Local View: Why superhero Black Panther is a big deal.
Why are so many of your black friends who aren’t comic-book fans so excited about the movie “Black Panther”?
There have been plenty of movies with predominantly black casts and crews: Think Tyler Perry, F. Gary Gray, Spike Lee or John Singleton. And there have been plenty of movies about black history: “Selma,” “Hidden Figures,” “Glory,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Amistad” and more modern-day issues like “Straight Outta Compton,” “Friday” and “Moonlight.”
But this is different. Those movies, great as they were, centered on the black experience in a historical setting. Or they looked at the black perspective on a modern issue like racism or colorism in the black community. And “Boyz n the Hood,” “Friday” or “Straight Outta Compton,” while excellent, don’t exactly present the black communities as being great places to live and kidfriendly. Poverty, crime, drugs, gangs and broken families drive much of the plots of those films.
“Black Panther” is so different. It is not geared mainly for a black audience like a Tyler Perry film. It’s geared for the millions of fans of action and superhero films. The massive audiences for “Wonder Woman” showed that there is an audience for “less popular” comic-book characters.
Women who knew nothing about the Wonder Woman character came out to support a female-directed, femaledriven movie. They brought their daughters. They cheered when Wonder Woman beat every enemy she faced, while the male characters often needed her to save them.
Now, for the first time, millions of black Americans can take their children to a movie where blacks are not portrayed as slaves. They’re not fighting to overcome poverty or racism. They’re not merely one in a larger group of good guys — not on the periphery, but at the epicenter.
With apologies to Wesley Snipes in “Blade,” the Black Panther is the first black superhero character in a major blockbuster. He’s not a hero because he’s black. He’s an African hero. His color doesn’t define his character — he’s not forced into some silly plot fighting the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis. And the film’s few white characters are peripheral, just as black characters have been for so long in so many films.
For black Americans, films like “Hidden Figures,” “Selma,” “Glory” and “Moonlight” are important. But now they can take their kids to an action movie with a superhero who looks a lot like them, who hails from a continent where many of them hailed, who talks of the history of his people not merely in the past but in the present. And who is surrounded by strong women, scientists and warriors alike.
And that is a very big deal, indeed.