How to Do ‘First Class’ screenwriting in a comic-book movie

(Full disclosure: I know a couple of the guys who wrote the script for X-Men: First Class. I’d feel the same way about their movie if I knew them or not, but part of the reason to write this is really to thank them for such a great piece of entertainment that could have gone wrong in so many ways, yet somehow went right.)

There’s a scene in X-Men: First Class that I would gladly show in the screenwriting class I teach. It happens in the first ten minutes, so it’s not as big a SPOILER as some things I could mention from the movie, but if you don’t want this pivotal scene laid out in detail for you in advance (some of you are that pure in your desires, bless you), then read no further.

The movie opens with a reprise of the scene that opened Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men –a young Erik Lensherr (Bill Milner) being separated from his family at a World War II concentration camp, and revealing his mutant magnetic abilities in a desperate rage as he twists a metal gate. This was always the key to making this franchise something more than just superheroics – you could never tell Magneto that he was completely wrong in his belief in the capacity of man for evil.

But this time around we see the immediate aftermath of that scene, where Erik is brought to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) for study. In this scene, Shaw wants Erik to show off his powers, and offers him patronizing encouragement and chocolate. He asks the boy to move a coin – the boy can’t. Now Shaw sighs, and says that for all their small-sighted bumbling, the Nazis have ways of getting results.

And now the camera switches position, and reveals a room on the other side of a glass wall filled almost floor-to-ceiling with surgical tools; a nightmare lab. In the characters’ world, this was there the whole time, but we’re seeing it for the first time. The filmmakers have chosen to expand the context, and make us dread in that exact moment what Shaw could have in mind next. We would not put it past someone to cut into a mutant to see what makes them tick.

The room didn’t change, but storytelling changed it for us, gave it additional meaning.

Now guards come in with Erik’s mother. Again, Shaw says, move the coin. Only this time, if Erik cannot, Shaw will shoot his mother. Fear is quite a motivator – Erik wants to do it more than ever. Still he cannot. Shaw counts to three. His mother tells him everything will be alright. Erik can’t do it. And Shaw pulls the trigger.

(Slightly more SPOILER-y tangent: grown-up Erik seems to have an obsession with stopping bullets, deflecting bullets, even turning missiles back on those who fire them. The movie never needs a character to say that it’s because of the one he didn’t stop here. Good writing has faith in the work it does.)

Now Erik is grieving. Now Erik is enraged. A bell on Shaw’s desk crumples. Then a filing cabinet. Then the helmets of the guards – crushing their heads and killing them.

And now all those surgical tools on the wall start to rattle and fly. And for the second time in this really cracking scene, the room is transformed by storytelling. Suddenly, the dread is not what the Nazis could do to little Erik with that stuff. It’s what Erik could do to someone, anyone, who has hurt him, with all that lethal metal. As Rorschach best said it in Alan Moore’s Watchmen: “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with *ME*!”

But Shaw doesn’t react with fear – he’s delighted. Laughing. We just learned something about him – he’s either more of a maniac than we knew, or there is something about him we don’t know yet that makes him less afraid. Later we will find out both things are true.

Erik, the future Magneto, holds onto that coin. One of a hypnotist’s most basic tricks is to put a coin in their subject’s hands and tell them that, after they count down from 10, they will drop it. Erik carries this coin for a long time, and has planned meticulously the moment when he will let it go. His fatal flaw is to think it will have enough meaning to the person he became getting there.

The message Shaw has for that little boy is “I am going to take away your childhood and make you a weapon.” And the way the writers and director use that manipulation of environment, the introduction of an object that will become a talisman representing a volcanic emotion, and the mysterious, horrific behavior of a character who will obsess us the way he obsesses his creation, is an elegantly-constructed mount for a gem of a scene that dramatizes exactly that. That someone could do that to a child, and that it cannot be undone by kind words or Charles Xavier’s unwavering friendship, gives Erik Lensherr more dignity and pathos than most comic book villains could ever dream of.

That little scene gets that much right and more, and yet never feels dense or complicated. It never looks like it’s working that hard. That’s what good screenwriting does.