What is to be feared, what has a more calamitous effect than any other calamity, is that man should inspire not profound nausea; also not great fear but great pity. Suppose these two were one day to unite, they would inevitably beget one of the uncanniest monsters of the "last will" of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism.
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

The alien essentially, as extraterrestrial or monster, is neither natural nor supernatural but fantastic. It is frequently preternatural or anomalous, a permutation of the "natural" order such as the "maladjusted" X-Men. The X-Men are mutants – freakish, genetic deviants who are feared by and often in fear of the very people they are trying to save. With its themes of xenophobia, alienation and ambiguity the scenario of X-Men transcends classical superhero genres, inviting tacit comparisons with this Worlds socially excluded minorities be they racial, sexual or intellectual. Significantly, the causes of the characters' various mutations are never made clear, though references to atomic/genetic experimentation are implied. As everything about the X-Men suggests the human body is equally, perhaps ultimately, the alien.

We are alienated from within our systems. "We" are not ourselves. X-Men follows post-futuristic science fiction, which has turned away from themes of space exploration and alien invasion. In the contemporary condition of virtual space, today's World is subject not to invasion by "pervasion" – a condition of kinetic accommodation and dispersal associated with the experience and representations of TV/videogames/computer terminals.

Immune systems are information systems. Biological space is pervaded and negotiated through exchanges of genetic data; biochemically, we are in a constant state of alienation from our "selves". The bipolar oppositions of self and other and the militaristic and colonial metaphors of body invasion and exploration that inform much of our popular immune system discourse have become obsolete. The world of X-Men is inverted on its own processes and intertexts. Its gaze is focused on the technologies of the body and on the intersections between the body and the mind, the body and the self.

X-Men takes mutation, body enhancement, and superhero motifs familiar from modern sci-fi/horror film to a post-humanist level of cultural self-awareness.

Re-mythologized, biological innerspace becomes implicitly "fantastic" in the sense in which Sartre used the term. The fantastic denotes a liminial zone occupied by the embodied subject: "an entire world in which things manifest a captive, tormented thought . . . both whimsical and enchanted" that never manages to "express itself" purely.

. . . matter is never entirely matter, since it offers only a constantly frustrated attempt at determinism, and mind is never completely mind, because it has fallen into slavery and been impregnated and dulled by matter. All is woe. Things suffer and tend towards inertia, without ever attaining it; the debased, enslaved mind unsuccessfully strives towards consciousness and freedom.
~~ Jean-Paul Satre, Aminadab: Or the Fantastic Considered as Language

While Satre proposed the "fantastic" as a language for existentialism, Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre) extended the term to refer to a literary mode of hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations, as experienced by the embodied subject.

Grounded like Satre and Todorov in psychology and neurobiology X-Men sustains a Todorovian hesitation between the physical and the metaphysical that takes on an openly dialogic form. A dichotomy in equal parts between the desire to believe in something and an inability to believe in something.

The mutated X-Men are body knowledge in all senses: the human body as ground of being, as victim and test subject, as Other; they also represent the medical perspective, the Foucauldian clinical gaze, to self and flesh-destroying medical technology.

X-Men projects a fantastic space in which Todorovian hesitation can be prolonged indefinitely. The imaginable/fantastic in X-Men corresponds with the neo-biological, neo-mythological territory presently occupied in contemporary science-fiction. It is a fantastic space in the Todorovian sense one in which a creative and sustained dialogue between skeptic and believer can take place.

Neitzsche's correlation of nausea and pity – "the will to nothingness" – takes place at the constitution of Paul Virilio's "dromocratic subject". Here, the body is emptied out, turned into a blank "metabolic vehicle", a speedway absorbing all of the infrared signs of the mediascape, encapsulated in a closed horizon which moves according to technological and a "new" biological time.

Virilio is explicit about the interpolation of the flesh by speed or the interiorization of the "will to nothingness" as the dynamic subject of dromology. A new kind of body has now been created.

Dr Jean Grey: Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now seeing the beginning of another stage of the evolution of man. These mutations manifest at puberty and are often triggered by periods of heightened emotional stress.

The "X-Men" presents a group of para-normals who have emerged from our midst but never left behind the problems that made them human before they were superhuman. Indeed, the central conceit of Singer's film is that the "villains" scheme is not to slaughter millions (though through a mistake this could occur) but to transform a large section of humanity into superhuman mutants, and thus end prejudice against this supposedly evolved kind.

The X-Men Profile

Professor Charles Xavier: Wheelchair-bound telepathic and optimist and mentor to the X-Men. "Man isn't evil, just uninformed."

Jean Grey: Redhead with psychokinetic abilities – the first X-Woman.

Wolverine: Aggressive misfit with heightened senses, metallic skeleton and razor-claws.

Storm: X-Woman able to unleash localised meteorological mayhem.

Rogue: The youngest of the new X-Man. A "psychic sponge". She automatically absorbs the powers and thoughts of anyone she touches.

Magneto: Master of the magnetic/metallic. Xavier's opposite. He considers the Human race to be dumb and dangerous and obsolete. "We are the future, Charles . . . they no longer matter."

Mystique: Blue-skinned metamorph.

Toad: Unnatural agility can climb walls and adhere to surfaces.

Sabretooth: A Wolverine duplicate. Psychopathic.

And

Senator Kelly: Paranoid mutant-hater who wants a "genetically cleaner" society.

Poland 1944. When a young boy gets separated from his parents in a concentration camp, he unleashes a magnetic force that bends the fence's metal gate. The boy grows up to be Magneto (Ian McKellen). Magneto and former friend Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), a telepath, are mutants, people whose extra-ordinary powers set them apart from other humans.

America. The future. Senator Kelly is calling for a system of registration for such mutants.