Eye on Canon Archive: Black Panther and Radical Relatability
From February 2018
>This post (eventually) contains spoilers for the film Black Panther<
In the decade that I have spent teaching college writing and literature, I, like all writing instructors, have developed a catalog of pet peeves that have arisen from years of seeing successive rounds of students commit the same errors. Among my personal coterie is the overuse of “talks about” to introduce every quotation in a paper, the denial of the existence of the apostrophe in all its uses, and the reliance on “another thing…” as a transition. But reigning as king on this list for at least the last five years has been the ability of students to flatly dismiss a text or film with a cool “I just can’t relate to this.”
Relatability has been the subject of many of my idle office hours’ contemplation as I have obsessively mapped the range of responses that get gathered into the category. Works of classic literature? Not relatable. Contemporary politics and debates? Not relatable. All works of literary criticism? Not relatable. A contemporary novel set on a college campus and featuring male and female undergrads and the sordid interactions such a population fosters? Not relatable.
As a teacher, I have tried to justify my quixotic quest to decipher this phrase as a means of improving my presentation of these works and the ways that I facilitate class activities around them, but it’s my impression that the battle of relatability is won or lost far from the classroom, often in the quiet of the library or noise of the dorm room where the student does or does not form a kind of indistinct connection to a work. In this space, I yield no power, and yet I feel responsible for helping students foster that relatability in our on-going quest to create “lifelong learners.”
When viewed with the least charity, students’ adherence to relatability is really just a substitute for disinterest or boredom. A simple truth is that texts and criticism, even when they are of outstanding quality, suffer from the connection to the academic context, as all the bright colors of novelty and excitement pale in the confines of homework drudgery. In this light, relatability feels infinitely superficial, and clichés about “generation selfie” can warp this into a student’s refusal to look beyond themselves and the values that directly shape their identity.
But viewed generously, students crave relatability as an anchor to keep them moored to a work within the swirling eddy of other demands on their time and attention. These students have their own experience and values in mind, but crave a reflection of them in the qualities of a character, structures of a plot, or ideas of a scholar. Through this reflection, they are able to interrogate those same values and the worth displayed by those who wield them. Relatability of this kind is a spark of empathy, a means of bridging the divide between art and life and inspiring a connection from which the student builds interest, understanding, and excitement. This type of relatability, if fostered correctly, is the power of art.
Wakanda: The Hidden Kingdom
By the basic standards of relatability, Black Panther should fail spectacularly. The film, set within the fictional civilization of Wakanda, posits a highly advanced nation that has secretly developed as a world apart from global history, untouched by the wars, enslavement, and colonization that scarred the rest of the continent and marked the powers of Europe and North America with the stains of innocent blood. This Afro-futurist fantasy is a pure sci-fi city crossed with the colors, shapes, and sounds of African culture undiluted by the diaspora. Director Ryan Coogler and his design team seem committed to making the world tonally familiar, but wholly unlike anything heretofore committed to film. While the dazzling array of computer-generated visuals runs the risk of approaching the quality of a videogame or cartoon, the design grounds itself organically in a fashion that remains undeniably earthly.
Perhaps the most striking example of this occurs early in the film with a staggering visual set around a ritual challenge of King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) as he is elevated to the throne. Set within a cliffside, we can see the dazzling colors of African fashion draped on a sea of black figures chanting, dancing, drumming, and generally celebrating their culture. This visual is powerful, and wholly unlike anything I have ever experienced on film.
If you know anything about the movie, it is the celebration-worthy fact that it is the first of the 18(!) films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) continuity to focus on a non-white superhero, and the first to be helmed by a black director, honors not yet bestowed upon women of any race[1]. The rapturous excitement that has built since the film’s announcement is warranted, as the diverse audience of Marvel films deserves heroes that represent all demographics, and Marvel’s previous incidents of whitewashing in Doctor Strange and Iron Fist demonstrate a studio afraid to fully embrace non-white leads.[2]
The build-up to the film has seen an inspiring set of milestones as Black communities and individuals around the country work to set presale records, buy group tickets for underprivileged youth, and even purchase whole theatre screenings to give tickets away. Expectations are high, and the Black community is hungry to “vote with their money” to stand behind a film that genuinely and authentically celebrates Black culture and talent.
At the heart of these gestures, particularly those aimed at children, is the drive of relatability and the ability to, at last, give kids a hero who looks like them, sounds like them, and speaks to their cultural inheritance. Certainly, in giving young Black children a hero to call their own, there’s no greater work this film could do, and the machinery of Disney merchandising ensures that those children get all the action figures, comics, novels, bobbleheads, coloring books and build-a-bears they could desire. There’s an undeniable power behind these items, and the fact that little black girls don’t have to rely on an American Girl doll that is a slave is both long overdue and hopefully an inspiration.
Beyond providing a hero and role model to these children, the film also demonstrates the pride that all persons of African descent feel in that culture and its survival, against all odds into the present day. The reviews of Black critics suggest that this emotion overwhelms all cynical thoughts of commercialism and spectacle that costume superhero films like so much vibranium. The film’s already enormous commercial success hopefully portends an expansion of the efforts made by studios to empower Black talent to create art in this vein.
Superficial relatability (and so many internet trolls) would thus dictate that, in empowering the Black community the film is actively denying, or at least neglecting the white audience. As a white heteronormative male falling directly into the 18-40 demographic, this not something I am accustomed to experiencing, and undeniably there are other segments of my demographics that feel threatened by it (again, see Twitter).
For these and other reasons, one could conclude that my experience of the film would be rooted in alienation or confusion, but the real genius of Coogler’s story and direction is to demonstrate the utter falsehood of such destructive divisions.
The Racism of Low Expectations
One of the many types of institutionalized racism faced by racial and ethnic minorities in America is the subtle ways that every system and figure of authority is pulled towards lessened expectations that place artificial limits on what those individuals can achieve. This terrible racism has taken root throughout the studio system to lessen expectations about what a film for Black audiences can be, and to lessen the expectations of its appeal to white audiences. Although Marvel and Disney may be working against this stereotype here, it took a full 17 commercially successful films before they took the plunge and placed their money on Black audiences. Even still, industry voices have expressed concern about how this film may struggle to find international success, as “Black films don’t travel.”[3]
But possibly for the first time in my life, I am feeling the sting of this type of stereotyping[4], as the deep insult I feel is that studios would operate under the assumption that a disparity in race between myself and the character would both dissuade me from buying a ticket and deny my capacity to connect with the art being shown. Having forced generations of Black, Hispanic, and Asian moviegoers to develop connections to heroes outside their race, they remain skeptical that white audiences would have the wherewithal to overcome our privilege and make that same move.
Generations of Hollywood executives have exerted the power of these expectations, hoping to court Black audiences but only so far as they won’t alienate the white audiences that dominate the critic class and a still-not-insignificant majority of ticket buyers. This has led to the elevation of heroes of color in franchises of nerd culture, but almost always left them in the lesser role of a supporting hero, or at worst the token figure developed thinly and only meant to support the hero. Famously, Disney used the Black character Finn heavily in the early marketing of The Force Awakens, but when the film’s final act spooled out, the film elevated Rey beyond Finn and defined the sequel trilogy on her white heroism. See too Lando arriving late to the original trilogy, War Machine’s subservience to Tony Stark, and Falcon’s unquestioning obedience to the commands of Captain America, despite military rank and experience suggesting all of these relationships should be reversed.
The perhaps all-too-simple conclusion to all of this is a set of media decision-makers stuck in the most superficial forms of relatability. While most parts of society have evolved beyond such basic principles of connection, the distributors either don’t recognize this evolution, or don’t believe it is yet the dominant cultural mode. The assumption that enjoyment and patronage require a personal proxy within a work suggests a failure to believe in the empathy which pushes us beyond the superficial and into the realm of shared humanity.
“King of my City/King of my Country/King of my Homeland”
It only took about 15 minutes of my first screening of Black Panther for all of this Hollywood wisdom to be discredited. After a brief mythological opening establishing Wakanda, the film transports its audience to an Oakland housing project in 1992 to unfurl a pivotal scene between Kind T’Chaka (Father of T’Challa) and his brother N’Jobo. On display immediately is the best of Wakandan culture and themes that are truly universal: family, honor, loyalty, and duty. The confrontation between the brothers establishes a critical conflict about how Wakanda should or should not wield its power, but set within a small project unit that maintains an intimacy between the characters, and a deep violence to the fratricide that closes the scene, but is not revealed until later in the film.
Like the rest of the film, what is clear from this scene is that the film has no interest in coddling its audience, and particularly its Western white audiences. Characters are given authentic African names, and they make references to Black culture (“A couple Grace Jones-looking chicks”) and won’t expend any time or energy explaining its references. This is a mode nerd culture is quite accustomed to (Heck, this may be Kevin Smith’s main talent), but rarely has this been exhibited by characters of color.
A survey of the critical response to the film finds a fixation of critics on the word “Shakespearean,” and for good reason. As the film moves between its large action set pieces (which are spectacular and nicely choreographed), the real energy of the film is in near operatic movements of its characters as they harmonize or clash with each other to serve the plot. T’Challa’s main thread is familiar to all stories of royalty: a desire to be worthy of the throne and rule righteously from it, but also to the intimacy of home and hearth: a reckoning with the inescapable truth that our parents, even if royal, are only human.
Beyond T’Challa, the most familiar archetype may be that of Winston Duke’s M’Baku, the hot-headed Jabari challenger who yearns to bring honor and prosperity to his people, an estranged tribe of Wakanda, but seems to lack the grace and bearing of real leadership. When, towards the end of the film, he proves his own selflessness in heroism, we see the power of redemption and humility on full display while never demeaning the hero who has rightfully learned his place. It’s Milton; it’s Han Solo; it’s every cop story; it’s human.
The central conflict of the film, between two figures with legitimate claims to the throne, is familiar to anyone who has read the Western canon. Refreshingly, Coogler has given Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger a clear perspective and a code that, while not exactly moral, is constructed through an effective and understandable logic. As many have said, were the movie to have a different outcome, one could just as easily imagine this as being the origin story of Killmonger and not the ascension of T’Challa. The result is that when the third reel spools up, the confrontation presented is real, visceral, and grounded through a complex code of honor that audiences have been indoctrinated into.
Yet, perhaps more than any of these grand confrontations, the real power of Black Panther is in the small relationships between the people that populate the mystical realm. The chemistry of T’Challa and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) has the recognizable force of soulmates caught in differing priorities. To a lesser extent, this is observable in Okoye (Danai Gurira) and W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya), whose relationship only gets a few brief nods in the film, but implies star-crossed lovers doomed to always let duty push desire aside.
Eclipsing each of these romantic pairings is the fun sibling relationship between T’Challa and his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright). While Shuri tends to steal every scene she is in, playing a joyful Q to T’Challa’s Bond, the spark and joy of her and her brother embracing and teasing each other is instantly recognizable, and instantly enviable. Their trademark handshake is equal measures of cool, joy, and loyalty, and is emblematic of the relationship.
Thus, through spectacle and sentiment the film draws us into the World of Wakanda and ensures that we see aspects of ourselves within each of the characters, sparking the empathy and understanding that can lead to genuine reflection on ourselves, our values, and our condition.
“Don’t Scare Me, Colonizer”
Yet, despite its commitment to fully realized characters and humanistic themes, this is not a film that is going to pull its punches when it comes to addressing global racism, and the history of colonization, slavery, and political intervention that shaped the plight of people of African descent throughout the globe. While Wakanda may have been shielded from those forces, they are a culture that still bears the scars of these dark global encounters. Thus, as a white viewer, I was made to face the violence and bigotry of my people and the dark legacy that it has left on the global. While never preachy or condemnatory, the film’s thematic awareness of this legacy permeates its runtime, inspiring sadness, shame, and anger in equal intervals. To celebrate the fantasy of a nation safe from colonial destruction is to simultaneously force a reckoning with the crimes of that system.
The first truly jaw-dropping moment, at least judging by some gasps in my screening, was when, in the Oakland prelude, N’Jobu demonstrates his Wakandan citizenship by displaying a lower-lip tattoo of glowing vibranium. As the gasps demonstrate, the symbol, though an inversion, immediately draws to mind the barbarism and callousness of chattel slavery. While here the tattoo proves membership and privilege, it is a reminder that the systematic institution invoked in the prologue was also a deeply personal violence remaking bodies into property. It is later revealed that N’Jobu also gifted his son with the tattoo, showing that privilege, like bondage, is generational.
To understand the central conflict through Killmonger is to understand the rifts that can exist between Africans and African Americans as each grapples with the effects that slavery has imprinted on millions of individuals both within and without the diaspora[5]. While Killmonger’s real anger may be focused on the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, he expresses it, when making his challenge, as the vehement anger toward the African nation and its isolationist policies that sacrificed the comfort and wellbeing of Killmonger, his family, his community and his people. While I am ill-equipped to fully understand the dynamics of this resonance[6], as a white viewer, I could not help but feel some sense of complicity for how my ancestors at a minimum allowed, but more likely propagated the systematic enslavement of countless millions.
As the film progresses, it shifts focus away from the imagery of slavery and more toward the language of colonialism. While it is impossible to disentangle colonialism from slavery, so much of the fear the Wakandans experience is focused on the powerful natural resource, vibranium, and the knowledge that the rest of the world would do anything to possess it. Indeed, the film demonstrates the lengths to which arms dealers (Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue) and CIA operatives (Martin Freeman as Everett Ross, the other Tolkein white guy) will go to get control of a small sample. Once Killmonger assumes the throne, his priority is to increase production and use the vibranium to arm operatives around the globe to start a revolution in Wakanda’s name. Here again, white audiences are forced to confront the ideology that colonial violence inspires through extraction and theft, and while it may not feel fully justified (as evil schemes should not be) it is, at its core, fully understandable (as evil schemes should be). Thus Coogler presents a critique of white supremacy within a popcorn film that, even if not fully recognized, must be reckoned with in part.
Lest the white viewer dispatch these lessons with the magic hand wave of “that’s all in the past, and not my fault,” the film frosts its postcolonial cake with a much more modern flavor of atrocity. When first recognizing an image of Killmonger, Everett Ross notes “He’s one of ours,” an ownership that admits Killmonger got his training through the US Special Forces and is proving to be an effective villain by deploying CIA tactics for political intervention. Ross expands on this later in M’Baku’s throne room by generalizing each of Killmonger’s actions and demonstrating how each calculated move is the same playbook the US has used in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East across the 20th and 21st centuries. While this ownership will later inspire Ross’s own heroism as he faces his own culpability in the conflict, it hits the audience harder, a reminder that this violence is not only historical, and is far from over.
These strands reach their apotheosis in the film’s final act as, beaten and dying, Killmonger makes a last request of T’Challa. As he watches the sunset of Wakanda that he first learned of from his father, Killmonger calmly requests, “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ’cause they knew death was better than bondage.” All the energy of the film’s conflict leads to this staggering moment, a realization that all the violence of Killmonger is in that fear of bondage that has weighed upon him from birth as the inheritor of colonial violence. I can’t begin to relate to the sentiment’s full dimensions, but I can’t help but see my own hands in the bondage he feels.
“Wise men Build Bridges, Foolish men Build Barriers”
For all the ways in which racial divisions and violence work to demonstrate the limitations on the capacity of whites to understand the cultural inheritance of the African diaspora, the film ultimately refuses to dwell on separation and instead, in perhaps its most radical move, forces audiences into a deeper understanding of power in the modern world, ultimately striking a hopeful note for what is possible.
To really understand the anxiety of the Wakandans is to understand the functioning of privilege, and the anxiety it gives to those desperately clinging to it. While the vibranium and protective shield set Wakanda apart from the nations and peoples of Africa, almost every character from the nation consistently questions the decision to protect that privilege at the expense of their neighbors. While this is a motivating value for Killmonger, it’s no less forcefully held by Nakia, whose first scene demonstrates her commitment to using that privilege meaningfully, and bringing freedom to other African women. While she loves T’Challa, their core difference exists over these concerns and her unbending assertion that Wakanda needs to do more for other nations. Elsewhere in the film, characters express great anxiety about the fear of accepting refugees into Wakanda and how that could fundamentally change the nation and open it to attack from forces both external and internal.
As T’Challa prepares to assume the throne, it is this issue that he is forced to negotiate, and this issue that will shape his reign and the continued prosperity of his people. His arc as the ascendant monarch is a hero’s journey to answer this question, and in questing for this answer he draws from his father, Nakia, and ultimately Killmonger to reach his own definition of what Wakanda should do with its privilege.
In this way, it is telling that it is Killmonger’s views that seem to have the greatest effect on him, as this is a uniquely American problem in our current world. Beyond simple rejections of Trumpian foreign policy[7], America in the 21st century is burdened by its privilege and the failures that have resulted from our national reluctance to exercise it for the benefit of the globe. As America starts to recede from the world stage and fade as an empire, the anxiety continues to fuel the xenophobia, racism, and fear that accelerate the downward trend.
Here then is the last turn of relatability, for all the difference and distance that the film’s circumstances might superficially present to white audiences, it is a film that is deeply concerned with privilege, power, and what one does with same. To examine the history of global violence is to see all the failures, but the film is brave enough to envision a better world. In envisioning the Afro-futurist society, it is bold enough to construct a form of privilege and then demonstrate the possibility such privilege, when exercised correctly, could bring to the world.
The final scene of the film unabashedly endorses this hopeful future, as T’Challa completes his redemption of his father by beginning Wakanda foreign intervention in the same Oakland housing project that shaped Killmonger in the prelude. After outlining his plans for community and technology centers to be led by Shuri, T’Challa is confronted with a simple question from a young black boy not unlike Erik before he was Killmonger: “Who are you?” It is a question for T’Challa, and he is now prepared to answer it, but more so, it is a question to the audience, and a demand that those who see themselves in Wakandan privilege take stock of their own gifts and determine how best to use that privilege in service of others.
“All the Stars in Motion”
This then, after much meditation, is where I land on relatability. It can be silly and superficial, it can be deeper and empathetic, but most importantly, it can be radical. This deepest form not only reflects and interrogates values, but it challenges and inspires us not just towards empathy but into real substantive reconfiguration of our worldviews. This is the power of narrative art and its ability to push us beyond the familiar into the unknown and toward the universal.
By alternatingly confirming and challenging my identity through the rejection and reflection of my values, the film offered powerful emotions and an interrogation of so much of what the world has been denied and given by the history of racial violence. While the fantasy offered may be that of a world unspoiled by this history, the hope is rooted in the real world and our ability to overcome and unite. The Panther isn’t a god, but a man, and even when his powers, gadgets, and costume are stripped away or perverted, the symbol retains its power.
#Wakandaforever
[1] While Guardians of the Galaxy features a woman within its main group of protagonists, Ant Man and Wasp (the 20th film in the continuity) will be the first to feature a titular female character, while Captain Marvel (film 21, currently filming) will be the first with a standalone female hero, and the first female director.
[2] It seems only fair to note that while Iron Fist avoided an Asian lead, its sibling programs Jessica Jones and Luke Cage presented outstanding fully-realized female and Black heroes respectively. Far from excusing Iron Fist, these demonstrate the opportunity lost.
[3] The previous experience of George Lucas and his attempts to get his film Red Tails made by a Black director comes to mind, as it took the full weight of his name and the money of Star Wars to even get a moderate release.
[4] But to be abundantly clear, this is structurally similar, but in NO WAY equivalent to actual institutionalized racism.
[5] Consider this a gratuitous plug for Yaa Gyasi’s incredible novel Homegoing, which takes this as its central project.
[6] Slate’s Spoiler Special podcast on Black Panther featuring Aisha Harris, Jamelle Bouie, and Veralyn Williams is a good place to start if wanting to understand this more.
[7] Coogler asserts that this film was fully written prior to the 2016 election and that comparisons to Trump speak to cultural values more than they do any persons real or imagined. But seriously, could you ask for a better comic book villain?