As successful as “Black Panther” was overall, nowhere did it succeed so much as in America, to that staggering $700 million domestic box office total. And a good portion of that is because of Black America.
That’s partly because of the film’s complex antagonist. There’s at least one moment, for every Black American who saw the movie, when we really, really felt for Eric “Killmonger” Stevens (played with apex-predatorlike menace by Michael B. Jordan).
One of the ways in which the film reveals its majesty on repeat screenings is with its opening line. The first time you hear it, it simply sounds like a Wakandan boy requesting a bedtime story that happens to double as the background for the bigger story to follow in the next two hours. But of course, even now the film is subverting the expectations it’s setting up: While the father’s voice is clearly African, the boy sounds American.
The next time you see the film, you know the truth from the start: The boy is indeed American and the full tragedy of N’Jadaka is realized.
But we don’t know any of this at first. We only see a boy playing night basketball in 1992 Oakland, Ca. Just as his is the first voice we hear, his is also the first face onscreen.
In a very real sense, “Black Panther” is Erik’s story. But it’s more still for us whose ancestors were brought captive from West Africa on ships.
You see, Erik IS the black American experience embodied.
He’s orphaned like us.
By the time we meet him, Erik is already being raised in a single-parent household. His mother is nowhere to be seen in the film. (The bitter irony, revealed by director Ryan Coogler in commentary elsewhere, is that Erik’s mother is imprisoned and the operation we see his father, N’Jobu, and “uncle James” planning is a prison break to free her.) And, of course, by the end of the scene, he is truly abandoned.
Similarly, we black Americans are marooned in a hemisphere an ocean away from our ancestral homeland.
The later scene where Erik meets his father in the Ancestral Plane is laden with multiple layers of meaning.
N’Jobu: “…I fear you still may not be welcome [in Wakanda].”
Young Erik: “Why?”
N’Jobu: “They will say you are lost.”
Young Erik: “But I’m right here.”
N’Jobu is actually speaking of both himself and his son, but Erik either does not see (he’s young here) or simply won’t accept the full truth of his father’s words — that their time in America has changed them both in deep, deep ways.
Erik’s response could also well be the cry of the African American, wanting to be recognized and connected to the motherland but not really comprehending that the motherland has too many of her own wounds to heal to nurture us the way we desire.
He’s persecuted like us.
During the film’s introduction to the adult Erik, we see him being shadowed in a museum of historical artifacts. There doesn’t appear to be a reason for him to have so much security paying him such mind. And yet, there are a couple of guards closely hanging about simply because he’s there. (That he actually does represent a threat in this case is immaterial, especially since his plan DEPENDS on their racial bias.)
Black people everywhere recognized the HELL out of this scene. Most of us have either experienced it or know someone else who has.
And since the film’s release, we have seen a number of instances where white people harass or call authorities on black people for little or no reason. Remember BBQ Becky, who called 911 on black park-goers having a cookout? Or Poolside Paul, who doubted black pool-goers belonged? Or my friend’s encounter with who she called “Airport Andy,” a man who tried to blame her for HIS impatience and dropping of his phone (camera footage showed his fault)?
I could go on and on. So we get Erik, here.
He’s Americanized like us.
In that above scene, Erik plays on the implicit bias of the museum curator with his African American Vernacular English (also formerly known as “ebonics”) mode of speaking to keep her focused on him as the threat to be removed instead of, oh, I don’t know, maybe getting medical attention because she’s been poisoned. But once the poison takes full effect and the woman collapses, he switches to using more standard American English, now manipulating the remaining security into no longer paying him any attention.
This is called code switching and it’s something we black Americans have had to become very adept at to be successful in this society. (Those who can’t are demonized as unintelligent or “ghetto” — note how Obama’s rise was peppered with comments of his being “well-spoken,” something we take for granted from white candidates. Or did before the elections of Bush II and Trump.) So we certainly saw ourselves in Erik Stevens there in that scene.
Speaking of which: What a great heist scene. It delivers all we need with a minimum of fuss and bother. Ryan Coogler is very good at this. (In contrast, DC superhero film director Zack Snyder would’ve belabored with dramatic slow motion shots and extra brutality or needless diversion. Look at the “heist” scene with Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince in “Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Sure we got the fun banter from the boys, but that Lex Luthor meltdown or whatever the actual hell that was derailed it completely. I digress).
Later in the film, Killmonger’s professional background as a black ops pro is further detailed, showing again just how Americanized he has become. Although he uses his Wakandan heritage to gain access to his ancestral home, his actions are guided by the skills and grievances he learned from his ACTUAL home. Which leads to the last way Erik is like his African American tribe:
He’s self-destructive due to his trauma
Unfortunately, Erik is us in the bad ways as well. Although he’s very controlled in the heist scene, he’s also prone to impulse, as when he takes the extra mask on the way out. For most of the movie, he’s disciplined and driven enough to overcome this character flaw, but in truth, the flaw corrupts his entire ideology and dooms him to failure, even if the Black Panther had not succeeded in retaking the throne. And his trauma goes deep, as we see.
It’s a similar case with the African American tribe. Studies have shown that extreme trauma may have the potential to rewrite DNA, so if true, the traumatic legacy of slavery literally remains in every cell of every descendant. As strong as we are and as much as we’ve survived and occasionally thrived, that trauma — whether indeed internal or simply manifested in the generations of oppression whose effects reverberate into the present — has held back much of our tribe.
And so we ask: Was Killmonger right?
There is a righteous sort of rage that is a common response to this injustice. And we see it onscreen first with N’Jobu, Erik’s father, and then with Erik himself. Unfortunately, their rage leads each from righteousness into sin.
Yet there are black folks who agree with this approach. They want to call Erik Killmonger a hero, just one who’s willing to do the proverbial “any means necessary.”
But he absolutely is not a hero. Not by any means.
Sure, he talks a good game about bringing justice, shaming the Wakandans for hiding the nation’s excellence and aid, and about beating the colonizers at their own game. But it’s mostly a sham.
Because of Linda. Remember her?
She’s the female accomplice to Klaue and Erik in the first half of the film — and Erik’s squeeze. She’s in every way the distorted (Americanized?) reflection of the women in Black Panther. She’s clearly highly intelligent and capable (it seems plain she poisoned the museum curator and electronically foiled the museum’s surveillance systems) but she only has two lines.
Her hair is also a weave.
(OK, that’s a low blow. The more I look at it, I think her hair is all natural, just straightened in the Western style.)
Still, all we see of her is what Erik sees:
- an accomplice
- a sex doll
- and, ultimately, an impediment.
She gets unlucky when the canny Klaue reacts instantly to Erik’s sudden betrayal by taking her hostage.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he tells her, comfortingly. And he immediately shoots her.
It’s amazing how many viewers who later said “KILLMONGER ISN’T THE VILLAIN BUT A HERO” saw that scene and forgot about this cold, unfeeling murder along the way to his quest for revenge. It speaks to how deeply the hurt done to our people lies, and how great the rage burns.
But we can’t let that rage run or ruin us.
There’s a term, “toxic masculinity,” that has come into vogue. Some don’t believe it’s actually a thing, that it’s just either a slam of masculinity in general or should be considered just bad behavior.
But I submit that Killmonger IS toxic masculinity, all hurt and violence that cannot show vulnerability.
It’s why he burns the garden of the heart-shaped herb. He can’t consider the world that will be after he’s gone. He doesn’t care. He can’t LET himself care.
“The world took everything away from me! Everything I ever loved!” he says in a rare burst of actual emotional honesty, before the mask of rage again tries to hide the underlying pain of loss that’s driven his every action since 1992.
That is, until his end.
I opened this essay with a declaration that every Black American feels great sympathy for Killmonger at least once. For me, it’s a final scene line of his that gets me in the feels every time I see this movie. Mortally wounded by T’Challa, all the rage drains out from Erik and he’s just the vulnerable child again. And after he says that his father promised to show his son the beauty of Wakanda one day, he turns to his cousin, his enemy, saying:
“You believe that? A kid from Oakland running around believing in fairy tales?”
UGH. I’m tearing up just writing this.
Because in the end, despite his villainy, despite his standing as scarified poster child for toxic masculinity, he really is just a traumatized boy who wants to believe in the fairy tale that was stolen from him.
In the very end, though, he’s just too damaged to accept the chance to live some of that dream. T’Challa offers to save Erik’s life, but Killmonger is defiant:
“Why [save me]? So you can just lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean … with my ancestors that jumped from the ships. ‘Cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
It’s a fierce line that resonates with every African American whose forefathers were chained aboard those slave ships. But like in so much else in his rage, he misses the truth: Our ancestors were the ones who SURVIVED the Middle Passage, then bondage and isolation in this hemisphere, then the systematic oppression after the Civil War, then the systemic effects enduring long after the civil rights movement.
Death may be better than bondage. But life and growth is better than both.
———
The rest of the series:
Intro — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/me-and-black-panther-part-1-intro/
PART 2: Wakanda — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/me-and-black-panther-part-2-wakanda/
PART 3: Blackest Film Ever? — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/me-and-black-panther-part-3-blackest-film-ever/
PART 4: The Women — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/me-and-black-panther-part-4-the-women/
PART 6: The Score — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/02/19/me-and-black-panther-part-6-the-musical-score/
PART 7: Yes, this is a king of a picture — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/me-and-black-panther-part-7-black-panther-is-the-best-picture/
And an epilogue: My Oscar Screening Party 2019 — https://kharisampson.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/personal-oscar-screening-party-2019/
Bridge Over Troubled Opinions 