[Like a record
number of fellow viewers, I spent a good bit of last September enjoying
Netflix’s newest Marvel superhero show, Luke Cage.
While Cage is unquestionably
entertaining, however, I would also call it the first #BlackLivesMatter
TV show—and as such, I wanted to spend this MLK Day week studying a few of
the show’s connections and contexts. I’d love your thoughts and reviews in
comments!]
On the historical
insights and limits of the show’s complex female villain.
If Frankie
Faison’s Pop is one of my two favorite characters on Luke Cage, the other would have to be Alfre Woodard’s
Mariah Dillard. I’ve been a huge fan of Woodard’s since her brilliant turn
in John Sayles’s
criminally underrated Passion Fish
(1992), and she was great in a small but complex and compelling role in 12 Years a Slave
(2013), among many other parts over the years. In the first few episodes of Luke Cage, Mariah might seem to be only
a supporting character, occupying a background role to her villainous adopted brother
Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali); but [AGAIN, SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT] after she kills Cottonmouth
in a post-traumatic rage (he has accused her of asking for and even “wanting”
repeated childhood rapes by a family member) in the show’s seventh episode, she
takes center stage as a main villain for the season’s second half. In so doing,
she not only influences the show’s plot arcs and conclusions, but also gets the
chance to dominate a number of important moments and scenes, with Luke as well
as with police detective Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Mariah’s assassin love interest
Shades (Theo Rossi).
I find Mariah
compelling for all those reasons (and for the sheer, indisputable fact of
Woodard’s towering talent), but am most intrigued by her purposeful connection
to and use of Harlem and African American history. For much of the show, Mariah
(a Harlem politician and businesswoman long before she adds supervillain to the
list) is working to open the Crispus
Attucks Complex, a Harlem community center named after the iconic
Revolutionary War figure (and, historians believe, mixed-race
son of a Massachusetts slave and a Wampanoag Native American). Speaking to
reporters in the first episode of the need for such facilities, Mariah
references prior Harlem icons such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm
X, and then argues, “For black lives to matter, black history and ownership
must matter.” While the line might be a bit on the nose, it helps establish
from the show’s opening episode on that this superhero story will be set in our
21st century American society and culture, and will consider both
the historic legacies and present realities of the African American experience
in that world—and, just as much, this line and moment establish Mariah Dillard
as a spokesperson for those legacies and realities, an advocate for remembering
that experience.
At the same
time, however, Mariah also intends and constructs the Crispus Attucks Complex
to be a literally impenetrable fortress in which to hide the ill-gotten monies she,
Cottonmouth, and their criminal enterprises are accumulating (Luke proves the impenetrable
part to be a fallacy, natch). This is a superhero show, after all, and she
is a villain (and, again, eventually a supervillain), so such details are perhaps
an inevitable part of her character. But while (as I argued yesterday about Pop
and the barbershop) certain aspects of the wedding of African American culture and
superhero stories work pitch-perfectly, I’m somewhat less sure of how to make
sense of these two sides of Mariah Dillard’s character and role in the show. That
is, she is again in many ways the most consistent spokesperson for African
American history and #BlackLivesMatter—or is she just a hypocrite, using those
topics and questions as a front for her selfish criminal agenda? I don’t think
that latter argument is sufficient to capture either Mariah’s complexity or the
fact that she’s not wrong in her statements about black history and community—but
on the other hand, we know at every moment that those statements are at best
half the story of Mariah and her identity and vision, and come to see that even
more clearly as her villainy deepens. I don’t have any definite answers to
these questions—and would love to hear your thougths in comments—but their presence
alone suggests the interesting depths of Luke
Cage.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other responses to Luke Cage
you’d share?
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