On Cynicism
So what was so great about Black Panther?
It isolated it's story and indeed, it's whole world away from the rest of the Marvel Universe, meaning it had no obligation to represent White people. Similar to that test that goes back to the 80's where a film needs to have two named female characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man, Black Panther I imagine passes with flying colours a similar test where 2 black characters get to have conversations with each other that aren't about white people.
It also paints a Utopic African Nation that is not just a facsimile of the current wealthiest nations on earth but casts an African Nation as superior. This is similar to a Total Quality Management (TQM) technique called 'Draw, See, Think' which is where you draw your best case scenario so you can envision it and then start figuring out how to get there. I don't doubt that it is tremendously powerful to see your culture or your heritage held in a positive light after a lifetime of being bombarded with negative associations and connotations. That's powerful stuff, the power of which is easily identified within individuals given the general scarcity of encouragement and positive feedback.
Furthermore, going behind the cameras and digging into reality, a bunch of Black People got paid. Ryan Coogler as Director who co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole also African-American, Cinamatographer was a woman, and special effects employed 2/3rds of the worlds' population. Not to mention that the characters of the film were in fact played by actors who are real people in real life and they took home what was hopefully big-fat-paychecks. In Andy Serkis and Martin Freemen there was enough white men to avoid obtusely alienating them, but they played bit-parts really.
So we've come a long way since Al Jolson, a long way since the last big blockbuster cultural phenomena set in continental Africa 'The Lion King' where barely any of the cartoon characters were voiced by African Americans (though they were more represented than Arab's in Aladdin).
And as Barack Obama said 'Better is good.' and it is worth remembering that.
Yes indeed, Black Panther is a terrific film truly flawless for anyone under the age of 12. As of this writing, I'm living through that period that effects some films known as 'hype' before as I'm willing to bet time will prove, the movie is relegated to it's true significance. Much like James Cameron's Titanic, or James Cameron's Avatar. And I feel as highlighted above^ the good will be simmered down like a sauce on a low heat to what I mentioned, and in the future we are I assume aiming for, perhaps the memory of the significance of an almost all-black cast in a major release film will simply be taken for granted by future audiences.
But right now, it's painful for me to behold. I could just ride it out, I could take no risks and keep my mouth shut so that if it turns out I'm wrong and I'm the minority curmudgeon that didn't get it, then I could let others have a good time... but fuck it, I've been appropriating Black Radical fashion for decades, I had to take shit from my brother for my white-guilt and the sudden influx of hype from my white friends is frustrating, because the Black Panther doesn't deserve the lip-service.
So spoilers you fucking man-child, I'm going to talk about the content, and why with time and digestion it will probably be scaled back to largely positive as a step in the right direction, rather than the sparking of a revolution, because if you close one eye and see with another - it's a problematic film. So much so it's hard to know where to begin.
In fairness, most of the problems can be laid at the feet of predominantly White people, maybe I'll start with the larger group because they are actually easier to deal with. The Disney Corporation, it's Chairman and CEO is Bob Iger, and Walt Disney Studio's is presided over by two White Male Presidents, whom are parent to Marvel Studios also presided over by a White Man who served as producer for Black Panther. And all these subsidiaries are assets on the books of Disney, whom are a publicly traded company with obligations to maximise profits for the shareholders, and take a guess who dominates the asset holding class in America, the world, everywhere.
Thus, if African Americans, and Africans everywhere are turning out in droves to celebrate seeing their cultures portrayed in a wonderful fantastic light for perhaps the first time in their lives, as moving as it is, it is also a mechanism whereby their wealth is redistributed to predominantly the wealthiest white people in global society. Other's have picked up on this and there was some online campaign to try and get the studios to donate 25% of the films profits to outreach as the Titular character proposes to do with the riches Wakanda has sat on for millennia. Unforch, this is happening at a time where Disney can safely tell a bunch of black kids in Oakland to go fuck themselves, and it probably won't hear a peep because attention is focused on other kids telling the NRA to go fuck themselves, nor probably would Disney be wrong in assuming that distributing all their black audience's money to their shareholders will result in them boycotting the next installment of the Black Panther franchise. After all, an abysmal hit rate on adapting comic books into movies has never stopped nerds from forking over their cash.
So that's that, and it's sad, but black communities might take away that they probably have billions of dollars at their command that instead of spending on movie tickets, could be spent on social programs if they could coordinate and market one as easily as Disney can sell a comic book movie.
The problems in the content lay at the feet largely of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (I'm sure it wasn't intended, but as a poweful metaphor, when Stan Lee makes his traditional cameo in the movie, Prince T'Challa has unwittingly just won a big stack of money on a roulette wager, which Stan Lee appropriates for himself.) These famous collaborators are two white men that conceived of the Black Panther back in the 60's. And Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole inherited the legacy of the most progressive minds in comics from the 60's.
And in the opening sequence where an animated black sand is doing the exposition of what the nation of Wakanda is and where it stands today, I was impressed that they alluded to the slave-trade. Of course, the moment they acknowledge the reality of slavery, the great Afro-Futuristic nation of Wakanda becomes morally culpable for it via omission. The Nations leaders literally made a choice of using their superior technology to liberate Africa from the tyranny of Colonial powers, or to seclude themselves and abandon their neighbors. They chose the latter.
I blame Stan Lee, you basically can't have a fictitious African utopia in Africa's Heartland without skewering yourself in this way. Thus the screenwriters could only avoid it by making Wakanda a dysfunctional and devastated nation state powerless to help their neighbors or attempt to tackle this moral dilemma, and I'm impressed they tried to tackle the moral dilemma head on, but I thought about it during the film, and the best solution I could come up with would have been for T'Challa to have been a massive breakaway from his forebears, standing in open defiance to his father - (basically playing the role of his uncle in the film) but it would have to be acknowledged, that Wakanda's isolationist policies leave blood on their hands, in much the same way Australia's appalling handling of refugees in contravention of UN charters we have signed is a source of great national shame.
So Stan Lee screwed them on that one, but the fact is, if you try to sidestep it, then you don't get to portray that Afrofuturistic nation, which I believe at its heart is noble. Perhaps for the given nerd audiences, they could have just ignored the dilemma of Wakanda's culpability. And I should be clear, the inaction of good men is by comparison, nowhere near the evil of actual colonial powers and European slave traders. At least the fictitious nation of Wakanda chose to isolate itself to sit on its horde of magical natural resources, rather than sell their fellow African's into slavery, which while exploited by slavers is likely like all dubious economics, to have been in part facilitated by local institutions. Like our (Australia's) elected representatives and Adanhi.
But the impression I got from the world building, was that Wakanda by and large was so far advanced that it could have been the world's dominant super-power, furthermore, the film establishes an asymmetric intelligence network, Wakanda's ruling power knows well the true state of the world, whereas the international intelligence community thinks Wakanda is one of the world's poorest nation that simply *doesn't* participate in international trade... which is very farfetched. Nothing in the history of the world suggests that a nation can simply choose not to participate in international trade, particularly anywhere on Continental Africa. Opium and artillery forced trade into China, Gunboats opened up Japan, Colonialists competed to build rail lines all through Africa to carve it up as territory, followed much later by Communist powers that still goes on today. In what world does an African nation get to say 'no sorry, we'll pass' 'oh okay then.'? No world, which is why this movie is great if you are under 12 but people in their 30s need to keep their hands out of their pants. Enjoy it for what it is, a nice thought, a beautiful illustration, but a problematic idea.
I apologize for me economics training, and I'm put in mind of my brother telling me about a physicist lamenting he can't enjoy comic book movies because of Bruce Banner's line in the first Avenger's movie 'How many spectrometers do you have? Put them all on roof tops and set them to Gamma radiation!' which he says is the scientific equivalent of 'How many cars do you have? Move them onto the roofs and set them to helicopter!'
In the same way, seeing the James Cameron-Navi like society that had an abundance of wealth and also goat herders, the economics of Wakanda are completely opaque. It is presumably not a capitalist society, because their agribusiness is barely even mechanized, certainly not optimized. They have sky scrapers but no real business entities. There's no international trade and vibranium is a magic substance that can do anything. It appears every citizen has access to bead bracelets that are arguably superior to Smart phones, though the advantages of a 3 dimensional holographic/nano-drone display on a portable device are dubious. At any rate, the people of Wakanda seem to have integrated technology into their lives with no real disruption. Despite the advanced technology they possess, the people seem to live a balanced healthy lifestyle, without consuming excess calories or suffering from 1st world diseases like Cancer and Diabetes.
Maybe they have cures for these, which again, renders Wakanda culpable, even if it is dependent on vibranium, the reserves shown effectively make them the same as the bad guys in sci-fi film Elysium. Sure the tribes are proud of their respective cultural heritages, customs and traditions, but there's no real indication as to how wealth is distributed in the nation of Wakanda. Maybe universal basic income, and maybe automation has pushed them to the point where the royal family basically are the only people that have to work, the rest are hobby farmers or museum displays. But then that leads to the question: what are the showpieces, the goat herders or the skyscrapers?
Alan Moore in his work 'Writing For Comics' stressed the rewards to be reaped from comprehensive world-building, in that if you thoroughly understand the physics and mechanics and economics of the world you have built you don't need to do any exposition, the audience will simply feel it's completeness. I didn't when it comes to Wakanda, and again I blame the laziness of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who knew a lot about innovating comics and not much else, and Wakanda is a thin facade as a result of their legacy.
Then there's the thing I'm seeing online that resonates least with me, and that is the character of Erik Killmonger, the most problematic aspect of the whole film. It's hard to blame Killmonger on Stan Lee too, because I suspect he's a more recent character and having just checked, yes, again he is the creation of white guys so that's some small consolation.
We meet him in a museum that inexplicably and uniquely doesn't label any of it's displays, and while I love his haircut's similarity to De La Soul's De La Do, he for some reason has gotten the museum's expert curator to come down and explain what would be on the display cards if it were any other museum in the world. This lady, though as culpable as any beneficiary of the legacy of colonialism is in my opinion, an employee of an organization that may have a passion for African culture and conservation. Nevertheless she is killed via poison, that was somehow guaranteed to be served to her by Killmonger's confederate posing as an employee in the lobby. A poison that takes effect at the perfect time.
This is just a classic dumb plan, the same as the Joker's inexplicable expectation that at midnight the odds of the barges exploding was somehow at it's peak rather than it's lowest probability in 'The Dark Knight'. What's more problematic for Erik Killmonger or Michael B Jordan, is that he has all the most painfully bad lines in the film, and he doesn't play it as a militant black activist that says naive and dumb shit all the time, nor do the actors play off of him. I believe the word is 'didactic' he is the character that hits us with a sledgehammer to make sure the political message gets across, and it's embarrassing.
Consider the potency of if he'd just asked pointed questions of characters he interacted with about their own moral culpability in the plight of black people the world over, he could have been a thoughtful, sensitive charismatic bad guy that left us in a genuine moral dilemma of who to root for. Instead he says shit like:
"How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?"
and perhaps worst line of the film:
"Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage."
Not only because the ancestors that jumped from the ships were the least likely to have any descendants, or that a comparison of a life in slavery compared to incarceration in Wakanda are probably not comparable, but because Killmonger is half Wakandan, he is descended from the people that stood by idly, capable of helping and expelling all colonial powers from the continent, and unfortunately is likely descended from ancestors who owned his other ancestors on his mother's side.
I love Michael B Jordan in the Wire, and in Creed, but he was given real shit to work with in Black Panther. His character in the end, making no sense at all, spending his whole life seeking connection to his home land, he then immediately sets about alienating himself from Wakanda until he is defeated and at the very moment he gains acceptance and compassion he chooses to end his own life. For all his political rhetoric, he turns out to be a hot mess.
Now, I want you to consider this narrative:
An African-American in line with the constitution and by his birthright ascends to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation. During his meteoric rise, the validity of his birth is questioned, having an African father and an American mother. He produces documentation of his citizenship but it is still doubted by some belligerent members. Once in power, he presents his vision for radical reform to bring antiquated policies of his nation into the 21st century. While he receives enthusiastic support from some quarters, and grudging loyalty from others, a more conservative faction set out to undermine his agenda and block it from transpiring. This faction seeks backing from outside powers to try and overthrow the legitimate new leader from separatists with a demonstrated record of resenting social progress in governmental departments. After resurrecting the champion of the nativist movement and calling in some debts, the faction then mobilizes to dismantle the policies put in place by the new leader and restore their native champion to power and the status quo. They compromise CIA officers in executing their plan and manage to escalate partisanship in their country to the point that citizens and government officials are clashing with each other. The new agenda is effectively blocked and stifled, and the nativist champion is restored to power whereby he immediately starts implementing his own naive dip-shit policies with little understanding of history, the world or international relations or economics.
This is both the story of Obama-Trump and Killmonger-T'Challa. I don't know what was going on, but it fits. All except in two dimensions - T'Challa is for the most part, articulate where Killmonger rambles lines straight off the top of his head without any seeming thought. So temperamentally the roles are reversed, Killmonger speaks like Trump and relatively T'Chilla speaks like Obama.
The second way it doesn't fit, is that Killmonger reveals scars for every person he killed in service of the CIA and in preparation for his revenge against the son of his father's murderer. Making his revenge motive morally bankrupt having inflicted the suffering of his youth on potentially thousands more people dwarfing any possible justification for taking revenge. Also it turned out, selling weapons US style to change the balance of powers was stupid. Wakanda just needed to take control of international airspace, shipping lanes and satellites with their superior technology to become the world power, albeit there was no evidence they had any countermeasure for nuclear threats. Apart of course from Vibranium.
And yeah... it's difficult, you have a lot of black on black violence in the third act as the characters struggle with the metaphorical internal conflict, and there's no way to avoid that without putting lots of white people into the cast. So you are trading off on goals, the writers had a LOT of mechanical connundrums to deal with thus the failings in message I suspect are the results of trade offs between representation, honoring source material and cannon, and navigating the tricky moral dilemmas those first two present you story wise. Such that you have husband and wife attempting to kill eachother while heroic white CIA guy uses drone ship to kill black pilots, and we are supposed to root for him?
Representation also ultimately made the titular character a hero it was impossible to root for, besides knowing he was in the forthcoming Avengers film and therefore destroying any possibility that he might actually die, and accompanying tension, in his opening set piece Token Damsel-Not-So-Helpless trope sandwiches him into a protagonist not worth caring about. I've noticed that one solution to female representation in action films and by extension comic book films has gone something like this - it used to be that heroic cowboy in White Hat surmounted impossible odds to rescue a helpless girl tied to train tracks and it always went down this way. Audiences liked this, but got sick of seeing women portrayed as helpless and useless and dependent on men. So they just shifted the scenario slightly, such that now superhero breaks through enemy lines surmounting impossible odds and demonstrating his potent virile masculine nature, while damsel in distress tokenistically takes out her immediate guard and maybe escapes her bonds just as the hero arrives to discover she is not so helpless after all.
T'Challa has this sequence trying to fetch his ex-girlfriend for a funeral. Spoiling her mission (so that she was in control the whole time until he fudged it up for her) and freezing such that he has to be bailed out by his personal guard. Then ultimately while he has a dig at Trump, suggesting it is better to build bridges than walls, this ill-advised move by the one African nation with true self-determination to cede it's advantage to the global community comes basically from him trying to get back with his ex. It's a bad policy procedure, and I really wish he'd bothered to sit down with Chomsky or Yanis Varafoukis or anyone that may have explained to a head of state what is likely to happen to a state that opens up it's trade to globalization...
I mean ultimately, it's a dumb fun comic book movie, based on ideas had by two white guys in New York almost 60 years ago.
So why is this post called 'On Cynicism' a word I hardly use or can spell without technological assistance. In part it refers to what I am often called, perhaps accurately given my suspicion of motives. But it mainly refers to cynical marketing, which is what is happening to you.
The motives of movie studios can be known, the reason you are getting Wonder Woman and now Black Panther is because marketers have figured out they can use your beliefs to sell you shit. It is cynical marketing because they suspect you'd rather just hear about your ideals than actually act on them, and they can make money off of that.
So here begins (yes, begins) a little crash course in marketing.
Marketing is process of communicating value. More understandishable, it is the marketers job to make you feel good about purchase decisions, and thereby increase profits. They are interested in how to make you want to buy things, and how to make you want to make other people want to buy things.
Much of the science of marketing is like a super-specific hopped up version of psychology. Having studied marketing and subsequently learning about clinical psychology, there's an extent to which clinical psychology is decades behind marketing. Which is problematic.
One thing they do though, is they are particularly interested in the difference between what people say they want, and what they actually want.
So here's two simple marketing concepts.
There are two kinds of people in the world - opinion leaders and opinion seekers. That's the first concept.
Now there's a hierarchy of needs, that while not concrete, predicts human behavior well enough to be considered valid. Basically you will only have the energy to live your truth if you feel esteemed enough by yourself and your peers, you'll only worry about how you are esteemed by your peers if you first belong to your peer group, you will only be concerned about belonging to a group of people if you have secured food and shelter, which in turn you won't care about if you are being chased by a bear. This is known as 'Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs'
Put the two together and what do marketers suspect?
Opinion leaders feel secure enough in their identity to be primarily concerned with expressing themselves, they are 'self-actualizers' these are the people whom you say 'what's with the cut on those jeans? Nobody wears them like that anymore' and they respond 'whatever, this is how I like them.'
Most people (about 3/4) are opinion seekers, they look externally for cues to tell them how to behave because they are focused on belonging. These are people who keep up with the latest trends, these are the people who image-craft on facebook.
And marketers spend a lot of time researching who's who. In many industries, marketing's role is basically to identify opinion leaders (via people called 'cool hunters') document them, then tailor products based on the opinion leaders opinions, and then mass market them to opinion seekers, who by and large need permission to adopt new styles/thoughts.
Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Tipping Point' is a much easier in depth way to learn about this process than completing a marketing degree like I did.
Now I don't work in marketing or even sales anymore, and I don't really keep up with the trade publications because I never have. But I feel 5 years ago if people said 'Image-crafting' you would have thought of people posting photos of beach holidays and date nights and all the highlights of their life making you feel as though your life was a complete and utter failure.
I would posit, that these days the predominant form of image crafting is broadcasting your political views on social media, something Jonathon Haidt calls 'value signalling' on my newsfeeds at least if you want to get cheap likes, you don't need to get engaged or book an international flight or have a baby anymore (though I'm sure they all still work) so much as rail against that politician or topic everyone hates, contributing little to furthering the discussion and preferably simply parroting someone else's ideas.
I'm often struck by how much social progress feels like the fashion industry to me. Most of my morbid-voyeurism has traditionally been dedicated to feminist ideas, but the high turnover disposal of discussion topics seem to reflect the seasonal fashion trends rather than suggesting that roughly every 3 months major problems are actually being resolved. eg. manspreading, mansplaining, gaslighting, emotional labor, intersectionality, #metoo ... none of these issues I feel have been resolved to my understanding, it just seems like there's the same competition for novelty to raise one's profile and displace the current opinion seekers that marketers tap into. Feminism just doesn't seem to make money out of the same turnover.
But what I suspect happened is that the marketers that work for Disney, identified that maybe 4 or 5 years ago the opinion leaders were the outspoken ones on issues of social justice. Then particularly in the comic market they noticed all the online chatter about representation etc. and noticed the migration of opinion seekers into the progressive camp. Young people have traditionally always been more left leaning, more egalitarian than generations before them, but there previously wasn't much social status to be gained by being obtusely so.
Now there is. 10 years ago, all my female opinion leader friends were engaged in imploring women to call themselves feminists. Nowadays all my female opinion leader friends appear to be quietly backing away from what feminism has come to mean (this is pure supposition on my part).
Tragically, as marketers give people just looking to belong permission to adopt the opinions previously held only by opinion leaders, some opinion leaders can ride high on the sudden surge of public sentiment. Others get suspicious of their own beliefs if a majority of people buy into them, and these are the opinion leaders that don't have a heartbreaking fall from relevance.
With a Whitehouse populated by a White Nativist administration looking to somehow return America to the 50's (before Black Panther was published) then it's pretty obvious that the traditional youth anti-establishment rebellious streak that tries to forge an identity of their own by pushing away from the values of their parents and even older siblings, is probably going to react to the times by competing to see who can be most progressively left.
The cynics are the marketers (and I guess me also) that feel that your ideology is basically arbitrary, what matters is your status among your peers and maintaining your membership to it. Thus, Black Panther, Wonder Woman is probably more a repition of cranking a well proved money machine than genuine social progress.
I'm confident in this because people seem to have forgotten that a black man was actually democratically elected to the highest office of what is really the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on Earth. Last year, an almost all black cast and production crew won 'Best Picture' for what is basically a perfect film called 'Moonlight'.
In conclusion, there's a possibility that I was simply primed to see Black Panther how I saw it. Just that day I'd watched a video about the sociologist who dubbed Walt Disney 'the most dangerous man in America' and in the 1920's had observed how Hollywood managed to get people concerned about the plight of fictitious situations than the plight of the real world. Shuffling out of a packed cinema surrounded by nerds who think developments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are really important just reminded me of this.
I'm in two minds, maybe it is a shared disgrace how much we care about comic book movies, and on the other hand, maybe it's for the best that nerds squabble over fake shit to prevent them from fucking up policy on real issues. That latter option feels like a dangerous idea though.
It isolated it's story and indeed, it's whole world away from the rest of the Marvel Universe, meaning it had no obligation to represent White people. Similar to that test that goes back to the 80's where a film needs to have two named female characters have at least one conversation that is not about a man, Black Panther I imagine passes with flying colours a similar test where 2 black characters get to have conversations with each other that aren't about white people.
It also paints a Utopic African Nation that is not just a facsimile of the current wealthiest nations on earth but casts an African Nation as superior. This is similar to a Total Quality Management (TQM) technique called 'Draw, See, Think' which is where you draw your best case scenario so you can envision it and then start figuring out how to get there. I don't doubt that it is tremendously powerful to see your culture or your heritage held in a positive light after a lifetime of being bombarded with negative associations and connotations. That's powerful stuff, the power of which is easily identified within individuals given the general scarcity of encouragement and positive feedback.
Furthermore, going behind the cameras and digging into reality, a bunch of Black People got paid. Ryan Coogler as Director who co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole also African-American, Cinamatographer was a woman, and special effects employed 2/3rds of the worlds' population. Not to mention that the characters of the film were in fact played by actors who are real people in real life and they took home what was hopefully big-fat-paychecks. In Andy Serkis and Martin Freemen there was enough white men to avoid obtusely alienating them, but they played bit-parts really.
So we've come a long way since Al Jolson, a long way since the last big blockbuster cultural phenomena set in continental Africa 'The Lion King' where barely any of the cartoon characters were voiced by African Americans (though they were more represented than Arab's in Aladdin).
And as Barack Obama said 'Better is good.' and it is worth remembering that.
Yes indeed, Black Panther is a terrific film truly flawless for anyone under the age of 12. As of this writing, I'm living through that period that effects some films known as 'hype' before as I'm willing to bet time will prove, the movie is relegated to it's true significance. Much like James Cameron's Titanic, or James Cameron's Avatar. And I feel as highlighted above^ the good will be simmered down like a sauce on a low heat to what I mentioned, and in the future we are I assume aiming for, perhaps the memory of the significance of an almost all-black cast in a major release film will simply be taken for granted by future audiences.
But right now, it's painful for me to behold. I could just ride it out, I could take no risks and keep my mouth shut so that if it turns out I'm wrong and I'm the minority curmudgeon that didn't get it, then I could let others have a good time... but fuck it, I've been appropriating Black Radical fashion for decades, I had to take shit from my brother for my white-guilt and the sudden influx of hype from my white friends is frustrating, because the Black Panther doesn't deserve the lip-service.
So spoilers you fucking man-child, I'm going to talk about the content, and why with time and digestion it will probably be scaled back to largely positive as a step in the right direction, rather than the sparking of a revolution, because if you close one eye and see with another - it's a problematic film. So much so it's hard to know where to begin.
In fairness, most of the problems can be laid at the feet of predominantly White people, maybe I'll start with the larger group because they are actually easier to deal with. The Disney Corporation, it's Chairman and CEO is Bob Iger, and Walt Disney Studio's is presided over by two White Male Presidents, whom are parent to Marvel Studios also presided over by a White Man who served as producer for Black Panther. And all these subsidiaries are assets on the books of Disney, whom are a publicly traded company with obligations to maximise profits for the shareholders, and take a guess who dominates the asset holding class in America, the world, everywhere.
Thus, if African Americans, and Africans everywhere are turning out in droves to celebrate seeing their cultures portrayed in a wonderful fantastic light for perhaps the first time in their lives, as moving as it is, it is also a mechanism whereby their wealth is redistributed to predominantly the wealthiest white people in global society. Other's have picked up on this and there was some online campaign to try and get the studios to donate 25% of the films profits to outreach as the Titular character proposes to do with the riches Wakanda has sat on for millennia. Unforch, this is happening at a time where Disney can safely tell a bunch of black kids in Oakland to go fuck themselves, and it probably won't hear a peep because attention is focused on other kids telling the NRA to go fuck themselves, nor probably would Disney be wrong in assuming that distributing all their black audience's money to their shareholders will result in them boycotting the next installment of the Black Panther franchise. After all, an abysmal hit rate on adapting comic books into movies has never stopped nerds from forking over their cash.
So that's that, and it's sad, but black communities might take away that they probably have billions of dollars at their command that instead of spending on movie tickets, could be spent on social programs if they could coordinate and market one as easily as Disney can sell a comic book movie.
The problems in the content lay at the feet largely of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (I'm sure it wasn't intended, but as a poweful metaphor, when Stan Lee makes his traditional cameo in the movie, Prince T'Challa has unwittingly just won a big stack of money on a roulette wager, which Stan Lee appropriates for himself.) These famous collaborators are two white men that conceived of the Black Panther back in the 60's. And Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole inherited the legacy of the most progressive minds in comics from the 60's.
And in the opening sequence where an animated black sand is doing the exposition of what the nation of Wakanda is and where it stands today, I was impressed that they alluded to the slave-trade. Of course, the moment they acknowledge the reality of slavery, the great Afro-Futuristic nation of Wakanda becomes morally culpable for it via omission. The Nations leaders literally made a choice of using their superior technology to liberate Africa from the tyranny of Colonial powers, or to seclude themselves and abandon their neighbors. They chose the latter.
I blame Stan Lee, you basically can't have a fictitious African utopia in Africa's Heartland without skewering yourself in this way. Thus the screenwriters could only avoid it by making Wakanda a dysfunctional and devastated nation state powerless to help their neighbors or attempt to tackle this moral dilemma, and I'm impressed they tried to tackle the moral dilemma head on, but I thought about it during the film, and the best solution I could come up with would have been for T'Challa to have been a massive breakaway from his forebears, standing in open defiance to his father - (basically playing the role of his uncle in the film) but it would have to be acknowledged, that Wakanda's isolationist policies leave blood on their hands, in much the same way Australia's appalling handling of refugees in contravention of UN charters we have signed is a source of great national shame.
So Stan Lee screwed them on that one, but the fact is, if you try to sidestep it, then you don't get to portray that Afrofuturistic nation, which I believe at its heart is noble. Perhaps for the given nerd audiences, they could have just ignored the dilemma of Wakanda's culpability. And I should be clear, the inaction of good men is by comparison, nowhere near the evil of actual colonial powers and European slave traders. At least the fictitious nation of Wakanda chose to isolate itself to sit on its horde of magical natural resources, rather than sell their fellow African's into slavery, which while exploited by slavers is likely like all dubious economics, to have been in part facilitated by local institutions. Like our (Australia's) elected representatives and Adanhi.
But the impression I got from the world building, was that Wakanda by and large was so far advanced that it could have been the world's dominant super-power, furthermore, the film establishes an asymmetric intelligence network, Wakanda's ruling power knows well the true state of the world, whereas the international intelligence community thinks Wakanda is one of the world's poorest nation that simply *doesn't* participate in international trade... which is very farfetched. Nothing in the history of the world suggests that a nation can simply choose not to participate in international trade, particularly anywhere on Continental Africa. Opium and artillery forced trade into China, Gunboats opened up Japan, Colonialists competed to build rail lines all through Africa to carve it up as territory, followed much later by Communist powers that still goes on today. In what world does an African nation get to say 'no sorry, we'll pass' 'oh okay then.'? No world, which is why this movie is great if you are under 12 but people in their 30s need to keep their hands out of their pants. Enjoy it for what it is, a nice thought, a beautiful illustration, but a problematic idea.
I apologize for me economics training, and I'm put in mind of my brother telling me about a physicist lamenting he can't enjoy comic book movies because of Bruce Banner's line in the first Avenger's movie 'How many spectrometers do you have? Put them all on roof tops and set them to Gamma radiation!' which he says is the scientific equivalent of 'How many cars do you have? Move them onto the roofs and set them to helicopter!'
In the same way, seeing the James Cameron-Navi like society that had an abundance of wealth and also goat herders, the economics of Wakanda are completely opaque. It is presumably not a capitalist society, because their agribusiness is barely even mechanized, certainly not optimized. They have sky scrapers but no real business entities. There's no international trade and vibranium is a magic substance that can do anything. It appears every citizen has access to bead bracelets that are arguably superior to Smart phones, though the advantages of a 3 dimensional holographic/nano-drone display on a portable device are dubious. At any rate, the people of Wakanda seem to have integrated technology into their lives with no real disruption. Despite the advanced technology they possess, the people seem to live a balanced healthy lifestyle, without consuming excess calories or suffering from 1st world diseases like Cancer and Diabetes.
Maybe they have cures for these, which again, renders Wakanda culpable, even if it is dependent on vibranium, the reserves shown effectively make them the same as the bad guys in sci-fi film Elysium. Sure the tribes are proud of their respective cultural heritages, customs and traditions, but there's no real indication as to how wealth is distributed in the nation of Wakanda. Maybe universal basic income, and maybe automation has pushed them to the point where the royal family basically are the only people that have to work, the rest are hobby farmers or museum displays. But then that leads to the question: what are the showpieces, the goat herders or the skyscrapers?
Alan Moore in his work 'Writing For Comics' stressed the rewards to be reaped from comprehensive world-building, in that if you thoroughly understand the physics and mechanics and economics of the world you have built you don't need to do any exposition, the audience will simply feel it's completeness. I didn't when it comes to Wakanda, and again I blame the laziness of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby who knew a lot about innovating comics and not much else, and Wakanda is a thin facade as a result of their legacy.
Then there's the thing I'm seeing online that resonates least with me, and that is the character of Erik Killmonger, the most problematic aspect of the whole film. It's hard to blame Killmonger on Stan Lee too, because I suspect he's a more recent character and having just checked, yes, again he is the creation of white guys so that's some small consolation.
We meet him in a museum that inexplicably and uniquely doesn't label any of it's displays, and while I love his haircut's similarity to De La Soul's De La Do, he for some reason has gotten the museum's expert curator to come down and explain what would be on the display cards if it were any other museum in the world. This lady, though as culpable as any beneficiary of the legacy of colonialism is in my opinion, an employee of an organization that may have a passion for African culture and conservation. Nevertheless she is killed via poison, that was somehow guaranteed to be served to her by Killmonger's confederate posing as an employee in the lobby. A poison that takes effect at the perfect time.
This is just a classic dumb plan, the same as the Joker's inexplicable expectation that at midnight the odds of the barges exploding was somehow at it's peak rather than it's lowest probability in 'The Dark Knight'. What's more problematic for Erik Killmonger or Michael B Jordan, is that he has all the most painfully bad lines in the film, and he doesn't play it as a militant black activist that says naive and dumb shit all the time, nor do the actors play off of him. I believe the word is 'didactic' he is the character that hits us with a sledgehammer to make sure the political message gets across, and it's embarrassing.
Consider the potency of if he'd just asked pointed questions of characters he interacted with about their own moral culpability in the plight of black people the world over, he could have been a thoughtful, sensitive charismatic bad guy that left us in a genuine moral dilemma of who to root for. Instead he says shit like:
"How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?"
and perhaps worst line of the film:
"Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage."
Not only because the ancestors that jumped from the ships were the least likely to have any descendants, or that a comparison of a life in slavery compared to incarceration in Wakanda are probably not comparable, but because Killmonger is half Wakandan, he is descended from the people that stood by idly, capable of helping and expelling all colonial powers from the continent, and unfortunately is likely descended from ancestors who owned his other ancestors on his mother's side.
I love Michael B Jordan in the Wire, and in Creed, but he was given real shit to work with in Black Panther. His character in the end, making no sense at all, spending his whole life seeking connection to his home land, he then immediately sets about alienating himself from Wakanda until he is defeated and at the very moment he gains acceptance and compassion he chooses to end his own life. For all his political rhetoric, he turns out to be a hot mess.
Now, I want you to consider this narrative:
An African-American in line with the constitution and by his birthright ascends to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation. During his meteoric rise, the validity of his birth is questioned, having an African father and an American mother. He produces documentation of his citizenship but it is still doubted by some belligerent members. Once in power, he presents his vision for radical reform to bring antiquated policies of his nation into the 21st century. While he receives enthusiastic support from some quarters, and grudging loyalty from others, a more conservative faction set out to undermine his agenda and block it from transpiring. This faction seeks backing from outside powers to try and overthrow the legitimate new leader from separatists with a demonstrated record of resenting social progress in governmental departments. After resurrecting the champion of the nativist movement and calling in some debts, the faction then mobilizes to dismantle the policies put in place by the new leader and restore their native champion to power and the status quo. They compromise CIA officers in executing their plan and manage to escalate partisanship in their country to the point that citizens and government officials are clashing with each other. The new agenda is effectively blocked and stifled, and the nativist champion is restored to power whereby he immediately starts implementing his own naive dip-shit policies with little understanding of history, the world or international relations or economics.
This is both the story of Obama-Trump and Killmonger-T'Challa. I don't know what was going on, but it fits. All except in two dimensions - T'Challa is for the most part, articulate where Killmonger rambles lines straight off the top of his head without any seeming thought. So temperamentally the roles are reversed, Killmonger speaks like Trump and relatively T'Chilla speaks like Obama.
The second way it doesn't fit, is that Killmonger reveals scars for every person he killed in service of the CIA and in preparation for his revenge against the son of his father's murderer. Making his revenge motive morally bankrupt having inflicted the suffering of his youth on potentially thousands more people dwarfing any possible justification for taking revenge. Also it turned out, selling weapons US style to change the balance of powers was stupid. Wakanda just needed to take control of international airspace, shipping lanes and satellites with their superior technology to become the world power, albeit there was no evidence they had any countermeasure for nuclear threats. Apart of course from Vibranium.
And yeah... it's difficult, you have a lot of black on black violence in the third act as the characters struggle with the metaphorical internal conflict, and there's no way to avoid that without putting lots of white people into the cast. So you are trading off on goals, the writers had a LOT of mechanical connundrums to deal with thus the failings in message I suspect are the results of trade offs between representation, honoring source material and cannon, and navigating the tricky moral dilemmas those first two present you story wise. Such that you have husband and wife attempting to kill eachother while heroic white CIA guy uses drone ship to kill black pilots, and we are supposed to root for him?
Representation also ultimately made the titular character a hero it was impossible to root for, besides knowing he was in the forthcoming Avengers film and therefore destroying any possibility that he might actually die, and accompanying tension, in his opening set piece Token Damsel-Not-So-Helpless trope sandwiches him into a protagonist not worth caring about. I've noticed that one solution to female representation in action films and by extension comic book films has gone something like this - it used to be that heroic cowboy in White Hat surmounted impossible odds to rescue a helpless girl tied to train tracks and it always went down this way. Audiences liked this, but got sick of seeing women portrayed as helpless and useless and dependent on men. So they just shifted the scenario slightly, such that now superhero breaks through enemy lines surmounting impossible odds and demonstrating his potent virile masculine nature, while damsel in distress tokenistically takes out her immediate guard and maybe escapes her bonds just as the hero arrives to discover she is not so helpless after all.
T'Challa has this sequence trying to fetch his ex-girlfriend for a funeral. Spoiling her mission (so that she was in control the whole time until he fudged it up for her) and freezing such that he has to be bailed out by his personal guard. Then ultimately while he has a dig at Trump, suggesting it is better to build bridges than walls, this ill-advised move by the one African nation with true self-determination to cede it's advantage to the global community comes basically from him trying to get back with his ex. It's a bad policy procedure, and I really wish he'd bothered to sit down with Chomsky or Yanis Varafoukis or anyone that may have explained to a head of state what is likely to happen to a state that opens up it's trade to globalization...
I mean ultimately, it's a dumb fun comic book movie, based on ideas had by two white guys in New York almost 60 years ago.
So why is this post called 'On Cynicism' a word I hardly use or can spell without technological assistance. In part it refers to what I am often called, perhaps accurately given my suspicion of motives. But it mainly refers to cynical marketing, which is what is happening to you.
The motives of movie studios can be known, the reason you are getting Wonder Woman and now Black Panther is because marketers have figured out they can use your beliefs to sell you shit. It is cynical marketing because they suspect you'd rather just hear about your ideals than actually act on them, and they can make money off of that.
So here begins (yes, begins) a little crash course in marketing.
Marketing is process of communicating value. More understandishable, it is the marketers job to make you feel good about purchase decisions, and thereby increase profits. They are interested in how to make you want to buy things, and how to make you want to make other people want to buy things.
Much of the science of marketing is like a super-specific hopped up version of psychology. Having studied marketing and subsequently learning about clinical psychology, there's an extent to which clinical psychology is decades behind marketing. Which is problematic.
One thing they do though, is they are particularly interested in the difference between what people say they want, and what they actually want.
So here's two simple marketing concepts.
There are two kinds of people in the world - opinion leaders and opinion seekers. That's the first concept.
Now there's a hierarchy of needs, that while not concrete, predicts human behavior well enough to be considered valid. Basically you will only have the energy to live your truth if you feel esteemed enough by yourself and your peers, you'll only worry about how you are esteemed by your peers if you first belong to your peer group, you will only be concerned about belonging to a group of people if you have secured food and shelter, which in turn you won't care about if you are being chased by a bear. This is known as 'Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs'
Put the two together and what do marketers suspect?
Opinion leaders feel secure enough in their identity to be primarily concerned with expressing themselves, they are 'self-actualizers' these are the people whom you say 'what's with the cut on those jeans? Nobody wears them like that anymore' and they respond 'whatever, this is how I like them.'
Most people (about 3/4) are opinion seekers, they look externally for cues to tell them how to behave because they are focused on belonging. These are people who keep up with the latest trends, these are the people who image-craft on facebook.
And marketers spend a lot of time researching who's who. In many industries, marketing's role is basically to identify opinion leaders (via people called 'cool hunters') document them, then tailor products based on the opinion leaders opinions, and then mass market them to opinion seekers, who by and large need permission to adopt new styles/thoughts.
Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Tipping Point' is a much easier in depth way to learn about this process than completing a marketing degree like I did.
Now I don't work in marketing or even sales anymore, and I don't really keep up with the trade publications because I never have. But I feel 5 years ago if people said 'Image-crafting' you would have thought of people posting photos of beach holidays and date nights and all the highlights of their life making you feel as though your life was a complete and utter failure.
I would posit, that these days the predominant form of image crafting is broadcasting your political views on social media, something Jonathon Haidt calls 'value signalling' on my newsfeeds at least if you want to get cheap likes, you don't need to get engaged or book an international flight or have a baby anymore (though I'm sure they all still work) so much as rail against that politician or topic everyone hates, contributing little to furthering the discussion and preferably simply parroting someone else's ideas.
I'm often struck by how much social progress feels like the fashion industry to me. Most of my morbid-voyeurism has traditionally been dedicated to feminist ideas, but the high turnover disposal of discussion topics seem to reflect the seasonal fashion trends rather than suggesting that roughly every 3 months major problems are actually being resolved. eg. manspreading, mansplaining, gaslighting, emotional labor, intersectionality, #metoo ... none of these issues I feel have been resolved to my understanding, it just seems like there's the same competition for novelty to raise one's profile and displace the current opinion seekers that marketers tap into. Feminism just doesn't seem to make money out of the same turnover.
But what I suspect happened is that the marketers that work for Disney, identified that maybe 4 or 5 years ago the opinion leaders were the outspoken ones on issues of social justice. Then particularly in the comic market they noticed all the online chatter about representation etc. and noticed the migration of opinion seekers into the progressive camp. Young people have traditionally always been more left leaning, more egalitarian than generations before them, but there previously wasn't much social status to be gained by being obtusely so.
Now there is. 10 years ago, all my female opinion leader friends were engaged in imploring women to call themselves feminists. Nowadays all my female opinion leader friends appear to be quietly backing away from what feminism has come to mean (this is pure supposition on my part).
Tragically, as marketers give people just looking to belong permission to adopt the opinions previously held only by opinion leaders, some opinion leaders can ride high on the sudden surge of public sentiment. Others get suspicious of their own beliefs if a majority of people buy into them, and these are the opinion leaders that don't have a heartbreaking fall from relevance.
With a Whitehouse populated by a White Nativist administration looking to somehow return America to the 50's (before Black Panther was published) then it's pretty obvious that the traditional youth anti-establishment rebellious streak that tries to forge an identity of their own by pushing away from the values of their parents and even older siblings, is probably going to react to the times by competing to see who can be most progressively left.
The cynics are the marketers (and I guess me also) that feel that your ideology is basically arbitrary, what matters is your status among your peers and maintaining your membership to it. Thus, Black Panther, Wonder Woman is probably more a repition of cranking a well proved money machine than genuine social progress.
I'm confident in this because people seem to have forgotten that a black man was actually democratically elected to the highest office of what is really the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on Earth. Last year, an almost all black cast and production crew won 'Best Picture' for what is basically a perfect film called 'Moonlight'.
In conclusion, there's a possibility that I was simply primed to see Black Panther how I saw it. Just that day I'd watched a video about the sociologist who dubbed Walt Disney 'the most dangerous man in America' and in the 1920's had observed how Hollywood managed to get people concerned about the plight of fictitious situations than the plight of the real world. Shuffling out of a packed cinema surrounded by nerds who think developments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are really important just reminded me of this.
I'm in two minds, maybe it is a shared disgrace how much we care about comic book movies, and on the other hand, maybe it's for the best that nerds squabble over fake shit to prevent them from fucking up policy on real issues. That latter option feels like a dangerous idea though.
No comments:
Post a Comment