Where Black Panther fails to marvel
A black ghetto dotting any American city is an atrociously hard place to undergo change and transformation. A clean and complete exit from ghettoisation, onto the path of a free utopia, is perhaps only a fantastic dream and no more. And yet traversing such a dream is precisely what might be most enchanting and life-affirming. Thanks to the movie Black Panther (2018), we now have a utopia in film which allows us to get a feel of traversing and experiencing such a fantasy. That too in 3D and 4D.
In a memorable scene, the black kids in the ghetto are dazed seeing a wonderful futuristic ship landing in their basketball court. No, it is not a drone of the surveillance state. It is completely different. It is a far more technologically advanced airship from the mythical black kingdom of Wakanda. The kids ask T'Challa, the Wakandan King: is this yours? T'Challa (who is the black panther played by Chadwick Boseman), hardly needs to reply, as he exudes a happy, deeply contented smile.
The audience warmly partakes every moment of this scene, as they subconsciously know that the ghetto is now permanently lit up by a bright star. Everything changes.
Wakanda is the world’s most technologically advanced nation in Africa. Its skyscrapers carry the imprint of African Timbuktu scaffolding and Mali pyramids, and its jewellery-like weapons are inspired by the beads of the East African Maasai tribe. It loves to hide itself, for reasons both geopolitical and esoteric. It is the country which you would have had had there been no colonialism, no slavery, no racism, basically if we didn’t have the history we had! “Africa” and “black” get thoroughly reinvented.
Black Panther escapes the grip of the present by lavishly basking in the freedom an imagined future offers. As the production designer Hannah Beachler explains, “The challenge was imagining how something futuristic looks in Africa.” Beachler earlier transformed a former slave-owning plantation into a place of strength and power for Beyoncé in Lemonade.
To talk of racism or anti-racism would be to remain trapped in the given, enslaved by “history-as-it-actually-happened”. An emancipated future must be created to then introject it into the present, force open and explode the “present”.
Without being a “post-racial” denial of racism, the imaginary horizon of the movie can be read as powerfully suggesting a way out of the “bad infinity” of anti-racist struggles. President Obama could not be King Obama! The black panther is forever kept out.
So now no more the “first-world” James Bond, but it is T’Challa, the black superhero who robotically lands in Busan, South Korea and fights his enemy. His younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) back home guides his every move using the most advanced futuristic guidance systems. The racy and hair-raising car chase on the roads of Busan makes for an exciting watch.
The Wakandan utopia is however impoverished in assigning the source of Wakanda's power to a secret metal called Vibranium. The movie begins by declaring that millions of years ago a meterorite crashed into the area leaving a huge deposit of this metal that has unbelievable powers. A mild radiation allows the growth of the mystic heart-shaped herb, whose juice gives the Black Panther superhuman powers.
Emancipation and happiness emanating from one stroke of blind natural accident of Vibranium dropping from nowhere? This one-stop technological fix is possible of course. I think of the oil-rich Arab countries. Some say even Hugo Chavez's revolution in Venezuela was financed by petro-dollars as the country has huge petroleum reserves.
But Black Panther as precisely a fictional film could have imagined a richer tapestry of the trials and tribulations, the inner struggle and historical saga of the imagined Wakandan people. Ordinary Wakandans are in fact absent in the story. The few long shots of the marketplace and bazaar only whet our desire to get a close-up of “ordinary life”. They show some close view of the shops and streets of Busan instead.
It would have been uplifting to watch the greatness of Wakanda derive not just from the “technological fix” of Vibranium, but from the collective spirit and the revolutionary zeal of the Wakandan people. Surely, there must have been something in the moral character and spirit of the Wakandan people to deserve the freak blessing of the extra-terrestrial metal's miraculous powers. We do not hear anything of that.
The ending is dreadfully anti-climatic. For now, we see Wakanda become so prosaic and non-fictional that it speaks through its (obviously dispirited) “officials” and “representatives” in a conference of the United Nations. It now speaks the language of the American Empire. It wants to usher in global peace and democracy. What happens to the kids in the ghetto now?
Black Panther opens up the fantastic realm with which to challenge the present, but turns out to be terribly dispirited and prosaic. This is where we have to ask if the movie really breaks out of the ideological bent of the Black Panther's origins in the Marvel Comics Fantastic Four series. That was the period of the 1960s and 1970s.
Decolonisation set fears that newly independent African nations might use their new found power to side with evil (read “communism”) and against “humanity”. Popular culture reflected this by putting Black Panther in some kind of a working relationship with the very American superheroes of the Fantastic Four.
It would also be instructive to see the Black Panther as a response to the rising wave of the black power movement in the 1960's, as Adilifu Nama pointed out.
But with the end of the Cold War, this ideology, today in 2018, can only be a Silicon Valley-type technological utopianism, with a slightly dated postmodernist regurgitation of tradition and old African tribal symbolism.
Married with woke feminism, it gives you the Dora Milaje, the all-female commandos who protect King T'Challa. They are great for being badass but this attitude is reserved only for the “outside enemy” or to those who challenge the authority of the King.
Again, the struggles internal to Wakandan society are missing, are never imagined.
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