What Black Panther is really about

If you really want to know what Black Panther is about, read son Adam. He knows. My engagement with popular culture is so limited (unless you count opera and other classical music, which you shouldn’t) there is little hope I have anything interesting to say.

But I know a little something about international affairs and conflict, on which Black Panther has important things to say. When the thrill of the fight is over, the film rejects the notion that a strong and violent autocrat, even one with justifiable resentment who says he intends to liberate the oppressed, would be better than an equally strong but popular and merciful leader, not only for Wakanda but also for the rest of the world. Erik Killmonger gets a decisive thumbs’ down, not only from T’Challa, but also from the writer and director.

Erik has suffered an enormous injustice: his father’s murder and his own abandonment. He has trained and exercised his entire life in a determined effort to exact revenge. He is strong and clever. Ruthless, he does what he thinks he needs to do not only to gain power but also to keep it forever. He still gets soundly beaten. No end justifies the means.

Instead the film serves up an alternative, one that appears explicitly and surprisingly after the credits. Then T’Challa calmly offers Wakanda’s technology and brains to the rest of the world, rejecting his own father’s determined effort to keep Wakanda secret and isolated. The forum for this almost trite reassertion of globalist values is, of course, the United Nations General Assembly hall.

Rather than impose its power on the rest of the world, T’Challa chooses to offer it to all.

What we’ve got here is the triumph of generosity over selfishness, of sharing to make everyone better off rather than hoarding to make America first, of calm intelligence over frenzied ignorance, in short of Barack Obama at his best over Donald Trump at his worst.

Despite all the African regalia, music and choreography, Black Panther isn’t much about race, partly because its two protagonists (and almost everyone else) are both black.* The one significant white guy in the movie is a CIA agent–usually on the side of ignorance and the forces of evil–who joins forces with T’Challa and, despite himself, does his bit for the internationalist cause. Nor should anyone miss the decisive role of powerful and brainy women in determining the outcome, as well as the ultimately decisive entry into the final battle of a self-interested but still important ally.

I admit that I don’t often find a film that depends this much on special effects and gratuitous violence all that edifying. But how many movies are out there that teach this lesson about international relations: in the end, alliances, ideals, cooperation, generosity and intelligence beat lone strong men, brutal realism, vengeance, selfishness, and egotism.

*I predict I’m going to get in trouble for that sentence.