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In 1794 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a sonnet entitled "Pantisocracy," which really has nothing to do with women's underwear. The poem refers to a scheme the 21–year–old Coleridge developed with the even younger Robert Southey: to gather a group of twelve men (notice the symbolic number) who would set up a utopian community along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania (my backyard!), tilling the soil in the morning and writing poetry in the afternoon. Coleridge was so committed to the idea that he married a woman he barely knew, Southey's sister–in–law, in order to ensure that the Pantisocratic commune harvested babies as well as barley. In the event, like so many of Coleridge's flights of fancy, the project never got off the ground, but such utopian schemes continued to seduce his Romantic contemporaries.

Neo–Romantic utopias link two films that were a grade above most of this past summer's paltry fare. Poultry, in fact, escape the paltry—as well as a degrading prison–like farm—in Chicken Run, where the production of "Grade A" eggs is, indeed, degrading. I laughed the whole way through this ultimate "chick flick," relishing the fact that all the intelligence, strength, and resourcefulness it displays reside in female characters (albeit hens). Yet I probably would not have reflected a great deal about the film if it weren't so much like another bit of summer fantasy fare, The X–Men.

While the one movie stars claymation hens and the other comic book mutants, both exhibit a neo–Romantic theme: that utopia can be achieved through the efforts of determined individuals who favor greenery over machinery, the natural over the technological. Both feature Coleridge–like visionaries who operate as the first among equals, inspiring their cohorts to work for freedom.

In The X–Men, Xavier, played by Patrick Stewart (did you notice that "Xavier" rhymes with "savior"?), is literally a visionary, his mutation giving him telepathic powers, and in Chicken Run, the hen Ginger continues to believe that escape from a barbed–wire–enclosed compound is possible, despite all her failed attempts. Her stamina is fueled by a longing for something she has "never felt, grass under my feet"—a place where she and her hen cohorts can establish what we might call, with apologies to Coleridge, a Poultrisocracy. In The X–Men, Xavier has already set up a sort of utopia: a school where children are trained to use their mutations for good. The school's Gothic architecture in the midst of verdant lawns and abundant foliage, a paradigmatically Romantic environment, contrasts radically with the modernistic cement and metal geometry of the enemy's habitation.

In both films, the malevolent antagonists seek to establish dominance over their worlds through new technologies. The Tweedies, who own the chicken farm, set up a Rube–Goldberg type machine for turning hens into pot pies, and Magneto (Ian McKellen) employs a high–tech gyrating device for turning "normal" people into mutants. Both machines are so dehumanizing (or at least de–henifying), that they negatively affect their owners: Mrs. Tweedy gets hoisted in her own gravy–making petard, and Magneto depletes his powers every time he uses his (literal) magnetism to set his machine into motion.

Chicken Run makes the contrast between machinery and greenery explicit when Mrs. Tweedy rubs her brand–new machine in dreamy circular strokes exactly like those Ginger employs as she strokes a wooden crate bearing the picture of rainbow–framed trees underneath the word "Paradise." Mrs. Tweedy, of course, is fantasizing about all the money she'll make from killing her chickens, while Ginger is dreamily stating "grass, cool green grass."

Like Coleridge seeking to escape the Industrial Revolution, the protagonists of Chicken Run and The X–Men seek to escape the mind–forged manacles of impersonal machinery. In contrast, they employ devices that enhance the personal rather than dominating it. Xavier enters an egg–shaped structure which enables him to surmount the limits of his own telephathic abilities (in order to help others, of course), and the chickens turn an egg–laying hut into a hen–pedalled airplane that enables them to surmount the limits of their prison. As the aging Rooster in the "cockpit" of the primitive aircraft intones to the hens, "You can't see Paradise if you don't pedal." Romantic utopias are driven by the imaginative efforts of talented individuals, not by piston–pounding, gyrating mechanisms. While Coleridge, seeking to raise money for Pantisocracy, performed poetry all around England, Ginger, seeking to raise her Poultrisocracy to get it over the fence of Tweedy's farm, performed "poultry in motion," as one wise–cracking mouse puts it.

Traditional British Romanticism, of course, was part of the transition from "Early Modernism" to "Modernism." Even though Coleridge and Wordsworth believed in the power of nature to create epiphanic moments that the authentic poet rendered into verse, both nevertheless died as Christian believers. The next generation of Romantics, however, embodied the modernist move away from theological affirmation; Shelley wrote a tract entitled "The Necessity of Atheism," and Keats manifested more reverential awe for the arts than for "the Infinite I AM." During the reign of high modernism in the early twentieth century, Romanticism was generally disdained, as when T. S. Eliot's friend T. E. Hulme referred to it as "spilt religion."

Commodifying history

So now, what do we make of Romanticism at the beginning of the new millennium? We might begin by recalling the Romantic passion for the Past, as expressed in the cult of ruins, the collection of ballads, the extraordinary success of Sir Walter Scott's historical fiction, and many other aspects of Romantic culture. Strip out the Romantic fascination with genius and originality, and what's left is a clear anticipation of postmodernity—our time, in which, as Frederic Jameson writes, "the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture."

Jameson's term for this museum–like juxtaposition of images from the past is "pastiche"—as exemplified in postmodern architecture, wherein part of a building, let's say, looks like a Roman villa while another part "quotes" a Gothic cathedral in a "co–existence of distinct moments in history." Rather than value historical progress, pastiche ironizes it, reflecting the postmodern assumption that history itself is an artifical construction, a narrative fabricated from facts which have been manipulated according to the cultural values of the historian. With this attitude, images of the past become commodified, valued not for what they can teach us, but for their affect; we consume them as containers of sentiment rather than of meaning.

The commodification of history can be easily demonstrated with The X–Men and Chicken Run, both of which begin by using images of World War II prison camps. The X–Men shows Nazis within a barbed–wire enclosure separating an adolescent boy from his Jewish parents; as the boy screams and extends his arms toward the barrier that has closed out his loved ones, the wrought iron gates bend toward him in what we assume to be the first manifestation of Magneto's magnetic powers.

Chicken Run starts with a tilt from the moon to a barbed–wire fence, within which a roving spotlight surveys the compound. Soon we see a chicken make a run for the fence, scoop out a hole with a spoon, and squeeze underneath. References later to the owners of the chicken farm as "Jerry" confirm that the allusion is to a German camp.

Each of these scenes, wherein a major player of the film defies imprisonment, operates as a metonymy of the whole film's content: Magneto seeks to escape his marginalization as a mutant, and Ginger seeks the escapism of a utopian community. However, by placing images of Nazi prison camps in their comic–book fantasy films, the filmmakers have emptied those images of their disturbing historical significance; the camps become merely a part of the fantasy, operating as visual tools signalling oppression, the same way the image of a bed in movies of the forties and fifties signalled sex.

Chicken Run, in fact, self–consciously spectacularizes its "pastiche" with numerous "quotations" of classic film texts throughout its narrative. The Great Escape (1963) has a large presence in the film, its music (or something very much like it) accompanying Ginger on one of her escape attempts; then, during solitary confinement, she bounces a brussels sprout against the wall of her coal bin the same way Steve McQueen in The Great Escape bounced a baseball during his confinement. Meetings to plan the great escape are held in Hut 17, obviously alluding to another World War II prison movie,Stalag 17 (1953). As the chickens turn Hut 17 into their makeshift airplane, one can't help thinking of Jimmy Stewart et al. resurrecting the plane in Flight of the Phoenix (1966); in Chicken Run, however, the engineer behind the project, a hen named Mac, uses the same Scottish brogue as Scotty, the engineer in Star Trek, eventually speaking his familiar words "We're giving it all she's got," and referring to Mrs. Tweedy as a "Klingon." Many other movies and TV shows are similarly "quoted" in the course of the film.

Though many films contain allusions to earlier works, the sense of postmodern pastiche in Chicken Run is reinforced not only by its allusive excess but also through its emphatic employment of verbal cliches. The second time I saw the film, I counted no less than 34 cliches (in 90 minutes!), from chicken puns—"Birds of a feather flock together" and "What kind of crazy chick are you?"—to banal motivational phrases: "Where there's a will there's a way" and "Good things come to those who wait." While many films are filled with cliches simply by virtue of lazy writing, Chicken Run is quite obviously conscious of its "already written" nature, ending the film with that most famous of all cliches as two mice earnestly discuss which came first, the chicken or the egg.

So too Chicken Run is self–conscious about its happy ending, undercutting it with subtle irony. As the camera zooms in on the Poultisocracy at the end of the film, we see a sign that once read "Bird Sanctuary"; the word "Bird" has been crossed out and replaced with the misspelled "Chikin." Where did all the birds go? The chickens, we infer, had to displace other inhabitants to achive their utopia, much as those who escaped oppression in Europe by settling along the Susquehanna displaced the Native Americans.

Christians as mutants

From a postmodern perspective, even the human subject is a pastiche: one's subjectivity is merely a fragmented montage of culturally constructed discourses. This is the kind of pastiche illustrated in The X–Men, which literalizes fragmentation with the mutants in Xavier's school; each mutant has one fragment of the body that sets them apart, like Xavier's confinement to a wheelchair, and another fragment which generates powerful effects—effects deemed anti–social until submitted to the needs of a different society, one which redefines the powers as "Good."

The body itself, then, becomes an effect of discourse: welcomed by one social group, it is called anathema by another, affecting the way characters perform. For example, people who touch the skin of the adolescent mutant Rogue (Anna Paquin) go into catatonic shock, forcing her to withdraw from all human contact; but in Xavier's community, her touch, when used in conjunction with the fragmented powers of other mutants, brings healing, changing the way she sees and uses her body.

Rogue is part of the film's allegorizing of reactions to homosexuality in America—updating, according to many reviewers, the civil rights issues that the original The X–Men comic books addressed. However, unlike the deplorable summer flick The Patriot, in which most of the redcoats were unremittingly ruthless while the majority of the Southern patriots were so good that even black slaves loved to serve (with) them, The X–Men refuses to deliver a simplistic "mutants good, bourgeois culture bad" scenario. Instead, the film presents both a modernist and a postmodernist response to the marginalization of mutants.

Exemplifying the first category, Magneto imposes his ideology on others, forcing them to agree with him by superimposing a force field upon their bodies so that they become mutants as well. Rather than waiting for the gradual change of bodies and minds, Magneto seeks to overthrow the anti–mutant system, arrogantly stating "God is too slow" as he climbs into his mutation–creating machine.

In contrast, the postmodern X–Men are willing to let nature take its course, such that those who are naturally born with a mutation are allowed to live in their pantisocratic–like community—accepting their difference in order to exercise their mutations for the good of the community and win the respect of those who once spurned them.

While the makers of The X–Men intended, among other things, an allegory about homosexuality, Christians may find in the film a subtext that its makers never dreamed of: Christians as mutants.

Modernism marginalized people of faith, regarding Christian intellectuals with a mixture of amazement and disgust. Take, for example, Kathleen Nott's 1954 work, The Emperor's Clothes, which contemptuously dismisses poets and critics who are outspoken Christians, saying they are "engaged in the amputation and perversion of knowledge." Nott is especially hard on C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers, calling them "braver and stupider than many of their orthodox literary fellows," because of their "tub–thumping" popularizing of the faith.

With modernist condescension, Nott contrasts Christian dogmatism with the "open–minded inquiry" of science which can invent machines: "If men learn to think consistently in the direction that leads to aeroplanes, they will also think in the direction away from authoritarianism and therefore theology. Moreover they will learn to think in a direction … toward psychology and anthropology and away from Sin and the Church."

Ironically, in her dismissal of old–fashioned dogma, Nott dogmatically mystifies science, perpetuating what Richard Rorty calls "a picture of the scientist as a sort of priest, someone who achieved contact with nonhuman truth by being 'logical,' 'methodical,' and 'objective.'" Postmodernists, believing that the scientist has no better access to "the real" than does the Christian, exposed Enlightenment humanism to be merely another faith vocabulary, thus allowing Christian intellectuals back into the conversation. Unfortunately, however, the academy is still filled with modernist–trained scholars who treat Christianity like a superstitious crutch in comparison to the "Truth" accessed through instrumental reason.

I can give two good examples from as recently as the 1990s. A father told me of his magna cum laude daughter's first year in college when she wrote an interpretive essay foregrounding her Christian assumptions; her professor gave her a "C," with no comments on the paper except that her "reasoning abilities were weak." Because she had never received a "C" before, the student took the paper to the dean, who asked two other English professors to assess the essay, both of whom gave it an "A." Apparently, in the first professor's mind, the affirmation of a Christian perspective is inherently muddled.

Another friend tells of a colleague who brags about responding to a Christian student in his classroom with the following (uncensored) statement: "Christianity is bullshit; and that's not opinion, it's fact."

In both cases, Christian students were being treated like intellectual mutants, claiming access to spiritual powers that modernist ideologues wanted to ban from the academy. Like the postmodern mutants of The X–Men, Christians are called to be in the world but not of the world, aware that earthly Romantic utopias are always illusory—for the evil eliminated from every Romantic utopia always already has the ability to return: a perception shared by postmodernists and Christians alike, although pronounced in radically different vocabularies. While postmodernists regard as impossible any human effort to escape the effects of discourse, Christians similarly regard as doomed any unaided human attempt to escape the effects of the Fall.

Crystal Downing is associate professor of English at Messiah College.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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