Black Panther review
Feb. 19th, 2018 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annwfynSo, this is a review, at least, partly, of my complicated feelings about Black Panther as much as a review of the film. That’s a disclaimer right there. Also, a disclaimer. I’m very white. Deeply white. Super white. And my understanding of the Black experience is pretty much zero, so I might get things wrong there too. Now I’ve said that, on with the film review.
Warning - very long. And spoilers.
*
First of all, I want to say I liked it, very much. I enjoyed every moment and was sad when it ended and felt emotionally engaged with the characters with absolutely no difficulty. I didn’t personally notice the ‘people not like me feel alien’ effect some folk has talked about, which may, of course, be because of the women. Taking aside the whole race issue, Black Panther is one of the most amazingly empoweringly pro-woman movies I’ve seen in fricking ages. In terms of superhero films, it comes second only to Wonder Woman in creating smart, independent, interesting, nuanced female characters, capable of having healthy relationships based on equality. Which means that in the MCU, apparently Wakanda joins outer space and 1940s Earth as the places where feminism exists. Bad luck 21st century American women.
And Shuri was the most perfect character ever, although I am unconvinced by her apparently being sixteen years old. She looks older, was played by an adult actress, and didn’t actually act like a sixteen year old girl. But whatever, Marvel. She’s still amazing.
The aesthetic was also beautiful and the cinematography made me deeply happy. There was always something to look at, always something interesting and different going on on screen and the film made a huge effort to make Wakanda different, while still making coherent sense.
*
But now, let’s move on to the other stuff, which everyone is talking about, which is race. For me, one of the things I found fascinating was I felt as if the film was actually telling two very different narratives about race. Or rather, the film asked a lot of provocative questions and raised a lot of issues, and then left one apparent resolution which fitted in very well with the essentially deeply conservative MCU (in which radicalism is bad, good noble aristocratic African Black people are very different to the scary and unreasonably angry African American people, and White people don’t need to feel that guilty because none of the main protagonists have actually ever been victims of racism or colonialism and are doing just fine, and everything is best resolved by working with the UN and building some outreach centres in Oakland) and yet constantly undermined that very conclusion.
Killmonger is not the villain.
Or rather, the film kind of claims Killmonger is the villain. He makes Black Panther’s family cry (although, I note, they seemed fine with the whole ritual waterfall combat based form of government their family relies on when their brother was beating the crap out of M’Baku), and he burns a load of flowers so there is no basis for superpowered monarchy in the future and wants lots of Black people to rise up and references the British Empire in terms of where he wants Wakanda to go. But he’s played by Michael B Jordan, who is, let’s face it, far more charismatic than anyone else in the film, he’s handsome, he’s passionate, he has a lot of actually very compelling arguments and he definitely gets the best lines. The guy dies with a stinging rebuke to White supremacy over the globe and a gut punch to Wakandan isolationism when he says he wants to be buried in the ocean, with his ancestors who jumped from the slave ships.
He’s not the bad guy. The film doesn’t even really try and sell us on him being the bad guy. It just accepts that he’s not allowed to win because holy crap, Fox News couldn’t write positive reviews of how lovely it is to see fluffy and unthreatening Black exceptionalism on screen in that case.
I also thought he had some amazing things to say about generational trauma – the African diaspora are the abandoned children of the continent, deprived of their right to an understanding of the culture and heritage, only able to identify as ‘Black’ because the middle passage robbed them of their ability to be Yoruba or Igbo, and that is a subtle but profound trauma. As humans, we care deeply about where we come from – it’s why HP Lovecraft created a whole genre of horror based around ‘your ancestry isn’t what you thought it was’, it’s why we love ‘hidden nobility’ storylines, it’s why ancestry DNA is so damn popular. It’s why Americans always have hyphens to tell you the tribe they claim back in Europe – Scottish, Italian, Irish, whatever. We took that away from them.
And here we see Killmonger – another abandoned child of Africa, only this time it’s made literal. He is orphaned when his radicalised father is murdered and then literally abandoned by Africa – by Africans – who get in a ship and fly away, leaving him to racism, poverty, violence and the constant threat of incarceration. He sees his dead and brutalised father, he’s abandoned and he takes that trauma and it makes him angry. His motivation is perfectly clear and it’s linked, I think, quite clearly to the wider African American experience. African Americans *get* to be angry, the film says. Can’t you see why?
*
Of course, this is the MCU and of course the ultimate resolution is essentially conservative, because the MCU is. For all it is beloved of comic geeks and people who think of themselves as terribly liberal and progressive, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as exactly radical.
So far, the heroes we’ve seen have been:
Tony Stark, the face of benevolent capitalism, who stroppily declares in Iron Man 2 that he has ‘privatized world peace’ and who is only threatened by stupid government and the urge of stupid elected representatives to, in some way, control his unilateral decisions on American intervention.
Captain America, who I adore, but who’s story has so far been ‘man joins military, decides it’s corrupt and goes uber libertarian’. He spent his entire last film ranting about how you couldn’t trust governments, or international bodies, and it needs to come down to an individual man’s conscience. I’m sort of expecting his next film to start with him living on a ranch in Montana where he is carefully stockpiling weapons for when the FBI show up. But it’s OK because he is very good. He is clean shaven and doesn’t swear and just wants to live the way they did in the 1940s (when I guess women did have more rights in the workplace…)
Black Widow, who’s whole story has apparently been how she always just wanted a nice guy and babies but has been forced to be a sexy kick ass assassin by the horror of sterilisation.
Hawkeye who apparently does own a weird isolated ranch in Montana.
I won’t rant too much about the assorted limp female love interests because that will lead me to my very bitter rant about Sharon Carter and the atrocity that is her being Peggy’s replacement. Steve Rodgers – I’m not happy with you!
The most radical of the lot has been Thor, disturbingly, who’s last film was a totally unapologetic tale of how a major imperial space power had to face the sins of the generation who built their world and look at the bodies it was built on, featured a bolshy female hero who wasn’t secretly in love with anyone, drank, belched, and didn’t get cured by a good cuddling but by actually facing her demons, and ended up with a bunch of refugees heading for Earth, with the narrative firmly on their side.
Within that context, I actually do find Black Panther subversive. Yes, it offers a reading that even Breitbart can (and does love) but it offers us something else. It asks a lot of questions and doesn’t necessarily give us the answers we want.
*
And finally, Bucky. I’m going to say now, upon seeing the film, I wanted to ship Shuri and Bucky instantly. He’s dour and angsty, she’s sparky and smart and optimistic. Together they would totally fight crime.
Then I was told she was 16 and he’s 100. Which is, I note, apparently totally fine in Buffy the Vampire slayer, but I agree, it’s creepy. Even if the actress is obviously in her twenties and I think it’s reasonable to assume that the genius research physicist is over the age of consent and I have my own issues with the tech genius princess needing to be infantilised in *some* way.
But apparently she’s 16. So I’m not shipping until she’s 20. I still want them to fight crime and I’m glad Bucky is in Wakanda. I think he’s got a lot to learn there and I am hopeful for how that will transform him going forwards.
*
Postscript – the Hanuman worshippers in the mountain also were fabulous. African Hindu vegetarians FTW!
Warning - very long. And spoilers.
*
First of all, I want to say I liked it, very much. I enjoyed every moment and was sad when it ended and felt emotionally engaged with the characters with absolutely no difficulty. I didn’t personally notice the ‘people not like me feel alien’ effect some folk has talked about, which may, of course, be because of the women. Taking aside the whole race issue, Black Panther is one of the most amazingly empoweringly pro-woman movies I’ve seen in fricking ages. In terms of superhero films, it comes second only to Wonder Woman in creating smart, independent, interesting, nuanced female characters, capable of having healthy relationships based on equality. Which means that in the MCU, apparently Wakanda joins outer space and 1940s Earth as the places where feminism exists. Bad luck 21st century American women.
And Shuri was the most perfect character ever, although I am unconvinced by her apparently being sixteen years old. She looks older, was played by an adult actress, and didn’t actually act like a sixteen year old girl. But whatever, Marvel. She’s still amazing.
The aesthetic was also beautiful and the cinematography made me deeply happy. There was always something to look at, always something interesting and different going on on screen and the film made a huge effort to make Wakanda different, while still making coherent sense.
*
But now, let’s move on to the other stuff, which everyone is talking about, which is race. For me, one of the things I found fascinating was I felt as if the film was actually telling two very different narratives about race. Or rather, the film asked a lot of provocative questions and raised a lot of issues, and then left one apparent resolution which fitted in very well with the essentially deeply conservative MCU (in which radicalism is bad, good noble aristocratic African Black people are very different to the scary and unreasonably angry African American people, and White people don’t need to feel that guilty because none of the main protagonists have actually ever been victims of racism or colonialism and are doing just fine, and everything is best resolved by working with the UN and building some outreach centres in Oakland) and yet constantly undermined that very conclusion.
Killmonger is not the villain.
Or rather, the film kind of claims Killmonger is the villain. He makes Black Panther’s family cry (although, I note, they seemed fine with the whole ritual waterfall combat based form of government their family relies on when their brother was beating the crap out of M’Baku), and he burns a load of flowers so there is no basis for superpowered monarchy in the future and wants lots of Black people to rise up and references the British Empire in terms of where he wants Wakanda to go. But he’s played by Michael B Jordan, who is, let’s face it, far more charismatic than anyone else in the film, he’s handsome, he’s passionate, he has a lot of actually very compelling arguments and he definitely gets the best lines. The guy dies with a stinging rebuke to White supremacy over the globe and a gut punch to Wakandan isolationism when he says he wants to be buried in the ocean, with his ancestors who jumped from the slave ships.
He’s not the bad guy. The film doesn’t even really try and sell us on him being the bad guy. It just accepts that he’s not allowed to win because holy crap, Fox News couldn’t write positive reviews of how lovely it is to see fluffy and unthreatening Black exceptionalism on screen in that case.
I also thought he had some amazing things to say about generational trauma – the African diaspora are the abandoned children of the continent, deprived of their right to an understanding of the culture and heritage, only able to identify as ‘Black’ because the middle passage robbed them of their ability to be Yoruba or Igbo, and that is a subtle but profound trauma. As humans, we care deeply about where we come from – it’s why HP Lovecraft created a whole genre of horror based around ‘your ancestry isn’t what you thought it was’, it’s why we love ‘hidden nobility’ storylines, it’s why ancestry DNA is so damn popular. It’s why Americans always have hyphens to tell you the tribe they claim back in Europe – Scottish, Italian, Irish, whatever. We took that away from them.
And here we see Killmonger – another abandoned child of Africa, only this time it’s made literal. He is orphaned when his radicalised father is murdered and then literally abandoned by Africa – by Africans – who get in a ship and fly away, leaving him to racism, poverty, violence and the constant threat of incarceration. He sees his dead and brutalised father, he’s abandoned and he takes that trauma and it makes him angry. His motivation is perfectly clear and it’s linked, I think, quite clearly to the wider African American experience. African Americans *get* to be angry, the film says. Can’t you see why?
*
Of course, this is the MCU and of course the ultimate resolution is essentially conservative, because the MCU is. For all it is beloved of comic geeks and people who think of themselves as terribly liberal and progressive, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as exactly radical.
So far, the heroes we’ve seen have been:
Tony Stark, the face of benevolent capitalism, who stroppily declares in Iron Man 2 that he has ‘privatized world peace’ and who is only threatened by stupid government and the urge of stupid elected representatives to, in some way, control his unilateral decisions on American intervention.
Captain America, who I adore, but who’s story has so far been ‘man joins military, decides it’s corrupt and goes uber libertarian’. He spent his entire last film ranting about how you couldn’t trust governments, or international bodies, and it needs to come down to an individual man’s conscience. I’m sort of expecting his next film to start with him living on a ranch in Montana where he is carefully stockpiling weapons for when the FBI show up. But it’s OK because he is very good. He is clean shaven and doesn’t swear and just wants to live the way they did in the 1940s (when I guess women did have more rights in the workplace…)
Black Widow, who’s whole story has apparently been how she always just wanted a nice guy and babies but has been forced to be a sexy kick ass assassin by the horror of sterilisation.
Hawkeye who apparently does own a weird isolated ranch in Montana.
I won’t rant too much about the assorted limp female love interests because that will lead me to my very bitter rant about Sharon Carter and the atrocity that is her being Peggy’s replacement. Steve Rodgers – I’m not happy with you!
The most radical of the lot has been Thor, disturbingly, who’s last film was a totally unapologetic tale of how a major imperial space power had to face the sins of the generation who built their world and look at the bodies it was built on, featured a bolshy female hero who wasn’t secretly in love with anyone, drank, belched, and didn’t get cured by a good cuddling but by actually facing her demons, and ended up with a bunch of refugees heading for Earth, with the narrative firmly on their side.
Within that context, I actually do find Black Panther subversive. Yes, it offers a reading that even Breitbart can (and does love) but it offers us something else. It asks a lot of questions and doesn’t necessarily give us the answers we want.
*
And finally, Bucky. I’m going to say now, upon seeing the film, I wanted to ship Shuri and Bucky instantly. He’s dour and angsty, she’s sparky and smart and optimistic. Together they would totally fight crime.
Then I was told she was 16 and he’s 100. Which is, I note, apparently totally fine in Buffy the Vampire slayer, but I agree, it’s creepy. Even if the actress is obviously in her twenties and I think it’s reasonable to assume that the genius research physicist is over the age of consent and I have my own issues with the tech genius princess needing to be infantilised in *some* way.
But apparently she’s 16. So I’m not shipping until she’s 20. I still want them to fight crime and I’m glad Bucky is in Wakanda. I think he’s got a lot to learn there and I am hopeful for how that will transform him going forwards.
*
Postscript – the Hanuman worshippers in the mountain also were fabulous. African Hindu vegetarians FTW!
