In interview Bryan Singer explained the Xavier/Magneto axis in terms of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It's true that each civil rights movement splits between the intergrationists and separationists – the proponents of non-violence versus violent activism. Any member of a minority facing discrimination can relate to the mutants' dilemma.

Depending on the time and latitude, the multitude of bodies with no souls, living dead, zombies, possessed, . . . is imposed through all history: a slow motion destruction of the opponent, the adversary, the prisoner, the slave; an economy of military violence likening the human cattle to the ancient stolen heard of the hunter-raiders . . . In total war, the Nazis will do nothing different when they create an internal social front against the foreign bodies of the Jews, gypsies and Slavs. The deportation camps are but the laboratories in which the cattle are treated industrially put to work in the mines, on logistical worksites subjected to medical or social experiments to ultimate recuperation of fat, bones, hair . . .

It's absolute inhumanity was but the ostensible reintroduction of the history of the originally bestiary, of the immense mass of domestic bodies, bodies unknown and unknowable. What else has the proletariat been since antiquity, if not an entirely domesticated category of bodies, a prolific, engine-towing class, and the phantom presence in the historical narrative of a floating population linked to the satisfaction of logistical demands?
~~ Paul Virilio

Two great classes of bodies emerge then; predators and parasites. Virilio's predators are the "warriors/ priests" who name the site of the sacrificial table of values, and whose function as abuse value is to violently re-energize the field. And parasites from dromocratic specialists to the "industrial drones" of the war machine, who can be motivated by the will-to-nothingness because their bodies are already "technical prostheses" always in flight, driven by extreme anxiety and motivated by a vision of freedom which is measured by a lowered standard of convenience.

X-Men screenwriters David Hayter, Tom DeSanto and Bryan Singer have created a structure for the film built on parallelism and oppositions. Magneto, the villain and Professor Xavier, the X-Men's founder, are in many ways equal but opposite to one another. Friendly foes, they are both powerful mutants, each with a band of followers.

Prof: Charles Xavier: Why do you ask questions ton which you already know the answers?

Magneto: Ah, yes, Your continuing search for hope. The war is coming, Charles, and I intend to fight it . . . by any means necessary.

Prof: Charles Xavier: And I will always be there . . . old friend.

However whereas Magneto wants to conquer the world, Xavier wants to save it; whereas Magneto’s followers are compliant disciples, Xavier's are students encouraged to think and develop. In many ways X-Men is about the attempt by Magneto – the mutant who discovered his powers in a concentration camp – to stop the politician Senator Kelly's "Nazi-like" scheme to impose a mutant registration scheme.

Senator Kelly: . . . and there are even rumours . . . of mutants so powerful that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts, taking away out God-given free will. Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants. To be taught by mutants! Ladies and Gentlemen, the truth is that mutants are very real, and they are among us. We must know who they are. And above all what they can do!

In counterpoint, it is Wolverine – who makes the journey from bitter/isolated loner to "X-Man" in order to halt Magneto's scheme – who drives the narrative. Wolverine's trajectory additionally finds echoes in Rogue's arc, from estranged Mississippi teenager to one of Xavier's gifted pupils, but whereas she's an outside because of what happened to her "naturally" at puberty. Wolverine's sense of alienation derives from being subjected to painful state-sanctioned medical research – a further allusion to Nazism. This plot narrative is a complex but dextrous structure – tightly woven around the central theme of prejudice – allowing the different characters to share the burden of a convoluted design.

X-Men shows us on the outside what we have become in the inside in the era of virtual technology. It's a contemporary version of the surrealistic mirror reversals, time warps, and space shifts of Alice in Wonderland, except this time rather than slip from the Real into the fantasy world of a deck of cards come alive, in X-Men we actually enter into the dark semiological interior of information society.

In a culture that is pulverized by the virtual-scape to the extent that we can now speak of "neon-brains", "electric-egos" and "data-skin" and the wider circuitry of a society held together by the sleek sheen of surface and network entering into the simulacra, X-Men is akin to being positioned in the hallucinogenic world of critical technology.

It was only a skip and a jump from Social Darwinism to biotechnological cybernetics. The jump was easily taken in the Second World War, by the very people who victoriously opposed the biocracy of a National Socialist State that based its political legitimacy on the utopia of a redemptive eugenics. Total mobilization and motorization have always been two sides of the same coin in the race for biological and technological supremacy.
~~ Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor

Like some gigantic implosion, the circulation of the general accident of communication technologies is building up and spreading, forcing all substances to keep moving in order to interact globally, at the risk of being wiped out, being swallowed up completely.

The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space.
~~ Paul Virilio, The State of Emergency