Login | April 23, 2024
The Black Panther offers thoughts about mass incarceration
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: May 18, 2018
Now that Marvel’s Infinity War dominates the cultural conversation (and partially inspired the last column here about population) I’m going to break the trend with a thought piece about The Black Panther.
In case you have spent most of this year off this planet, The Black Panther the 18th installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has already grossed over $1 billion dollars and become one of the cultural touchstones of the year. It has been hailed for a story dominated by black characters and its cinematic realization of Afro-futurism which blends respectful depictions of African culture with speculative elements from science fiction or fantasy.
Like the best adventure movies, it offers levels of story that rumble below the gadgets, fights and explosions. Those deeper troughs include explorations of African and African-American identity, colonialism, racism and how oppressed peoples safeguard their humanity while fighting for liberation.
The sub rosa theme I found particularly resonant explores crime, punishment and mercy in the portrayal of the fate of the movie’s villain, Eric Killmonger.
This column will discuss the movie’s end in detail, so the usual spoiler warnings apply. If you haven’t seen the movie, yet, it’s still running in theaters and available for purchase on streaming sites. The column will be here when you are done.
The movie’s titular hero is T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, the newly crowned king of Wakanda, an African nation so technologically advanced that it can hide itself from the rest of the world. He also serves as the Black Panther, a superhero protector of the kingdom with augmented strength and agility.
Killlmonger (Michael B. Jordan) is T’Challa’s cousin, born and raised in America and trained as a supersoldier by the CIA. Killmonger seeks to usurp T’Challa as king, then use the technological bounty of Wakanda to foment global wars of liberation.
At a turning point in the movie, T’Challa discovers that his father was at fault for leaving young Eric in Oakland where he grew up impoverished and embittered. At one point, arguing with the spirit of his dead father (remember, this is a comic book movie) T’Challa, exclaims, “He’s a monster of our own making.”
The movie also portrays Killmonger as a monster of America’s making, both because he grew up in the city slums that testify to our history of racialized inequality, but also because of specific CIA training about destabilizing third world regimes.
The villain deaths in the Marvel movies follow a kind of Aristotelian poetics. They come at the climax of a pitched battle, usually signal some villainous lack of contrition and almost invariably include the villain exploding or otherwise being disintegrated.
Killmonger’s end breaks with that standard mode. In the inevitable final showdown, T’Challa mortally wounds Killmonger, then carries him to an outcropping where they watch the sun setting on Wakanda. T’Challa offers him medical help, but he refuses, preferring death to imprisonment. Then T’Challa regretfully watches as the man who tried to kill him dies.
T’Challa’s reaction to learning of the responsibility his family and nation bears in creating Killmonger is both to fight to bring him to justice and to mete out that justice with compassion. And in the end, he implements a less bloodthirsty iteration of Killmonger’s program.
I suspect that it’s no coincidence that this melding of justice with mercy comes to us in a film produced by African-Americans. Compared to whites, black Americans are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated or killed by police, but they are also nearly twice as likely to be victim of a serious crime.
When people talk about the importance of representation in creative arts (or anywhere else) the argument is about perspective. Black experience intersects with crime and justice in the United States in a way that I believe makes the interplay of justice and mercy a more obvious proposition.
Most of the criminal justice reforms being debated fall short of the wholesale policy reversals necessary remedy our societal addiction to long-term incarceration. For example, setting free those imprisoned for nonviolent drug felonies would not reverse this country’s status as the most incarcerated modern democracy.
To truly address our mass incarceration problem, we will need to reduce the penalties for serious felonies, including crimes of violence. That in turn would require us to change our perception about those who have committed violent crimes to allow us to temper justice with mercy.
The idea that we as a society bear some of the blame and therefore some of the responsibility for the creation of violent criminals offers one conceptual route to that place.