The Passionate Politics of “Black Panther”

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Many films in the Marvel franchise reflect American turmoil of the day, but the land of Wakanda, in “Black Panther,” is unusually complex and resonant.Photograph by Marvel / Walt Disney Studios / Everett

What’s remarkable about “Black Panther” is not just that the very act of making a high-budget franchise superhero film with a cast of mainly black actors is so woefully exceptional. It’s that, despite the technical requirements of a superhero film (and, no doubt, despite the supervision of Disney’s producers), the director, Ryan Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, has made a movie that’s both personal and audacious. “Black Panther” fuses the imaginary realm of Marvel characters with world history, contemporary politics, and specifically the experience of black people in the United States. Many Marvel releases reflect American political turmoil of the moment, but this film’s confrontations with the agonies of the day are unusually complex and resonant.

The film’s action follows that of “Captain America: Civil War,” from 2016, in which T’Chaka (John Kani), the king of the imaginary African land of Wakanda, is killed in a terrorist attack on a United Nations complex in Vienna. In “Black Panther,” T’Chaka’s son, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), returns to Wakanda to assume the throne. One of the great virtues and pleasures of “Black Panther” is its coherent and intricate world-building—it delivers a history of Wakanda that feels less like an exposition than like a discovery. The movie’s backstory, dispensed in two big sequences, is intensely dramatic in itself. The first of these sequences establishes Wakanda, a landlocked country in eastern Africa, as home to Earth’s sole supply of vibranium, the world’s strongest metal, which is endowed with a potentially devastating power of its own. Wakanda has isolated itself in order to protect its stores of vibranium—and to protect itself from the invasion or the enticement of would-be colonizers—but its rustic landscapes conceal, with the help of holograms, its mighty technological sophistication. The second backstory reveal takes place in Oakland (Coogler’s actual home town), in 1992, where a Wakandan prince, N’Jobu (Sterling K. Brown), is stationed. Witnessing the burdens borne by black Americans, he decides to distribute his country’s vibranium and weaponry worldwide, in an effort to aid a revolution against white-dominated powers. N’Jobu’s brother T’Chaka, then the King of Wakanda, thwarts the effort, kills N’Jobu, and covers up the plot. But the prince, who is married to an American woman, has a son with him, a young boy who grows up to challenge T’Challa for the Wakandan throne.

But, before that takes place, T’Challa returns home to Wakanda, where—following the long-standing tradition for the country’s royal succession—he must accept a challenge from a pretender to the throne in the form of hand-to-hand combat. After T’Challa prevails, he takes his ex-partner, the warrior and humanitarian Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and the Wakandan general Okoye (Danai Gurira) on a mission to South Korea. Their aim is to prevent the illicit transfer of vibranium, which has been stolen by a young man (Michael B. Jordan) who’s playing a long game. His name is Erik Stevens, a.k.a. Killmonger—and he’s the son of N’Jobu, the prince who was killed in Oakland. A brilliant student and a former U.S. Special Forces soldier, Erik has been preparing for this moment for all his life. After an explosive series of battles, Erik goes to Wakanda seething with anger and seeking revenge; he challenges T’Challa for the throne, and, after a fierce and bloody fight, which he wins, he demands of the country’s despairing guardians to be crowned king.

Killmonger’s purpose in taking over Wakanda is more than just revenge, however: he seeks to fulfill his father’s self-appointed mission in an even more radical form. Killmonger plans to distribute vibranium to Wakandan “war dogs” embedded in countries around the globe. With their help, Wakanda would overthrow the world’s existing governments, correct the historical error and injustice of white domination, redress the oppression of the world’s black people, and create a Wakandan empire on which “the sun will never set.” In pursuing his mission, Killmonger wields his power cruelly against Wakandans, as well. In response, T’Challa, Nakia, and T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), who is Wakanda’s leading scientist, seek, in a quiet but determined plan, to overthrow him.

The symbolic dimensions of “Black Panther” are ample and powerful. Wakanda evokes a prelapsarian Africa, free of Western colonial devastation: the country’s resources are unplundered, its chain of tradition is unbroken, its cultural heritage is fully realized, and its technological achievements embody both the country’s material and intellectual resources. The blend of classical arts of African origin with high-tech wonders, of warmly vital skyscraper cities of African inspiration (rendered in eye-catching production design by Hannah Beachler), suggests a popular version of Afrofuturism—even if the soundtrack, with its vibrant songs by Kendrick Lamar, doesn’t suggest much of Sun Ra’s extravagances (it would have been fun to catch a bit of the Wakandan avant-garde).

Coogler, who previously directed “Creed,” his 2015 reboot of the “Rocky” series, has a distinctive mode of dramatic inspiration: he catches the existential struggles of life and death in quiet moments of intimate confrontation. That artistry itself is more than just emotional; it both reflects and bitterly criticizes an inescapable aspect of American life. In a flashback, Killmonger recalls a conversation, in Oakland, in which he told his father, N’Jobu, “Everybody dies, it's just life around here.” But that, of course, is no way to have to live. Here and elsewhere, Coogler dramatizes, clearly and relentlessly, the air of oppression—constant menace from police violence, from conditions of occupation and degradation—and of intentional cultural and economic deprivation and systematic powerlessness, arising from a pressurized atmosphere of deadly hatred that strips the fullness of life to the starkness of survival.

The temptation of black radicalism, of taking up arms against oppressive white-supremacist powers, is present in “Black Panther.” But its heroes, though entirely sympathetic to the needs and demands of the oppressed, reject it, favoring improvement over revenge, a quest for justice over a new round of injustices. They do so not merely out of the goodness of their hearts. Rather, if the heroes of Wakanda reject the revolutionary radicalism of Killmonger, it’s because they see it as merely the obverse of the white radicalism that’s in real-life power now. (A series of suggestions scattered throughout the movie reinforce that implication all the more.)

Having obtained power, the cruel and brutal Killmonger has no intention of relinquishing it—ever. The age-old process of royal succession depends on the use of a blue, glowing “heart-shaped herb” that’s cultivated in a quiet corner of the kingdom. Killmonger orders it destroyed, because he intends to be, in effect, the last King of Wakanda. Killmonger is the personification of democratic perversion, an autocrat who’s elected according to the rules of the game but who then changes the rules to maintain a stranglehold on power. T’Challa tells him, “Your heart is full of hatred; you’re not fit to be a king,” and tells Nakia that Killmonger “is a monster of our own making.” (There’s an element of backstory that I don’t want to spoil that explains how literally this is true.) Though T’Challa, Nakia, and Shuri—along with T’Challa and Shuri’s mother, Ramonda (Angela Bassett)—unhesitatingly exile themselves from their tyrannized homeland and prepare for armed conflict against it, the crux of the drama isn’t their allegiance but, ultimately, that of the general Okoye: whether she will remain true to her oath to serve the throne of Wakanda, whoever may occupy it, or whether she’ll decide that her love of country requires her to rebel.

In “Black Panther,” Coogler isn’t just posing a question to black activists; he’s posing a challenge to Wakandan officials and institutions. Which is to say, to American officials and institutions, as well. First, the film evokes a moment of crisis, when duty and conscience may make disloyalty to one ruler and his regime a matter of higher loyalty to the country and the state. Second, it raises the question of political process, its inadequacy, its failure. The Wakandan tradition of a physical battle that decides who occupies the throne may have worked just fine for centuries, when the goodwill of all challengers could be assumed, but the system is vulnerable to the manipulation of a strongman whose prime claim to power is strength. It’s a system that may have worked once, but in a modern technocracy there are virtues besides the ability to win a hand-to-hand fight that a ruler would need.

There’s a tag scene, midway through the end credits of “Black Panther,” showing T’Challa addressing the U.N. about Wakanda’s new deal: his plan to share his country’s knowledge and resources with the world. (He concludes with a line of pointedly current import: “The wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers.”) In the inevitable sequel, I wouldn’t be surprised if the venerable process of transitions of power—the very essence of Wakanda’s institutions—weren’t transformed to go hand in hand with the nation’s transformed place in the world.