This essay, on the new Marvel film Black Panther and the response to it, was the main part of my Observer column this week. (The column included also a shorter piece on the significance of questions.) It was published in the Observer, 18 February 2018, under the headline ‘Black Panther has a burden that no superhero is strong enough to carry’.
I like my fictional heroes laced with moral ambiguity. When I was young, my favourite sci-fi series was not Doctor Who or Thunderbirds but the clunky, barely believable Blake’s 7. It told the story of the spaceship Liberator and of its crew’s lonely battle against the evil Federation. What the series lacked in production values, it more than made up in the character of Avon. He was one of Blake’s 7, but he was never ‘good’. There was a menace in his soul that one could almost touch.
It was inevitable, then, that when I saw Black Panther, the superhero blockbuster widely acclaimed as a cultural turning point in its portrayal of black identity, I was drawn not to T’Challa, the handsome hero king, or to Shuri, his techno-genius sister, but to Erik Killmonger, the would-be usurper of the throne.
As a Marvel comic character, the Black Panther first emerged in 1966, a totem of black strength and identity. It later became a series in its own right. But it is the new Hollywood film, directed by Ryan Coogler, with a largely black cast, which has created global ripples.
The story is set in the fictional African state of Wakanda, a nation wealthy and advanced beyond imagination, thanks to vibranium, a mineral with almost magical qualities brought to Africa by aliens. Wakanda has never been colonised, but its wealth and technology have also been hidden from the world, protected by a force field.
And therein lies the conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger. (If you don’t want spoilers, skip the next few paragraphs.) Killmonger is of Wakandan royal blood, but has been brought up in America. He is brimming with rage at the treatment of African Americans and of black people globally. He demands that Wakandan power be used to protect black people by waging war on the ‘colonisers’. T’Challa will not countenance the spilling of blood.
This conflict is the moral core of the film. It’s not that Killmonger’s desire to wage war, or his view of all whites as colonisers, is commendable. It is, rather, that the pain and fury he expresses, and the moral tensions he embodies, mirror that of so many black communities, from Ferguson to Johannesburg. The meaning of identity, of blackness, of resistance, even of humanitarian intervention – all tumble out of his conflict with T’Challa. Yet the film barely explores any of this. Killmonger becomes little more than a straightforward baddie whom T’Challa has to overcome.
The film has a glorious cast and an even better soundtrack. It is watchable in the way that most Marvel films are and better than most in the series. And yet there is no escaping that the plot is lame, the battle scenes routine, the drama as dark as summer in Lapland and as taut as cotton wool.
The real problem, though, is not the film but the weight of social and moral expectation that has been heaped upon it. ‘The very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance’, suggested the writer Jamil Smith in a Time magazine cover story. In the Guardian, Ben Child called it ‘the most radical’ comic-book movie, because it ‘dared to imagine a future where the achievements of African scientists dwarf those of their western counterparts’.
‘Resistance’ is a Hollywood film and ‘radicalism’ a cinematic fantasy? The response tells us less about the film than it does about the contemporary state of ‘resistance’ and of ‘radicalism’.
It is no coincidence, suggests Jonathan Gray, associate professor of English at New York’s City University, ‘that this movie appears precisely in a moment in which our politics seems inescapable’. It’s ‘a political context in which both the legal gains of the civil rights movement and the interracial optimism of the Obama era have been undermined’.
Wakanda, then, as a utopia from which to escape Donald Trump. Hollywood has always pandered to escapism. But the response to Black Panther is not about momentarily being able to forget the harsh realities of life, but of embracing fantasy as resistance to the harshness of reality.
‘My father said that one day he’d take me to Wakanda, the most beautiful place in the world’, Killmonger recalls as he is dying. ‘Can you believe that? A kid from Oakland running around believing in fairytales!’
Fairytales can be good, even necessary (though they can also be dark and deep and complex). Even I was swept along by the story of black redemption. But let’s not turn radicalism or resistance into a fairytale.
Pandaemonium 
The film also resonates with a demographic of people especially Black people because it is one of the first of its kind. Very rare do you see us in a positive light. A generation that has seen the election run and achievements of a Barack and Michelle Obama have been recently craving something similar to what we witnessed in eight years. The days of gangster roles, outlandish comedic behavior, and slave films have not taken a toll, but sparked interest elsewhere. Exemplifying the strength of what a people can be has always gave hope a generation of people long plagued with disparities and inequalities through entertainment: The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and A Different World. What has been entertainment for one gave rise to optimism to another.
> embracing fantasy as resistance to the harshness of reality
During grad school, I interviewed a homeless family of color outside a concert in SF. When it let out, about half streamed past where they sat on the sidewalk. It took about ten minutes. I think they got a dollar, from someone that had to walk around them, a girl, forced into eye contact.
Fantasy is a socially acceptable way to avoid facing discomfiting, important realities. Those young liberals who passed us by the thousands allowed shared fantasy to put their moral sense on hold, when a nickel from each would’ve been a small fortune to that family. Tens of thousands of liberal kids like this wave their phones while various paeons to rebellion and resistance sound forth from their artists. They were the same lemmings inside and outside the building, but the fantasy inside allows them to feel exculpated, redeemed by virtue of a sincere desire that good appear in the world.
We feel in the dark for a knob to turn. The right raves and repeats itself on Fox, the left is watching consumerist TV, or they’re out buying a bigger screen. Americans either disengage, or they work to sever themselves from their political opponents. For both of us, our families and institutions slip away. The cynicisms we’ve endured since Reagan– AIDS, Iraq, Libya, Clinton’s crime disasters– now clothe and animate this President, the open desire for class war, and a crusade of rightist follies in the name of defense.
We desperately need strong liberal leadership and integrity. Perhaps women may finally be allowed to lead here.
Liberal leadership and integrity ? Oxymoronic.
And the West’s abortionista women are the people with the least right to lead a moral revival.
Liberalism is a Double Game; enjoying Western privileges while denouncing them. Nor does it have backbone.
Ergo, it has no future. Try to devise a New Leftism.
White Dominion died in 1945 with the defeat of fascism, but the absurd Kremlin dinosaurs inadvertently kept it propped-up for some decades more.
The white folks – having sold their souls for Power and Money – now face ruin and bankruptcy (in every sense), as does the world’s environment as collateral.
The non-whites – whether in China’s factories or in “Black Panther” – have for so long been mesmerised by the West, that all they can think of doing is playing the white folks’ game, only better, in an absurd game of “Anything you could do, we can do better”. But as we see, playing the white folk’s game doesn’t end well – so why play it all ?
Why not try some Lateral Thinking ?
E.g. Non-materialism, or economics designed around the family, around people (not the reverse, as at present). Why worship the white idols of Power, Tech and Money ?
Trump, Fox, the Alt Right are pitiful symptoms of their own defeat, with nothing to say or do but wallow in nostalgic fantasies like MAGA.
The real issue is of course Money, economics.
Congratulations to Black America, finally finding its voice in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
I’m failing to see why this is a ‘first’ of any kind. The first Black superhero movie? No, that’s probably Meteor Man. The first Black Marvel superhero to make it to the big screen? No, there were three Blade movies, one of which, directed by Guillermo del Toro, was very good indeed.
The first part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to have a Black lead? No, that would be Luke Cage, who got ten times as much screen time in his own show, Jessica Jones and The Defenders. And Luke Cage was rooted in real history, the history of Harlem, it’s music and culture, not an imaginary parallel world.
So we really have to narrow this down to something specific to make it a first: a Marvel Cinema Universe movie starring a Black lead.
It reminds me of the fuss The Independent made about Star Trek Discovery having the franchise’s first Black lead. Except it wasn’t. There were seven years of Star Trek Deep Space Nine with a Black lead. So they changed the story to ‘the first Black woman’, which might be true but they had to narrow down the demographic before they found a ‘first’.