Radiolab - Mutant Rights

Episode Date: December 22, 2011

In this podcast short, a strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From.

W. N. Y.C. C. C. P. Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Epumran. I'm Robert Crilwich.

This is Radio Lab. Podcast. And today on the podcast, we're going to talk about containers. Well, no. Yeah. Why not? Well, because it's bigger than containers. It's categories.

Ugh. Because. It's like the boring. way, it's the boring word for containers. No, it's not at all boring. Taxonomy. Can we say that? Yes, you could, yes, this is a story about what goes where and what doesn't go there and what should

go there if you were only smarter about it. Ike, Sri Fankarazza, are you around? Yeah, that's what I want to talk about. So you have a story to tell us, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you tell us your story. Yeah. Set it up for us, Ike.

Well, let's start back in 1993. Okay. With two customs attorneys. I'm Sherry Singer. And my name is Indy Singh. Singer and Sing. Singer and Sing. And one day, the two of them are looking at this customs book called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule.

What was it called again? The Harmonized tariff. Harmonized today. He almost harmonized at the Harmonized tariff. It's this huge book, chock full of customs classifications. Meat products, milk products, vegetables. It's got everything in it. Literally thousands of provisions.

So they're flipping through this big book. And what they noticed that day is that, is that, In this book were the following words. Representing only human beings. They saw this fateful phrase right next to the word doll. Under the harmonized, a doll was something that represented only a human being. A doll represented a human being. Only a human being.

It could not be any other creature but a human being. So Barbie is a doll. Right, but here's the thing. In this big book, right next to dolls, is this whole other category called toys. Which covers. Things like monsters, robots, angels. Basically anything that isn't only representing a human.

So the dolls are human and the toys are not human. Yeah, and where it gets weird is that these two categories were being taxed differently. How? How differently? 12% for dolls and 6.8% for toys. Really, so getting a Barbie doll into the country would be more expensive than importing a transformer or something? Yeah. Why? I assume it was because there was a domestic industry.

A domestic doll industry. That wanted and needed protection. Do you think there was a powerful doll lobby? Anyhow, you got these two categories. You got these two ladies. And they have a client called Marvel Comics. Marvel Comics. This is the home of men with capes

and superpowers. Yes. And beautiful boots. Tights. Marvel, yes. What about Marvel? Well, Marvel Comics has this universe of action figures coming into our ports as dolls.

Wait. All their action figures were being classified as dolls? Everything was a doll. Yeah. A 12% rate of duty. And Sherry and Indy realized that there's a huge opportunity here. If they can convince the government to remove the Marvel action heroes

from the human-y-barby doll category and push them into the robot demon-y toy category? They can save a huge amount of money. We saw dollars. Tens of thousands of maybe hundreds of dollars. Thousands of dollars. She's 50 a million dollars. And then so.

More than a million dollars? Because they wouldn't be taxed as high. But this is about more than just business. This is about more than Saturday morning cartoons. This is about what it means. to be a human. What? What do you mean?

Well, think about it. They have to convince government officials that under U.S. law, these characters are not considered human. Oh, gastrously, really. So Sherry and Indy headed to customs. Customs headquarters. In D.C., with a giant bag full of superheroes. We actually went down there.

We had a meeting. We brought samples of all the items. You brought action figures, you mean? We did. We had 60 or 80 figures. And one by one. We tried to convince them that these figures do not represent a human being. And believe it or not, this meeting ended up in a series of court cases that went on for 10 years.

Ten years? Because where it got really complicated and interesting is when they got to Marvel's Crown Jewel, the X-Men. We really didn't even read the stories. Sherry and I were not familiar with comic books. Well, they should have. Because it's a great story. I mean, the story of X-Men is kind of about the next phase of human evolution. Regular parents having regular kids,

but some of these kids, around their awkward teen years, start to develop these strange mutant powers. So the story is humans who mutate it. Yeah. Well, that's what makes this so legally tricky. I mean, are these characters still human, or have they evolved somehow out of humanness into something entirely different? Now, the government says that all of the imported action figures, they are representations of human beings if they have things like a head, a mouth, eyes, nose, hair, arms, torso, breasts, muscles.

If you look at any of these guys, Cyclops, he has all the basic elements that are the government's definition of a human being. And what do you say? Well, eventually, to make their point, Sherry and Indy pulled out a blue furry guy that X-Men fans might know as Beast. We can look at Beast. This is one that we won early on. Well, he's called Beast. Even customs. But he has a head.

He has two arms. He has two legs. He does have those. He wears glasses. In response to Robert's comment. But you know, Beast in the X-Men storyline, he's a pretty, like, a sophisticated guys. They're like he's a thoughtful intellectual. Am I right, Ike? Yeah, you would be the first X-Men to quote Shakespeare to you. He quoted Shakespeare. He quotes Shakespeare. He quotes Shakespeare.

He knows so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And men in England now abed will count a manhood's cheap. So don't you think that puts him well down the human sort of bell curve? Well, in this case, our argument would be, is human being do not have blue skin. The judge agreed. It doesn't resemble a human being. That's a pretty safe argument. There are human beings who have blueish skin.

You should know. The beast is harder to fit into the mold of what we customarily know as human. That's Joe Liebman. He worked on the case for the government side. He has aspects that perhaps are closer to the monster. But it gets trickier. Take the most popular ax-man. Oh, who's that?

Wolverine. Wolverine. He's got muscular arms and legs. He puts on a coat and a flannel shirt and he's a logger. Sure. But the eyes, they just didn't look human. And that's what our basic... And the claws also.

And the claws. Metal claws. Razor-like adamantian claws. And in the story, a mad scientist implanted them in his arms under his skin. But that just means he's a guy who had a little augmentation. No? Well, he's developed something we don't know to... know to actually exist.

That does not mean... That it might not exist in future humans. In a world that we have not yet seen. Joe's basic point is, don't rule it out. He pointed to this runner, Oscar Pistorius. They call him the Blade Runner, the world's fastest man on no legs. The double amputee runner from South Africa

who wears prosthetic legs that some people claim actually increase his speed. Saying his prosthetics had more spring than human legs. And some people say he should be disqualified from competing against able-bodied humans. The body that governs track and field banned him from competition. Well, forget about augmentation. What if we're just talking mutation?

I mean, as a human, we have about 20,000 genes. And if one of them just gives you claws, that doesn't mean that the other 19,999 genes are keeping you pretty much in the human classification. I studied my undergraduate degree is in microbiology and biochemistry. So I know that we have mutations going on in our body constantly. So we're all mutants. But in common language and in science fiction, when you use the word mutant... She says you mean something or someone that's...

Disfigured... ...alian. That's no longer like us. So, colloquially, if Marvel calls the X-Men mutants, then... They're not human. On the Wolverine case, did you win or lose? We won. We won?

Well, how do you feel about this, like? I don't know. I'm kind of seeing red. No, but seriously, here's the thing. In the X-Men universe, all the X-Men are trying to do is fit into our world. I don't want to hurt you, Eric. I never did. To feel like a human being.

It's the truth. Marvel Comics has created this world where Mutants want to be treated like humans, and the government is persecuting them as monsters. But in the real world, it's exactly the opposite. You got Marvel saying they're monsters, and you got the government saying, no, let them be human. In the X-Men universe, humans are very often out to get the mutants,

dismissive the mutants, fearful of the mutants, liquidating them, experimenting on them. First of all, tell us who you are. I am Brian Singer. I'm a filmmaker. Brian directed a bunch of the X-Men movies. X-Men 1, X-Men 2, X-Men United. And he says all the movies at their heart are parables about living in a world where you don't fit,

where you're not the right category. In fact, the first X-Men film he directed, the U.S. government fears mutants so much that this U.S. senator puts forward legislation called the Mutant Registration Act. Mutants are very real, and they are among us. We must know who they are. And above all, we must know what they can do.

That us-them conflict is key to the entire saga. Well, yeah, and it's no coincidence that it was born during the height of the civil rights movement. Oh, so this is like, so this is modeled then on a civil, on a moment in world history, where people were trying to figure out how to either get along or not get along. Yeah, absolutely. And this tension plays out within the mutants themselves, where you have two groups, the X-Men, who choose to take the stance to, to defend a world that hates and fears them.

Don't give up on the marriage. And then you got this other group of mutants, led by Magneto. What would you have me do, Charles? And he doesn't have faith that humanity's ever going to embrace mutants. We are the future, Charles, not them. They no longer matter. He saw that what happens when you're different

is you get rounded up. Experimented on, eliminated. And you're gassed. It's interesting to hear you describe that. Because when I walked out of the most recent movie, I felt such a... such a strong, maybe a stronger connection with Magneto after you saw what he went through. Yeah, you see the intimate victimization of him and you root for him because he's ultimately

facing a monster. And when he was making these movies, he had that monster of intolerance and prejudice on his mind, and it was actually pretty personal to him. There's a photo album my family has, and it starts in the 20s. And I was looking through it, And I recognized the lineage. And then there were a few pages of just these portraits of different people. I didn't know who they were. And I said to my dad, I'm like, who are these people? And my dad goes, they're all gone.

They're the ones that are gone from Poland. They're just all gone. They're erased. There's no records. There's no property. There's no nothing. So he doesn't even know their name? No.

We just know that there are people that were part of the neighborhood and the family in the 30s that never left Poland like my grandparents did. and disappeared. Well, I know this sounds pretty heavy for a comic book, but over the years, the X-Men have been a stand-in for, well, first, the civil rights movement of the 60s, and most recently, the story works as an allegory for gay rights. In fact, in X-Men, too, we actually had a coming-out scene.

In the scene, this kid, Bobby Drake, he's hiding some of the X-Men in his parents' house. And then his parents come home and find him with these strangers. Aren't you supposed to be at school? Bobby, who is this guy? And he is full. basically to show his parents that he's a mutant. There's something I need to tell you.

Everyone takes a seat in the living room and Bobby using his special mutant powers. He freezes a little cup of coffee. And the parents react in panic. Bobby. And the mother actually says, Have you tried not being a mutant? Really? Like it's a choice.

We have to get to, we have to find, like, what the ultimate legal disposition of this case was. Yeah. So did they, did they, in the case? and say that these characters were human, or did they perpetuate this retail bigotry, I can say that they were non-humans? Do you guys really want to know? Yeah.

We have to know. We have to, come on. Yeah, exactly. Tell us. Non-humans. Ah. Seriously? Yeah.

Eventually the judge ruled that all Marvel heroes, not just the X-Men, are not human. Hmm. So Sherry and Indy one. We're not civil rights, though. So when you're having your nice meal after the case, and you don't feel at all that you have just robbed humanity from a whole population. No, we had absolutely no guilt at all, like none. Wow, well, thank you, Ike.

You're welcome, Jeff. That would be Ike-Swees-Kandaraja, our reporter on this story. We also had a fine producer. Matthew Kielty, who has just left us for greener past. Thank you, Matt. I am Robert Krollwitch. And I am Chadapumrad. And thanks for listening.

Whatever you may be. Message 1. Hi, this is Mary from Douglas, Wyoming. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Sloan.org. End of message.