Does This Remind You Of Anything / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

Examples of Does This Remind You of Anything? in live-action movies.

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• Lambert's Cruel and Unusual Death in Alien involves the sinewy tail of the Xenomorph sliding up between her legs, and then cutting to Ripley listening to Lambert's grunts of pain before cutting out. Given the film's infamous sexual overtones, the parallels with a rape scene were very likely intentional.
• All the Boys Love Mandy Lane contains a very dark example: the scene wherein Mandy murders Chloe is heavily sexualized.
• Curt Connors' use of the Lizard serum in The Amazing Spider-Man is very reminiscent of a drug addiction.
  Rhys Ifans: So in a sense, it's almost like what crystal meth would do to an addict, where you feel all powerful and almost a sense of hubris that you can do anything, and that for Connors becomes addictive. That's why he returns to being the Lizard, and guys who are on powerful drugs want everyone else to feel the same, regardless of its social benefits. They want everyone to feel that great, because they feel great.
• Annihilation (2018): When Lena runs for the door of the lighthouse, the way that the humanoid presses itself against her body from behind is disturbingly reminiscent of sexual assault.
• Aquaman (2018): Arthur's mother is Atlantean (who look like white humans), and his father is Maori. It's probably not just a coincidence that the prejudice toward their relationship (and him, as a "half-breed") mirrors real dislike of interracial relationships or people born from them.
• Art of the Dead: When Gina rapes Kim, we get a scene where the goat-demon is thrusting his tongue into Kim's mouth, with the implication that Gina is doing the same to Kim's other "mouth".
• Joseph Losey's The Assassination Of Trotsky has a long and extremely graphic bullfight sequence about halfway through the movie, witnessed by the character who ultimately assassinates Trotsky. Quite possibly the most unsubtle (and needlessly grotesque) bit of foreshadowing in cinema history.
• In Baby Doll, Silva sneaks into the house, finds a rocking horse in the nursery and raucously straddles it and hits it with his riding crop while "Shame, Shame, Shame" plays.
• Noni and Kid Culprit's disastrous BET performance in Beyond the Lights. To recap: The entire performance was already primed to be extremely sexual with Noni and Kid Culprit simulating sex on a bed on stage. But it begins to cross the line into dangerous territory when Noni, trying to shed off some of her sexual image, refuses to strip on-stage as was choreographed and maneuvers herself out from underneath Kid Culprit on the bed. He in turn furiously pushes her down several times and attempts to disrobe her much to hers and to some in the audience's shock. Continuing the performance, Noni slides down Kid Culprit's legs, only to have him hold her head down near his crotch, refusing to let her up even when she tries to get up several times. The performance ends with Noni publicly humiliated. The sexual assault imagery is so overt that By-the-Book Cop Kaz ends up punching Kid Culprit on stage on national television.
• Big Brother (2018): Zufa, the Token Minority (half-Pakistani and half-Hong Konger) wants to be a musician, and is subject to constant Police Brutality based on his skin colour. His actor is actually half-black (Nigerian and half Hong Konger) in Real Life.
• Bit: Duke's ideology bears a strong resemblance to some of the more extreme feminist views that largely flourished in The '70s (e.g. living entirely separate from men, or making them into the oppressed group). The director has said he drew on two of these, lesbian separatism and the SCUM Manifesto, as inspiration. Laurel on the other hand seems to represent more moderate, third wave views that reject this (as she's transgender, something these movements accepted more than second wavers, that can be symbolic as well, but Duke herself is completely accepting of her). That said, the film isn't wholly unsympathetic with why some women might go that far as a result of mistreatment, and Duke is consequently revealed as being a rape survivor who had been a Sex Slave for many years.
• Blood of the Tribades: The religion of Bathor is pretty clearly supposed to parallel Christianity, although specifically versions that have persecuted queer people and oppressed women, but also controversies over how much has been corrupted over time (or even if there are divinely-given scriptures at all). Plus of course the homophobia and misogyny that has been supported with religion generally.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy makes some flirtatious innuendos about Quincy's big "thing" - namely, his bowie knife.
• There was a scene in City Slickers where Mitch and Phil are talking about what seems to be impotence but they're really talking about using the VCR. And they've been at it for four hours.
• The Brother from Another Planet: The whole plot is an obvious allegory for American slavery/race relations, with the protagonist nearly indistinguishable from a Black human who has escaped slavery, while the two men after him are both identical to White humans. He even indicates this himself by pointing to the museum painting of a Black human slave then himself, showing they're the same. However, it turns out that skin color isn't the actual reason, but as his race has three toes.
• Children of Men:
  • The heroes are trying to smuggle a refugee (i.e. illegal immigrant) across the border and out of the country, and this ends up saving civilization as they know it (or so they hope).
  • The ads used to sell Quietus (the suicide pills) are deliberately meant to resemble antidepressant ads.
  • There's also the political situation in Great Britain, where the country responds to a national catastrophe by using a persecuted minority group as scapegoats and victimizing them with organized violence — ultimately rounding them up in prison camps.
  • When Miriam is pulled off the bus, The Libertines' "Arbeit Macht Frei" can be heard in the background. The song title translates to "Work will make you free", which was written above the entrance to Auschwitz.
  • As the bus drives away, the "hooded man" from Abu Ghraib prison can be seen in one of the cages, in the exact pose from the infamous torture pictures.◊
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers:
  • Dale has apparently gotten a "CGI surgery" to look more realistic, which is portrayed much like someone getting plastic surgery.
  • Monterey Jack's well-known cheese addiction is treated much more like a drug problem. In one scene, a bunch of animated mice are shown eating cheese in what appears to be the rodent equivalent of a crackhouse or opium den.
  • Sweet Pete's backstory (the former Peter Pan, who was let go after growing out of the role, unable to find work in Hollywood and eventually had several run-ins with the law) is eerily similar to the fate of Peter Pan's first voice actor, Bobby Driscoll.
• C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, an Alternate History where the South won the Civil War, features several false propaganda films supposedly from the Fifties that portray those favoring the abolition of slavery as evil ("Watch out, because your neighbor could be an Abby!"). Later in the Mockumentary there's another propaganda piece that asks "Have you now, or have you ever been, a homosexual?" Both are intended to be similar to the Red Scare fear of Communism.
• Colossal: The film revolves around a massive Kaiju's attacks in Seoul, which are eventually revealed to be due to the main character Gloria inadvertently puppeteering the creature while in her hometown (whenever she's stumbling home drunk each night after her latest bar crawl, the Kaiju perfectly mimics her gait and actions). Basically, the Kaiju's rampages are a visual metaphor showcasing how Gloria's addiction isn't just ruining her life, but it's also hurting the lives of everyone around her.
• Hoo boy, this exchange in Commando when John convinces Bennett (who looks like both a member of The Village People and Freddie Mercury) to let go of his daughter and have a knife fight with him.
  John: You don't want to pull the trigger. You want to put the knife in me and look me in the eye and see what's going while you turn it. That's what you want to do, right?
  Bennett: (with an orgasmic expression on his face.) I can kill you John.
  John: Come on, let the girl go, just between you and me, don't deprive yourself of some pleasure, come on Bennett, let's party!
  Bennett: I can beat you, I don't need the girl hahah, I DON'T NEED THE GIRL! I don't need the gun John. I can beat you. I DON'T NEED NO GUN! AND I'LL KILL YOU NOW!
  • The fights ends with John impaling Bennett on a long hard steam pipe, which continuously sprays out of the open tip,
• A classic example is from the late 80's comedy The Couch Trip where on a radio call-in show, John Burns (Dan Aykroyd) suggests to a man trying to overcome a problem with premature ejaculation, to imagine working on his car instead. His description of taking apart a transmission... well, if the caller had had the opposite problem, it would've helped.
• Cthulhu: The movie is basically the classic tale of a gay man rejecting his close-minded small town and its lifestyle and values. It's just that in this case, those small-town values include membership in an apocalyptic sea cult and churning out a few mutant kids.
• Daredevil (2003): The fight between Elektra and Bullseye was shortened due to the fact Bullseye was assaulting a woman and sexualizing violence. The end of the fight evokes a different feeling than what Bullseye intended. He grabs Elektra, keeps her close to his face as he attempts to kiss her. He manages to bite down on her lower lip and kiss her while gutting her, then viciously throws her away. Given how he finds her attractive and wanted to kiss her while mocking her moving her face away and how physically close he was despite how much she didn't want it come across less like the murder it was and more like Bullseye was out to rape Elektra. At the end, Elektra is shown crawling on all fours to Matt, gasping for air, near tears and asking for help, akin to a rape victim. Considering Bullseye is a sadistic psychopath, the idea he would rape Elektra if given the chance isn't far off.
• The Dark Crystal: After the Skeksis Chamberlain fails the Trial by Stone, the other Skeksis all pounce on him and start tearing his clothes off while he squawks in terror; re-watching this scene as an adult, it's pretty hard not to see this as essentially a G-rated gang rape (indeed, if the Skeksis had been more humanoid and the Chamberlain had been female, it's unlikely they could get away with putting such a scene in a kid's movie.)
• From The Dark Knight, when Joker falls out of his clown truck and Batman is driving towards him on the Batpod.
  "Come on, come on, I want you to do it, I want you to do it, come on, hit me..."
  • Which is echoing a similar scene from Batman (1989), this time with the Joker standing in front of his parade float and Bats in the Batwing. Then Joker pulls a rather long gun out of his pants as Batman comes ever closer to the climax of the film.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Caesar is thought to have died by most of the apes after Koba shoots him to frame the humans. His return to confront Koba is treated with almost religious awe. Additionally, Koba's shooting Caesar, destroying the ape colony and framing the humans to start a war bears similarities to conspiracy theories around 9/11 and the Second Gulf War.
• Daybreakers:
  • Society is running out of a resource that it needs to keep functioning. Those in charge of procuring it insist they can always find new supplies of it somewhere. At the same time, they are searching for an alternative more easily renewable resource, but have no plans to alter the selfish behavior that brought about this shortage in the first place. Society's last hope is a scientist who was never very happy with exploiting this resource in the first place and refuses to consume it himself. This movie certainly uses a lot of the classic tropes one finds in a conservationist movie with a Post-Peak Oil Green Aesop.
  • While reminiscent of peak oil and fossil fuel depletion in general, the human blood shortage is also reminiscent of any number of scarcity issues, corporate ethics issues, and the like. Maven of the Eventide noted in her video on the film that, ten years later, its metaphor is just as applicable to Global Warming, with the vampires' short-sighted destruction of vital resources quite possibly leading to their extinction.
  • Blood-deprived vampires turn into subsiders, and the non-deprived consider these Feral Vampires a threat. Of course, the reason the subsiders are starving is that they tend to be poor, homeless, outcast or otherwise "undesirable" members of society. The government decides on a Final Solution. At the hands of the military, the subsiders are hunted down, chained up and mass-executed by a death march into the sunlight, which reduces them to ash and smoke.
• Deadpool 2:
  • Russell Collins is a teenage mutant who despises the fact that everybody shuns him, attributing that to the fact that he's not only a mutant, but the only fat one among countless others that look like supermodels. He idolizes violent characters like Deadpool and Juggernaut, goes on a rampage in an institution full of minors twice and the main characters debate whether he should be given emotional support or treated like any other terrorist. He's essentially a superpowered school shooter. Deadpool even lampshades this, noting that Russel dresses like the Unabomber.
  • Additionally, there's Essex House, the "Mutant Reeducation Center" which takes in young mutants, tortures them into suppressing their abilities, and often uses God as a justification. Several reviewers have pointed out the similarities between Essex House and gay and transgender conversion therapy. Wade even derides the head of Essex House as a "pray the gay away" type at one point.
• District 9:
  • The Police Brutality perpetrated by the MNU soldiers, the "No Non-Human Loitering" signs◊, and even the title of the film itself are all decidedly unsubtle, with chilling effect.
  • Wikus turns to his coworkers drops a very telling line when Christopher points out that he's been served an illegal eviction notice and the MNU has no legal right to evict him and his child.
    Wikus: This one's a little smarter than the others, ya?
  • The MNU militant insignia shows a goat with two horns, two ears and an elongated beard that makes it look like a upside down star.
  • The shaven-headed Koobus seems very reminiscent of Neo-Nazis. Particularly the lines of how he "loved watching prawns die" and calling Wikus a "filthy half-breed". The actor deliberately gave Koobus an English accent and a loathing of Wikus (an Afrikaaner).
  • The aliens' drug-like addiction to cat food is based on a very common colonial occurrence: you find some substance the natives don't have (usually alcohol, caffeine, or sugar), get them hooked on it, and then make unfair deals with them that exploit their addiction.
  • The treatment Wikus receives from his fellow humans after the news media claims he's been infected with an alien STD recalls the social ostracism of people infected with HIV/AIDS.
  • The deplorable slum the prawns live in was an actual slum at the time, and continues to be a staple of South Africa.
  • The alien language incorporates clicking sounds in a similar fashion to many African peoples, such as the Bantu.
  • In a non-racial example, some critics have observed that the prawn guns tend to fry and explode people in a way that's very similar to...well, a bug zapper.
• Doctor Sleep:
  • There's a lot of unsettling pedophilia undertones for any scene involving the True Knot hunting for/abducting children with the Shine so they can feed.
  • During the climax of the film as Rose tortures Dan and feeds on his Shine, the scene is shot to be reminiscent of a rape scene complete with looks of near-orgasmic ecstasy for the former and terrified defiance for the latter.
• Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood features gangsta Loc Dog receiving a package of white powder from his friend, promising him that he'll get some when it's ready. Loc then measures, tests, and puts the powder in an apparatus on the stove. Of course at the end of the scene, it's shown that he's not processing heroin but rather baking a tasty cake instead.
• The Split-Screen Phone Call between Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger in Down with Love has a strong amount of sexual innuendo.
• In one version of Dracula, Jonathan cuts his finger while dining with the Count, who gets a little too... excited about this and wants to suck Jonathan's finger.
• In Dragnet (the 1987 movie) there is this bit:
  Connie Swail: (who has just been rescued from becoming a virgin sacrifice) How come his is so much bigger than yours?
  Officer Joe Friday: Miss?
  Connie Swail: The gun.
  Officer Joe Friday: I've never needed more.
• In Drop Dead Gorgeous, Tammy's lines about rides on her tractor sound a lot like describing sex. She even has a smoke afterwards, which becomes a plot point.
• Played for Laughs in the opening credits of Dr. Strangelove, where romantic music is played over footage of planes refueling in mid-air, making it seem like a bizarre porn movie.
• Earth Girls Are Easy: Two girls are quite eager in wanting to take Wiploc (a.k.a. a gender-inverted Green-Skinned Space Babe) home once they see what he can do with his tongue. Also, the final shot of the movie is the long, slim spaceship flying through a donut-shaped space object.
• Elysium:
  • The film has an impoverished and overcrowded Los Angeles with a primarily Spanish-speaking population trying desperately to get to the place where all the wealth and resources seem to be concentrated. The mostly white, English-speaking population of the wealthy land are aggressively trying to keep the masses of non-citizens at bay. It's all a metaphor for immigration.
  • The movie also mirrors the "white flight" pattern seen in many American cities: minorities move into a city, causing middle- and and upper-class whites to move to the suburbs, and when minorities start moving to the suburbs, whites move to further suburbs. The logical conclusion to this is for the upper class to build their own space station..
• Extinction (2018): One of the flashbacks shows human demonstrators chant "You will not replace us", aimed at the androids. This is almost the exact same chant used by neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the nighttime rally they held, except it was "Jews will not replace us", based on their claim of a Jewish plot to replace "Aryans" with blacks, Latinos and others. Perhaps not coincidentally, the leads here are Latino and Jewish.
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
  • America has outlawed wizard-nomajs relationships both as friendships and marriages, something that Europeans like the British find outrageous. This is very similar to what happened in real life, like the fact that the US had segregation laws that made marriages between different races illegal, and though friendships were not illegal, considering the segregation of everything (bars, churches, workplaces, schools) it was pretty hard to socialize with other races. Europeans, with some exceptions, didn’t have similar laws and this practice was seen as barbaric in many countries of Europe.
  • When Newt and Porpentina are about to be executed by the American magical government, the method of choice is a chair floating in a room above a silvery magical substance which seems to be inspired in part by the Pensieve, since it shows memories of the soon-to-be victims as a means of easing them into it. Pensieve comparisons aside, it also resembles two historical methods of execution, both of them applying to the setting: first off, it's a chair explicitly used for execution, just like the electric chair which was the method of choice in America for decades; second, it resembles dunking, a means of forcing confessions out of accused witches in historical periods when they were actively persecuted.
  • The way "Graves" manipulates Credence by showing him affection and promising he'll teach him how to be a wizard is highly reminiscent of child grooming/predation, even though Credence is in his mid-twenties. There's even a deleted scene where he takes Credence to dinner and gives him a flower.
• In The Fly (1986), Seth's slow and horrific transformation into something not entirely human was intended by David Cronenberg as an allegory for growing old: Seth loses his hair and teeth, his skin becomes discoloured and lumpy, and he eventually struggles to walk and eat solid food. Many other critics and fans saw the gradual deterioration of Seth's condition as a disease - most notably cancer and AIDS, it was The '80s after all.
• An early scene in French Cancan has showman Danglard and his newest starlet Nini visit a dance teacher to create a new version of the cancan. When they arrive at the studio, the dancers lounging around in their underwear look more like hookers than hoofers.
• In Girl with a Pearl Earring the scene where Johannes Vermeer pierces Griet's ear for her as well as touching her lips is symbolic of her losing her virginity as well as the scene where he sees her hair (it's played like he saw her naked).
• In the first "God's Not Dead" movie, Ayisha gets kicked out of the house by her father for converting to Christianity and in the sequel, Martin would also be rejected by his father for being a Christian. Intentional or not, it's still ironic how a Christian movie is using a "certain" metaphor about teens coming out to their parents, only be be disowned by them.
• Godzilla:
  • The original film: Considering Ishir⁠ō Honda directed this film and its screenplay, there are several references to Japan's experience in the aftermath World War II and the incoming Cold War:
    • The Eiko Maru blowing up in the beginning is a direct reference to the nuclear incident that occurred earlier in the year, when the US Castle Bravo test detonated a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific and the Lucky Dragon 5 fishing boat got caught in the radiation burst by accident.
    • Godzilla himself is not just a metaphor of the atomic bomb (or nuclear weapons in general), but also a living nuclear weapon. A rather sad part, Godzilla in the climax is treated as the monster itself is innocent, since it experienced the aftershock of the nuclear weapons that gave the monster its powers as much as Japan did. In essence, not only is Godzilla a metaphor for nuclear weapons, he's a victim of it.
    • The exchange with Ogata and Dr. Yamane when Ogata agrees with the army to kill Godzilla because of him being a reminder of the atomic bombings. The generation that survived 9 years ago were haunted by the aftermath of the bomb and its horrors at the time (hence stories such as Barefoot Gen did not pull punches on the subject as Keiji Nakazawa survived the atomic bomb that killed his family). Unfortunately, Yamane doesn't take it well with Ogata's decision, and kicks Ogata out of his house.
    • The fire raids. Those of you don't know about the fire raids, look it up.
    • A couple complains about using bomb shelters should Godzilla come again. The majority of the generation of that era would most likely be survivors during the time when US air raids were common during World War II.
    • After Godzilla's raid in Tokyo, the aftermath itself looks as it it was hit by an actual atomic bomb, with scenes of crowded hospitals filled with the dead and dying, children and patients coming into contact with Godzilla to indicate they will die of radiation poisoning. Considering who made this film, Toho's depiction of the aftermath is actually tame compared to graphical works that depicts the detonation of a nuclear weapon, such as Barefoot Gen.
  • Godzilla vs. Hedorah: At one point Hedorah is hanging out by a factory, leaning over the smokestacks and sucking up the smoke and pollutants. And he closes his eyes in bliss while nodding a little. Duuuuuuuude...
  • Rebirth of Mothra: Mothra's roars and sounds when she's laying her eggs is reminiscent of a woman screaming during childbirth.
  • Godzilla (2014): In similar spirit to Gareth Edwards' earlier film Monsters (2010), the scenes of destruction left in the Kaiju's wake and how they're constructed with emergency services, camps and displaced survivors bring to mind the aftermath of Real Life natural disasters. Adding to the effect is that all the major urban locations the Kaiju wreck (Japan, Hawaii and San Francisco) are known for being hotspots of earthquakes or tsunamis and having infamous large-magnitude disasters of those types happen there at some point after 1900.
  • Shin Godzilla:
    • Whereas the original film was an allegory of the then-recent Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident (and obviously by extension, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), this movie is an allegory for the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster that happened in 2011. The anti-nuclear weapons moral is still preserved in this film, however.
    • The title monster's tail's shape, length, glowing red veins, and beam that fires from it make it astoundingly phallic. The film's final shot implies it to literally be a reproductive organ.
    • On a more terrifying note, Godzilla's scars, shriveled arms and body, and other deformities makes him look like as if he was hit by a nuclear bomb. In Japan, survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave a rather sickening description of people that were hit by the bomb with that exact description, called "Ant-Walking Alligator people".
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): This film mainly uses the Kaiju and humanity's relationship with them as an allegory for humanity's relationship with nature and Global Warming.
    • Monarch are talking to the United States senate about how humanity's current course of action is unsustainable, and for the sake of their own species' survival they must change their ways to coexist with the Titans instead of trying to destroy or dominate them; yet every serious argument they're making for Titan coexistence is clearly just going in one ear and out the other ear in the senate. Political attitude to global warming, anyone?
    • Ghidorah, the one Titan who actively threatens to destroy humanity and render the world inhospitable for most other complex life, is not only released from Antarctica as a consequence of the ice fields being destroyed, he also seeks to destroy the world by creating a global Natural Disaster Cascade which includes tsunamis, wildfires and Ghidorah's own spreading storm systems — all of which are Real Life escalating symptoms of anthropogenic climate change which ultimately threaten to make the Earth inhospitable to both humanity and most other existing life. In fact, the novelization specifically states that Ghidorah's apocalypse is essentially the same as the Global Warming process that humanity was already causing but massively sped up.
    • A news article in the Creative Closing Credits mentions there's a minority among the population who remain firmly entrenched in their anti-Titan sentiments despite evidence of the Titans' relationship with the Earth's ecology now being "insurmountable" and refuse to believe it, now being called "Titan-deniers" after public opinion on the Titans has shifted towards the positive; just like Real Life climate change denialists who remain ignorant of the increasingly irrefutable evidence that Global Warming is both real and a serious problem.
  • Godzilla Minus One
    • The depiction of Godzilla's Atomic Breath attack, particularly the charging sequence: in addition to Godzilla's spines glowing blue, they also visibly protrude from his back. Godzilla has been described as essentially having a nuclear reactor for a heart, making the appearance of his spines jutting out reminiscent of control rods being pulled out of a nuclear reactor.
    • The destruction of Ginza concludes with Godzilla firing his Atomic Breath at a tank battalion, creating a massive nuclear explosion on impact. The enormous explosion, the city-flattening shockwave and subsequent vacuum, the resultant mushroom cloud, and the pitch-black ash-mixed rain that followed are all evocative of the destruction following the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• In Hail, Caesar!, one of the main characters is a studio executive in The Golden Age of Hollywood being headhunted by an aviation firm. The recruiter tries to entice him to leave by telling him that television has made movies obsolete and the entire film industry will collapse within five years, reflecting similarly inaccurate claims made in the late 00's and early 2010's that the internet and streaming would kill television.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has a certain scene in which Lord Voldemort and Harry scream and groan in some very suggestive ways. Especially if it is heard without the video.
  • It's even preceded by this line:
    Voldemort: (...) no matter, no matter. Things have changed. I can touch you now!
  • The same movie contains a scene of the imposter of Mad-Eye Moody beginning to rummage like crazy through his shelves, pushing glass bottles aside and obviously frantically searching for something. It's the polyjuice potion, to keep his appearance up, but to anyone who knows the behavior of an alcoholic searching for booze, this scene was a great depiction of it.
  • Where the books went the route of making the Death Eaters look like stereotypical Dark Wizards, with baggy hooded robes and masks, the fourth film modified the outfits a bit to replace their hoods with pointed hats, making the parallel between them and the Ku Klux Klan unmistakable.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince gives us Felix Felicis, a luck potion that apparently makes Harry behave like he was high.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 has an incredibly creepy scene where Bellatrix Lestrange tortures Hermione by carving "Mudblood" into the younger woman's arm. From a distance, the scars look disturbingly similar to how minority groups were given tattoos on their arms by the Nazis when sending them into concentration camps during The Holocaust.
• Help!: John's line, "No doubt about it, we're risking our lives to preserve a useless member!" (In context, it's about Ringo's ring finger, which isn't necessary to his drumming but which he refuses to part with; taken with the Running Gag of Ringo's reputation, it sounds as if the line is meant to refer to Ringo himself as the useless member of the band.)
• In High School Musical 2, after a rather homoerotic dance number posing as a baseball game, Chad and Ryan talk about Ryan's "game". Meanwhile, Ryan is playing with a baseball in his hand, and Chad is quite enthusiastically shaking a ketchup bottle◊. Yeah. Oh, and, they're wearing each other's clothes, with no explanations as to how or why.
• The Host (2006): The film deliberately evokes the SARS crisis, bird flu, and the Agent Orange bioweapon.
• Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person takes much humor from Sasha's vampire situation being a more extreme reflection of mundane human issues:
  • The prologue were Sasha's parents are told about her "issues" is clearly a mockery of parents having a young child diagnosed as neurodivergent. The parents different reactions are also typical: her mother wants to have her committed to solve the "problem" while her father is more accepting and tries to shelter her to a fault.
  • The scene were Sasha first takes home Paul and tries to bite him is obvious a parody of a teenager bringing home a boyfriend to have sex for the first time, with her inability to erect her fangs being a gender flipped parody of erectile dysfunction. Denise reaction to them coming is her house is not dissimilar to an older, experienced sibling being pleasantly surprised that their little sister will get laid.
  • Denise being stuck with JP is not dissimilar to someone getting knocked up by mistake and ending up having to take care of the baby.
• The Hunger Games: There are constant reminders of the influence of reality television on the setting, such as the sponsors and need to "play to the audience" for the sake of ratings.
  • The District 11 riots resemble the Civil Rights put downs.
  • District 11 in general looks a lot similar to plantations from the Pre-Civil War era. The only difference is that they're threatened with death instead of just lashes.
• The scene in Independence Day where Jimmy Wilder (Harry Connick Jr.) bends down on his knee to grab a wedding ring that fell on the floor, accidentally dropped by Captain Hillier (Will Smith). A fellow pilot walks into the men's locker room to see Wilder on one knee, making it look like he's proposing to his best friend.
• Little Red Riding Hood is known as a cautionary fairy tale - and the scene between her and The Wolf in Into the Woods has a definite pedophilia edge to it.
• Jennifer's Body: Jennifer's abduction by Low Shoulder has some extremely rapey overtones. They take advantage of her shock at the bar burning down to ply her with drink, bundle her into their van, and drive off into the woods. During the journey, a terrified Jennifer even outright asks if they're rapists, and doesn't get a straight answer. Afterwards, her behavior is noticeably different, with inappropriate emotional outbursts (in this case, demonic possession, but this is also a sign of trauma). Needy must then watch everyone venerate and adore the men she knows did something horrible to her friend. Later on Jennifer recounts what happened to Needy, how they tied her down helplessly as she'd very obviously feared they'd rape her. It turns out they had even worse in store though.
• In Jewel Robbery from 1932, the Robber gives a security guard a “funny” cigarette that when smoked makes the guard giggle and ramble incoherently. He also mentions that the guard will wake up with a good appetite in the morning.
• According to Entertainment Weekly's review of The Jonas Brothers' 3-D concert movie, there's one part where the brothers spray foam at the audience — out of a hose. The reviewer only hopes that the target audience doesn't see the symbolism in this.
  • "That's great, boys. You like taking the Jonas Brothers' hot foam in your face, girls?"
• King Kong (1933): A savage is taken to America in chains, threatens a white woman and causes mayhem in the city. Some people see a racist subtext here.
• In the 1942 melodrama Kings Row, town ladykiller Drake McHugh (Ronald Reagan) is injured in a train accident and both of his legs are amputated. Amputated by the disapproving father of the virginal girl he's engaged to. The legs just might be standing in for another part.
• In Maleficent, the titular character is drugged by someone she believed was a friend, then mutilated in her sleep, which pushes her over the Despair Event Horizon. She was effectively date-raped on screen. This is a metaphor which Angelina Jolie states was entirely intentional.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man, Tony Stark is trying to unsuit himself...
    Tony: Hey! Ow, ah, ah!
    Jarvis: It is a tight fit, sir.
    Tony: (pained grunting)
    Jarvis: Sir, the more you struggle, the more this is going to hurt.
    Tony: Be gentle. This is my first time.
    • Tony's line when Pepper shows up immediately following the previous exchange sold the scene:
      Tony: Let's face it. This is not the worst thing you've caught me doing.
  • In The Avengers (2012), Loki tries to brainwash Tony Stark with his very long staff, but fails due to Tony's arc reactor protecting his heart.
    Loki: (a confused and frustrated look upon his face) This usually works!
    Tony: Well, performance issues? It's not uncommon. One out of five...
    • Also in that film, given it's about New York suffering massive damage from an unexpected attack, there are clear parallels with 9/11, especially the post-battle reports. There is also a building collapsing like the Twin Towers after a Leviathan goes through it, and a scene set inside an office building where the people panic seeing a Leviathan - which is an aircraft - approaching the window (though the scene features the relief of the Hulk racing through the cubicles to the rescue).
    • The scene where Iron Man lets go from the nuclear bomb he's redirecting towards the Chitauri headquarters resembles how fuel tanks detach during the launch of the Space Shuttle.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Given The Avengers was "super-villainous 9/11", this film's events are the equivalent of the PATRIOT Act, plus the NSA Sinister Surveillance controversy starting from Edward Snowden's leaks of NSA documents in 2013. It even comes complete with WikiLeaks, as Black Widow uploads S.H.I.E.L.D./HYDRA's databases online. Additionally, the Insight Helicarriers are essentially Predator drones on steroids.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: invoked "Peace in our time." Said once by Tony Stark, three times by Ultron - once by replaying a recording of Tony saying it. When Steve dresses down Tony for trying to "win a war before it starts", he's not just talking about Project Insight - he's talking about the horrors he fought before he went into the ice. He's remembering all the fates that were sealed by Neville Chamberlain making a decision for everyone else; "Peace for our time," a year before Hitler invaded Poland.
  • In Thor: Ragnarok, when the brothers finally find Odin with Doctor Strange's help... and he seems so out of it, almost as if he doesn't even recognize his sons at first, is unresponsive to what they're saying, and talking about their long deceased mother... it easily plays out like he's succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, and is one of the most heart-wrenching moments in the film, if not the franchise.
  • Overlapping with Internal Deconstruction, in a weird sense the character arc of Thanos the Mad Titan in Avengers: Infinity War (as pointed out here by Bob Chipman) has him he basically goes through a mirrored version of the MCU's typical Hero's Journey within a single film: He gets an epic introduction that serves as an effective Establishing Character Moment for himself, an origin story, a backstory, pathos, psychological depth, gets to make his case, goes through an arc, forced to make a difficult choice, gets multiple "all is lost" moments where his goal is seemingly thwarted, he gets (from his perspective) exactly the happy ending he wanted on his own terms, and even goes through the MCU's typical pattern of having the hero fight against villains who are in some way deliberate Foils/Mirror Characters to them — i.e., both Doctor Strange and Iron Man are people with huge egos that want to control the world to protect it, Thor, Scarlet Witch, and Star-Lord are also all people who have lost their homes and families and childhoods, and his adopted daughter Gamora is self-explanatory.
  • In Ant-Man and the Wasp, when Scott and Hope meet Bill Foster to discuss the Goliath project, Foster says his record height was 21 feet. Scott smugly says he reached 65 feet. An exasperated Hope then asks if they're done comparing sizes.
  • The Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel (2019) excuses the Kree Empire's genocidal ambitions towards the innocent Skrulls by deriding them as "terrorists" and "potential security threats", sounding evocative of the racist language used in bigoted Western policies to target Middle Easterners both during and following the War on Terror. Additionally, their More than Mind Control methods utilized for keeping Carol Danvers under the thumb of the Kree are all textbooks examples of gaslighting.
• The Matrix: Those familiar with Buddhism and Gnosticism will find similarities in the plot with the idea of the world we see being an illusion that blinds us to the true reality. Neo is also similar to Buddha or Christ with this context.
  • During the interrogation scene in the first film, Neo has his shirt ripped open, is held down as he struggles and is unable to speak as something is forcefully entering his body against his will.
  • In The Matrix Resurrections "Tiffany" expresses discomfort about her name, even though as far as she knows, it's the name that she's had all her life, and notes that even though she's a mother, she's unsure if this is something that she personally wants or if she's just doing what she's expected to. When she awakens to her true identity as Trinity, she no longer makes any secret of how much she hated being called "Tiffany", similar to a trans person despising a deadname; in this regard, her struggles with the idea of motherhood also parallel how a trans person might struggle with social expectations that prescribe what someone of their assigned sex "should" want from life. And on a completely different note, the film's finale, where the heroes must evade a massive swarm of bots on the streets of the Matrix is highly reminiscent of a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Probably the reason why The Miracle of Morgan's Creek had so much trouble with The Hays Code is because the plot is basically a satire on the Nativity story.
• Max drank about nine milkshakes with several party goers cheering him on in Max Keeble's Big Move in a manner that is very reminiscent of a binge drinking contest.
• Monsters. An unwanted bunch of aliens from Mexico are constantly attempting to cross the US border and actually succeeding despite a giant fortified wall being put in place to stop them. You've got the American immigration controversy.
• In Monte Carlo, Count Rudolph (disguised as a hairdresser) insists on giving Countess Helene a scalp massage despite her protests. She starts out by saying, “No, no, no, no!” and progresses to rapturous moans of “Oh, that feels good … Ohh! Oh, that feels even better.”
• Similar to Girl with a Pearl Earring, in Moonrise Kingdom, Suzy yelps when Sam is the first to penetrate her... earlobe, with a fishhook.
• Mr And Mrs Smith: Multiple times, the film intentionally parodies some of the more awkward beats in a married relationship by having them intersect with the main characters both having double lives of being assassins.
  • John returning home from a hit is reminiscent of a cheating husband returning home after an affair. He drives home quietly, puts his wedding band back on, and picks at the red on his collar (though it's blood instead of lipstick).
  • While interrogating their target, the couple argue as if they're disagreeing on how to raise a child. At one point, John even says "Can we not argue in front of the target? It sends mixed signals."
  • The conversation when the titular couple are discussing how many people they've killed plays out like they're discussing previous sexual partners.
    John Smith: How many? Ok... I'll go first, then. I don't keep exact count, but I'd say, uh, high 50s, low 60s. I mean, I know I've been around the block and all, but...
    Jane Smith: 312.
    John Smith: (surprised) 312? How?
    Jane Smith: (semi-sheepishly) Some were two at a time.
• In Muppets from Space, the scene where Gonzo talks about being an alien sure sounds an awful lot like coming out of the closet...
• In New Moon, one of the wolf pack's wives gets her face nearly clawed off because she made her wolfman angry. But she forgives him, and acts like it never happened, because that's what good women do. Implications abound whether or not this is meant to be taken literally (and with Stephenie Meyer's writing, who can say?)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984):
  • There's a scene with Nancy in the bath with her legs stretched out and Freddy tries to attack her by reaching a hand up out of the water in between her legs and then pulling her down trying to drown her while laughing.
  • Tina's death visually evokes a rape.
• No God, No Master: The promotional materials bring up a lot of parallels that the First Red Scare (1919-1920) had with The War on Terror-attacks by one fringe group sparking a massive government crackdown, including raids and arrests which had sketchy legality (however those arrested were deported, not detained, after being held on prison ships in dock), most of people with no evidence they had committed any crime (it helped inspire the American Civil Liberties Union's formation) who'd immigrated to the US.
• Pacific Rim:
  • invoked After their first spar (which mostly focuses on their mutual excitement, breathless shouts of exertion, and flushed bodies moving against one another), Raleigh is more convinced than ever that he and Mako are meant for each other... as Jaeger co-pilots. According to Word of God, the implications were intentional.
    Raleigh: We're compatible! You felt it too, right?
  • The Kaiju are ranked by category, from Category 1 (easily trounced by Jaegers) to Category 5 (virtually unstoppable). This is the same way that Real Life hurricanes and tornadoes are rated, playing up how Kaiju assaults are more like natural disasters than giant monster attacks. This is even lampshaded by Raleigh at the beginning of the movie:
    Raleigh: Some things you can't fight. Acts of God. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way. But when you're in a Jaeger, suddenly, you can fight the hurricane. You can win.
• In The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists short 'So You Want to be a Pirate': "I just love long, hard things that go boom!" (referring to a cannon).
• When Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End calls the brawling Pirate Court to order, he steps onto the table with a pistol in one hand and, curiously, chain shot in the other. During his speech, we get a shot of Jack peering through his legs, where you can clearly see a pair of huge, cast-iron balls.
• Plan B: Pablo develops a very close relationship with Bruno that he doesn't tell his girlfriend about. He says that it's because Bruno is like a twelve-year-old friend that he doesn't want to share with anyone else, but the parallels between their relationship and a closeted gay/bi man having a secret affair with another man are unmistakable, especially considering that the film was directed by a gay man and Pablo and Bruno's friendship does eventually become romantic/sexual, although not until after both men have broken up with the girl they were originally pursuing.
• Pleasantville:
  • Not that the movie's subtle about its parallels with a cultural revolution. The signs discriminating against non-monochrome people even read "No Coloreds".
  • The scene where Bud and Margaret are in Lovers' Lane. She tempts him into eating a red apple. Now what biblical story involves a woman handing a man a certain Forbidden Fruit?
  • The still-grey people of Pleasantville burning books.
  • The Chamber of Commerce's logo seems vaguely menacing (reminiscent of fascist symbols), especially coupled with the angry atmosphere when it meets later. It starts invoking the Red Scare (appropriately for a '50s based show) with their quite repressive Code of Conduct which bans all art or music they feel goes against Pleasantville's traditions, and also the Kangaroo Court-like trial later. They also mandate that history textbooks not teach any "changeist" view, which seems like an allegory of the anti-evolution efforts during the early 20th century.
• In Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, gun obsessive Eugene Tackleberry loses his virginity, for which he and his equally gun obsessed girlfriend have to take their guns out of their holsters etc and put them on the floor. As they do, the lights go off, and but a moment or two later a gunshot is heard.
• Sir Ian McKellen's film version of Richard III. The setting is established right off as 30s Europe. Sure, why not? Then we come to Richard's coronation scene... and down come the long, red banners with his black-and-white emblem and fervent background chanting. Oh, right.
• In French crime films of the 1950s, e.g. Rififi, it is common for the protagonist to have spent four or five years in jail. There is a critical consensus that this is a reference to the German occupation of France in World War Two.
• RoboCop 2 has one moment of dissonant sensual stillness, when the main villain Cain meets his former lover Angie in the midst of a warehouse massacre. They pause and she holds one of his mechanical limbs, sighing erotically as she caresses a groove in his closed pincer claw. Cain seems into it, until he realizes he'll never feel pleasures of the flesh again (being a brain in a robot) and he summarily grabs Angie by her head and snaps her neck in frustration.
• In Saving Private Ryan, some people have pointed out that Pvt. Mellish's Nightmare Fuel death via being physically overpowered and pinned to the floor and very slowly stabbed with his own knife while his sweaty German attacker leans in close enough for a kiss and shushes and whispers for Mellish to stop struggling and just let it happen, resembles a rape scene.
• In The School for Good and Evil (2022), after Sophie's make-over, Tedros looks at her, and his finger starts to glow, which he is clearly embarrassed about and fumbles to hide. Since the Dean's just explained this happens with strong feelings, it isn't hard to assume they allude to a boner.
• The song "Breakin' Out" in Shock Treatment plays over scenes of Brad escaping from the asylum. But listen to the words, and it seems to be about another kind of coming out entirely...
• Spartacus had the scene where General Crassus is being bathed by his slave, and he begins to enquire about the slave's appetites... for oysters or snails, that is. Crassus goes on to argue that preference is nothing more than that, and not liking "oysters" is not a moral failing, but a matter of taste.
  Crassus: My taste includes both snails and oysters.
• Smoke Signals: Just replace "seats" with "land" during the scene when the two Native American protagonists find their bus seats have been stolen by two racist white men.
  Thomas: Um, excuse me? These are our seats.
  Man: You mean these were your seats.
  Victor: No, that's not what he means.
  Man: Now listen, these are our seats now. There ain't a damn thing you can do about it.
• Spectre: In this James Bond film, Max Denbigh/C, the person who was hired by SPECTRE in reality as part of Ernst Stavro Blofeld's strategy to destroy 007, constantly questions the relevance of spies in a post-Cold War world and advocates the use of Attack Drones and mass surveillance to M, 007's boss. This is reminiscent of Rogue Agent Janus/Alec Trevelyan belittling 007 for clinging on to outdated ideals in GoldenEye.
• The Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • Peter Parker's problem with, ah, "shooting blanks" in Spider-Man 2.
  • Spider-Man and Mary Jane's first kiss in Spider-Man? You know, the one where he's hanging upside down in the rain...
  • Depending on the audience, the following dialog might lead to snickers.
    Peter: Picking up where we left off.
    Mary Jane: Where was that? We never got on. You can't get off if you don't get on, Peter.
  • How about it in Spider-Man 3?
    Spider-Man: (pinning Venom down) You have to take off this suit!
    Venom: You'd like that, wouldn't you?
• Starship Troopers 3: Marauder: The face of the peace movement becomes Elmo Gonif, a wounded veteran who's in a wheelchair, wearing the metals he earned at protests, bearing a strong resemblance to the anti-war Vietnam veterans like Ron Kovic who'd done the same thing. He even has a similar beard and style to his clothing like many did.
• Like their TV series, The Star Trek films love to do this:
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a big, honkin' allegory about the end of the Cold War. It starts off with the horrible disaster on the Klingon moon Praxis, (not in Chernobyl); which forces the Klingon Empire, (not the Soviet Union) to reach out to the Federation (not the West). Conservative hard-liners then kill (not attempt to kill) Gorkon (not Gorbachev) for his trouble. From there, it diverges a bit from actual history, but you get the picture.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness: The Federation suffers a major attack on Earth, and the leaders of Starfleet, specifically Admiral Marcus, try to turn this into a war against the Klingons, who didn't have anything to do with the attack. Then Marcus orders Kirk to kill a terrorist by shooting photon torpedoes at the Klingon homeworld instead of bringing him in for trial. Real subtle, guys.
    • Kirk's ending speech, where he says "There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves.", can get interpreted as a refutation of both the War on Terror and the Darker and Edgier direction that the Star Trek franchise and sci-fi genre as a whole have taken in recent years.
  • Star Trek Beyond: Krall's Social Darwinist rhetoric bears a strong resemblance to that of the Nazis, no doubt on purpose. This may be ironic given that he turns out to be a black man. The good guys get this too, oddly, with Scotty illustrating Federation doctrine that strength comes from unity with the "fasces" symbol (a bundle of sticks is stronger than one) that was used by the Italian Fascists and inspired their name (of course, they are hardly the only ones who said this).^note The actual Nazis and Fascists said both things, in fact. Struggle was good between nations or races, but unity was also a strength within as well.
• Star Wars:
  • The Dark Side. Feels good while you're using it, but ultimately ruins your life as you lose yourself and everyone you love.
  • The Prequel Trilogy is rife with political double meanings.
    • The Separatist Council is made up mainly of corporate lobbyists who care more about their profit than the Republic they swear allegiance to. Hm...
    • The Separatists' official name is the "Confederacy of Independent Systems", and their mission statement is to secede from a Republic which they see as denying them "economic privileges." Certainly sounds a lot like a real-world confederacy whose attempted secession sparked a bloody war...
    • And finally, there's this gem from Revenge of the Sith:
      Padmé Amidala: So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.
  • The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren interrogating an abducted Rey while the latter is tied down and in obvious terror and pain has more than a few parallels with a rape scene. There's also a lot of uncomfortable fascist imagery around the First Order, with Hutz's New Era Speech being intentionally evocative of Triumph of the Will; according to J.J. Abrams, the main inspiration he had for the First Order was Nazis fleeing to Argentina after the Second World War and then re-gaining a power base.
  • The Last Jedi: The scene where Luke walks in on Kylo Ren and Rey holding hands via their Force Bond plays out very similarly to Interrupted Intimacy. Rian Johnson even compared it to a sex scene. However, when combined with the above entry regarding the previous film, it raises some implications.
• The piano duet between India and Charlie in Stoker is very suggestive. Between their physical closeness, Held Gazes, and quick gasps, it comes off as an allegorical sex scene. The fact that Charlie is India's uncle does not detract from the subtext. At all.
• The scene at the start of Stuart Little where the Littles meet and decide to adopt Stuart plays out like a white family adopting a black kid. The adoption agent even says "We try to discourage parents from adopting outside their own... species. It rarely works out".
  • In the second film, the relationship between Falcon and Margalo seems very similar to that of a domestic abuser and their victim respectively, especially when Falcon is angry.
• In Transformers, Frenzy spread-eagling himself over a computer terminal he'd plugged into, twitching and yelping.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: The girl who aggressively hits on Sam gets squirted in the face... just not by Sam. Of course, Sam doesn't really help the scene by yelling, "Oh my God your face! Lemme get some wetnaps for your face!"
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • Is it just a fun Film Noir spoof, or an allegory on the Great American Streetcar Scandal? Why not both?
  • Also, Jessica Rabbit literally playing pattycake with another man is treated like an affair.
  • The relationships of Toons and humans in the movie: An allegory of racial relations and segregation in the time period it's set?
• The Wolf of Wall Street: Set at a minor-league brokerage firm on Long Island that specializes in penny-stock pump-and-dump schemes? Most of the employees younger single men who indulge their considerable fortunes on hookers and cocaine at debauched company parties? Motivational speeches by a charismatic asshole who drives a Ferrari? If it sounds a lot like Boiler Room, it should—that film was also inspired by the real-life Stratton Oakmont firm.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men:
    • Magneto's description of God sounds a lot like Professor X. Doubles as Fridge Brilliance after it's revealed in X2: X-Men United that Magneto views mutants to be gods among insects, and there is no one in the world he respects (and loves, as we learn in X-Men: First Class) more than his old friend.
      Magneto: I've always thought of God as a teacher, a bringer of light, wisdom, and understanding.
    • The relationship between Charles and Erik is set up as being akin to the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; near the end of the film, Erik even quotes Malcolm X's line, "By any means necessary."
    • If you didn't already get the suggestion that Senator Kelly was akin to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the fact he claims he has a list of known mutants early on the film should be a clue.
    • A line from Mystique that's more noticeable in hindsight due to the increased attention toward school bullying, especially of gay students.
      Mystique: People like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child.
  • X2: X-Men United: Bobby Drake "comes out" with his mutant powers to his parents, who respond, "Have you tried not being a mutant?" Director Bryan Singer and actor Ian McKellen are queer, and were asked for assistance in writing this scene, basing it on a "coming out" conversation.
  • X-Men: The Last Stand: Mystique refuses to answer to Raven Darkholme (her birth name) because "that's my slave name." Considering the franchise's rather unsubtle use of Have You Tried Not Being a Monster? and Mystique/Raven's struggle about the discrepancy between the way she appears and her true identity, it also brings to mind a transgender person adopting a new name that reflects their gender. Also the words "slave name" were used by the likes of Malcom X or Muhammad Ali rejecting their surnames likely given to one of their ancestors by a former master.
  • X-Men: First Class: Hank McCoy says about his mutation, "You didn't ask, so I didn't tell."
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past:
    • Between going through a personal hell, his mind clearly not working straight, it being the '70s and him shooting up to dull the pain, Xavier closely resembles a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran. James McAvoy has even called it his Born on the Fourth of July look.
    • There is Jesus imagery surrounding Charles; his story arc is almost a metaphor for Jesus accepting his role as a martyr, with Xavier having to choose between life as a man, or getting in that wheelchair and suffering to save the world.
    • The images from the Bad Future of mutants being branded to identify them, camps full of mutants, and those who helped them being marched to off-screen executions is strongly reminiscent of the Holocaust. Given the X-Men series' penchant for drawing that parallel, it's undoubtedly deliberate.
    • The footage of the mutants fighting at the Paris Peace Conference is eerily reminiscent of the Zapruder film, right down to the small format and shaky cam.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: En Sabah Nur's relentless pursuit of Xavier for the latter's body and the subsequent Mind Rape is a disturbing analogy for an obsessive stalker/rapist wanting to violate his prey. It also helps the impression that Charles is a Pretty Boy, which further enhances his image as a victim. A later scene reinforces this subtext; after being denied possession of Xavier's body, Apocalypse begins to angrily call out to Charles and demand he show himself in a manner reminiscent of an abusive spouse. In addition to the not-so-subtle shot of Professor X being cuffed to a slab against his will while his captor looms threateningly over him, there is an I Have You Now, My Pretty vibe when Apocalypse forcibly pushes his bloodied, but still beautiful-looking captive down to the floor and gloats, "You're mine now."
    • What really drives the rape metaphor home is how Apocalypse's whole interaction with Xavier was all about taking control over the victim, which is the primary method a rapist would use to make the victim feel helpless.

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