidelining within the narrative, these are my favorite characters in their respective movies. The actors are great, their powers are cool and interesting. They deserved so much more. I hope I was able to show that.

Anyway, the end of this story is that I got most of the way through putting the vid together before my computer crashed and I lost a lot of data. I was able to recover a draft of the vid itself, but the thought of clipping from scratch in order to make any edits was too discouraging and I moved away from it until this year, when the Fanworks Con “Please Scream Inside This Vid” show was announced. That seemed like the time to do it, so I looked back at the draft, decided it could work with relatively minor edits, and here we are now!

Misc. additional commentary:

- The glitchy effects were part of my concept for the vid from the moment I picked the song, but I found them absolutely crucial to making it watchable and visually interesting instead of just depressing. Even edited way down, that DOFP death footage is bad to watch! The glitches muted the effect somewhat.
- There’s one shot of Sunspot in this vid, basically as a nod to his comics incarnation. In comics Sunspot is Afro-Brazilian; in Days of Future Past he’s played by a light-skinned Mexican American. It’s not directly relevant to the theme of the vid but I missed the less whitewashed, more comics-accurate Sunspot they could have had and I liked the shot, so there you go.

¹Since people find new music from vids I feel obligated to mention that as of July of this year POS has been implicated in some shitty behavior towards women within the Minneapolis music scene.

²We see a version of Spyke as a soldier in Vietnam in one scene, but it’s not a speaking role. There’s also a non-mutant Vietnamese general who Mystique briefly impersonates.