LEGION: Yourz/Mine/Ourz — Never Therez
This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
Introduced by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz in New Mutants #25, David Haller, our eponymous LEGION, encompasses the entirety of the X-Men universe’s possibilities. An anti-hero with more power than Charles Xavier, Legion’s split-mind-telepath combo allows David to acquire any mutant power as long as he can create a personality to compartmentalize it in his psyche, a showcase of the prejudice/empathy tug-of-war environment that endangers Marvel’s mutants. Cosmic entity, troubled young man, and supposed threat to mankind, Legion is fit for whatever storyline you can possibly imagine in the mutant-sphere. When Sienkiewicz joined New Mutants in issue #18, the art took on an expressionist style that rivals Ditko’s run with Doctor Strange in representing mystic and psychological experience on the page, five years before Sam Keith and Neil Gaiman’s Prelude and Nocturnes Sandman splash. The teen-soap-adventure became a psychological fantasy in the year of ’84, Illyana Rasputin’s arc from Gifted Youngster to Magus of Limbo leading into David Haller’s one-pager intro —
LEGION’s thematic thread is founded on the thrill and throes of that mental mess: Confusion. Nonlinear, driven by an increasingly unreliable narrator, Noah Hawley’s FX adaptation is a bouquet of New Mutants psychedelia. Its dense text makes for an hour of television that can be sifted through in repeat viewings, or with keen focus. Lucky for fans of all things trippy, its mind-meld-motive makes for great water-cooler conversation in between airdates and an unrelenting pace for those inclined to binge. We’re treated to multiple power-sets, District 3 Agents vs Mutants showdowns, a visit to the astral plane, and more than one dance sequence all in the first six episodes.
The Summerland Institute that seeks to train David in controlling his split-mind is doomed to disconnect. They are all without one another. Separate, separate, separate. That is how they stay safe. Syd has an antisocial personality disorder, incapable of physical contact, and David is schizophrenic, treated for dissociative identity disorder and autism as a child in the comics. When Xavier first tries to speak to the boy in New Mutants #26, the psionic wall David has built as a defense for his thoughts blasts the professor out of the astral plane and back into his body. David just laughs. In the most recent two episodes of the FX series (Spoilers Abound!) the yellow-eyed globulus man terrorizing David’s memories — at times in the guise of The World’s Angriest Boy, a paper-mached storybook apparition — was revealed to have been projecting itself as Aubrey Plaza’s Lenny/Benny, attached to David’s consciousness possibly since birth.
Panic manifests the parasite as an obese demon, peace brings it out as Lenny, and another reveal confirms Lenny isn’t his first imaginary friend. His sister Amy was quietly understanding throughout David’s childhood, doing her best with a teleporting, telepathic, telekinetic brother and his imaginary pet beagle, King. In that scene the comic fans heard bells ringing: Shadow King. The Shadow King, as Psychiatrist Lenny, tells Syd ‘feelings of separation, of difference from the rest of the world,’ are a byproduct of her disorder and not one of its inciting causes. The sort of mind manipulation you can try without mutant powers.
Inside the implicitly-fabricated, Shadow-King-Ruled Clockworks Mental Ward of Hiro Murai’s ‘Chapter Six,’ Amy Haller is a bullying employee of the facility, and Syd, perhaps David’s only other intimate relationship, is actively fighting against the mirage. Jeremie Harris’ memory artist, Ptonomy, trips around the subjective past in an interactive way reminiscent of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Cary and Kerry share a body. Telepath Melanie Bird, the Summerland matriarch, was abandoned by her husband for the astral plane, an existence within timeless subconscious, and the list of dysfunctional, codependent minds goes on.
Noah Hawley’s series posits that no “I” exists without “We,” as it’s the distinction between individual and collective which gives meaning to identity. A notion of self provides autonomy, and Claremont’s original vision for New Mutants was as much about political environments as it was about psychological spaces. Just ten issues out, still in their first volume, the New Mutants fall into the clutches of an authoritarian alien-queen, an evil government plot, and a Neo-Roman conspiracy before assisting Xavier in pulling his son out from the abyss of subconsciousness. The “war” Summerland says they’re training David for may not be what we expect it to be, it may turn out to be a war for David’s mind. Or District 3 is a very real antagonist and David oughta wake up soon, lest his fellow mutants end up government property. Most likely, it’s both.
Othered, categorized and hunted, the mutants are a group to be monitored and corralled. Safe spaces like Xavier’s school and the astral plane provide some respite, small slivers of tranquility to learn and grow and let You Do You. But the norm is covert persecution, hunted for their differences and branded by the top of the pyramid as a modern plague. Only in Noplace can they be just who they are.
During a game of prescription-med-checkers, Syd asks Kerry/Cary, ‘Do you notice the door in the hall? It’s not always there.’ In reply, Kerry asks, ‘So where is it? When it’s not there, I mean.’
Are you are confusing The Hall With a Door for The Hall Without, or is it really that you noticed it’s both, the Hall With & Without a Door…
Where were we?
For each mystery LEGION presents, answers matter more within the viewer’s psyche, within your/our particular perspective than they do as a form of fact. Emotional logic takes over plot and brings insight in the How and the What of that memory of yours/ours that was just triggered. A framing of mental health as internal and external battle, as Claremont and Sienkiewicz understood it. We know that we are as unreliable as the series’ characters and creative team, our past is an illusion of emotion just as David’s. That may feel like a flaw, but it takes an illogical creature to adapt to this illogical world. Free from your confines you may wonder about wondering. There must be some use to the useless bits inside me, and so the inquiry persists.
Looping around in your mind, bored/anxious, dissatisfied/eager, both and neither, you get sick of looping at all and ask aloud:
How do I change the way I change the way I feel?
