Pay Back Africa

Tonight’s blog entry, which ought to be a relatively simple movie review, is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to write, which is in itself is illustrative of how thorny cultural criticism has become in late-stage capitalism.  The reasons for this are manifold and all worth exploring:  increased diversity, the desire for representation, the elimination of critics as a professional class, the muddling of criticism and publicity, the conglomeration of intellectual property, identity politics, the way blockbuster movies are made and packaged, and half a dozen other issues.  Any of them would make an interesting entry on its own.  But maybe later.  For now:  Black Panther.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way:  Black Panther is by no means a bad movie. For what it is, it’s pretty solid, and is often very good.  The reasons that seems insufficient, though, are the absolute tidal wave of hype that preceded it, the hugely imbalanced weighting it’s gotten from aggregators (as well as the predictable social media backlash against those who dared question it), the colossal box office it’s done, and the way it’s been bound up in notions of black self-worth and self-representation.  None of these have anything to do with whether or not it’s a good movie, but they’ve become part of its fabric in a way that means talking about it in a meaningful way is almost impossible.

But there is an awful lot to love about Black Panther.  The costume and set design, the makeup and hair and music — all the things that make it look the way it looks — are all powerfully impressive, and make Wakanda seem like a real place inhabited by real people.  It’s one of the few superhero movies that conjures a specific and resonant sense of place and time.  The acting is all incredibly engaging and fun despite the relative slightness of the roles, and Michael B. Jordan even manages to extract more emotional power out of his character than was written into it in the first place. The initial fight scene between T’Challa and M’Baku is thrilling and clear in a way that most superhero movie brawls aren’t, and the scene where he takes down a war rhino is the closest a Marvel movie has gotten to conjuring the spirit of the comics since the first Spider-Man movie.  And while I’m not black, I understand how seeing this movie would be incredibly inspiring to black folks who aren’t used to seeing themselves portrayed in these contexts — as heroes, as kings and queens, as scientists and spies, as noble and in control — and that’s not something that’s easily discounted.  It was mostly a lot of fun, and I’d watch it again in a hot minute.

On the other hand, anyone arguing that it’s some kind of radical departure from the standard superhero movie template is fooling themselves.  It has almost every single story beat that the last half-dozen Marvel movies have had, and that’s absolutely by design.  Ryan Coogler’s direction isn’t particularly inspired — it’s the rest of the crew that does the heavy lifting — and too much of the action is typical of the genre:  muddled, confused, poorly blocked, and so swamped in CGI that you’re never really sure of what’s happening.  It’s awfully slight thematically, and undercuts itself the few times it tries to get more meaningful (more about that later).  A lot of its story pitfalls are arbitrary and exist only because it’s been forced to conform to the marketing requirements of the Marvel machine.  And honestly, some of the dialogue is less from Mother Africa than it is pure 100% American corn.

Now, before we proceed with the ugly part, let’s make a few things clear:  no superhero movie needs to have good politics.  In fact, none of them have, and probably none of them ever will, because the superhero genre does not lend itself to them easily.  Vigilante action, power fantasy, and the idea that some people are just inherently superior are baked right into the recipe and extracted only with great effort and self-analysis; comics have attempted it only rarely and movies never.  Furthermore, nobody ought to go into Black Panther — a multi-million-dollar product released by a mega-billion-dollar corporation — expecting it to be progressive, or woke, or even politically aware.  That would be terribly naïve, and nobody should have done it; not before the movie was released, and not now.

And that’s good, because, folks, the politics of Black Panther are pretty goddamn terrible.  I’m not the first person to point this out — I especially recommend Ricky Rawls and Leslie Lee’s Twitter posts — but the plot of the movie essentially involves a heredity monarchy built on ritual combat monopolizing a natural resource to maintain a nationalist, isolationist system.  When a legitimate heir to the throne appears and decides to use that resource to arm and equip oppressed people of color all over the world, he instantly becomes the villain.  Rather than participate in anti-imperialist revolution, the country’s leaders opt for a violent civil war; the revolutionary figure (who, to boot, is portrayed like a mad-dog ghetto thug straight out of a paranoid NRA fantasy) is killed and the newly aware monarch settles for teaching inner city kids to code.  As Lee puts it, Black Panther “dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints it as villainous, and then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the Earth slaughtering each other to protect whites.”

There’s all sorts of other problems with the movie politically.   The presence of the Martin Freeman character, a CIA agent who literally blows black people out of the sky to prevent them from aiding the struggle against people exactly like him, is a huge mistake, particularly in light of the real CIA’s real history with real African leaders.  The movie also tries to have its cake and eat it too, in an obvious dodge swallowed whole by way too many Marvel stans, by implying that the problem with Killmonger isn’t his revolutionary intentions, but his violent means.

First of all, I have bad news for you, folks:  the question ‘Is violence bad?’ is deeply and profoundly dumb and boring.  Yes, violence is bad.  So is cancer.  The question is what we’re supposed to do about it.  A much more interesting question is ‘Is violence effective?’; another is ‘When is violence justified?’  But Black Panther isn’t very interested in those questions, so we’re left to somehow accept that it’s bad for Killmonger to use violence to overthrow oppressive governments that exploit entire countries and wipe out entire populations, but it’s fine for T’Challa and his people to use violence to beat Killmonger — or, for that matter, to fuck around with slavers and child soldiers in neighboring countries, as long as the people they kill are other Africans.

It’s a complete ducking of the issue, made even more absurd by the fact that it takes place in the context of a superhero movie, where the whole genre is built in the idea that it’s fine to use violence against bad people.  Do you remember any other Marvel or DC movie that did so much hand-wringing over the concept of violence?  Apparently it’s only a concern when the violence might be targeted at the ruling classes.  Beyond all that, as Rawls argues, the whole notion is bogus from the premise up:  Wakanda has had incredible technology for a thousand years that puts them light-years beyond any other country on Earth, but it’s never even occurred to them to have a system of government slightly more responsive to human needs than a bloodline monarchy predicated on whoever is the best at beating the shit out of people? These aren’t inherent qualities of the narrative.  These are choices made by writers, and they’re bad ones.

But guess what?  It’s perfectly possible to like a movie with garbage politics.  (If your politics are like mine, it’s practically a necessity.) The only people with egg on their faces are the ones who have argued all along that Black Panther is not only the crowning achievement of the cinematic art, but also the wokest thing since Wonder Woman — a movie to which this was far superior, but with which it shared many commonalities of clumsy storytelling and muddled meaning.  They’re the ones having to back off and say “Hey, it’s just a movie” now.  The rest of us can take Black Panther for what it is while being well aware of what it isn’t.