She makes a man walk into traffic. He gets hit by a car, a van actually. He goes flying, and the movie keeps moving.
That’s the moment the whole case against this character gets built on. That Jean Grey in this film is sadistic. That she’s careless with people who never did a thing to her. That she hides behind being special, and the movie shrugs it all off at the end and asks you to feel good about her.
I’ve heard that case a lot this week, and I want to give it its due, because she does monstrous things in this film and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But that case is right about what she did and wrong about who she is. And one piece of it, one very specific piece, we made up ourselves.
So let’s go to the record.
Nobody arguing about this movie is arguing about this movie. They’re arguing about a woman they’ve known for 60 years, and they’re holding a 19-year-old girl up against her. That was never a fair fight.
So here’s what I did. I went and pulled the actual record: issue numbers, cover dates, and one decision an editor made in 1980 that settles more of this than anything anybody said about the film all week. And when you put this version of Jean Grey next to what the comics have already done to her, she isn’t the dark one. She’s the tame one.
You’re Not Defending a Character, You’re Defending a Memory
Start with who you think she is, because I think that’s the whole problem.
If you came up on the X-Men, the Jean Grey in your head isn’t a killer. She’s the quiet one. The demure one. She shows up in the ’60s book as the only woman on a team of boys, and for a long stretch the most interesting thing the writing lets her do is be the point of a triangle. The Boy Scout in the visor on one side, and eventually the animal on the other, the one who pulls something out of her the Boy Scout never could. And then she dies, and it lands, because that’s back when a death in a comic still felt like it might hold.
That’s decades of accumulated character. That’s a lot to carry into a theater.
But you’re not defending a character. You’re defending the memory, and only one of those is actually on screen.
“Jean Would Never Do This” Is a Craft Question
The version of this I hear most is some flavor of “Jean would never do this, why would you make Jean the villain?”
That’s a craft question. Craft questions have answers, and this one is about 2,300 years old.
Aristotle worked out a long time ago that a story can’t do much with a person who is entirely good. Take somebody spotless and destroy them, and it isn’t tragic, it’s just ugly. You don’t feel sorry for them, you feel sick. Take a villain and destroy them, and that doesn’t land either, because you’re not sorry then, you’re satisfied. Justice got done. You’re fine.
The only person a story can actually do anything with is the one in the middle. Not all good, not all bad, and they bring it down on themselves.
So when somebody tells me Jean Grey could never be a bad guy, they’re asking for the one version of her that can’t work.
(There’s a whole mechanism underneath that, and a word Aristotle uses two completely different ways in two different books. I go all the way into it in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll join me over there.)
There’s a reason we keep going back to Claremont’s Phoenix, and it isn’t that Jean is good in it. Let’s just be straight about that.
What She’s Already Done
The bar this movie supposedly went under is sitting a lot lower than you remember.
Jean becomes Phoenix in X-Men 101, cover dated October 1976, Claremont and Dave Cockrum. The run everybody means when they say Dark Phoenix is 129 through 137, with the epilogue in 138. That’s 1980. Claremont, John Byrne, Terry Austin.
Here’s what happens.
Issue 132, April 1980. Mastermind has been running an illusion on her for months, and it takes. She believes she’s Lady Jean Grey, wife of Jason Wyngarde, and she sits down as the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. She breaks it in 134 and becomes Dark Phoenix.
Then 135, July 1980. She gets hungry. She flies out to a G-type star and she eats it. The system around that star belonged to a species called the D’Bari. Five billion of them dead.
And the D’Bari weren’t invented for that story. They weren’t a prop somebody cooked up so Jean would have something to blow up. They first show up in Avengers 4, March 1964. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made them. They’d been sitting in that universe for 16 years before she got there.
She didn’t wreck a set. She erased something somebody else built.
Then on the way home she takes out a Shi’ar cruiser, which brings an entire empire down on the X-Men. That’s what gets you the duel on the blue area of the moon in 137, which is also the issue where she triggers an old Kree weapon and kills herself. Not 138. That’s the funeral.
The Ending Marvel Redrew
That’s all in the comic. Here’s the part that isn’t.
Jim Shooter was editor in chief at Marvel at the time. He read 135, watched a woman commit genocide on the page, and got curious enough to ask where the story was going. What he found was that Claremont and Byrne had walked it back. The plot had her getting mind-wiped and de-powered and just going home. Back to the mansion, back to sitting at the same lunch table as Storm.
His words: “Did I have a moral issue with that? Yeah.”
His position was that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. That you don’t kill five billion people and then get better.
So they redrew the last five pages of 137. They killed her.
And if you want to read the version where she lives, you can. Marvel printed the original ending four years later as Phoenix: The Untold Story, April 1984, with a transcript in the back of all of them arguing about it.
The publisher at Marvel Comics looked at Jean Grey in 1980, decided what she’d done was unforgivable, and had the ending changed so she would die for it.
So if you want to argue this movie made Jean Grey too dark, you’re not arguing with the studio. You’re arguing with Chris Claremont and Jim Shooter, and you’re about 46 years late.
Ultimate X-Men Already Ran This Movie in 2003
If 1980 feels like ancient history, like some other era of the character that doesn’t count anymore, then let me put the real precedent in front of you, because it’s recent and it’s almost shot for shot.
Ultimate X-Men 25, early 2003, Mark Millar and Adam Kubert. The Hellfire Club has been quietly funding Xavier’s school the whole time, and not out of belief. They wanted access to one student. Sebastian Shaw tells Jean what she actually is: the vessel for a force older than time with the power to snuff out suns. Then they run the ritual to wake it up.
It works.
She is so enraged that these men presume to touch her that she kills the entire inner circle, reaches into Shaw’s head, strips him of his fortune, moves it over to Xavier, and kills him. And in the same sequence, the same one, she goes out into the world and starts healing sick children, comforting people who want to die. She stands over a homeless man and nearly brings him back.
Mass killing and tenderness. One person, one afternoon.
And then Xavier stops her, not with power, because he can’t. He stops her by telling her she’s just Jean. That she’s a woman with delusions of godhood and not a god. And it works. She comes back. Somebody reached her with love instead of force, and that’s the only thing that worked.
That’s this movie, published in 2003.
Now, I could cherry-pick that, and you should not let me. Ultimate Jean isn’t just a darker Jean. Thirteen issues earlier, in 12, she’s the conscience of the team. She physically holds Colossus back from crushing a squad of human soldiers, and what she tells him is that they kill because they don’t know any better, and mutants are supposed to be better than that.
That’s not a dark character. That’s an assertive one. And a Jean who will hold that line and also burn a room down is a far more interesting woman than the one you’re asking me to protect.
Two Girls, and That’s the Whole List
That’s the record. Now let me actually make the case, because everything up to here is background, and background isn’t a defense.
Two girls get thrown out by their mother for the crime of being born different. Not neglected, not misunderstood. Put out. And whatever they build after that, they build with nothing and they build it alone, because there’s no school yet. There’s no bald-headed billionaire in a wheelchair who turns up and tells them they’re special and gives them a bed. That world doesn’t exist yet.
There’s her and there’s her sister. That’s the whole list.
And her sister is the one who has it together. Sarah is the one with the control. Sarah is the one who teaches Jean how to reach past the 30-odd feet her power naturally covers, how to hop mind to mind and go further. Everything Jean can do in this film, she can do because her sister taught her.
And then a government agency takes her in a park while Sarah is covering Jean’s escape. So the last thing Sarah does as a free person is buy her sister a few seconds.
Put yourself there. There’s nobody to call. There’s no institution on your side, because the institution is the thing that took her. And then she reaches out, because it’s what she taught you. That’s the thing you two can do. And you feel her. You feel the terror in her. Not hear about it. Feel it.
I know exactly what I’d do. I would go through everything and everyone in front of me to get her back, and I would not slow down to check who they were.
And into that walks a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. A good man. So young and so fundamentally decent that when somebody in a suit hands him a story about a dangerous woman attacking government facilities, it doesn’t even occur to him to ask who wrote the story. He just believes it, and he goes.
From inside her head, he isn’t a hero. He’s the next thing standing between her and the only family she has left, and bigger than the ones before him. That’s all.
And then she gets the answer. Sarah didn’t die. Sarah was killed. Held for study and observation by the same people who took her, taken apart so they could work out how to build another one, and it killed her. There’s not going to be a trial. There’s no headline coming. Nobody is answering for it, ever.
And the last thing Jean will ever have of her sister isn’t a voice or a face. She will never feel that mind brush up against hers again. It’s that woman’s final seconds looking up at a vent.
I do not condone what she does after that. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I’m about to be just as clear about the other side of it. But I do understand it completely.
The Body You Supplied
Which brings me back to that man in the street, because I went and watched that scene again. I saw the movie a second time yesterday, and I paid very close attention to this specific complaint, because I knew I was making this one today.
Here’s what’s actually on screen. She makes him walk. The van hits him. He goes flying. It’s a bad hit, and the movie doesn’t soften it.
And then the movie never tells you what happened to him. There’s no body. There’s no line about it. Nobody confirms it. Not on screen, not after, not once.
Now, every single person making this argument is a comics reader. And comics readers have one rule we all go to the mat for. You know the one. We’ve been running it since we were nine years old.
If you do not see a body, they are not dead.
We’ve used that rule on characters who exploded. We’ve used it on characters who got vaporized on the page with witnesses standing right there. That rule is practically gospel around here.
And then this movie hits a man with a van, doesn’t show us what happened to him, and you filled in the body yourself.
Come on.
The single most damning item in the case against this character is a death the film never committed to. You supplied it, because it’s easier to be angry at something your own imagination built for you. That’s a straw house.
And I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where somebody is going to run further than I did. That doesn’t clear her. She still put an innocent man in the street. That’s monstrous whether he got up or not. And being right about her sister doesn’t buy it back. It just means the case against her is bigger than the evidence for it.
Revenge Is Not Justice
Let me tell you why this sits with me the way it does.
If somebody hurt a person I love, if Baby Know-It-All, my daughter, was ever hurt on that level, I can guarantee you I would move heaven and earth, and woe betide the poor soul who got in my way, whoever that might be. You’d see me use not only the full force of my six foot seven frame, but every ounce of intelligence and focus my ADHD mind can bring to bear on one thing. Revenge.
Notice I said revenge. Because revenge is not justice. They are not the same thing, and they don’t do the same thing to you.
Revenge is fantastic to watch. It’s a guy with a skull on his shirt clearing a room like it’s the Old West. No remorse, roll the credits, and it rules.
That is not what it does to a person, and I think that’s the real miss in this film.
Not the violence. The violence is the point, and the violence is earned. It’s that the movie lets it cost her almost nothing. She’s 19. She isn’t a soldier. Nothing in her life trained her for what she does in this film, and a rampage like that takes something out of a soul that was never built to do it. It should be on her by the end, and it mostly isn’t. She moves through it too clean.
And what makes that a miss instead of a choice is that the movie proves it can do it. It does it once, when Peter finally lets her into his head, and she’s in there, and she gets a moment of Aunt May, and somebody speaks to her with real love and real wisdom. That’s the first time in the entire film this girl is handed the thing every other person in the story got for free. She never had it. Her mother threw her out. The only person who ever loved her got taken and cut apart. And she gets 30 seconds of borrowed Aunt May from a boy she was trying to kill an hour ago, and it goes through her like a spike.
That’s the film understanding its own character perfectly. I just wanted more of it.
There you go. Now you know. And if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
So Where Does That Leave Her
She’s a criminal, fully. I’m not doing the thing where a sad backstory quietly turns into a permission slip. She hurt people who had nothing to do with what was done to her, and I’m not going to pretend that’s the same thing as being wronged.
And more than that, she’s the proof. This is the moment in this universe where the danger stops being theoretical. Through her, everybody gets to see firsthand exactly what one frightened 19-year-old with that kind of power does to a city. She’s going to be the reason the fear has a face, and they’re going to be right to be afraid.
That’s a hell of a thing to hand a character in its first appearance.
And if I’m being honest about where this is pointed, I’ve read where this version of her goes in the Ultimate books. The road doesn’t end in redemption. It ends with her under a false name, cut off from everybody, running a separatist movement, standing on the wrong side of a fight against people who used to be her family. Ultimate Comics X-Men 33, December 2013. Not corrupted by a cosmic bird. Just hardened and alone and certain she’s right.
That road is real, and it’s the one she’s on. But that’s not the character I think she’s going to be, and it isn’t the one I want.
Because the most interesting hero you can build isn’t the one who was never tempted. It isn’t the one who stayed clean because nothing ever came for them. It’s the one who has been all the way down in the dark, who did things down there they can’t take back, who isn’t blameless and is absolutely not innocent, and who comes back up anyway carrying every bit of it, turns around, looks straight into that dark, and says: I am not letting you do to anybody else what you did to me.
That’s not a girl from a ’60s comic book. That’s somebody you can build a universe on.
They keep telling me this character would never do what she did in this movie. She’s already done worse, and the men who made her killed her for it.
If any of that came across harsh, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it at you, I mean it at the argument. I’ve been sitting with this one all week and it got under my skin a little. That happens when I think a character is getting a bad deal.
So tell me where I’ve gone wrong, genuinely. The man in the street: do you think he lived? And does it change how you read her if he did? Put it in the comments on the video above, because I read them all, and I’ll be straight with you: half this one exists because of what some of you put down there last week. You handed me this. Keep doing that.
