[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 an unfortunate
change to a longstanding character, and its important role nonetheless.
As my friend and
colleague Matthew
Teutsch has detailed in a couple of thoughtful
blog posts, the character of Everett Ross has been part of the Black
Panther universe for a couple decades. Indeed, this Special Attaché
for the Office of the Chief of Protocol (a US State Department position) wasn’t
just a central character during Christopher
Priest’s 1998-2003 run with the comic; he served as Priest’s narrator and
the audience’s primary perspectival lens on T’Challa, Wakanda, and their
stories. That Ross was overtly described as “the
emperor of useless white boys” only makes Priest’s use of him that much
more complex and compelling, a provocative way to engage directly with white (and
all) audience perceptions of both a black African superhero like T’Challa, who
the protagonists of superhero comics typically are and aren’t, and the issue of
race in comics overall.
By the time he
appeared in the film Black Panther, Martin Freeman’s Everett
Ross had already been introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a role in Captain America: Civil War, and with one key change from his
identity in the comic: he now
works for the CIA. That change was perhaps necessary for Civil War, as a State Department functionary
wouldn’t be in charge of a major counter-terrorism task force as the character
needed to be in that film. But Marvel always thinks in terms of the big picture,
setting up threads that will pay off many films down the road, and quite
frankly making the one white
good guy in Black Panther a
representative of the CIA was a seriously problematic move. To put it bluntly,
a major plot thread and theme in Black
Panther is the relationship
of the Wakandan nation and regime to the rest of the world; and to say that
the CIA has a checkered history when it comes to America’s relationship to the
international community, and particularly to regimes
with whom we are not allied, would be to severely understate the case. While
there’s no specific reason to believe that the film’s Ross is seeking to
overthrow or undermine T’Challa’s regime, there are countless general reasons
to think so; and in any case a knowledge of that history makes it almost
impossible to see Ross (whom the film asks to contribute significantly to T’Challa’s
final victories) as anything other than a potential threat to our hero.
I don’t think
that’s an intended effect of Coogler’s or the film’s, but I would also say that
the change in Ross’s character is not entirely a bad thing. After all (SCENE
SPOILERS HERE), in one of the film’s most surprising and funny moments,
Wakandan tribal leader M’Baku
(the mesmerizing Winston Duke) and his underlings repeatedly silence Ross
as he attempts to offer his unhelpful perspective on a situation, barking over
him until he stops talking. To see a white character silenced by a group of
black characters in this manner would be striking in any film; to see a
powerful US government representative silenced by African tribesmen, and in a
moment and way where the audience is entirely positioned to sympathize with the
tribesmen and laugh at the CIA agent’s humiliation, is quite simply stunning. The
moment wouldn’t have nearly the same power if Ross were a low-level bureaucrat,
or if we didn’t have that overall historical sense of the CIA’s role in
relationship to such African and world communities. Moreover, I might even
argue that Ross’s helpful contributions to the film’s climactic battle are at
least partly set up by this moment; that is, that the powerful American
official has to be laid low before he can truly recognize and act upon what
Wakanda needs from him, rather than the other way around (as has so thoroughly
been the case in world history). One more layer to a film that’s full of them!
Next Panther
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on the film or its contexts?
PPS. Matthew Teutsch adds:
ReplyDelete"Priest created Ross. One other point would be that in Priest’s run, T’Challa says he joined the Avengers (earlier iterations) to spy on them. There are links in my posts to Priest’s posts in his website about the run. They’re interesting."