Entertainment

Why can’t Black Hollywood get its villains right?

I watched Black Panther: Wakanda Forever with high hopes and it delivered. In fact, it checked several boxes:

Yet, I left the theatre with a heavy heart, with the question “why” lingering in my mouth. I had watched the movie with a group of African and African American students from my department, and I could tell that everyone was awed by the stunning displays on the screen, and the sheer magnificence of the worldbuilding. I did not want to ruin the exuberance and deep sense of pride that many had come out of the theatre so when I was asked how the movie went, I said fine. However, as soon as I got into the car of the person who had offered us a ride home, I blurted out my thoughts. I praised the movie for everything great it did before landing on the one criticism I had,

“Why can’t we get our villains right?” I remember saying, “Why must the villains in Black Panther be the people who we don’t or shouldn’t have an issue with? If we are (re)telling the story of Africa through futuristic lenses, can’t we take it as an opportunity to mete out justice to those who have truly hurt us, those who deserve our wrath, why pick on people with whom we have historically had little to no conflict?”

“You don’t pitch one BIPOC against another,” I said as I ended my venting statements.

Spoiler Alert: You see, in Wakanda Forever, we made an enemy out of the Talokans. Blue-bodied people with a breathtaking empire underwater, a kingdom in hiding led by the immortal Kulkukan, Namor (child without love) with winged legs, a fearsome speed, and the power of the gods. Just as Wakanda is modeled based on Africa, Talokan is the spitting image of the Aztec Empire in all its glory. I have never seen any such detailed representation of the Aztecs. It was mesmerizing, seeing how Wakanda Forever resurrected this empire and bestowed it with the futuristic majesty befitting of its status. The clothes! The buildings! The greetings! The arts and crafts! The body markings. Good God, I have always been fascinated with the Aztec empire, but just watching Wakanda Forever made me fall in love with that glorious past kingdom again AND with its Mexican descendants. But Ryan Coogler and his team resurrected the empire for what?

So they could become the villains against whom Wakandans raise their spears, daggers, and body armors. So Namor and his understandable hatred against the surface world (which, in his own sense, just means the American and European parts of the world) could make a Black Panther out of the hot-headed, vengeance-seeking Shuri. What’s even more upsetting is that the base reason for the conflict that claimed the lives of many Talokans and Wakandans in an epic sea battle scene follows with the trope Marvel movies are known for – The need to protect a young American woman. Thor’s worlds revolve around Jane, Iron Man’s around Pepper Pots. In Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness, the woman who needs to be protected is a teen sorcerer named America; In Wakanda Forever, the one in need of protection from Namor and the Talokans is a genius black American college student named Riri Williams. Riri’s characterization in the movie stands out to my mind, especially considering her humor and black American mannerisms, but when I think about how she is the sole reason for the conflict between two BIPOC races, what her role leaves is a bitter taste in my mouth.

As I rant on, a friend tries to justify the choice to make a villain out of the Mexicans by saying that villainizing the Americans or Europeans would have been too predictable, too flat. Besides, he calls my attention to the fact that Coogler and his team are just enacting the comics written by Stan Lee. I don’t consider these justifications strong enough especially considering the number of shades and disses that were thrown at the westerners in the movie. Right from the beginning, attempts were made to spell out the antagonism between Wakanda, France, and America. Also, Namor’s awareness of and desire to revenge the atrocious colonization of Mexicans by the Spanish is vividly depicted. But the movie never sees any of these brewing oppositions through; instead, by the end of the movie, a strong allyship between America and Wakanda is established. Also, the first Black Panther is also bedeviled with the same problematic complex of villainization. Killmonger, an African American with a fraught history with the royal family of Wakanda, becomes the singular villain of the movie. Yes, it is good enough to address the tenuous relationship between Africans and African Americans, but why do it with such intensity, such brute, insensitive force that punctures deeper into the issues of displacement and non-belongingness that has sown feelings of awkwardness and discord between Africans and African Americans. Again, considering its strong futuristic leaning, couldn’t Killmonger’s character have been scripted in a way that does not make him the problem, but the effect of causal actions in the historical trajectory of Africans and African Americans? Or couldn’t the whole damned plot have been rewritten to showcase an alternative history? Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is, in my opinion, a paradigmatic example of how Black Hollywood navigates the issue of villainization. If it’s not a movie about slavery, precolonial and colonial times, interracial marriage, or outright racial discrimination (the kind of movies for which Black cinema mostly gets its Oscar and Emmy awards), if it’s not a documentary or a history-inspired movie, then, most often than not, the villain or foil in the movie is someone of a relatable racial or ethnic affiliation. As much as I don’t agree with centering white folks in our narratives, it truly is disturbing to see that Black Hollywood does not know how to make villains out of its real enemies.

When it comes to the issue of creating alliances between BIPOCS and properly villainizing western entities without necessarily centering them, Alexie Sherman’s Reservation Blues does these well. The novel starts with Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s encounter with Robert Johnson, the result of which becomes a ‘gifted’ guitar around which the whole plot is spun. It is obvious that Sherman deliberately wishes readers to notice and reckon with the interaction between “the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe” and the “strange black man and his guitar” (Sherman). The two, though meeting for the first time, seem to find solace in each other’s company and their similarities more than their differences are accentuated. Like Johnson, Builds-the-Fire is aware of the seductive danger of the arts; he can reckon with Johnson when he says that he got sick due to music. Sherman points this out clearly: ““Thomas knew about sickness. He’d caught some disease in the womb that forced him to tell stories. The weight of those stories bowed his legs and bent his spine a bit” (12).

Also, both Thomas and Johnson are aware of who Big Mom is and they share a feeling of reverence for her. Big Mom, in this context, can almost be likened to the mammy stereotype that Americans made out of their nannies during slavery. Sherman rewrites this trope by not just making her a sage-like omnipotent being who has lived through the times of slavery, the early times of rock music, and even beyond, he also accords Big Mom a role that is significant not just for black people but for the indigenous Spokane people at the Reservation. Big Mom, a symbol of black resilience against oppression and ancestral protection, becomes someone that lives within the reservation and is sought after in the government abode of American Indians. Big Mom also acts as a bridge between Indian mystical beliefs about female supernaturals and those of black people. For all we know, Big Mom could be both Osun and Amotken. Just as divine intervention works, it is on the journey to meeting Big Mom that the rock star Johnson ‘forgets’ his guitar in Thomas’s car, thus handing over the mantle of rock music ingenuity and the double-edged sword of liberation it signifies, not to a fellow black person, but to another ethnic group within the population of societally machinated marginalized entities.

It is interesting that Sherman sparks an initial conflict over the guitar between Victor and Thomas. Victor, upon hearing Thomas strum and sing with the guitar for the first time, beats him to a stupor. But this Victor cannot stop hearing the melody from the guitar; this Victor is tormented with the self-healing properties of the guitar; this Victor goes back to Thomas and begs him alongside Junior to form a band; this Victor becomes the all too popular lead guitarist of the Coyote Springs; this Victor who had not met with Johnson at all becomes the “Guitar God”. It is significant how these men whose tendency to fight with themselves due to the hunger, poverty, drought, and dearth that has been made to run rife in their community because of governmental neglect, are made to form a bond after the intervention of Big Mom and the comradeship that Johnson exhibits by coming to Spokane even in his ill state and leaving a part of himself behind. The musical bond shared by these men snowballs into a revival of community within Spokane. Nights after night, the people of Spokane would gather in their hungry, battered state to hear the Coyote Springs play. By choosing this plot development, Sherman, no doubt, wishes to show that despite the terribleness of living and livelihood caused by imperial and hegemonic forces, communities need not turn against themselves to survive; they should, instead, seek positive alliances and companionships.

Sherman also decenters Americans in this novel despite villainizing them. This he does well through the characterization of the Gentleman, Betty, Veronica, and Lynn. Despite the vagueness of the description accorded to the Gentleman, it is obvious that he is a white devil, the bane of the existence of black rock musicians. The Gentleman is the white promoter, the white music agent, the white producer, the “I-will-make-you-rich-and-famous-if-you-kiss-white-peoples’-asses talent discoverer. However, this Gentleman is given mild descriptions that emphasize his ordinariness. Yes, he might be regarded as a “handsome white man” but he is also regarded as “a ghost, just a small animal dashing across the road” (247, 376). Even when it is eventually revealed that the guitar might have originally belonged to the Gentleman, the power of possession is immediately wrested from him when Big Mom reveals that “it belongs to whoever wants it the most.” Also, despite the scent of desirability with which Betty and Veronica are coated, they are fully characterized as exploitative, insensitive, unlikable people who exhibit traits of cultural appropriation, fetishization, and outright racism. As much as one is wont to question the flatness of the presentation of these white women, it is clear that Sherman is interested in properly villainizing these women as opposed to simply using them as pedestals upon which to stage a murky narrative about how the marginalized are often the architects of their own misfortune. Sherman through Reservation Blues demonstrates that it is possible to project a vision of alliance between BIPOCs and call a white spade a white spade resorting to excessive didactics and non-nuanced presentation of marginality.

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