[Few pop culture
texts have exploded
into our collective consciousness more than Ryan
Coogler’s film adaptation of Black Panther. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
this film phenomenon, starting with an older post on the comic and moving into
a handful of other contexts and connections!]
On two distinct
and opposed associations of gender with violence, and what links them.
A number of celebrations
of Black Panther have noted that
if features many more badass, butt-kicking, nuanced
female heroes than did the year’s other most prominent superhero smash, Wonder Woman. I’m not a big fan of
pitting films against each other in that way, as I’d always rather see texts
and culture (like history) as additive, a chance to celebrate multiple worthy
subjects rather than to see our commemoration as a zero-sum game. But leaving Wonder Woman aside, there’s no doubt
that Black Panther features more
prominent female heroes and leads than any other superhero film I’ve ever seen
or heard of (and pretty much all other blockbuster films as well): not only the
Dora Milaje, the army of legendary female warriors who protect T’Challa and
Wakanda; but also T’Challa’s friend and love
interest Nakia (a Wakandan spy and operative whom we meet rescuing a group
of kidnapped African women and girls) and his
sister Shuri (Wakanda’s director of technology and a worthy rival to James
Bond’s Q as the film’s provider of amazing gadgets and great
one-liners). In their own distinct but parallel ways, all of these women
are at least as badass as T’Challa, and reflect a nation and universe where
women can be butt-kicking superheroes with no asterisks or limitations.
Interestingly
enough, the film’s villain, Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger, represents a
very distinct side to gender and violence. While Killmonger’s perspective and
plan are at least somewhat sympathetic (as I discussed in Tuesday’s post), one
of the traits that most clearly denotes the character as a supervillain is his
tendency to threaten, abuse, and kill women (an analysis I first heard articulated
by my
friend Kathleen Morrissey). [SPOILERS FOLLOW] From his shocking and brutal
(and seemingly unaffected) killing of his own girlfriend when she stands in the
way of his objectives, to his mistreatment and abuse of numerous Wakandan women
(many of them elders), to his willingness (fortunately thwarted) to kill the
teenage Shuri in the film’s climactic battle, Killmonger quite simply directs
the majority of his on-screen rage and violence toward female characters. In an
era when we’ve finally begun to have the necessary
and long overdue conversation about the relationship between domestic
violence and mass shootings, the association of Killmonger’s violence with
his treatment of women seems far from coincidental or random.
These two sides
to women and violence in Black Panther
could be seen as contradictory—that is, if women are just as badass as men (and
consistently they are in the film, if they’re not indeed more so), then how can
we also see them as victims of a man like Killmonger? But I would argue instead
that these two threads are interconnected, linked by a shared and seemingly
common sense but in fact striking (especially in an action blockbuster) idea:
that female characters can contribute just as much to a film, have just as much
to offer its plot, themes, and world, as do male ones. In recent weeks a
chart made the viral rounds detailing the percentages of dialogue of male
and female characters (who speak more than 100 words in a film) in the last
couple decades of Best Picture Oscar winners; suffice it to say that even in
the best cases the balance was significantly tilted toward male characters. I
haven’t seen a breakdown for Black
Panther, although I’m pretty sure it’s far more evenly distributed; but in
any case, this is a blockbuster action film with more significant female than
male characters, and one in which those female characters contribute to the
plot, themes, and world on multiple crucial levels. Ideally I wouldn’t have to point
out such a fact as noteworthy, and perhaps films like Black Panther will help us get to that point.
Last Panther
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on the film or its contexts?
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