First of all, let me stress that I love the Black Panther franchise and the world that has been created for it. I especially love the characters and their organic and personal interactions with each other and the moral dilemmas that they must wrestle with during both films. Having said that, I also have issues with both films, especially Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022, Ryan Coogler). My distress over the latest entry in the Black Panther franchise has compelled me to write this analysis. To my mind, both films, though especially Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, are enormous missed opportunities for something truly special, and that lack is only compounded by the scale of these films and the massive number of people they reach.
Black Panther
For this blog post, my primary focus is going to be on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever but I do want to touch on the first film, a way to better set-up what I’m going to address in the second film. To my mind, as so many people have stressed, the first film was an admirable achievement and an exciting breakthrough for establishing how Others (people of color, indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ people, etc.) in general but especially African Americans can create and star in a huge and successful blockbuster. For that alone, Black Panther (2018, Ryan Coogler) must be considered a monumentally important film. As so many scholars and writers have said and I echo, the many positive and empowering representations of such rich and complex characters, the fidelity to African heritage and culture, and the creation of an advanced Black civilization are invaluable contributions to representations of Blacks everywhere.
More pointedly, for my primary focus here, what was great about the first film is how it at least touched on a crucial issue, the dark history of how first world imperial powers, including America, colonized African countries and enslaved Africans. We get this set-up in the opening segment when it is stressed how Wakanda’s advanced technological advancements (due to their fortunate access to vibranium) allowed them to hide and isolate themselves, escaping the horrors of colonization and oppression that their neighboring countries had to endure. Indeed, the profound and tantalizing suggestion is that if left alone and not colonized, indigenous civilizations such as Wakanda and Talokan can develop into prodigious civilizations.
We also get this colonialism commentary when Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) asks the museum curator how first world countries got indigenous artifacts, a reference to how first world powers didn’t just colonize African countries (and other countries as well of course) but robbed them of their cultural and religious artifacts, to be put on display for the consumption of western first worlders. Killmonger goes on to stress this heinous legacy when his goal is to give advanced weapons to oppressed Blacks so they can rise and destroy their oppressors. That becomes one of the crucial plot points of the film, how Wakanda has shamefully put their own well-being ahead of helping Others and though of course Killmonger’s choice of how to help Others means violence and war on a worldwide scale – and thus wrong (!) – his desire to not let Wakanda be a selfish isolationist country anymore is a good one, one that T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) says he will take up at the end of the film. And that would seem to set up something truly special for a sequel, which, alas, is not where the sequel goes.
Before I get to that, though, I want to stress the one glaring problem I have with the first film, a problem that becomes even more manifested in the sequel.
The Ideological Problems of Black Panther
I define ideology here as those belief systems we are born into, making these belief systems so ingrained and normalized that we don’t even see them as belief systems, instead seeing them as natural and normal and thus not to be questioned. The problem with mainstream films is that they constantly reinforce these toxic ideological norms, norms such as toxic masculinity ideologies (patriarchy, phallocentrism, hypermasculinity, sexist gender norms), white supremacy, capitalism, fundamentalist religious belief systems, class hierarchies/elitism, heteronormativity, and so on. To my mind, Black Panther reinforces two glaring toxic ideologies, toxic masculinity ideologies and monarchical (hierarchical, elitist, privileged, authoritarian, undemocratic) rule. I can best clarify this contention with one painfully problematic moment in the film.
When Killmonger first makes his presence known in Wakanda, he declares that his blood line makes him eligible for a challenge to T’Challa’s thrown. It doesn’t matter that Killmonger is not a native born Wakandan, nor that he is a psychopath (albeit a sympathetic one!), just the fact that he has “royal” blood in his veins makes him eligible for this challenge. It seems that T’Challa could deny him this challenge but of course T’Challa, being a phallic man, couldn’t possibly deny a challenge less his phallic power be questioned. It doesn’t matter that T’Challa is putting at risk not just his life (the “challenge” itself being a primitive and barbaric display of phallic violence) and the lives of his loved ones, but the lives of his people and the lives of millions of others around the world. That only monarch (King) T’Challa has the final say in this speaks to both the ridiculousness of monarchical rule and why it’s an elitist, authoritarian, undemocratic and primitive way of being. What makes this choice to make Wakandans “royals” especially silly is that Wakandans are in all other ways extremely enlightened people!
More Glaring Ideological Problems in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Before I get to my issues in the new installment of Black Panther, let me just stress that I so appreciated how the filmmakers handled the tragic death of beloved actor Chadwick Boseman. The celebration of life/funeral sequences of T’Challa doubled as a celebration of life/funeral for Chadwick Boseman, in effect allowing all of us to mourn and celebrate the life of Chadwick. The replacement of just Chadwick Boseman/Black Panther images in the Marvel Studio scroll was an additional touching tribute and like so many others, it brought me to tears.
The ensuing way that Shuri struggles with T’Challa’s death was all powerfully and organically done.
It is in the political-ideological choices this film makes that I have such an issue with, even more so than the first film, to the point where the film kind of sunk for me.
Where is the Colonialism Thread That was Promised in Black Panther???
So, instead of really fulfilling the promise made at the end of Black Panther, the filmmakers chose to essentially sideline this all-important colonialism issue. Where is the opening of Wakandan borders and technology and resources to their neighboring African countries? Where is the absolutely essential commentary on how colonialism, imperialism, and globalization have robbed African countries and other global south countries of their ability to develop and advance themselves? Where is the exploration and introspection of Wakanda’s isolationism and disengagement from the horrors that have been inflicted on the African continent and other global south countries? Where is forcing America and other first world countries to really face the horrors that they have inflicted and still inflict on the African continent and other global south countries?
Did the filmmakers just not want to delve into this difficult-to-confront and-digest territory? Like in Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever seems content just barely skirting this issue, with Okoye (Danai Guria) teasingly calling Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) “colonizer,” I guess our one holdover from the previous film. Did the filmmakers think they had done enough with this issue and so only needed to just give a nod to it???
We do get one moment with Namor (Tenoch Huerta) when as a child he goes back to his homeland to bury his mother and squarely confronts colonizers who have colonized his Mayan progenitors. And this is a powerful moment, but giving us a flash of a past we are all too familiar with feels more like a token gesture instead of really getting at the profound and disturbing and long lasting deeper implications of colonization and now neocolonialism-globalization today. (In short, this includes first world powers and moneyed entities [IMF, World Bank, etc.] getting global south countries deep in debt and then forcing them to do the bidding of first world countries, exploiting global south people and extracting the natural resources of these countries, and using these countries as spaces where there are little to no regulations, making it easier for first world powers to devastate fragile waterways and ecosystems and of course pay little to workers, who are largely seen as disposable.)
Making Namor and the Talokan Primitive Bloodthirsty Killers
Perhaps the most disappointing facet of the film for me is in making Namor and the Talokan bloodthirsty killers. Namor is supposed to be 500 years old and yet he has little in the way of wisdom and a deeper understanding of the human condition. He and his people wantonly kill Americans, Wakandans, and desire to kill Riri (Dominique Thorne), a young scientist who doesn’t even know what she has created. And they kill them for what seems to me shallow reasons. In the case of killing the Americans, they seem to kill them for extracting vibranium, but the Americans don’t even know about the Talokans so in this case the Americans are innocent of taking resources from an Other. Ideologically, this representation of a Latino people is extremely problematic. If these places were reversed and the Wakandans were represented this way, there would be an outcry for such a demeaning and primitive representation.
Uh, Why does Namor Hate the Surface World So Much???
Unless I missed something in the film, I believe the only reason we are given for why Namor hates the surface world so much is that experience of seeing how savage they are to his progenitor people I highlighted above. Beyond this experience, he does seem to have at least some awareness of how savage and dangerous the surface people are. At one point, he angrily mentions how the Americans are trying to extract vibranium from their territory, but, again, that is hardly a reason to hate them since they didn’t know they were stealing from the Talokan, which of course Namor is aware of. He says the word “extract” in a bitter tone, so perhaps he hates the surface world because of how they extract resources elsewhere, but this is never made clear.
Namor’s hatred of the surface people for their oppression and enslavement of his progenitor people is at least somewhat understandable, if he had made the specific connection to this treatment of a long ago past and how the surface people – or at least some of them (America!) – still act this way today.
And that is the most disappointing aspect of the film for me, how it has this golden opportunity to give us an angry advanced civilization who, yes, has a right to be angry, angry at a surface world (first world countries anyway) for its oppression and exploitation of (disposable) Others but also angry at a surface world that is extracting resources from Others for their own mercenary needs, not caring about how this impacts Others or giving them fair recompense or about the ecological devastation they are creating. This latter point, again, just barely touched on with Namor’s one line, really is essential for what this film seems to want to accomplish, e.g., extractive capitalism becoming a horrific part of globalization and moneyed interests’ exploitation and oppression of Others, not to mention this facet of capitalism being the root cause for climate change and other ecological catastrophes in the world. In terms of climate change and other ecological catastrophes, it really is beyond belief that this wasn’t made part of Namor’s hatred of the surface world, especially in terms of how the surface world is literally killing our oceans.
In this way, there are so many ways that the filmmakers could have created a real meaningful and complex civilization who is angry with the surface world but instead we get a people and Namor who for most of the film seem just another throwaway one-dimensional evil villain(s). And that brings me to an additional frustration, how we do get a more nuanced Namor during his time with Shuri (Letitia Wright), showing her his city and talking to her about his past. But instead of giving us this thoughtful and seemingly sensitive Namor throughout, we only get flashes of him, making his character very inconsistent and contradictory.
Finally, there is an additional point here, one that gets at how the above is really just one glaring contrivance. When Namor tells Shuri that he wants an alliance with Wakanda so they can go to war with the whole surface world, Shuri rightfully just says “madness.” But that’s it! Shuri and Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) could have perhaps reached Namor – who mostly does not seem “mad” – had they told him why this desire was “madness.” And it is an insane desire as I think anyone with an ounce of common sense could deduce. It is insane (do I really have to spell it out??) because going to war with the whole surface world in this Marvel universe would mean going to war with powerful weaponry including weapons of mass destruction and if Wakanda was allied to the surface world, that would mean adding their technological might to the mix. Of course, that also means other super-powered beings who would come to the aid of the surface people.
Had they spelled this out to Namor, perhaps he could have been given the deal that Shuri gives him at the end before all the killing began. But the filmmakers wanted a clash between the Talokans and the Wakandans and so these rational and reasonable exchanges never happen, and that’s also probably why they made Namor and the Talokans little more than primitive Neanderthals at times, to create this glaring contrivance, inauthentically manifest this war between otherwise advanced civilizations.
I HATE the War Between Others Storyline and Where is the Blood?
I thought for sure the filmmakers would have done what so many others have done, create a faux conflict between the Wakandans and the Talokans and then create another enemy that unites the two civilizations against a common enemy, presumably a neocolonist first world power. But to my frustration, they really do pit these two Others (Wakandans/Talokans/people of color/indigenous peoples) against each other in a bona fide war, Wakandans and Talokans killing each other! I guess I’m in the minority, but boy did this storyline leave a bad taste in my mouth. I really hated to see two glorious civilizations/Others go to war with each other, especially considering that they do seem to have a common enemy that they should be allying themselves against, not in terms of going to war with first world countries who have historically and still today exploit global south countries, but in terms of allying themselves with global south countries and/or standing up and stopping this exploitation and oppression and killings of (global south) Others and the destruction of the natural world.
The other egregious part of this “war” storyline is the filmmakers’ sanitizing of “war,” giving us comic book violence, with no blood! The reason war is so horrific is because human beings are killing other human beings, a truly barbaric act, the barbarity compounded by war sanctioning such killings. For war to be seen in this horrific light, we must not just see people killing people but the realness of these violent killings, including the blood spilled and the graphic nature of such violence. Only in that way can we truly see and understand why war is such an obscenity. Without REAL violence and killing, we can only see such a war in comic book violence terms, where in effect stick figures knock each other down with little in the way of impacting us with actual loss of life. Desensitization of violence is a very real and damaging thing. It’s one thing to have two super-powered beings fighting each other in a comic book violence way (often contextualized in terms of hero versus villain, making the violence less disturbing) – still desensitizing perhaps but at least we know we are watching escapist violence – it’s another thing altogether to manifest war between peoples, the mass killing needing to be real and felt in all its disturbing and traumatizing inhumanity. (Side note: That’s one of the things that makes the super-hero streaming series Invincible so sublime, for its deconstructive approach to comic book violence, making the violence all too real and disturbing.)
The Lost Potential of Super-Hero Movies
Alas, though I really do enjoy super-hero films, most of them leave me disappointed. The potential to not just give us exciting escapist entertainment but to also give us something deeper is just practically begging to be pursued, but few of them do this. The ones that do (Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2; Captain America: Winter Soldier; X-Men: Days of Future Past; The Suicide Squad [2021], to name a few) are in my view the handful of super-hero films that reveal the potential for super-hero films to be something truly special. Hopefully, future Black Panther films will take this step and do what seems so obviously ingrained into its very (revolutionary) nature, to invest itself in the progress, well-being, empowerment, and agency of (global south) Others and by extension humanity in general.