Black Panther: Mirror Image

A symposium in the men's room followed a screening of Black Panther. A gentleman in long flowing yellow dashiki asked how the rest of us liked "the movie." (There were other titles at other screens, but there was no doubt which movie he meant -- car loads of men and women came to Black Panther in African garb).  I didn't hear the comments others made as they left, but I said that I had enjoyed the sense of family and community.

He agreed, but said he was disappointed, because he'd anticipated action in the USA, rather than in the fictional kingdom of Wakanda.

He may have preferred the prologue to the movie. The setting flashes on the screen, "Oakland, 1992," shorthand for dead end neighborhoods, gang violence, drugs and weapons. In dialogue, the estranged brother of Wakanda's king  attributes world-wide misery to centuries of colonial exploitation, slavery, and race-based oppression.  What happens next makes a more compelling origin story than Bruce Wayne's for the movie's alpha bad guy, Erik Killmonger.  But following that, the action shifts to the continent of Africa.

I suggested that Wakanda was in fact a kind of mirror-image of the USA.  He wasn't convinced.  End of discussion.

I could have  mentioned being swept up by Ludwig Göransson's colorful score, composed with what he picked up from his month with musicians in Africa, or the delightful interplay of star Chadwick Boseman with a trove of female co-stars: Angela Bassett as Queen Mother, Danai Gurira as General Dora, Lupita Nyon'o as the spy Nakia, and Letitia Wright as Shuri, the king's kid-sister and scientist. Breath-taking vistas of paleo-futurist Wakanda and rapid-fire special effects fights were entertaining, too -- though such effects are pro forma in Hollywood movies by now, and I confess that those wear me down.

But I was most stimulated by the way the conflict over the future direction of that fictional kingdom  reflects our own deep-seated national conflicts back at us clarified, as a fable.

We Americans, too, have lived centuries in defensible isolation,  proud of our resources, wealth, military might, and advanced technology, unduly paranoid about invaders (counting down from 1796: French, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Reds, Latinos, Terrorists).  Our super-hero T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, is a king whose policy is Wakanda First.  Yes, he can befriend a CIA agent, and he knows the streets of L.A., N.Y., and Seoul, but he will neither send his armies out to liberate oppressed people nor allow refugees in: "I am not king of the world; I am king of Wakanda."

I'm hardly alone in taking the movie this way.  Others I've read say that this fictional kingdom of Wakanda is the real star of the film.  David Edelstein allows that Michael B. Jordan's seething revolutionary Eric Killmonger, who wants to arm the African diaspora to overthrow the other races, is more charismatic than Chadwick Boseman's entitled king T'Challa, who determines to preserve his kingdom Wakanda in its bubble of isolation. Critic John Podhoretz in Weekly Standard  praises Black Panther's co-writer / director Ryan Coogler for putting the strongest arguments in the mouth of its radical. The final face-off between the two characters results in a satisfying, even redemptive, synthesis.

Black Panther was not in my pantheon when comic books dominated my early adolescence,  so I'm surprised to learn in a little research today that those elements that fascinated me in the movie were present from the very first appearance of the character in an issue of Fantastic Four during the 1960s.  The Black Panther was always T'Challa, king of a technically-advanced Wakanda, responsible for his people as much as for fighting the threat du jour.  See the article.