Ah, the mutant—science fiction’s emblematic character for “Why not add another gene pool disaster?” to the plot. You can’t swing a light saber at a comic-con without hitting someone in a mutant costume, probably with tentacles or extra eyeballs or, if they’re really old school, a gill or two. Yet somehow, the question remains, often asked in darkened theater aisles or during heated Reddit debates: Does every classic sci-fi story really need a mutant? The answer, dear readers, is an eye-roll-inducing “Yes. Yes, it absolutely does.”
Consider this: without mutants, what do you have? Just another dystopian future. Probably it’s a dystopia that’s run by a bunch of sleek, faceless corporate types. Maybe there are too many good-looking rebels in leather, but I can assure you: it’s a future that’s umami-free. Dystopia aside, you’ve got some kind of evil genius experimenting in a lab, and mutants are the inevitable outcome. Remember: if it ain’t mutant, it ain’t dystopia. And for our purposes, we’re concerned with full-on, well-onto-the-scene mutants: the kind you’d expect to see on a limited-edition graphic novel cover.
I have attended numerous midnight screenings and director Q&As, but few films provoke more excitement than the mutant flicks. At a recent screening of X-Men: Days of Future Past, I witnessed a viewer debate a pal about whether Mystique’s powers make her a better commentary on societal acceptance or just another cheap thrill. Spoiler alert, dude: she can do both. And that’s the beauty of the mutants—layer after often thrillingly layered commentary on our own supposedly accepting society. We need ’em in our sci-fi toolkit.
Now, let’s plunge into the reason that characters genetically altered for ill are just as necessary to the form as all those monologues in which humanity is doomed. We’ll look at some classic instances, discuss the critical and fan love/hate relationships we have with mutants, and, if we’re lucky, change a few minds about the silliness of thinking mutants are unnecessary when so many stories hinge on them. Hang on; it might get a bit wild.
The Mutant Manifesto—Why Science Fiction’s Unsung Heroes Are Mutants
The shock value of mutants and the freak-show effect they have on audiences are nothing compared to the real reasons we have for featuring them: in sci-fi, they are tools for exploring sci-fi’s most unfashionable and unthinkable questions. Take The Fly (1986). David Cronenberg’s infamous masterpiece isn’t merely about a man who turns into a fly. It offers a profound examination of the horror of potentially losing one’s humanity. Spelled out in a narrative wrapped tight and slick with Cronenberg’s trademark bodily fluids, The Fly’s gut-punch payoff is really small for how big a journey you take to get to it.
After witnessing the awful and devolutionary effects of a man turning into a fly, you realize that the true nose-wrinkle pumpkin moonshine ha-ha for mutants is the serious business of not becoming one.
And that’s only the surface. Consider the cultural behemoth that is the X-Men franchise: “an entirely devoted phenomenon.” There’s no denying that the X-Men movies (and the copious amounts of media tie-ins that they’ve engendered) have done the best job by far of using mutantdom as a way of examining (and, in some cases, deconstructing) society’s prejudices and plumbs our collective hopes. The X-Men fandom has “afforded a way” of seeing a truly American art form—comics—become not just entertainment in the “pulp” sense but also, truly, in the Gothic sense, for what Gothic storytelling does best.
It allows the author and artist to control—indeed, to reflect—on the messy contradictions that we as humans deal with in our daily lives: inescapable contradictions of strength and vulnerability, goodness and evil, and of trying to figure out in what ways we should fit in versus stand out.
A few years ago, I went to a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. The people on the panel were discussing some aspect of storytelling; I don’t even remember what. I do remember that it got kind of heated, as these conversations tend to do when nerds like me get passionate. But what I really recall is this Magneto (cape included) cosplayer in the back who got really upset and animated and started accusing writers of lazy storytelling for using mutants as characters. And okay, I kind of get that. A mutant who’s just a powerful nothing is a shortcut.
But I also think that if you do it right, using mutants as main characters is an Almost-Foolproof Fictional Device.
Consider the classic Ridley Scott film Blade Runner from 1982 instead of its widely debated sequel: In the original, Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, delivers the oft-quoted, bawl-inducing final monologue. Said monologue doesn’t “hit you hard” just because Batty is “more than just human,” but rather because Batty’s value as a character echoes societal concerns regarding right and wrong, and our empathy (or lack thereof) for those who society deems deviant: for neighbors and far-away companions who earn their keep playing “flawed, beautiful aberrations.”
It’s unfair to suggest that mutants always get it right. Sci-fi futures are not universally improved by the addition of a few errant chromosomes. I see you, 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man—what’s up with Lizard, anyway? And hey, just because you can turn a hero’s nemesis into a mutated monster doesn’t mean you should. When the mutation isn’t the core of the character, that’s fine. With Spider-Man, the mutation leads to a weak villain. But when the mutant is layered with narrative depth, the character doesn’t just elevate our perceptions of the story—it IS the story, a well-wrought spectacle with the substance to challenge our perceptions while it’s keeping us thoroughly entertained.
The mutants of science fiction films are the agents of chaos. They are the misfits who simply will not fit into society’s neatly boxed catalog of acceptable behavior, no matter how many times society tries to nail the boxes shut. And where would sci-fi cinema be without the chaos agents of a good old-fashioned sci-fi multi-billion dollar franchise? They are part society must allow to be and part it should never have to be, not if it wants a reflection as coarsely honest as confessional cinema generally is.
Refuting the Detractors—Counterarguments and the Justification for Including the Mutants
Naturally, not everyone stands behind the mutant agenda, and the contrary voices are the ones that pop up like clockwork at every sci-fi panel, podcast, and Twitter thread, regarding the precious arguments they have against mutants. They claim mutants are an overused plot device and a shorthand for “alienated outsider” that overshadows more nuanced themes. They sometimes dismiss films like The New Mutants (2020), which didn’t quite know what to do with its superpowered misfits, as evidence that sci-fi has lost its edge. But let’s take apart these arguments one by one.
To start, there’s this old, worn-out complaint that mutants have become too mainstream, too popular, too plain old pop to be credible as counterculture figures. At best, this is half a complaint; the mutants are popular. I don’t deny it. But it seems to me that a mutant becoming popular isn’t a reason to discredit its narrative; in fact, I can show you some deeply meaningful and thoughtful mutant narratives precisely because they’ve got to a popular stage where they can work for a society and, incidentally, a pop culture that is always right on the verge of going either repressive or liberatory.
And I would cite the narrative of the X-Men character called Rogue as a particularly poignant and rich example.
Let’s also remember the historical context here. The very idea of mutants has a real-life basis in the horrific aftermath of nuclear explosions, genetic tampering, and Cold War apprehensions. Creatures with three heads and mind control powers were a product of the golden age of sci-fi fiction, but that period’s literary output was mostly an expression of cultural fears and qualitative uncertainties about the types of changes science was bound to bring about. Rampaging, radiation-born monsters from semi-scientific or “pseudoscientific” tales of terror weren’t just a Japanese phenomenon epitomized by Godzilla. Clairvoyant adolescence enjoyed an apotheosis not too long ago in manga, anime, and graphic novel art that have so much become the avatars for the very idea of “Japanese style,” but American mutant tanks, soldiers, and the lettering of comic book panels might bear the greatest cultural essence.
We cannot overlook the fact that mutants bring certain drawbacks to the superhero formula. At their worst, they might as well be called “magic people.” Bad writers can, and often do, create stories laden with mutant characters and few truly engaging mutants simply because mutation makes a convenient excuse for unleashing chaotic situations that amount to nothing more than “chase the bad guy for a while before we finally get to the real bad guy.” Indeed, what was the last truly great superhero film? Was it 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past? (An argument could be made for it being that, so far.) But even that film seems like a long time ago when you compare it to recent superhero films that have come out.
My, how time flies, right?
Let’s tackle the elephant in the room: do mutants sometimes overshadow the “hard science” that purists believe should dominate science fiction? Sure, I’ll concede that. Gattaca (1997) doesn’t need a mutant to deliver its soul-crushing vision of genetic determinism, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is about as close to sci-fi gospel as one can get—with no mutants to be found. But here’s the kicker: these movies don’t succeed despite their lack of mutants; they succeed because they focus intensely on their own thematic concerns. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Yet, even in their absence, the spirit of the mutant—characters grappling with altered identities, humanity pushing up against the boundaries of nature—lurks under the surface.
You can’t entirely escape the idea that in a world where humanity might push too far, mutations (biological, mechanical, or societal) are inevitable.
Consider “District 9” (2009), a film that holds equal parts of both science fiction and social commentary. In “District 9,” alien refugees become a stand-in for a historically oppressed group, and the film offers an oblique exploration of what it means to be human. Aliens living in through-the-looking-glass conditions in “District 9” parallel a denied group living in the “other” space of apartheid-era South Africa. Isn’t the intersection of humanity and “otherness” a central element in comic book tales about mutations?
Some critics deride the presence of mutants in “serious” sci-fi. But mutants—at least the way I see it—can be more than the bald assertion that “evolution is all around.” They can be allegories for every form of otherness, from the social outcasts of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) to the misunderstood life forms in Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), where DNA blending creates a fringe science playground—not exactly what the World Health Organization has in mind when it encourages keeping to a 10-foot pole after an Ebola or Zika outbreak. Sure, mutants can serve as the basis for mad scientist or freak show spectacles.
And they can also serve as brilliant and necessary fictional embodiments of the kinds of “serious” issues sci-fi has—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—on its plate.
If you still think that the mutants don’t matter to sci-fi, consider why fans are drawn to conventions in the first place. They don’t go simply to pay homage to good science fiction; they go to celebrate the hallmarks of the genre that get them hot under the collar—the characters who wrestle with the thorny ethical conundrums emblematic of sci-fi proposals and predictions. For many fans, mutants are the hallmark signifying the really deep, really risky stuff that makes sci-fi the art form it is. And that is why mutants matter to the sci-fi genre, not just as a trope but as the very “living, breathing (and sometimes plasma-shooting) soul” of sci-fi.
To those who hold their pristine, unadulterated stories of speculative fiction tightly and insist that the mutant is a too-frequent trope, I would counter: You keep your narratives free of the “other,” and let me have mutants in my fiction. I choose the misunderstood, the unfathomable, the mutant over the mundane any day.
