The vanishing territorial distance, which reduces perception of perspectives to nothing, initiates the advent of a dominant psychological time. A mixture of the relativity of the living-present and the technical vectors prevalent completes a defeat of the constituted world – a decentering of the animate being.

The time frequency of light has become a determining factor in the apperception of phenomena, leaving the spatial frequency of matter for dead.
~~ Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

Wolverine: You know Magneto's right: there's a war coming, are you sure you've chosen the right side?

Storm: At least I've chosen a side! Help us! Fight with us!

Wolverine: What? Join the team? Be an X-Man? Who the hell do you think you are? You're a mutant. The whole world out there is full of people who hate and fear you, and you're wasting your time trying to protect them.

For Michel Foucault, people do not have a "real" identity "within" themselves, that is just a way of talking about the self – a discourse/narrative. An "identity" is communicated to other via interactions with them, but this is not a fixed element/factor within a person. It is a shifting temporary construction.

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.

History as the systematic disassociation of identity is necessary because this weak identity which we attempt to support and to unify under a mask, is initself only a parody – it is plural, countless spirits dispute its possession, numerous systems intersect and compete.

X-Men recapitulates the primal scene of modern medical technology. It is Foucault's "The Birth of the Clinic" post-millennium style from the embodied patients point of view. Reversing the "sci-fi alien invasion scenario", the mutants body comes to strand metonymically for all marginalization and commodification of human bodies. Mutation is a mirror image proclaiming that essentially "mutants are us". The mutant becomes merely the farthest out in a number of biopolitically extreme possibilities which together reflect a cultural moment in which bio-power is the issue.

Dr. Jean Grey: Mutants are not the one's mankind should fear.

On one hand, the body has seemed increasingly within the realm of conscious human manipulation and control, through transplantation, genetic and reproductive technologies, cryonics, plastic surgery, trans-sexual surgery, cybernetics and the electronic sensorium. On the other hand, there technologies have made the body a resource or commodity, alienating it from what is traditionally known as the "self". It is a "display case" of parts to be sold or "spaces" to be filled for commerce. Meanwhile, our cures have spawned new plagues. “Aids” may well be the first of the modern large-scale epidemics of infectious disease. Moreover the age of anti-biotics is giving way to an age of anxiety about disease, fostered by new viruses that mutate almost as soon as they have been identified, (Ebola or hantavirus) or by anti-biotic-resistant and/or "flesh-eating" bacteria (Lemonick 66).

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history's destruction of the body.
~~ Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

Modern medicine has re-cast the "unknown" with the perimeters of the human body. Western expansionist medical discourse is hopelessly confused by auto-immune diseases in which the body attacks itself. X-Men reflects an age in which, according to chaos theory, the human immune system currently finds itself in the vicinity of a strange attraction. Which is to say that the biochemical aspect of humanity dedicated to distinguishing self from other is already diminishing. Things become increasingly strange more rapidly until things change, quite utterly, signalling the emergency of a "new" order.

In short X-Men viewers are given a vitalistic world informed by the discourses and technologies of the body, by Foucauldian bio-power. The nexus is in the genes.

The fact that X-Men are human mutations - "adapted" human bodies – human genetic material and information – makes the body both vulnerable and powerful, oppressed and oppressive. The mutation scenario provides a metaphor for the way we perceive human and other biology at this particular cultural moment. As in a Foucauldian sense a "rebirth of the clinic". Ultimately it is a metaphor for the present fragility of the self, which biology, psychology and cybernetics increasingly pronounce an illusion. At the same time, this tenuous enhanced notion of the body provides a new arena for self-definition as the body "opens-up" and is projected as an erotically charged fantastic space

Magneto: We are the future, Charles, not them. They no longer matter.

Believing mutants to be superior to the rest of the human race, Magneto has developed a machine which mutates ordinary human DNA and gives it similar powers to mutants; he plans for Rogue to absorb his powers – which drives the machine – and transform the world leaders, meeting on Ellis Island, (New York) for a conference, into mutants.

Following the death of Senator Kelly, on whom Magneto tested this device, Xavier realises Magneto’s plan will lead to the death of many humans.