Chadwick Boseman: A superhero with a thousand faces
Until newspapers are mature enough to allow for honest expressions of profanity and invective, we’ll have to settle for childish euphemisms like the following: 2020 has been a doggone crappy year.
On Friday evening, many of us gave spontaneous expression to our sense of loss upon hearing of the death of Chadwick Boseman, the actor best known for his role as T’Challa, the Black Panther in four blockbuster movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Because Mr. Boseman’s death was announced one day into a three- day social media detox for me, I was lost to my own thoughts about the actor and what he stood for. I didn’t read the outpouring of grief for him on Facebook or Twitter, but I could imagine it.
Because only his closest confidantes knew of his third- stage colon cancer diagnosis in 2016, it’s impossible not to be in awe of his productivity through the many rounds of chemotherapy and surgery he underwent during and between projects.
Mr. Boseman was one of Hollywood’s highest- profile actors after the titanic success of “Black Panther,” so keeping his condition under wraps in such a gossipy town and industry is the equivalent of what masked comic book superheroes do to keep their civilian identities secret.
How did he do it? While we’re at it, how did Mr. Boseman do any of the things he did in the nearly half decade since his diagnosis? How was he able to pack on muscle and learn capoeira, the AfroBrazilian martial art in preparation for his role as the fictional monarch of Wakanda when he was probably feeling tired and nauseated every day of filming?
How was he able to say “yes” to roles ranging from a Vietnam- era soldier in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” to the movie adaptation of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom?”
How was he able to keep his composure through countless takes when he must’ve imagined his life slipping away with every super- heroic stunt in front of a green screen? When the villainous Thanos snapped his fingers at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” causing T’Challa and billions of other humans to disintegrate like fine ash, did he feel his mortality more acutely than the other actors in that scene who considered it just another day on the set?
Was his character’s “resurrection” in the sequel and his return from near death in his eponymous movie all the sweeter given the very serious medical challenges he was undergoing as Chadwick Boseman, the mere mortal?
Much has been made of his stoicism in the face of death and how his ability to keep his struggle with colon cancer under wraps was another sign of his “heroism.” But I can’t help but wonder if an opportunity was also lost in the years he soldiered on, smiling through the pain and projecting the image of the middle- aged heir waiting to ascend to the Hollywood throne once occupied by Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington in their time.
What if Mr. Boseman had felt sufficiently comfortable to share what he was undergoing with the public while showing it was not impacting his productivity but spurring it on?
Because of his wealth, Mr. Boseman was able to afford the best health care imaginable short of the futuristic herbal technology of Wakanda.
Chadwick Boseman had cancer, but he could still go toe- to- toe with Captain America in one movie and Erik Killmonger in another. He was still Chadwick Boseman, a man who was no less a superhero than the fictional one who made him a household name.
I’m not naive. I realize that while coming clean with his cancer diagnosis would have thrown a spotlight on a system that, unlike most Western democracies, still reserves the best health care for those who can afford it, it would also have made him unemployable or at least made it more difficult for him to get insurance to appear in the many movies he did since his diagnosis.
There’s a stigma that even Mr. Boseman, for all his energy, vibrancy and dignity would have had to overcome. He would have had to battle enemies even bigger and badder than Thanos — the actuarial tables of accountants, insurance companies and studio executives calculating the probabilities he could finish any project he was headlining.
He would have also had to battle the invasion of his privacy he obviously cherished. For being one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, he was never tabloid fodder, even at the height of Black Panther- mania. His dignity and essential decency short- circuited the usual rubber- necking that attends celebrity.
Though he made the cover of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter and several other major platforms that herald the arrival of superstardom, he managed to successfully eschew the media scrutiny a real- life T’Challa would’ve had coming.
In the end, his privacy mattered more to him than striking a blow against structural unfairness. He also didn’t want to be gawked at, pitied or secondguessed about the roles he took in the years, months or days he had left. I can’t say I blame him. I’m just wistful.
Cancer shouldn’t be allowed to be a career ender, especially for someone as enormously gifted as Mr. Boseman was. He would’ve been an even more powerful role model these last four years had we known what it actually took for him to show up on the set of the movies we were privileged to see him in. That’s more powerful than any superpower his cinematic alter ego in the MCU possessed.
Chadwick Boseman wasn’t a superhero, though he was drawn to portraying them in the movies. Whether he was channeling the spirit of fictional T’Challa or the very real Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and, for a change, “The Godfather of Soul” James Brown, he was scrupulous about showing their vulnerabilities as well as their superpowers. That was his great gift to cinema. We now know his mortality was what was partially fueling his performances with so much of its pathos.
Now we are all too aware of Chadwick Boseman’s vulnerabilities in his last years. They were carefully hidden behind a mask of stoicism as inscrutable as the Black Panther’s on a dark night.