Are they stepping up, or dropping out?
‘Black Panther,’ ‘Annihilation’ offer different answers
It’s possible, even reasonable, to have either of two wildly divergent reactions to the current state of American politics and “the discourse,” writ large.
Donald Trump’s surprise win in the 2016 election has spurred a sharp and heated reaction, one filled with marches and protests and activism at virtually every level. On the other hand, the generally high level of nastiness and politicization of day-to-day life emanating from all sides on every social media platform has encouraged a number of people to step back, to disengage on a moment-to-moment time frame.
Without getting bogged down in the specifics of Trump-era politics or the wokeness wars, two new movies make eloquent cases for these diverging approaches. Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” is a movie-length brief for choosing engagement over isolation from the world stage, while Alex Garland’s unsettling “Annihilation” offers a powerful portrait of why someone might choose to disengage.
“Black Panther,” of course, is the latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Well-reviewed and a monster at the box office, “Black Panther’s” Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) is one of the few interesting big-screen super-villains in recent years because you could plausibly argue that he was, in fact, correct. He may have gone a bit overboard in his desire to topple the world’s governments and replace them with people who shared his skin color – racial world war would have been an ugly, lengthy affair, regardless of Wakanda’s technological advantages - but he wasn’t wrong to look upon centuries of Wakandan apathy with disgust.
Killmonger surveyed his birth nation Wakanda’s history of quiet complacency in the face of evil – of slavers stealing Africans and ship-
ping them across the Atlantic; of the depredations of colonialism; of warlord-engineered famine and hatred-inspired genocide taking place on its borders while King T’Chaka (John Kani) and his predecessors seemingly spent their time developing vibranium-infused tasting menus for the fortunate few in their isolated paradise – and came to realize that empire was good, actually.
“The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire,” decrees Killmonger, whose exploits with the U.S. military expertly trained him for the task of setting wrongs right. Looking at his behavior metaphorically, rather than literally, we can see a character who is driven to action by indifference, who looks at the world as it exists and wonders why it isn’t better. In his view, the morally iniquitous Wakanda – despite its technological advances, despite its ability to avoid the horrors of previous centuries while wrapped within its cocoon – is a dystopia because it has hoarded its resources and refused to work to make the world a better place. And Killmonger is a utopian. Albeit a bit of a bloody-minded one.
In “Annihilation,” meanwhile, I found myself drawn to a character who found herself surrounded by violence and foolishness and retreated from it all.
“Annihilation” is about an expedition by five female scientists into the mysterious “Area X,” where a permeable barrier known as “the shimmer” has descended over a marshland and is transforming everyone and everything within it. Biologist/army vet Lena (Natalie Portman) has joined the odyssey in order to find out what happened to her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), and she’s the nominal star of the show.
More intriguing, at least to me, was Josie (Tessa Thompson), a physicist who has joined the expedition in the hopes of cracking the scientific mystery behind the inability to send or receive data from Area X. Her efforts in turn unravel the mystery behind the genetic transformations taking place. Josie is scarred figuratively, perhaps by some trauma in her past, but also literally: She’s a cutter, her arms bearing the scars of years of self-mutilation.
Confronted by the horror of Area X – one of her teammates is killed by a blind, misshapen bear that screams in a human moan; we see video of Kane cutting open the stomach of one of his compatriots on the previous expedition, revealing a writhing mass of what looks like eels where a stomach should be – she succumbs to its beauty, giving in to the transformation taking place within her. Flowers sprout from her scars. Retreating into the bushes, she lets them take over. Within moments she is part of the landscape, a woman turned into a flower.
There is something appealing about her metaphorical withdrawal, given the stupidity of our times. Whether it’s the president hollering on Twitter or a death struggle over corporations offering a modest discount to members of a group dedicated to defending a portion of the Bill of Rights, we live in fundamentally silly times.
“Annihilation” itself has been caught up in its own exhausting controversy: Despite starring five women (one of whom is black, one of whom is Latino, one of whom is Jewish) along with three men (one Guatemalan-American, one British actor whose parents are from Hong Kong, one black Brit), it has still been judged wanting by some internet notions of intersectionality.