[COLUMN] Legion Remains the Best X-Men Show, and an Evolution for Live Action Superheroes | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers through the end of the second season of Legion.

With the first season of X-Men ’97 wrapped up, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to take a look back at Legion. Produced by showrunner Noah Hawley for FX, adapting the cult X-Men character created by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, Legion isn’t just the best X-Men show ever made, it’s the best live action adaptation of a Marvel property. It’s a bold and clever interrogation of the superhero concept. It is an evolutionary leap for the genre.

David Haller (Dan Stevens) is a powerful and borderline omnipotent mutant, the son of Charles Xavier (Harry Lloyd). His adoptive sister Amy (Katie Aselton) signs him into a psychiatric institution, convinced that he suffers from mental illness. After helping him escape, Melanie Bird (Jean Smart) eventually manages to demonstrate that David has superpowers. It seems like a classic superhero narrative, but the truth is more complicated: David has superpowers, but he is also mentally ill.

The character of David Haller was introduced in the pages of New Mutants in March 1985. He emerged in an industry that was on the cusp of revolutionary change. The following year, 1986, would radically reinvent the concept of the superhero genre through stories like Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen which demonstrated “the potential for tragic, understated reworkings of superhero archetypes.”

These comics were bold and ambiguous, embracing a maturity and sophistication previously unimagined within the world of four-color superheroes. Writer Alan Moore confessed that he conceived of Watchmen as “a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density.” However, the potential of that year went largely unfulfilled, as those works inspired countless imitators offering shallow affections of maturity, but few that embraced true complexity.

In recent decades, the comic book movie has taken over Hollywood. While there were hints of experimentation and diversity of perspective in early works like David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition, the genre has largely standardized and stagnated in recent years, with Marvel Studios executive acknowledging recently that the company has had a “rough time” lately.

Even now, Legion feels like a breath of fresh air, a bolt of energy coursing through a genre that has largely atrophied in live action. This is obvious even in the show’s distinctive visual language that includes extended dance sequences, expressionist horror movie chases, animated musical confrontations, and rap battles. It’s possible to see the influence of the show’s aesthetic on WandaVision, Loki, and Moon Knight, but none of them come close to matching its visual inventiveness.

However, discussions of Legion tend to fixate on the show’s distinct aesthetic, which makes sense. It’s a comic book show, and it embraces bold stylistic choices that feel true to the medium. However, the show also engaged more fundamentally with the idea of the superhero. What is the genre about? What does it speak to? What are its core assumptions? And what do those assumptions really mean in the broader context of contemporary pop culture?

The series feels like a defining statement on the Trump era. The first season premiered in February 2017, but was written before the election. However, it eerily resonated with deeply uncertain times. “It’s a post-truth comic-book show!” Dan Stevens boasted in early press. “The fake news of comic-books shows!” However, the second season of Legion was the first thing that Hawley wrote after Trump’s election. (He’d been halfway through writing the third season of Fargo during the election.)

Thematically, the second season is largely preoccupied with the notion of shared delusions, as outlined in segments narrated by Jon Hamm. “Human beings are the only animal that forms ideas about their world,” he explains. “We perceive it not through our bodies but through our minds. We must agree on what is real. Because of this, we are the only animal on Earth that goes mad.” Madness and ideas are indelibly linked, through the visual metaphor of monsters hatching from eggs.

“What we are really exploring in the second season is not individual insanity but group insanity,” Hawley explained. “There’s a quote from Nietzsche that says, ‘insanity in individuals is rare, but in groups, it is the norm.’ And so we really wanted to explore that.” In Legion, insanity is contagious. It spreads like plague. It’s an idea that resonated very strongly in contemporary America, where it seemed like a significant portion of the nation had fled from reality into fantasy.

But what sort of fantasy, specifically? While the western had been the dominant form of American cultural fantasy during the 1950s, the superhero was the icon of the 21st century. In popular culture, the genre embraced the power fantasy that “might really does make right”, most obviously in films like Captain America: Civil War. In interviews around that time, Alan Moore parallelled the genre’s ascent with the appeal of right-wing populism, rooted in “a denial of reality and an urge for simplistic and sensational solutions.”

After all, so much of the modern political chaos is rooted in the appeal to a righteous strongman with the power to bend the world to their will. Much was made of the rioters in the Capitol wearing t-shirts and carrying shields referencing Captain America, tossing looted goods into branded backpacks. This is not to suggest the genre is nothing but fascistic power fantasies – it can also offer empowerment fantasies – but simply to acknowledge the uncomfortable ideas that can lurk at the heart of the genre, often uninterrogated.

Interrogation is key. The first episode of Legion revolves around an interview of David by Clark Debussy (Hamish Linklater), an operative of the mutant-hating Division 3. Even as David aligns himself with Division 3 in later seasons, Debussy remains suspicious. When David disappears for a year, Debussy believes he might have turned traitor. “Are you familiar with the term ‘collusion’?” Debussy asks, which is a very precise and charged word to use in the context of April 2018.

David is a superhero. He is told that he is special. He is certain that he is going to save the world. Beneath the show’s distinctive aesthetic, the plot hinges on familiar superhero conventions. The Shadow King (Navid Negahban) is an ancient and entombed evil, not unlike Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) in the last X-Men movie released before Legion premiered. David encounters an alternate version of his girlfriend Syd (Rachel Keller) from a dystopian alternate future.

This is classic X-Men stuff, evoking Days of Future Past, the comic that provided the basis of the last X-Men feature film before Apocalypse. This future version of Syd is even missing one arm, in a sly homage to the beloved time travelling X-Man Cable (Josh Brolin), who would appear in the same year’s Deadpool 2. The show’s stylistic language might be novel and ambitious, but the narrative framework is familiar within the larger context of the superhero genre.

This version of Syd doesn’t come from a timeline where the Shadow King won. Instead, she comes from a world in which David killed the Shadow King. David is the existential threat, a man who believes himself to be the hero of the narrative and who has the power to bend reality to his will, safe in the certainty that he is “a good person.” This isn’t to suggest the Shadow King is a hero or a victim. When he tries to play that card with Syd, she counters, “Maybe we're all villains.” Nobody thinks that they’re the villain, and it’s easy to get swept up in righteous delusions. In reality, maybe the characters of Legion aren’t heroes or villains.

“I’m going to do the deconstruction of a villain,” Hawley reportedly told FX in his original pitch for the series. Producer Simon Kinberg described the show as akin to Breaking Bad. Hawley conceded that he was drawn to the show by that premise, wondering, “Well, it would be interesting if it was a supervillain story on some level.” Legion challenges the very idea of the hero, the notion that anybody can use such power and remain virtuous. Central to Legion’s critique of the superhero genre is “the delusion of the narcissist, who believes that they alone are real.” From the second season on, David puppeteers even his friends to suit his ends.

David allows himself to do terrible things because he believes he’s justified as the protagonist of this particular story. In interviews after the controversial second season finale, Hawley contended that this was the “larger great-man-versus-good-man dynamic.” He elaborated on the character logic of this fantasy, “If you’re a great person who is making the world a better place, do you also have to be a good person?” This is the logic of “the main character”, reducing everybody around them to props or “non-playable characters.”

However, the show goes further by exploring the underlying gendered assumptions that inform so much of the genre. A lot of Legion is built around David’s relationship to Syd, and how the women in the show are often defined by the men in their lives, as secondary characters. “Of course, it's never their fault, our men,” Melanie assures Syd at the start of the second season. “God forbid we should have a feeling about it. What choice do they have? Destiny calls. What kind of bitches would we be to stand in their way?”

David feels entitled to Syd. After all, he is the hero of the story – and the hero always gets the girl. The show is unsettled by this from the beginning. The first time he kisses her, she screams, “No, David! No!” At the end of the second season, feeling subject to unfair scrutiny from people who should be grateful to him for all that he had done for them, David does something unforgivable. He uses his powers to make Syd submit to him. As she puts it, “You drugged me and had sex with me.” David offers a lame justification, “I deserve love.”

Hawley understood the importance of using the superhero genre to have a conversation like this. “While the superhero genre isn’t entirely a ‘male’ genre, it is still consumed by a lot of boys between the ages of 13 and 18,” he explained. “And if we don’t have these stories about power — and the way that men use power to, on a human level, do evil to women — I think we’re doing those readers a disservice.” Indeed, the era’s discourse about political power was also about sexual power.

Hawley also acknowledged that this was a challenge to audiences used to absorbing these narratives uncritically. “I understand that there are certainly people who come to these stories for escape or entertainment in a way where they're like, I don’t want that in my entertainment,” he admitted. “‘It doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me think about things that I don‘t want.’ I understand that 100%. All I can do is say that it didn’t happen by accident.” It’s uncomfortable and challenging, in a way that a popular genre should be willing to be.

Indeed, even the show’s stylistic conventions are part of a large conversation about the mechanics of the genre. The emphasis on dance and rap battles is a rejection of the sort of “winner takes all, might makes right” logic of the classic fight or scene, because - according to Hawley - these alternative contests “can be an act of courtship. It can be posturing — peacocking. So the dance itself has a lot more dimensions to it than pure action.” He elaborated, “When you realize that, why would you ever do anything but dance?”

This is the beauty of Legion. While David is not a hero, he is never beyond empathy. While he abuses his power in a way that hurts others, he is not beyond forgiveness and rehabilitation. The show never loses sympathy for characters like David and Syd, even as it reveals that they have done terrible things. In the series finale, the Shadow King and Charles Xavier prepare for a face-off recalling their classic comics battle, only for the Shadow King to swap Charles’ knife for a bottle of beer.

“We can make anything we fancy in this arena of infinite promise, and this is what we come up with?” the Shadow King asks his old rival. “Weapons? War? Surely we have more imagination than that.” Instead, the pair talk. They come to terms with each other. One of the more provocative ideas in Legion is that even a complete monster like the Shadow King can grow and change, under the right circumstances, escaping the familiar repeated narratives. As Hawley notes, “Defeat is never change. Only change is change, right?”

All of this was a radical approach to mainstream superhero multimedia during the late 2010s, tackling so many of the genre’s underlying assumptions in provocative and inventive ways. It explores what the superhero power fantasy can mean if it is left unchecked, and how that sort of unexamined fantasy of clear-cut heroes and villains informs so much of contemporary pop culture. Villains definitely exist, but good people can do terrible things when they are convinced of their own righteousness. The series also proposes an inventive alternative to the simple demonstrations of strength and dominance that define the genre.

In some ways, Legion feels like the closest that live action superhero film and television has come to that 1986 moment. Like Logan, which was released the same year that Legion premiered, it’s impossible to imagine Disney allowing anything evenremotely comparable with its control of the X-Men brand. Legion proved that the live action superhero genre could evolve. Nothing since has come close.