Marvel's new film "Black Panther" has recently become a topic of controversy. The Oscars ceremony, the film that tells the story of African countries, first caused discussion about "political correctness".
But unlike this year's best film, The Shape of Water, which forced people to swing between the two ends of carnival or tired of political correctness itself, "Black Panther" seems to be both left-wing politically correct and conservative, harvesting praise in all camps and earning super high box office.
Duanerousselle's article, published last month in 2013, explains this phenomenon by arguing that Black Panther is an empty vehicle that accommodates the possibilities of interpretation.
As a Chinese audience, this is a great opportunity to see how the american left and right factions have requisitioned the film.
Slag translation, there are deletions, honestly suggest that you have the conditions to read the original text directly: https://dingpolitik.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/black-panther-as-empty-container/, welcome to correct the discussion.
Black Panther as an empty carrier
February 17, 2018
duanerousselle2013
Last night my family and I went to see Black Panther. I was happy to see it, it was a problem.
Wakanda – the tribal state on the African continent – is self-independent and pretends to be a third world country, but in fact hides great wealth, technology and facilities from the outside. Paradoxically, it seems far superior to Western capitalism as we know it today, allowing the oppression of beings outside Africa. This raises an interesting question: After the dialectical unification of African culture, did the Wakanda nation want to represent the vision of rational bureaucratic capitalism in the West?
Prince N'Jobu (a spy sent to the United States by Wakanda) wants to abolish international oppression of Africans in order to create a cosmopolitan or egalitarian international community. As a result, someone was killed and his son was orphaned. The little boy grew up outside Africa, in the land of oppressors and colonizers. Before his death, he described his ancestors jumping from a slave ship, because death was a better choice than falling into the hands of a slave owner. He had the same conviction as his father: man must confront his oppressors, not join the exploiters, in developing an isolated state in some humble, late revolution.
This allowed me to discover the most interesting part of the movie. Here I would like to make four points. Two come from the ALT-RIGHT and two come from the far left (ULT-LEFT).
The first alternative right view is that you will find stories online celebrating that Black Panther is an "alternative right-wing movie." What to say? Because it is a distinctly nationalist film, promoting homogeneous culture, providing an anti-globalization perspective, and so on.
For example, "The Alternative Right Has a New Hero, Black Panther" puts it: "After a closer look at wakanda's culture, many conservatives quickly realize that T'Challa (the king of African countries) has a personality similar to the socio-political worldview of the alternative right", "Black Panther" is anti-globalist. Its moral endpoint is embedded in a strong nationalist conviction that constantly places the protection of the history, culture, and identity of its people above any external attempt to open up Marvel's fictional African nation. Wakanda is a stratified society that is deliberately racially homogeneous, and its immigration policy is essentially isolationist. The influence of other cultures is banned in Wakanda because the film considers other cultures to be harmful to the well-being of the people. The armies hatut Zerzae (former secret police force turned into mercenary teams) and Dora Milaje (the royal female consul team) built on cultural identity were instruments of these policies by the king of Wakanda. In this sense, T'Challa showed striking neo-Nazi tendencies. —Carl Perkins, Published in International Policy Digest on June 26, 2017
There is another, more popular right-wing narrative that rejects the worldview version of Black Panther. An article in the Huffington Post read: "The head of the Facebook group 'fed up with Disney's franchise treatment and Star Wars FanDom' calls himself an 'alternative right.'" (Note: Down with Disney's Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys, which has been shut down by Facebook) They recently announced plans to lower the film's Rotten Tomatoes ratings as soon as Black Panther hit the film on Feb. 15. The group was clearly "white racist" and didn't like the fact that the film was almost entirely black actors. This part of the alternative right cares about nationalist values, but mostly white nationalist values.
We note that the alternative right has split on the importance of Black Panther.
On the other side is the far left's narrative of the film. Mainstream responses have begun to celebrate the film's emergence. The article "A Picture of Freedom for Black Panther" links the film to the work of Franz Fanon.
(Note: Fanon, frantz fanon, author of The Suffering Man of the World, Black Skin white mask)
I will quote from the text: "In 1952, psychoanalyst and revolutionary Franz Fanon observed that in comic books, 'wolves, devils, evil spirits, bad people, barbarians are always symbolized by black or Indian figures'. Things have changed since then... Fanon believed that the colonized people had the right to seek liberation by any means necessary. But Wakanda was never colonized... And it aspires to revolutionize from below. ”
I'd like to quote the rest of the article in its entirety, because it also helps us to take a closer look at the film:
Killmonger was an outcast orphan who grew up in poverty in the United States, and his life was shaped by the scarcity of the city and the experience of the war machine inside. The desire for a stable home, a true belonging, and the desire to correct injustice under the threat of violence in a world order that was always exploiting people of African descent. Jordan (the actor who plays the killer) skillfully weaves through the motives of these conflicts. He played Wallace in The Line of Fire and Oscar Grant in Kohler's first film, Fleetville Station, and he showed the same anger and longing in Black Panther, a performance that gave both of his predecessors sentimentality and unusual depth. In Black Panther, there is a scene of him clashing with the director of the British Museum, which houses dozens of stolen African works of art, and he teases the origin of these delicate masks, conveying a sense of injustice that has lasted for centuries and spread throughout the Atlantic.
T'Challa, on the other hand, was born well-bred and pure-blooded, and he had a long-term vision of technology derived from vibranium, a super-energy metallic material unique to Wakanda, as a potential threat to the global balance. The Murderous Demon Lord is happy to see this chaos occur, hoping that one day 'the sun will never rise again from the Wakanda Empire'. This inconsistent boasting is reminiscent of the achievements of historical figures like Winston Churchill, which resonates differently in provinces where Churchill's armies often brutally pursued colonial rule (thanks to The Crown and Darkest Hour, we've recently been savoring the flavors of the Renaissance in the imagination of popular culture).
Black Panther repeatedly hints that wakanda would have faced a similar Western invasion if it had not concealed its advances from the outside world.
As you can see, the far left comments on the "bottom-up revolution" celebrated here – "non-violent", that is, non-confrontational revolution. I call it the "decaffeinated revolution." Or, in other words, a capitalist revolution (as distinct from a revolution that transcends capitalism). But within the far left there is a subtle space for different interpretations. Here are some typical ideas:
First, Franz Fanon was a radical revolutionary. The article mentioned above called the Farnoms ' Society " proud of the film " . I don't think so. Fanon once said: "There is no doubt that among the colonized countries, only the peasants are revolutionaries, because they have nothing to lose, but they can gain everything." Outside the class system, the hungry peasants were the first among the exploited to discover that only violence could do what they wanted. (only violence pays) There is no compromise for the peasants, no concessions; colonization and decolonization are only a matter of relative power. ”
We should ask ourselves, who is the "farmer" in Black Panther, who is the "outsider", who is the "orphan"? The answer almost undoubtedly points to a murderous maniac. And who is the founder/king of a rich country?
Other comments:
1) When I Googled "Black Panther" and didn't search for "Black Panther Party" (the first black resistance organization in the United States in the 1960s), the links on the screen were a box office (capitalist) movie. Isn't that "over-decoding" black history? The first link, "Black Panther Wiki," became an introduction to the film, compared to "Black Panther Party" five years ago. Today, our kids search for "Black Panther Party" and find not content about armed beliefs, but movies by Walt Disney, an American propaganda company.
A workstation of the Black Panther Party
2) I admit that I may have overlooked something, but the character who represents the radical revolution in the film — the passionate man, the man willing to die for his faith — is a bad person. The film presents the internal confrontation of Africans – telling the story of internal division (rather than independent camp versus external camp). As a result, they eventually allied themselves with the United States and with the CIA (and we should remember which side the CIA was on in the human rights movement). How would Franz Fanon evaluate the internalization of this vulnerability?
British actor Martin Freeman, who plays the CIA
3. "Black Panther" uses slang and various body gestures to portray the bad guy personality, which can evoke stereotypes about African Americans. In fact, I found it eye-catching. Chris Locke (an African-American talk show actor) has been acting on controversial talk shows since the nineties, and he divides African-Americans into two broad categories: the good ones and the bad, and the black panther approach makes me think this could be the movie versions of those talk shows.
4) The film glorifies the "process" (i.e., rational bureaucratic capitalism). The victory lies in keeping the system permanent, that is, keeping the system running on the same track. Black Panther does not face his enemies because he is brave because he respects the rule of law.
5. Finally, although Wesley Snipes (an African-American actor who almost played Black Panther at his peak in the 1990s) was the key to unlocking the film, despite the fact that the film has a large pool of African-American actors, it is still a Disney production. What would Edward Sayyid say?
It seems to me that Black Panther has opened up a space for the alternative right and the alternative left to agree or oppose each other for similar reasons. Isn't this its "perverse ideology"? It's like Beethoven's Ode to Joy, Symphony No. 9, exactly as Žižek defined—requisitioned both by the Nazis and the Soviet Union, and also in China's Cultural Revolution, as well as an unofficial theme song in Europe. "The universality of this well-known melody can be expropriated by completely opposing political movements," Žižek said, "This is how ideology works—the meaning is never single." It must operate as an empty carrier, open to all possible meanings ... The problem is that the neutrality of the carrier is never as neutral as it seems. ”
Isn't that what the movie Black Panther does?
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