Derek Johnson. Popular Communication. Volume 6, Issue 4. October-December 2008.
Knight of the British realm Sir Ian McKellen seems an unlikely anchor for contemporary Hollywood’s blockbuster science fiction and fantasy genres, most visible in the 1990s for the title role in Richard III, his turn as an aged Nazi war criminal in Apt Pupil, and his Oscar-nominated performance as gay film director James Whale in Gods and Monsters. Yet in the new millennium, the thespian became central to Hollywood franchises spanning comics, toys, video games, and online content, a process of reinvention that began in 2000 with his role as Magneto, the mutant Master of Magnetism, in the comic book adaptation X-Men. In addition to playing the wizard Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) and reprising Magneto in two X-Men sequels (2003, 2006), McKellen generated further notoriety as one of the first Hollywood stars to maintain a public presence online. Through his Web site, www.mckellen.com, the actor showcased not just his theatrical work but also created a space to interact with fans of X-Men and Rings, responding to their questions and providing production updates. According to Variety, McKellen metamorphosed from Shakespearean thespian to “Hollywood’s franchise man” (Robey, 2003, p. A9). As “Lord of the Box Office,” McKellen’s appeal “broadened beyond theater aficionados to include comic buffs…” according to Entertainment Weekly. “Who’d have guessed this is a guy anchoring two massive sci-fi franchises?” (Flynn, 2002, pp. 50-51). Sufficiently impressed that a sexagenarian Shakespearian had cornered the blockbuster market, few bothered to comment on McKellen’s sexuality amid mutation from “stately Shakespearean actor to geek-flick favorite” (Gaslin, 2001, p. 73). Why mention the added improbability that an openly gay actor would embody these assumedly hetero cult icons?
Compared to the five Tom Cruise films released in the same 2000-2003 period, the domestic box office gross of McKellen’s first five franchise films confirms his primacy in blockbuster Hollywood. McKellen’s films earned $1.4 billion, while Cruise’s earned only $772 million. What this comparison misses, however, is that none of McKellen’s franchise films banked upon his star power to generate audience interest—certainly not to the degree Cruise himself drove theater attendance. Instead, franchises such as X-Men differentiate themselves via trademarked, corporate-owned characters performed by actors like McKellen. As intellectual property owned by Marvel Entertainment and licensed to Twentieth Century Fox film distribution, the Magneto character entered the cinema with a prebranded, presold identity derived from comics and other media.
Character-based franchise systems thus challenge stardom. Because franchise characters are household names, franchise actors face greater obstacles to surmount character-actor status and become household names themselves. While Hollywood blockbusters have traditionally repackaged British thespians, perhaps most notably Sir Alec Guinness in Star Wars, McKellen faced the added trial of transcending characters predefined in other media (whereas no Obi-Wan Kenobi prefigured Guinness’ performance). Nevertheless, McKellen unquestionably generated a star image within this context. Thompson argues that Rings made McKellen an “overnight star” able to command higher salaries (2007, p. 33), while his 2007 appearance on Extras—a series built around star cameos—evidenced the cultural currency of his persona outside character roles. Character performances in franchise vehicles do not preclude stardom but present a separate set of negotiations for it; considering Turner’s call for an analysis of stardom based in the management practices that constitute it (2003, p. 136), franchise economies based on existing intellectual properties can be said to create new conditions for managing would-be star labor. The management of McKellen’s image thus constitutes an instructive site of struggle in a moment when media corporations rely upon trademarked character brands in addition to or increasingly in lieu of celebrity to market media product.
After contextualizing these tensions between stardom and intellectual property within larger institutional shifts, this study draws upon comics, film scripts, and trailers to examine the inter- textual branding of the trademarked Magneto character outside of McKellen’s participation in and appropriation of it in his own star inter-text. Given the prior production and marketing of Magneto in the X-Men franchise system, two previously autonomous inter-texts collided when McKellen performed the character. By examining the construction of McKellen’s star image through publicity statements, fan correspondence, and popular discussion of him in relation to Magneto, this study subsequently evaluates the management of these two co-circulating but often irreconcilable inter-texts. How did the Magneto trademark absorb, inflect, or get subsumed by McKellen’s star persona? What significance did McKellen’s publicity discourses ascribe to the Magneto trademark? More specifically, how was the gay activist project highlighted in his constructed star persona advanced or hindered by intertextual association with Magneto? Ultimately, this article explores tensions between two modes of Hollywood product differentiation—the star system and character branding—arguing that McKellen’s star text piggybacked upon the Magneto trademark a radical, non-normative politics of queerness enabled but simultaneously confounded by the intertextual constitution of the Magneto brand. Contemporary transmedia economies enable properties like Magneto to be mobilized as resources in the management of star texts like McKellen’s, but also create unique challenges to star labor and representation in that parallel iterations of a trademark remain in need of but outside the effective purview of star management. McKellen’s star text could manage the Magneto property sufficiently to queer it but insufficiently to prevent the Magneto inter-text from shaping what that queerness means.
Star Brands/Character Brands
Although early firms such as Biograph eschewed stars for corporate trademarks and logos (Klaprat, 1985, p. 353), by the 1920s stars provided the primary means of product differentiation and demand generation in the cinema marketplace, signed to long-term contracts by studios that shaped their public personas. As Gamson suggests, stars provided distinguishable brand names packaged to meet market needs (1994, p. 68). After the 1948 Paramount decision, however, studio production declines freed stars from long-term contracts, and star images became a contested site of production between competing interests (p. 80). Stars developed personas to suit long-term career development, avoiding over-association with single roles, while studios oppositely sought short-term exploitation for the duration of new single-picture contracts.
Given this reduced interest and control over star images, post-classical Hollywood explored new forms of product differentiation. Since the 1970s, studios have pursued “high concept” style, a mode of production and means of product differentiation designed to ensure success in a fragmented marketplace by integrating filmic images with cross-media marketing strategies (Wyatt 1994, p. 20). Because high concept favors surface-level imagery, the transmission of narrative information frequently relies upon pre-sold properties, and familiar star images thereby retain worth. Schatz writes that when “fewer films carry much wider commercial and cultural impact, and where persona are prone to multimedia reincarnation, the star’s commercial value, cultural cache, and creative clout have increased enormously” (2002, p. 200). In a multimedia age, Turner concurs, the viability of celebrity “as a branding mechanism … has assisted their fluent translation across media formats and systems of delivery” (2003, p. 32). However, while stardom persisted, the multimedia orientation of high concept Hollywood simultaneously presented alternatives. If the star system emerged from vertical integration, as Gamson and Klaprat suggested, then parallel systems of product differentiation emerged from the horizontal integration of conglomerate Hollywood. By the 1990s, horizontally structured corporations cultivated loyalty to their own branded mythologies, directly competing with star brands. Nike, for example, dropped out of the Space Jam marketing blitz when the massive number of product endorsements signed by star Michael Jordan threatened the primacy of their own corporate brand (Klein, 1999, pp. 49, 55).
While the Jordan struggle evidenced tension between stardom and corporate branding, the tendency for the latter to attract consumer scrutiny (Murray, 2005, p. 422) helps feed a third option, based neither in celebrity nor corporate images but instead on content sub-brands. Instead of stables of contracted stars, today’s studios rely increasingly upon stables of intellectual properties. Branded franchises such as Harry Potter and Star Wars develop not out of infrastructural monopoly but rather out of copyright, trademark, and licensing controls enabling serialized content overproduction across media markets (Curtin & Streeter, 2001, pp. 233-234). In such networked content systems, stardom and celebrity persona arguably take a back seat, replaced by character brands. Disney’s success as a manager of intellectual property is particularly instructive. Fictional characters like Mickey Mouse are not “stars” as traditionally defined (de Cordova, 1991): They have no private lives or off-screen personae for audiences to follow, with even the identities of costumed Disneyland performers hidden. As Wasko explains, Disney conceives each character as a wheel whose spoke—products in different media markets—each revolve around that core character brand (2001, p. 71). Franchises, therefore, typically favor branded character properties over celebrity. Thus, as Thompson explains in her detailed analysis of Lord of the Rings, “[t]oday the franchise is often the star” (2007, p. 6).
Nevertheless, it would be shortsighted to write off stardom rather than examining how franchise systems alter the dynamics of celebrity. Stardom has not become defunct. For example, Barker proposes that special effects and directors are only two new modes of “stardom” operating in contemporary Hollywood (2003, pp. 8-11), and certainly franchised characters such as the X-Men (or Mickey Mouse) could be usefully added to this list. Yet, as Barker adds, “[s]tars’ relations to these franchises have been less studied” (p. 13). King (2003) answers Barker’s call, but stops short of advancing our understanding of celebrity image management in relation to media franchises by declaring that case study Will Smith—a film, TV, and music star—is himself a franchise. King conceptualizes stardom across media, but in treating stardom and franchising synonymously, does not speak to how stars might approach participation in franchises that exceed their own star texts. Franchise performers frequently recreate characters that have appeared previously in other media environments. As such, the very nature of stardom changes in the franchise.
Instead of declaring stardom either defunct or synonymous with the franchise, a more productive third approach adopts Barker’s conceptualization of star vocal performances in animated features such as Toy Story, where actor Tom Hanks shaped a character but did not control the character’s appearance, movements, and facial expressions. Barker’s account is not one of stardom negated by character but one in which stardom must negotiate character: Stars “can voice a character, and thus transfer to it some of the resonances of their established persona. But they cannot own it” (2003, p. 20). So we might similarly ask how franchise performers inflect characters with star personae while simultaneously lacking complete control over performance of those characters. To adapt presold properties into live-action film franchises, actors remain necessary, and would-be stars, despite decentered marketing power, might shape those intellectual properties according to their own interests and personae—even as they cannot control what other iterations of the characters do in comics, video games, or television. Although many scholars look to audiences as a site of resistance to intellectual property monopolies, tensions surrounding the collision of star brands and character properties might prove equal battlegrounds of creativity and meaning management. How do established character brands absorb, reject, or inflect star personae? How have star and character brands like McKellen and Magneto negotiated and shaped one another as a result of this tension?
Magneto: Branded a Super Villain
Since the 1990s, Marvel Comics, owner of the X-Men properties, has explored content branding in parallel to high concept Hollywood. In 1996, the company hired several new executives to “lead Marvel’s transformation from a struggling marketer of comic books and trading cards to a broad-based entertainment company modeled after Disney” (Jensen, 1996, p. 8). To that end, Marvel President David Schreff argued the company needed to make its intellectual properties “relevant in all forms of media” (1996, p. 8). Although this diversification ultimately pushed Marvel to bankruptcy, the recovered company maintained a risk-averse focus on content brands in the 2000s by licensing its properties to other media corporations rather than investing in production itself. When Twentieth Century Fox produced X-Men films, the resultant exposure made the X-Men license more valuable in other markets. Marvel is a licensor, and like Disney, its characters comprise the heart of its business.
As one of these long-circulating characters, Magneto first appeared in the pages of X-Men #1 in 1963, long before Marvel movies were conceivable. Like most Marvel characters, Magneto has a history mired in contradiction, retroactive continuity, and multiplicity: as one account based upon the X-Men comics explains, Magneto has vacillated from “wanting to exist in harmony with Homo-Sapiens, wanting a separate homeland for mutants, and wanting to enforce his superiority over all humanity” (Nichols, 2006). Yet Magneto has also multiplied through television animation, video games, and even the parallel comic continuity of Ultimate X-Men. There is no one Magneto. Yet across all iterations, a core brand identity, if sometimes unstable, does cohere around the property. Gifted with the ability to manipulate magnetic fields, Magneto (a.k.a. Magnus, a.k.a. Erik Lensherr) has been consistently portrayed as a misguided but tragic figure, a survivor of fascist atrocities (usually Nazi concentration camps) convinced of the need for mutant rule over a bigoted but politically dominant human majority. His militant position always opposes him to former friend and mutant pacifist Professor Charles Xavier. In the 1997 flashback issue X-Men #-1, Magneto referenced his experiences with fascism to explain his desire to “make sure these atrocities never again happen to anyone.” But Xavier vilified this single-mindedness as being “so far down the road to becoming what you hate.” Hurt by fascists, Magneto became one.
Despite occasionally allying with the heroic X-Men and recanting his most extreme actions (even standing trial for crimes against humanity), Magneto inevitably returns to the core “supervillain” identity that defines the character. In the 1997 comic mini-series Magneto, for example, the character donned a new yellow and blue costume bearing the “X” logo, signaling his allegiance to the X-Men. This first cover promised “The Master of Magnetism—Reborn!”, but simultaneously acknowledged his status as both “the X-Men’s greatest foe and most powerful ally.” The cover of the final issue rendered visually this persistent villainy at the character’s core, juxtaposing the hero Magneto and his promise of “a new beginning” with the old red-and-purple- costumed Magneto villain. The cover appeared violently torn in half by Magneto’s good and evil incarnations, suggesting the volatility of his new image. Soon after, Magneto returned to rogue status, his standard costume, and, by 2000, plans for human genocide. Though Magneto would reform again by 2004’s Excalibur, his potential for relapse sustained the catalog-wide 2005 Marvel crossover event House of M, in which reality was remade with Magneto as supreme ruler. Though his daughter Scarlet Witch created this universe—not Magneto, as initially suspected—Magneto’s megalomaniacal history (and resultant poor parenting) drove the ensuing shenanigans. Reduced to brand image, the complexities of Magneto’s “by any means necessary” agenda and shifting allegiances are compressed into a character readily identifiable as a fascistleaning villain whom heroic X-men can oppose. Reporting on Marvel’s 2001 decision to suspend observance of the kid-friendly Comics Code, for example, Newsweek invoked the Magneto image as cultural shorthand for malfeasance: “They may publish ‘X-Men,’ but the plan sounds worthy of Magneto” (Begun et al., 2001, p. 10). Without context or backstory, Magneto functions as a brand name for villainy, just as Kleenex stands in for tissue.
So how did the X-Men films participate in this ongoing character brand? While McKellen certainly shaped the character, the films’ scripts offered the foundation upon which he built his performances in X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and X-Men: The Last Stand. Each film had a dual antagonist structure: first, a human villain plotting genocide or oppression of mutants, and second, a parallel preemptive strike by Magneto. The X-Men must stop both plots, although Magneto sometimes aides them in defeating the human villain. Throughout the film series, the character—while complex, tragic, and three-dimensional—underwent very little arc. His role in the plot changed, but his political radicalism and willingness to use violence to achieve his agenda remained constant. Individual schemes fail, but the agenda defining the character persisted, enabling each subsequent film to showcase a new attempt to meet that goal. If Magneto were ever reformed, the franchise would lose its most powerful and charismatic antagonist.
Compared to the human villains, that charisma made Magneto more effective and iconic in promotion. The trailer for the first film, for example, referenced only the secondary antagonism represented by Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants. “Trust a few … fear the rest” the trailer warned, hailing the viewer as a menaced human and obscuring how the human government’s “Mutant Registration Act” drove Magneto’s defensive reactions in the film. “We are the future, Charles, not them,” Magneto bellowed, suggesting that he planned to end human existence—despite lesser intentions in the film to obtain mutant rights solidarity by mutating the politicians. While the film failed to deliver on Magneto’s apparent threat to all humanity, this promotional para-text rendered such potential visible to audiences whether they saw the film or not.
Film marketers thus propagated the Magneto brand by appealing to the character’s villainous core, a strategy continued in trailers for the sequel. Although later trailers revealed more of the human Stryker and his plans for mutant genocide, the first X2 trailer played out similarly to the X-Men trailer. Audiences briefly glimpsed Stryker and heard nothing of his plot; instead, Magneto again appeared to play the primary antagonist (even though he remains a sympathetic victim of military brutality and ally of the X-Men for most of the film). This trailer cut from Magneto’s ominous warning “The war has begun” to Xavier asking “Erik? What have you done?” despite the fact that Stryker drove the dramatic conflict. Only in the last act of the film did Magneto seize an opportunity to strike back at humanity. While a second X2 trailer did promise that Magneto and his Brotherhood would ally with the X-Men to defeat Stryker (“Now is the time for those who are different … to stand united”), other elements signaled the franchise’s status as a branded character vehicle, rather than star vehicle. Instead of stamping actors’ names across the screen, the second X2 trailer highlighted each character’s name. In marketing, Magneto’s name was key (and Wolverine’s, and Mystique’s…), not Ian McKellen’s. No X-Men trailer, in fact, used any actors’ names in promotion. In this character branded franchise, trailers did not proclaim “Ian McKellen is/as Magneto”; Magneto was Magneto, operating independently from McKellen’s performance of him.
The third X-Men film possessed the same dual antagonist structure: humanity develops a cure for mutation, and a threatened Magneto reacts. Once again, the trailers suggested little of the human threat, showcasing Magneto’s warmongering instead. Echoing the first trailer, Magneto blared: “They wish to cure us, but I say we are the cure!” Frenetic editing obscured the narrative through-line, but branded characters provided some narrative context for the trailer images. Because characters like Magneto were so consistently marketed as villains across media platforms, it was possible with only brief glimpses to make narrative inferences about a film, regardless of whether trailers distorted those plots. Magneto, the fascistic villain, would again pose some threat.
McKellen: Franchise, Fans, and Gay Activism
In this web of intellectual property, each iterative performance of Magneto comprised only part of a larger system, recalling the dynamic Bennett and Woollacott described between actors and roles in branded inter-texts like the James Bond films:
In the case of John Wayne movies … star image overlays and resonates with the character … [T]he character becomes a part of the “John Wayne” identity … In the case of Connery and Moore, their lives have been “Bondianized” rather than the reverse: they have become parts of the composite signifier “James Bond” rather than Bond being a fragment of the star images of Connery and Moore. (1987, p. 273)
The composite signifier Magneto, then, similarly subsumed Sir Ian McKellen. So how was this seeming subordination managed in his star image-building project?
Perhaps the primary site of McKellen’s active transformation from Shakespeare to franchise was his promotional Web site, mckellen.com. As Thompson explains in her analysis of the promotion for Lord of the Rings, McKellen launched the site in 1997 out of an auto-biographical impulse; though not intended to promote a specific project or franchise, it “quickly became one of the main sources for fans wanting behind-the-scene Rings news” (2007, p. 139). By 1999, with both Rings and X-Men in production, McKellen received some 200 e-mails daily, and despite continued personal involvement, the site became an object of deliberative management, both by a publicist screening questions and posting responses for McKellen, and increasingly concerned studio executives seeking to control information flows (pp. 146-147). Monitored and sometimes censored by studios such as New Line, mckellen.com was not a site where studio- controlled franchise and character promotion aligned with the production of star texts, so much as one where they imperfectly collided. The site cultivated fan interests beyond X-Men or Rings alone, promoting Kellen across franchises regardless of corporate parentage to situate Marvel/Fox’s Magneto alongside New Line’s Gandalf. Upon entry, visitors experienced a looping audio-visual slideshow of McKellen’s most famous performances. Magneto’s “They wish to cure us … ” played not only alongside Gandalf, but also Richard III’s “Now is the winter of our discontent,” among other nonfranchise roles such as James Whale. Instead of subordinating McKellen to the Magneto brand (as in the film trailers), mckellen.com actually inverted Bennett and Woollacott’s star-franchise dynamic, rendering Magneto only one of McKellen’s many characters. In these promotional texts, Magneto became an iterative spoke in the McKellen brand.
Yet the resonance with which mckellen.com subordinated Magneto to McKellen remains indeterminate. First, mckellen.com remained a marginal, only quasi-authorized arm of the X-Men promotional apparatus; “official” Web sites sponsored by Fox and Marvel did not link to the site, giving mckellen.com little chance to inflect wholesale, franchise-wide readings of the character. Still, while few X-Men fans would have initially sought out McKellen’s site, Thompson argues that in the case of Rings, traffic spiked as franchise fans realized the inside access provided by the thespian. Thus, not all visitors to mckellen.com were first and foremost fans of McKellen, granting him access to a larger base of in-the-know X-Men fans. Second, in talking about the production of star image through mckellen.com, we risk endowing McKellen an extraordinary degree of agency and intention. To the extent that agency and intention imply necessary effectiveness, this must be avoided, as McKellen’s promotional project worked from the relative margins, and thus met constant, negotiated struggle rather than predestined success. But to the extent that agency and intentionality suggest conscious, concerted effort to frame McKellen’s star text in relation to iconic character roles—however ineffectual, inconsistent, or unheard—the thespian’s Web site should indeed be considered a site of calculated, goal-oriented image construction and management (in the practical sense emphasized by Turner). The significance of mckellen.com came not in wide reach or success, but tensions between imperfectly managed star and character brands given the conditions for star labor and representation in contemporary culture industries.
McKellen’s Web project therefore aimed to intervene in industrial relationships between branded properties, stars, and audiences. In a digital environment characterized by audience interactivity, the site sought to preempt what McKellen’s webmaster refers to as “dreadful fan sites” (Stern, 2000), but also to create an alternative to studio-controlled trailers, official Web sites, and other promotional tools over which performers had equally little control. Thus, press releases at mckellen.com proposed a new model in which audiences, not studios, served as intermediaries in star-based promotion:
[t]he Internet creates excitement in another, more direct way—through interactive involvement of the public in the inner workings of production … [O]ld “star system” ideals of aloofness and mystery should give way … It should be part of the actor’s job to keep in touch with their fan base. (“Frenzied” 2000)
Challenging closed image production and firm-handed control over stars, the site presented McKellen as a pioneer: “the first major film star to use the Internet to interact with fans on a continuing basis, posting online journals of his filming experiences, and regularly fielding questions sent by fans and journalists via email” (“International Film,” 2000). Despite challenging studio controlled promotion, McKellen’s interactivity simultaneously made him attractive to studios courting online fan audiences. By providing and publicizing interactivity (in a password-protected “Media Lounge” supplying Electronic Press Kits), McKellen’s publicity team emphasized his viability as a star in an age of studio franchises and online fandom.
Nevertheless, publicists stretched the thespian’s popular credibility in these respects. “I have no problems with being seen in a comic book movie,” McKellen claimed in a press release. “I revere much popular culture: for instance, I sang with the Pet Shop Boys … and a year ago even made it onto Late Night with David Letterman” (“Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart,” 2000). For a would-be “franchise man,” these were not wholly convincing examples. In a radio interview, McKellen expressed even greater ambivalence toward the popular: “It’s been an ambition of mine for a long, long time to be opening in what’s going to be clearly a hugely successful film and also be available to the discerning public live on stage” (“National,” 2001). McKellen claimed elsewhere that through “two iconic men of power [Gandalf and Magneto] … I was introduced to the multitudinous fans … and intrigued to enter the world of franchises and plastic dolls” (“Cinema,” 2006). Why would a Shakespearian position embrace this merchandised world to talk to fans about playing with his Magneto action figure? (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000c)? Did Sir Ian enjoy slumming it? Or did franchises and their supposedly less discerning audiences have value to McKellen’s star project?
Despite its eccentricities, McKellen repeatedly framed his franchise participation as a political dimension of his star persona. His association with X-Men, therefore, extended an existing star project—not a break from the past but a mutation. Though “never closeted backstage,” McKellen came out publicly during 1988 debates over Section 28, a British law prohibiting discussion of homosexuality in schools (Steele, 2001, p. 36). Following Knighthood in 1991, McKellen became an outspoken gay rights advocate, openly accusing the British Labor government “of being no better than its Tory predecessor at tackling gay issues” (BBC News, 2001). In Hollywood, McKellen had been similarly forthright about fears of being typecast or marginalized, calling those concerns “[b]ullshit … If anything my career has taken off since I came out … [O]f over 20 film parts I’ve played since then, only three have been gay. I don’t think of myself as a queer artist, but I do bring my own gay perception to anything I do” (Kilday, 2000, p. 28). Nevertheless, McKellen admitted the challenges of being gay in Hollywood—and potentially, greater acceptance of gay British thespians—believing it “very difficult for an American actor who wants a film career to be open about his sexuality” (BBC News, 2006). McKellen recognized a tension in Hollywood between open sexuality and career mobility, and his participation in franchises arguably helped him avoid marginalization as a supporting gay player. According to one gay press article, McKellen was one of several actors who, “to avoid typecasting … share a common movie genre: sci-fi action, of all things … McKellen rules as Magneto, a villainous mutant rebel—a far cry from his gentle, Oscar nominated turn as gay director James Whale in Gods and Monsters” (Kilday, 2000, p. 28). By this logic, the action-oriented franchise enabled gay actors to escape confinement to gentler, markedly-gay roles.
More concretely, however, McKellen used his promotional apparatus to inflect the X-Men franchise, and Magneto specifically, with non-normative readings and queer politics. McKellen spoke of the X-Men films as atypical Hollywood fare; to call them “franchises as if we were just making money is an insult to everybody involved, including the audience. We are telling a very important story and because we’re telling it with the same characters three times over just means that the story is worth telling three times over” (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” 2006). McKellen promoted X-Men as “most important of all the superhero franchises” (“E-Post: X-Men 3,” 2005) based on its status as “the story of a repressed minority … What continues to distinguish this cinema franchise from others is its roots in political awareness” (“E-Post: X2,” 2003). By articulating X-Men to civil rights activism, McKellen productively rendered it accessible to gay readings and identifications, stating twice that X-Men comics appeal specifically to three groups: “young blacks, young Jews, and young gays” (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” 2006; “McKellen’s Big Night Out,” 2003, p. 64). Popular reception corroborated McKellen’s characterization of the X-Men mythos as civil rights allegory. However, these discourses typically centered on race, particularly in the 1960s origins of the comic book. As US News & World Report explains:
… the X-Men’s real superpower is the ability to lure readers with epic tales, blending exotic heroes like blue, elfin Nightcrawler and a thinly veiled civil rights allegory. Humans hate mutants like the X-Men, Professor X is a Martin Luther King Jr. wannabe, and Senator Kelly channels Gov. George Wallace in his segregationist heyday. (Molinaro, 2000, p. 1)
In this binary view of civil rights, Magneto’s oppressed, by-all-means-necessary politic made him the more radical (and thus threatening) Malcolm X.
The assimilation of Magneto by McKellen’s star project did not sever articulations to radicalism so much as extend it from the sphere of race to contemporary sexuality. As McKellen told fans, “[m]utancy is a metaphor for this disassociation with society and applies to gays, no doubt,” using his star persona to encourage viewers to undertake gay readings of the text (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000d). McKellen passionately upheld “mutancy” as a viable metaphor for radical political struggle in the gay and lesbian community. At an X-Men: The Last Stand press conference, McKellen attacked the idea of “curing” mutation (a theme in the film), defending difference and articulating the mutant condition to his own non-heteronormative sexuality: “[a]s a gay man, the idea that … I can be cured as a mutant is contemptuous as people who think I need curing because of my sexuality … I don’t think that people should be cured of their God-given nature.” Co-star Hugh Jackman, however, argued by example that:
Rogue, as amazingly powerful as she is, has potentially a very lonely life, never being able to touch anyone, never being able to have a physical relationship, never being able to have children, never able to be married. Now, as politically abhorrent as something like a cure is, it’s also humanely, socially [credible] that a character like [her] would take it. (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” 2006)
Unconvinced, McKellen effectively channeled Magneto to respond:
It isn’t necessarily her particular mutancy that’s her problem. It’s other people’s reaction to it. It’s maybe society that’s rotten, not her. The last thing we should do is try and cure her … [T]here are many ways of helping people who are handicapped rather than giving them extra limbs or forcing them to be what we think is normal. (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” 2006)
Likening McKellen to Magneto in this instance does not suggest cartoonish super-villainy but instead a radical critique of normality in opposition to a politically dominant majority. McKellen’s argument echoes Warner (1999), for whom biological norms depend on socially constructed standards that assume all people should be like most people (p. 57). In this view, queer politics should reject normality because the normalization of queer lives makes them non-threatening, accommodating the dominant culture and leaving power structures intact (pp. 66-68). McKellen took a similar position here, implicitly suggesting that threatening characters like the villain Magneto might usefully critique dominant notions of heteronormativity.
While McKellen worked through promotional practices to open Magneto to queer political readings, he stopped short of claiming Magneto as gay. As Brooker (2002) and Murray (2004) evidence, corporate guardians of properties such as Star Wars and Harry Potter historically police homoerotic readings that dilute the brands’ perceived family-friendliness. If McKellen extended his own gay identity to Magneto, he would have risked displeasing his corporate employers. Further, the amalgamation of two minority statuses could have potentially blurred the political thematic surrounding the character: Magneto might have been less understood as an oppressed mutant if audiences also had to consider him an oppressed homosexual. While the representation of villainy has long drawn upon decadent, flamboyant, and in the American context, British tropes, those cultural associations alone proved insufficient to open Magneto directly to a semiotics of queerness. Whether because of the character’s hetero-reproductive backstory (his marriage to Magda and parentage of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch), or a general resistance to bringing queer undercurrents of villainous representation into the open, the casting of an openly gay actor as Magneto provoked much controversy among fans. This lead to what McKellen calls “abusive” discussion about his sexuality—even if this “was never such a big deal as the design of my fighting gear and the costumes” (“X-Men FAQ,” 2000; see also McKellen, 1999). In this sense, Magneto’s perceived heterosexuality was just another continuity issue, and some fixated fans rejected McKellen as an incompatible element of that continuous brand. Thus, mckellen.com appealed to acting craft to differentiate between McKellen’s performance and the resultant Magento character, foregrounding the actor’s method homosexuality while preserving the assumed heterosexuality permeating Magneto’s multimedia history: “I pretended to myself that I was being attacked by Senator Jesse Helms, the notorious homophobe. Out came my indignation and anger which, expressed through Magneto’s voice, manner, and character, seem to have been convincing. This does not of course mean that I play him as a gay man” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000a).
The scripted relationship between Magneto and the shape-shifting femme fatale Mystique, newly created for the X-Men films, also reaffirmed that heteronormativity despite the casting of the openly gay McKellen. Mystique was not just any woman; she can theoretically assume any form, but as portrayed by Rebecca Romijn, she wore nothing but blue body paint and a few strategically placed scales. The hot, naked form she maintained as Magneto’s devoted lieutenant and lover made him appear quite the hetero-stud. Yet McKellen’s promotional discourse used Mystique to simultaneously suggest a sexually non-normative Magneto. McKellen refused to acknowledge homoerotic tensions between Magneto and Xavier perceived by some fans, directly stating on mckellen.com, that “As for sex, Magneto’s mate is Mystique.” But crucially, McKellen continued: “[w]ho knows what shape or character or gender she adopts in bed? Not me nor I suspect even Rebecca [R]omijn!” (“E-Post: X2,” 2002). Though closing down a homoerotic Magneto/Xavier relationship in favor of the script-sanctioned Magneto/Mystique pairing, McKellen’s randy musing slyly suggested that when in bed with the shape-shifting Mystique, gender and sexuality are up for grabs. The feminine Mystique might not be so feminine after all! This deconstruction of the X-Men text strategically repositioned franchise characters in relation to McKellen’s star persona, reiterated by his publicity machine on other occasions: “I should think, considering her transmutancy, that Mystique is quite a handful in bed—nothing that Magneto couldn’t cope with of course” (“E-Post X-Men,” 2000e). In positing Mystique as “transmutant,” McKellen opened her partner Magneto to non-heteronormative sexual possibilities—a reading supported both by Magneto’s cool indifference to her nudity and the conclusion of their relationship in the third film. Once Mystique is “cured” and confined to a single female form, Magneto discards her.
Critical reception of the film acknowledged some of this potential non-normativity. One scene from X2, for example, inspired more than one camp reading. Having allied with the X-Men, Magneto and Mystique join them on their jet en route to Stryker’s secret base. When confronted by an angry Rogue (her hair permanently streaked as a result of her ordeal with Magneto in the first film), a chuckling Magneto snipes: “We love what you’ve done with your hair.” While The Village Voice more obliquely considered this “priceless bit” one among many of the “juiciest line readings belong[ing] to Magneto” (Hoberman, 2003, p. 125), Rolling Stone celebrates how he lobbed the line at Rogue “like a bitchy Cupid” (Travers, 2003, p. 70). Although the latter calls the film “a tribute to outcasts—teens, gays, minorities, even Dixie Chicks,” few specifically read non-normative sexuality into Magneto’s character beyond these campy deliveries. Rolling Stone’s review of the first film, however, did articulate mutants to sexual non-normativity: rather than perceiving a civil rights allegory promoting racial equality, however, the review described the Mutant Registration Act as “a bill forcing mutants to register like child molesters” (“X-Men: The Geek Movie,” 2000, p. 119). By articulating mutants to the threat of sexual deviancy, this reading evidenced the problematic nature of McKellen’s star project in relation to intellectual property outside his control. The potential sexual non-normativity of characters like Magneto, even only limitedly conveyed through McKellen’s star text, became articulated to deviancy through their branded villainy.
McKellen’s promotional project, therefore, was necessarily limited by Magneto’s parallel transmedia branding as a super villain. While he cannot overtly defend his character’s villainous genocidal actions, McKellen again appealed to his craft to nuance Magneto’s motives and rhetoric. “I’m constantly being asked about being a villain,” McKellen lamented:
I never met an actor who thought of that as a character trait … they might be villainous, but villains? As if there’s no motive for their behavior? Magneto’s got plenty of motive and attitude and political mass. You might think he’s doing the wrong thing, but you’ll come the worst of any argument with Magneto. (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” 2006)
Asked whether he prefers playing Gandalf or Magneto, McKellen replied similarly, “[a]lthough it is arguable that Magneto’s motives (whatever his actions) aspire to goodness as much as Gandalf’s, I prefer to try and understand the characters I play rather than to pass judgment on them and therein lies the satisfaction” (“E-Post: X2,” 2002). While McKellen regretted Magneto’s actions, he simultaneously played him “as a man who knows he is right” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000a). He emphasized the character’s political ends rather than his means, clarifying, for example, that Senator Kelly’s death in the first film “underlines the dreadful mistake of Magneto’s plans to mutantize the world leaders. His intention is never to kill them—rather it was to recruit them” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000e). However, McKellen could only rehabilitate Magneto so far. When pressed, McKellen admitted that because Magneto “is prepared to kill” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000b), he must personally “sympathize more” with the politics of Xavier (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000a).
Constantly juxtaposed to the assimilationist but heroically-coded Xavier, Magneto simultaneously enabled and hindered McKellen’s articulations of X-Men to radical, non-normative gay politics. As one fan wrote to McKellen:
The bad mutants live in a dank hole in the ground and engage in infighting while the good ones are all beautiful, live in a grand old building and help each other with their emotional problems. The movie seems to be saying that radicals are ugly, vicious and above all dangerous as the plan to mutate the politicians shows … If you accept this reading, even as a possibility, then was your experience as a gay man used to perpetrate straight propaganda? (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f)
By opening Magneto to radical gay readings, the actor simultaneously subjected that villainous representation of radicalism to accusations of reinforcing heteronormativity. McKellen responded, “[p]erhaps Magneto had to be pure villain but he didn’t feel like that, playing him … Some might be persuaded by Magneto’s violent politicking as, without his intervention, the wicked senator’s prejudice could have prevailed” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f).
While encouraging debate, McKellen’s acknowledgement of Magneto as “pure villain” ineffectively discouraged criticism of the representation. Another fan cited McKellen’s assertion that X-Men “could be read in relation to the fight for human rights for gay men and lesbians,” but argued that “[the] way the film portrays activism is deeply troubling for me. Should we sit by and let our human rights and relationships be ignored and vilified?” (E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f). Because Magneto had been overdetermined as a villain, both in the film and in franchise iterations outside the actor’s purview, McKellen could not entirely rehabilitate his radical politic. Moreover, by queering Magneto he could be perceived to have participated in the vilification of queer activism. In response, McKellen could only try to disarticulate Magneto from specifically gay-identified readings:
The central disagreement between Magneto and Professor Xavier can be related to the divide evident in all human rights struggles between those who are prepared to use violence and those who are not. Beyond that, I wouldn’t look to the film or the original comics’ storylines to illuminate the particular problems of gay activism. (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f)
The collision of Magneto and McKellen inter-texts further complicated this untenable relationship between non-normative sexual politicking and villainy. Prior to X-Men, McKellen repeatedly played villainous roles marked by monstrosity and frequently fascism specifically. In 1999, McKellen played a Nazi war criminal in Apt Pupil for producer-director Bryan Singer. Critics noted how in the 1995 film version of Richard III, the actor “played the king as a Hitlerian despot” (Flynn, 2002, pp. 50-51). Even the “gentler” role of James Whale in Gods and Monsters conveyed some monstrosity, both through the Frankenstein thematic and in his dysfunctional personal relationships. As director Bill Condon told The Advocate: “Ian especially has been willing to show some rather ugly sides of himself” (Steele, 2001, p. 36). Thus, read alongside the fascist and monstrous tropes in McKellen’s star inter-text—the very images juxtaposed to Magneto on mckellen.com—the villainy ascribed to the Magneto character was buttressed. Magneto’s fascist ideology of mutant supremacy calcified cinematically and promotionally though intertextual relationship to the McKellen star text. Legible as a performer of fascist roles, McKellen enabled continued reading of Magneto as a fascist, and thus, a villain of damnable politics.
McKellen could not control through promotional practices this collision of star inter-text and character history, evidenced by fans on his site that consistently reproduced undesirable articulations between McKellen, Magneto, and fascism. One concerned fan wrote that “Magneto seems to have a Nazi-like philosophy. It is not because of the past parts you have played, but because of that single line (indeed, you have it on the main page of your website) ‘We are the future, Charles, not them.’ That line could be put in Hitler’s mouth” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f). This fan at once denied the power of McKellen’s other roles in determining Magneto’s fascism but consciously considered them nonetheless. McKellen tried to deflect this overdetermined connection: “Hitler’s power used constitutional power to oppress minorities. Magneto is a political subversive fighting for freedom. The rhetoric might be similar but their beliefs are not” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000f). But visitors to McKellen’s Web site continued to read McKellen’s performance as Magneto within his larger oeuvre—as the site and his star persona encouraged. While another perceived in Magneto an “internal strife also present in your interpretation of Richard III,” McKellen distinguished the two by replying that “as you put it there are obvious similarities, although I trust Magneto’s motives more than Richard’s. Magneto is never careless with lives, whereas Richard glories in his control over others” (“E-Post: X-Men,” 2000b). Despite McKellen’s attempts to shape readings of Magneto, the fascist discourses brought to bear on the property by his own star text reinforced villainous character branding rather than challenging it—thus thwarting attempts to manage the character as part of a queer star text.
Conclusion: Twinkle, Twinkle Franchise Star
Describing McKellen’s star quality, Variety argued that:
[i]n all of Ian McKellen’s indelible moments on film, there’s a sinister twinkle in his eye. His villains are devilishly charming … even the heroic Gandalf remains darkly unfathomable … [In X-Men he] carries the full weight of that series’ sly political subtext, bringing expert layers of contradiction to a persecuted fascist. (Robey, 2003, p. A9)
Given this perceived sinister dimension to McKellen’s oeuvre, and the potential impact on his queer politics, the thespian’s participation in the Lord of the Rings franchise bears particular significance. McKellen played Gandalf with the same twinkling eyes that animated his monstrous characters, and yet the wizard sage remained unequivocally heroic. More so than the original novels, the film franchise branded the wizard as a figure of all-knowing goodness—literally a “white hat” by his transformation into Gandalf the White in the second film. Yet such righteousness did not stymie McKellen’s ongoing interest in accommodating gay readings of franchise characters. In the DVD commentary for Fellowship of the Ring, Sean Astin claims to have deliberately played a moment between Samwise and Frodo (following the latter’s recovery from a wraith attack) as tenderly homoerotic—a creative choice attributed to McKellen. The DVD, therefore, endorses McKellen as a primary influence in rendering the franchise implicitly queer. Furthermore, as one of the most successful franchises ever, Rings afforded McKellen more cultural capital to pursue his political project than did Magneto. For The Advocate, Gandalf was a victory for gay visibility:
[p]laying the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings may make Sir Ian McKellen the world’s best- known gay man. And he’s armed and ready to carry the fight for equality along with him … play[ing] the lead role in the fantasy lives of the world’s children, for decades to come. What’s more heroic than that? (Steele, 2001, p. 36)
Gandalf’s visible heroism made McKellen a hero. As Armistead Maupin explained in the same article: “The fact that an openly gay actor is going to have his face all over Burger King cups … is really quite significant.” Gandalf paid off long-term strategies for managing activist star images in contemporary transmedia economics, a success curiously described by The Advocate: “Oscar, Magneto, Gandalf. And voila! A new platform on which to wave that banner for gay equality. Is McKellen that clever? … McKellen isn’t telling. ‘I’m just a gay man living in the world, really.’ And his eyes twinkle” (36, emphasis added).
This habitual description (in both gay and trade press) of McKellen’s “twinkle” could be read as stereotype, marking the actor as flamboyantly glittery. Or, articulated to the “sinister” McKellen oeuvre, this twinkle could sully Gandalf’s victory for gay visibility. Yet describing both McKellen and his political acumen, this twinkle suggests a sense of complication and multiplication within the star’s inter-text. Gandalf and Magneto meet through McKellen. Magneto is, without a doubt, a bad guy; yet that twinkle means that he’s also Gandalf, a good guy. Might then the political victories claimed of Gandalf mitigate the vilification of the non-normative politics McKellen activates within Magneto? Newsweek acknowledged that despite his fascist edge, “McKellen’s Magneto is not the histrionic madman we’re accustomed to, but a scarily sane villain … simply appalled by humanity’s lack of humanity; change a couple of lines in the screenplay and he could be the hero” (Giles, 2000, pp. 56-57). Gandalf cannot affect changes in the X-Men franchise, but he could perhaps modulate Magneto’s meaning in and through the McKellen inter-text.
Yet the star discourses managed by and through McKellen worked from the margins, interfacing with character-centric modes of product differentiation favored by media franchising. Constructing a star image in relation to a brand controlled by Marvel Comics, McKellen worked to articulate a radical politics that challenged commonsense notions of normativity. The limited success of this project, however, resulted from the intertextual collision of his performance as Magneto, the character’s pre-established brand identity, and the actor’s pre-existing, aggregate star persona. McKellen assimilated a corporately-held trademark within his larger star text, opening Magneto to gay readings as a McKellen sub-brand; but in doing so, he subjected a non- normative politic to vilification through articulation to the character’s overdetermined fascist image and the monstrous characters in McKellen’s own oeuvre. Even if Gandalf heroically rescued this project, it came at least partially from intellectual property managers’ ability to brand the character as hero in spite of that sinister twinkle in McKellen’s eyes. Meanwhile, the Magneto property continued to be deployed in parallel markets outside of McKellen’s purview. Though McKellen subordinated film Magneto to a set of intertextual relations within and constitutive of his star text, the actor paradoxically became a sub-brand of the character alongside comic book Magneto, video game Magneto, and action figure Magneto.
Thus, in the contemporary moment, the management of star image and intellectual property are necessarily intertwined. Actors’ abilities to subsume franchise characters within their star texts remain strained; at the same time, the persistence of stardom, however marginalized in franchise systems, keeps branded intellectual property open to alternative meaning management. This symbiosis bears significance not just for management of image production and promotion, but also for practices of consumption, where Magneto, McKellen, and Gandalf become equally impossible to unify and to tear asunder.