'The Black Panther' Seeks to Inspire, Not Incite Revolution
(Bloomberg View) -- I’m old enough to remember when the Black Panther was young. I first encountered the character in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s, when he began appearing in the unfortunately named “Jungle Action” comics and learned scholars were arguing stridently over whether Marvel’s black superhero represented racial progress, the young radical I fancied myself was enthralled.
The name itself was revolutionary, but not by association with the Black Panther Party, whose prominence the character largely antedated. No, the revolutionary act was the use of “black” at a moment when the polite word was still “Negro.” The character was introduced in 1966, the year before Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton would publish “Black Power.” By choosing to call him what they did, the character’s creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were casting their lot with the younger generation of activists in the struggle for racial justice.
I mention all of this as background to the film that is currently smashing box office records. The movie is marvelous, and deserves all of its accolades. But as to the public conversation about the transformative power of the black superhero from a hidden, hyperadvanced African country -- we have been down this road before. In fact, we had the very same conversation when T’Challa, the titular Black Panther, was still just a comic character.
“There has been a noticeable trend in the last few years,” wrote Broadcasting magazine in 1973, “toward relevancy and social comment in a medium previously considered just ‘kid’s stuff.’” A featured example was the Black Panther. In high school and again in college I wrote papers about the changes, and each time T’Challa stood at the center. James Turner, director of Afro-American studies at Cornell University, wrote a critical letter to the comic’s editors, which they gave a full page.
From the start, the Black Panther worked as a comic book hero in a way that, say, Luke Cage (created by Marvel in 1972) didn’t. One critic complained at the time that Cage’s dialogue told the reader “there was some white guy writing this book who had no idea what the character should sound like.” A part of the Black Panther’s appeal was the smooth fit into the dialogue of the moment. From the beginning, wrote Adilifu Nama in “Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes,” the character was compelling because he stood “in stark contrast to the historical and symbolic constructions of Africans as simple tribal people and Africa as primitive.” Of course everybody sees that now; Nama’s point is to remind us of how remarkable an idea this was in 1966.
In the original comic, the racial trope was powerfully put. T’Challa came of age by driving from Wakanda white smugglers intent on exploiting the country’s resources. He lured world-famous white superheroes to his country to test his mettle against theirs. He beat them. Behind the comic lay the subversive idea that the black community concealed mighty forces that on some unexpected occasion could rise up from nowhere and smite the oppressor. (Early on, the Black Panther fought the Ku Klux Klan; in a later flashback version, his father slaughtered Nazi invaders.)
This motif of secret rather than public black power was the subject of a small but significant literary genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- a genre I devoured. The best-remembered example is “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (1969) by the former U.S. Army officer Sam Greenlee, a tale to which “The Black Panther” at several points pays a distant homage. Another fine specimen of the genre was “Operation Burning Candle” (1973) by the literary scholar Blyden Jackson. What these and many more works of the period have in common is the suggestion of a sort of Fifth Column existing secretly within the black community, capable of wielding far greater power than the white world imagines.
If one was a revolutionary, such volumes as these, each by a black author, might have been seen as optimistic: The guerrillas, at great cost to themselves, spark movements for genuine social change. But there was also much carnage in the stories. Not all the harm was to the guerrillas. Perhaps that was why even very sympathetic white novelists of the day saw matters differently, producing a literature of bloody but failed black revolutions, of which the most prominent were probably “Trespass” by Fletcher Knebel (author of “Seven Days in May” and the suddenly canonical “Night of Camp David”) and “Siege” by Edwin Corley, both published in 1969.
The Black Panther comics promised a more subtle version of the same idea. Yes, the hidden power was lurking; but no, it wouldn’t be used. Not, at least, for revolution. The new film’s writers cleverly use that very issue as the story’s pivot. Although there’s a convenient white villain (Ulysses Klaue, who in the comics is Klaw, the Panther’s constant adversary), the central conflict is between T’Challa, who wishes to protect the tradition of a Wakanda hidden from outside eyes, and Erik Killmonger, who wants to use the nation’s technological prowess to spark a worldwide uprising.
But for all the film’s battle over this idea, we are meant to see T’Challa, the antirevolutionary, as the good guy. This is in keeping with the literary theorist Umberto Eco’s deconstruction of the comic-book superhero. The superhero, Eco writes, “is gifted with such powers that he could actually take over the government, defeat the army, or alter the equilibrium of planetary politics.” But he doesn’t. This is what makes him a hero. What Eco calls “the immobilizing metaphysics” of the story is that whatever the superhero does, it must be directed in the end to a common good that does not include overthrowing the state.
As film superhero, the Black Panther is a nice fit for this essentially conservative model. We root for T’Challa, even though we know that for him to win the revolution must lose. By revolution I don’t mean nice progressives using law to do nice progressive things; I mean revolution, blood in the streets, a phrase that is uttered more than once in the comic version.
Revolution is what much of the literature of the era that produced the Black Panther comic was ultimately about, and it’s what the film, with its vision of bold yet peaceful change, ultimately isn’t. The film’s T’Challa is a pragmatist; although he never says so explicitly, he seems wise enough to understand what the U.S. has learned and Killmonger hasn’t, that should war ever come, advanced technology is no guarantee of victory.
“The Black Panther” is a great movie, the best work Marvel has done. T’Challa is a fantastic hero. Despite an intriguing ending that I won’t spoil, however, it’s clear that he’s no revolutionary. He might try to inspire the rest of the world, but he’ll never force it to change.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include “The Emperor of Ocean Park” and “Back Channel,” and his nonfiction includes “Civility” and “Integrity.”
When he first appeared in 1966, the Black Panther represented Marvel’s third attempt at a regular black character. The previous two had been soldiers.
A version of what I have in mind in canonical sci-fi is chapter 48 of Isaac Asimov’s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth.” There the powerful being called Bander, member of a hidden single-gendered race, expresses doubt as to whether its hyperadvanced weapons could defeat humanity in an all-out war. Bander’s weapons are better, but there are a lot more humans.
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