Movie Enthusiast Issue 47: Thoughts on Black Panther
This weekend I saw Black Panther! It was nice! Faithful readers of this newsletter know what that means—yes, this was Tim’s first Marvel movie! Thus I have a lot of thoughts, only half of which have to do with Black Panther as such.
First of all, and maybe this will surprise you, but I ADORE costume designers more than any other technician on a film crew. (Yes, I have a special affinity for cinematographers because their work most closely resonates with my own artistic talent, but I wouldn’t know how to hem a garment to save my life let alone design hundreds of original outfits for a film.) So on that note, can we just engrave every Costume Design award that will be given at every movie awards show next year with Ruth E. Graham’s name now? What versatile work! What gorgeous work! I mean, not only did she design this revelation of a hat and dress:
…but she also designed a suite of superhero outfits, traditional garb for each of the tribes of Wakanda for use in ritual settings, and some kick-a streetwear for when the Wakandans go out on the town? And no matter what mode she’s operating in it always looks fantastic? I’m shook.
Another good thing: there are a lot of powerful women in this movie, and whose power comes in many forms. I mean, Shuri—who, by the way, is a fabulous character and I wish Letitia Wright the top pick of every future project she ever wants to make from now on—just, like, casually built Wakanda’s entire mass transit system?! And Coogler and his co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole never draw attention to this fact in the ways that we’ve grown accustomed to blockbusters doing so. Their having power is never questioned by anyone in the movie, nor is the fact that they have it used as the object of a “gee-whiz, lookit that woman upending my expectations!” gag. They just are powerful, they are brilliant, they are gorgeous, and we accept it because Coogler (and cinematographer Rachel Morrison, who doesn't use a single demeaning angle on any of the female characters in this entire film) never questions it. When Lupita N’yongo walks up to a woman in South Korea and starts talking to her in fluent Korean, you’re startled for half a second before the “duh” moment strikes: why shouldn’t a black woman in a movie be a language savant?
As for the bigger picture: I liked that this movie took place all within its own world and didn’t feel like an advertisement for the rest of the Marvel universe. I liked that there was a meaningful conflict and a villain with interesting motivations and that said villain had genuinely powerful final dying words. I liked a lot of the iconography—especially in both T’Challa and Killmonger’s respective visits to the ancestral plane.
I do feel like there’s a cap on my enjoyment to this movie though, mostly having to do with I sense is the corporate influence of the Marvel brand on the movie’s imaginative scope. The movie gives you plenty to talk about, but the way in which its delivered fits pretty neatly into what felt, to me at least, like a preordained model of filmmaking. I kept waiting for the movie to do something unexpected or for any of the stunning craftsmanship to serve a purpose beyond being nice to look at. Not that having something nice to look at for two hours is a bad thing, but I for one was only entertained in a very passive way. Only once did the filmmaking actively engage me: in the cut from the shot of Killmonger observing the destruction of the ritual chamber to the shot of him entering the throne room with the camera upside down and slowly spinning itself rightside up. Now that was awesome. But why should a two-hour-long movie have only one such moment?
There’s a lot to say about the movie’s politics! Kameron Collins acknowledges how thorny the discourse is in his strongly positive review for The Ringer:
[W]ould any of the movie’s representational power still matter if Black Panther weren’t any good? Again: complicated. The social politics of it all are eerie and dense; those politics, twined with history, aesthetics, the New York Times push alerts I keep ignoring, the open-all-hours despondent chaos of my Twitter feed, and on and on, is even more fraught. It’s possible to love Black Panther but be conflicted, but still love it, but still be conflicted, all the while sharing in the unmitigated joy of its existence. “The film arrives as a corporate product,” writes Carvell Wallace, beautifully, for The New York Times, “but we are using it for our own purposes.” I like thinking of Black Panther in those terms: not just as a movie you watch, nor as a challenge to the woke box-checking of the political minefield we call the internet, but as something we can use.
As to the topic of representational power, Christine Emba and Zack Linly, both writing for the Washington Post, are right to applaud Black Panther on its very real and very important political significance. The movie opens a lot of doors on arrival: as Linly concludes, “Maybe the question black audiences will ask now isn’t ‘Will we get another shot?’ but ‘What will we do next?’” and as Emba a bit more incisively adds: “The more normal it is to see people of color in spaces of power, the harder it will be to sustain the assumptions — and justify policies — that enforce America’s greatest and most terrifying fiction: that there must always be someone to look down upon, that people of color must necessarily be second class.”
It’s refreshing to see a superhero movie start a robust debate (Miriam Bale tweets: “Loving the criticism of Black Panther's politics. (Also loving that it's a movie w/ ideas that can be criticized, instead of a barrage of noise and smirking camaraderie.)”) On the one hand you have Jelani Cobb writing eloquently in the New Yorker in the movie’s defense, and on the other you’ve got Armond White articulating his contrarian take more thoughtfully than usual in National Review. And then you have Moonlight director Barry Jenkins bridging the divide with this astute observation: “BLACK PANTHER is PEAK double consciousness. It’s a Marvel movie, sure. And a blockbuster, absolutely, covers those bases and covers them well. But a film that features that vegetarian bit? Or Killmonger’s last line? Ryan’s made two movies at once. And he crushed them both 🙌🏿” (And then as soon as I had finished writing this newsletter, this critical piece in Boston Review appeared out of thin air; the take machine churns on…)
What seems to be missing right now is a discussion of the movie as something you actually experience with the senses and not just some texturally nonspecific delivery mechanism for ideas and ideals. Movies are more than just the sum of the political discourse that springs up around them. There’s a lot more we could talk about with Black Panther: Why do all the fight scenes have to be so unimaginative? Why doesn’t a single musical cue make a memorable impact? Who exactly is benefitting from the disorientingly lit and structured first 20 minutes of the film? We’ll get around to those questions some day. But for now I realize there are much more pressing questions to ask, and I think it’s fine that we ask them.