[Film Review] Black Panther

If you're a white boy (or girl) like me, this is likely to be your first foray into Afrofuturism. I think it might be for me, though I can't be sure -- it's not like there's a comprehensive Afrofuturist Registry or whatever. But whether it's your first encounter with Black-created science fiction or your thousandth, Black Panther offers something I can promise (with reasonable certainty) that you've never seen before: a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster movie, created by Black authors, artists, and actors, tied into a major and extremely popular shared cinematic universe, in which Blackness is not only prominent, but portrayed positively and in a way which is central to the story. Black Panther goes to places I never expected to see a Hollywood movie deal with in such a frank manner, and even goes so far as to point the blinding cultural spotlight that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe towards some disturbing and controversial truths.

Yeah, that's right: this movie asks you to consider some uncomfortable facts about race in America, Africa, and the African Diaspora. Deal with it. You'll still get to see awesome fight scenes, top-notch special effects, and subtle nods to Marvel Comics and MCU history. It's not all sad-times and serious business: there's plenty of domestic comedy, explosions, and affectionate kisses from battle-rhinos to keep you entertained.

[This review will contain mild spoilers for the first act of Black Panther, but I'll do my best not to ruin the major surprises for you.]

The tale begins with a visually-stunning infodump which explains the history of Wakanda and its massive deposits of the super-metal vibranium, as well as their decision to conceal their technological prowess from the rest of the world, and how they came to select the first Black Panther as their king. Since then, the title of king-and-Black-Panther has passed from father to son in the royal line: upon the recent assassination of King T'Chaka (John Kani) in Captain America: Civil War, the mantle passes to his son, Prince T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman).

Women are well and strongly represented; most of T'Challa's
entourage, from his bodyguards to his tech guru, are female.

(From the very first shot, I was reminded of that scene from the beginning of Roots, in which newborn Kunta Kinte is held up to take his first look at the night sky by his father, who tells his infant son "Behold! The only thing greater than yourself." In a way, Black Panther is a love-letter from Black parents (and aunts, uncles, big brothers, and big sisters), to the next generation of Black children, saying "Behold! This is how awesome your future could be; make it so.")

After that we jump ahead to Oakland, California in 1992, where King T'Chaka shows up unannounced, surprising his younger brother Prince N'Jobu (Sterling K. Brown), who has secretly been arming people of African descent with Wakandan weaponry in order to bring about revolution. T'Chaka is forced by this betrayal -- and N'Jobu's attempt on the life of T'Chaka's adviser -- to kill his younger brother, an act which will have dire consequences for T'Chaka's kingdom . . . and for his son in particular.

Next we skip ahead to the modern day where T'Challa ascends to the throne after a quick round of ritual combat. He learns that Age of Ultron villain Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) -- who recently stole a sizable chunk of Wakandan vibranium and killed several people in the process -- has resurfaced in Busan, South Korea, which prompts T'Challa to round up a posse -- consisting of his ex-lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and his chief honor-guardswoman Okoye (Danai Gurira) -- and head out to bring him in. This plan of course goes south, forcing T'Challa to return empty-handed . . . or nearly so. CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) gets caught in the crossfire of Klaue's escape (which is effected by one Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a former U.S. black ops soldier and son of Prince N'Jobu, making him T'Challa's cousin), and T'Challa decides they can't leave the man to die from wounds he sustained in "their" fight. So they pack Ross onto their quinjet and take him back to Wakanda for a round of super-healing . . . which entails exposing their country's technological superiority to an outsider (and a white guy to boot!)

Michael B. Jordan lends villain Erik Killmonger a formidable emotional range,
from a scary-intense calm to a bitter, wrathful spite.

But of course, things go from bad to worse when Killmonger shows up unexpectedly in Wakanda, revealing his hidden heritage and, by dint of his royal blood, challenging T'Challa for the throne . . . and the mantle of the Black Panther!

Alright, that's all the storyline I'm gonna spoil for you. Onward, to the review!

I don't think I've ever seen a movie with a token white guy before: it was an interesting inversion of the status quo. I also think it was a smart move on the writers' part, because by making a White man (Martin Freeman) one of the good guys, they preclude the inevitable racist braying that the film demonizes White people. The film doesn't exclude White people, neither from the protagonists nor from the antagonists, it simply takes the logical step of casting a movie set mostly in Africa with mostly people of African descent. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Killmonger is unusual for a Marvel villain: instead of being crazy-eyed psycho or a moustache-twirling omnicidal tyrant, Killmonger is calm and soft-spoken, almost scarily calm: a marked departure from his depiction in the comics, where he's about as restrained as Hulk Hogan. The villain was actually one of the film's strongest points (and Black Panther has a great many strong points). While he's unquestionably evil and clearly not interested in what's best for Wakanda -- or anyone else, including himself -- once we learn his backstory, he becomes . . . not exactly sympathetic exactly (we can't agree with his methods, or even his goals), we can at least understand what made him so fucked-up in the first place, and feel bad for him and his misfortune at the hands of an unjust system and his betrayal/abandonment by the people (his own flesh and blood) who should have taken him in and cared for him. 

Black Panther doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths about the African condition, both in Africa itself and across the globe (e.g., black-on-black crime, institutionalized racism, stereotyping, the need for Pan-Africanism, etc.) As Killmonger points out (as near as I can remember the quote), "Y'all sittin' up here comfortable [while] there's about two billion people all over the world that looks like us, but their lives are a lot harder [than yours]."

Killmonger is unusually philosophical for a Marvel villain: his words (especially his final line of the film) will stay with you long after Black Panther is over. Just make sure you stay until the very, very end.

Wakanda forever!

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet - Books One and Two

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet - Books One and Two (Marvel, 2016)
Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Illustrator: Brian Stelfreeze
Colorist: Laura Martin
Letterer: Joe Sabino

One of my New Year's resolutions was to get through my huge backlog of reading material, which by necessity entails NOT adding even more books to my already-overstocked reading list. Which is why I can't say that I planned to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' newest addition to the Marvel Universe, it just kind of happened one day when I saw these sweet-looking comics on display at my local library, just sitting there... tempting me... with their topicality and sick cover-art and Ta-Nehisi's name up there on the cover like some big... tempty thing.

Besides, I'd never read a Black Panther comic before, so I figured it'd be an interesting new experience. It's background reading, so you can appreciate the movie better, I told myself. It'll count as "doing something for Black History Month" or whatever.

This being part of the Marvel Universe, the tale begins in medias res - or rather, ex post facto: Wakanda, the African nation of which T'Challa (a.k.a. the Black Panther) is king, has just endured a series of deadly calamities: a Biblical flood instigated by Namor the Sub-Mariner, an invasion by Thanos, and a coup d'état by Doctor Doom which left T'Challa's sister Shuri, the previous Black Panther, trapped between life and death. The country is in chaos, and many Wakandans feel that their king has failed to protect them, and that therefore he "is no king at all". The sorcerer Tetu and his mind-witch Zenzi feel that monarchy has served Wakanda poorly, and so they stir up anti-royal, pro-democratic sentiment among T'Challa's subjects to fuel their Nigandan-backed revolution. Meanwhile, two of the Dora Milaje (the king's all-female honor guards) have gone rogue: after Aneka murders a serial rapist in an extra-judicial killing and is sentenced to death for undermining the rule of law, her lover Ayo steals a pair of prototype exoskeletons and breaks Aneka out of prison. Dubbing themselves the Midnight Angels, the two set off on an anti-rape rampage across Wakanda's lawless hinterlands, murdering bandit-kings and sexually-abusive patriarchs without trial or mercy. T'Challa is forced to hunt down and apprehend two of his own beloved and loyal servants—women with whom he agrees on the righteousness of their cause, in theory if not in practice—in order to preserve the rule of law in his own kingdom.

One of the things I really like about A Nation Under Our Feet is that no one could really be called a "villain", at least not in the traditional, mustache-twirling sense. Sure, there are minor characters like the White Gorilla and Zeke Stane (son of the villain from the first Iron Man movie) who you just love to hate, but for the most part all of the people working against Black Panther have sympathetic goals, even if we don't agree with their methods. What American reader could hear about an attempt to overthrow a hereditary monarchy and replace it with democracy and not feel at least a little affinity for their cause? What person with a heart could hear about systematic rapists being murdered by the very women they abused without feeling at least a twinge of poetic justice? Much like Game of Thrones, the reader is never sure who to root for, because we know that victory for one side means defeat for another faction with which we sympathize.

In fact, Coates makes us wonder for a while whether T'Challa is even the guy we're supposed to be rooting for. In Book Two, in a desperate attempt to restore order to his rapidly-disintegrating country by any means necessary, T'Challa recruits a consultancy team made up of the worst of the world's leaders: men who employ spies and torturers and even outright terrorism against their own people to maintain their own fragile grasp on power... and he asks them for their advice! T'Challa even uses nanobot technology of questionable origin (i.e., Doctor Doom) to enhance his own search for his sister's wayward soul. Speaking of whom, Book Two is interlaced with Shuri's story, as her soul journeys through the Djalia, the spiritual plane of Wakandan memory, where she learns the history of her people from a griot-spirit while simultaneously coming into her own, truer self. Book Two also sees the Panther teaming up with The Crew, an all-Black team of superheroes including Luke Cage and Storm, who help T'Challa raid a terrorist hideout in the grand, over-the-top, bullets-flying-in-your-face tradition of the very finest blaxploitation films of the 1970s.

At times, the use of Wakandan vocabulary was confusing. Words like jabari, mjinga, and jambazi are just tossed off by the cast without any explanation or easy way to look them up. At first I thought I could guess what they meant from context, but I kept coming across clues that made me think I had got it wrong. I realize that this is how people talk, without constantly explaining themselves, but a Wakandan dictionary, or a glossary at the end of the book, would have been nice.

Speaking of extras at the end of the book, both volumes feature "Process & Development" sections which include samples of character art, rough sketches of individual characters and entire pages, and excerpts from Coates' script. These bonuses are kind of interesting, but they won't really teach you anything new about how comic books get made.

Finally, each volume ends with reprints of classic Black Panther issues. Book One includes the Panther's first-ever appearance in Fantastic Four #52, a fun romp through a techno-organic jungle populated with deafeningly-bright primary colors and Jack Kirby's trippy, mechano-fantastic visuals. Book Two concludes with two issues of Panther's Rage, a 1973 adventure-tale which is extremely, at times hilariously, 80s. The main villain, Erik Killmonger (yes, that's his actual surname), is a bare-chested, spike-wearing, whip-wielding African giant who appears to dunk his entire head in a bucket of Soul-Glo every morning.

I think this is the first time the Black Panther has had both a Black writer and a Black illustrator at the same time, though I can't swear to that. Either way, Coates and Stelfreeze work well together, and I look forward to seeing more from this pairing. Coates' storytelling is excellent (A Nation Under Our Feet was nominated for a Hugo award for Best Graphic Story), but there are occasional resorts to well-worn comic book cliches (faked deaths, infodumps, deliberately misleading the reader, etc.) to heighten drama. I also found the story in Book One a little difficult to follow; I had to read it twice before I fully understood all the players and their various motivations, but Book Two flowed much better, once all the exposition was out of the way.

Overall, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet is a rollicking adventure yarn which doubles as subtle political commentary. Under the guise of discussing the myriad troubles which beset this fictional African country, Coates surreptitiously introduces and explores topics which are near and dear to his heart, such as internalized racism, statecraft and kingship, and what it is that truly makes a country (and its king) great:

T'CHALLA: The day after I became king, [my uncle] S'Yan offered a single piece of wisdom. "Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do." This was profound. For it meant that the majesty of kings lay in their mystique... not in their might. Every act of might diminished the king, for it diminished his mystique. Might exposed the king's powers and thus his limits. Might made the king human. Breakable. [...] [W]hat the people know not is the true power of kings.

Holy act of Congress, Batman! It's almost like he isn't talking about Africa at all!

[Book Review] The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 2010)

Written just after — and published in the midst of the the fallout from — the Great Recession of 2008, Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist is something of an aberration in the world of nonfiction prognostication: a text which, Roddenberry-like, dares to suggest that not only are we probably not headed for disaster, but the future will almost certainly be better than even our wildest dreams; better than we ever dared to hope.

Counter-intuitively, this is not a thought which many people enjoy entertaining. Most people (and I include myself in this statement — or at least, I used to) would like, even need, to believe that the world cannot go on without them, or at least without the particular set of circumstances which created them as individuals. These doomsayers would have us believe that the world was in a constant state of improvement until roughly the time they were born, which just so happened to be the apex of human civilization, and everything after that has been and will continue to be one long defeat.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, © Zach Weinersmith (yes, really)

Though this kind of thinking is understandable (every human being lives at what they perceive as the tail-end of history), Mr. Ridley makes some pretty compelling arguments why this conclusion is fallacious. For one, we can look back on the last 100,000 years of history and see that life has steadily gotten better in every way we can measure. Compared to the first members of Homo sapiens (or heck, even our parents and grandparents) modern humans eat better, live longer, have fewer chronic diseases, are less likely to die from violence, reproduce less, produce more food using less land, extract more energy from less fuel, and generally live better lives than ever before in our species' millennia of existence. Granted, this progress hasn't always been fast, and it never happens evenly across the entire population, but even the poorest human on earth today lives a life which is measurably better than that of the earliest hominids; even pre-contact tribes of the remote Amazon have bows and arrows, stone tools, and fire. It is the height of arrogance, the author asserts, to look back on this steady and ceaseless march of progress and conclude that the future must hold nothing but ruin and degeneracy (and to be honest, despite my natural inclination towards pessimism, I find myself agreeing with him almost against my will).

The Rational Optimist is broken down into eleven chapters, which trace the arc of human history in roughly chronological from our early hominid predecessors (like Homo erectus and neanderthals) all the way to the Singularity of the near-future. The author's main thesis is that all human progress comes from ideas "having sex" with each other: that it the process of exchange and cross-fertilization which gives birth to new ideas and technologies, allowing us to raise our standard of living in ways that other tool-using animals do not. "Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution", Ridley asserts in the prologue.

Ridley also makes the assertion that the dominance of Homo sapiens stems from the fact that we are the only animal which trades, which exchanges like for unlike. Other animals exchange food and grooming and sex in the hopes of reciprocal food, grooming, and/or sex at a later date, but only humans exchange sex for food, or food for tools, or one type of food for a different foodstuff. This tendency toward exchange and specialization allows us to draw on our species' collective brain, instead of being trapped by the endless treadmill of self-reliance. A self-sufficient hunter-gatherer must spend all of his mental energy on filling his head with the million-and-one things he needs to know in order to get enough calories by himself; conversely, a fisherman and a farmer can use trade and specialization so that each of them eats a more varied and healthier diet and has more leisure time (which they can use to consume more and provide employment to yet more people) without either having the faintest how the other plies his trade.

Ridley goes on to point out that despite its Ferengi-esque reputation, commerce has done more good for humanity than almost any other force in history. Slavery was one of our earliest inventions, but it was the steam-engine which abolished the slave trade by making it no longer profitable. Brutal, appalling cruelty towards both humans and animals was a (if not the) major form of entertainment in the pre-industrial world, but once our economic well-being no longer depended on human- and animal-powered labor, bloodsports became unacceptable. Ridley opines that "Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising, and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs."

In the final chapter, Ridley lays out his case for optimism about our future. This is where lots of optimists falter, and their two biggest stumbling-blocks are usually African poverty and global warming. Ridley soberly and realistically assesses both these issues, and not only finds cause for hope, but goes so far as to say that not only should we not despair of these twin terrors of the future, it is our moral duty to continue to believe that things can get better. The moment we stop believing that things can improve is the moment the world's most desperately poor and underprivileged cease being able to claw their way out of poverty. Ridley says "It is precisely because there is still far more suffering and scarcity in the world than I or anybody else with a heart would wish that ambitious optimism is morally mandatory. [...] those who offer counsels of despair or calls to slow down in the face of looming environmental disaster may not only be factually but morally wrong."

Now for the stuff I didn't agree with.

Ridley has a pretty dim view of religion and of the state — to him, priests and politicians are "tiresome fellow[s]" at best, and "parasites" at worst (which I guess they are at the worst of times, but I think it ignores a lot of nuance, and at their best I do believe that they can make tangible improvements to a great many human lives). It worries me that he doesn't hold with the conventional wisdom that global warming will devastate our planet's food supply and economy (though he does admit that resettling all those billions of people who live in future flood-zones will be expensive, and likely contentious), pointing out that just a few decades ago, scientists were sounding the alarms because global cooling, which they said would also devastate our planet's food supply and economy. Also concerning is that he's extremely gung-ho about genetic modification as a future food source, a bandwagon I'm not quite ready to jump on just yet. I fear that he may be overestimating humanity's tolerance for change and improvement, but so far we've done a pretty good job of adapting to some really spectacular levels of change and chaos — after all, we've made it through the Warring States period, the Dark Ages, the Black Death, two World Wars, and the Cold War without blowing it all up, haven't we?

While I might not yet be 100% on board with the optimism bandwagon, The Rational Optimist has achieved something remarkable: it has demolished or damaged most of the arguments I previously used as justification for my pessimistic cynicism. For decades, I've assumed the worst about the future and humanity, but Matt Ridley has pointed out an uncomfortable truth: that my pessimism turns out to be unnecessary and incorrect a lot more often than I'd like to believe. It feels kind of weird to think about the future and experience neither stomach-churning fear nor bitter pessimism, but it's a feeling I could get used to. Pessimism is a habit I've had for a long, long time, and being without it (even though I never enjoyed it) feels kind of strange, like suddenly regrowing a long-lost limb.

I won't say I'm an optimist now, but I can't say I'm a pessimist anymore. And isn't that a reason to be hopeful?