There's no place like this to call home

[sovay]

And later in the afternoon, I combined the prevailing concerns of the last twenty-four hours and saw Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) at the Capitol Theatre with gaudior and rushthatspeaks. I can't write about it right now, but it's a gorgeous film: worldbuilding, performances, music, myth, serious and beautifully realized Afrofuturism. The thing where if you get enough women in the same cast together, they have conversations about honor and technology, not just men. I want my toolkit-loving niece to be old enough to show her this film for Shuri. Casino shootouts and war rhinos. Maybe the next time Nabiyah Be's on film, she'll get to sing. Once upon a time the most familiar way into this story would have been through the eyes of Ross of the CIA, and this is not his movie.

Comments

[drwex]

My take on this (which I wrote a bit about in my own review) is that these two, like everyone else in the film, are stand-ins for types/philosophies. One of the amazing things about this script is how well it does that.

Klaue is the stand-in for the ravenous white colonial oppressor- he steals the riches and kills the people and doesn't care. He's a gleeful crazed murderous maniac, who's just as happy to employ Black people in his rampage as not.

Ross is the stand-in for people like me - the well-meaning, white liberal sorts who think African history started when white people showed up (that's what we learned in school, after all) but who absolutely will fight alongside the good people, including taking a bullet for them. The fact that he gets called "colonizer" and never blinks or gets defensive about it is HUGE. The fact that he never even attempts to rat out the Wakandans to his nominal masters in the CIA is also huge.

I love this script to pieces and totally want it to get an Oscar. It does so much so well.

[kore]

Ross is also a corrupter though -- he knows Erik through the CIA work, and IIRC he's the only one in the film who calls him "Killmonger." He's helping out Wakanda but he already hurt Erik.

Does he have a chance to rat anyone out really? The interrogation goes on, then Erik blows in to rescue South African Gollum and after that Ross is in Wakanda for the rest of the movie.

I think Klaue is also supposed to stand in for the stereotype of the Great White Hunter, the only white guys who went into "darkest Africa" &c &c, like Bror Blixen (Isak Dinesen's husband).

[sovay]

Ross is also a corrupter though -- he knows Erik through the CIA work, and IIRC he's the only one in the film who calls him "Killmonger."

I don't remember him directly calling Erik by that name, but he does explain how Erik earned it.

He's helping out Wakanda but he already hurt Erik.

Yes. I was surprised that he got a redemption arc and I really enjoyed it—it felt earned—precisely because it was so secondary and so low-key. Because he takes a bullet for Nakia, because T'Challa breaks his non-interventionist rule to save him, because he does fight for Wakanda instead of destabilizing the country as his government trained Erik to do (and as Ross himself, if so ordered, might have done), it would have been almost inadvertently easy to make him a white savior, the modest, canny, important American heroically taking his place of pride in the mysterious African utopia where almost no white man has gone blah blah etc. Instead, he's a guy who helps some and doesn't screw up too much. He's not superfluous, but he's not central. And that's all right.

[kore]

He really is not central! It's like, if we had to have a white guy in the film, that was the way to do it.

I don't think anyone calls Erik that in the film, no, but I could be wrong-- I was shutting out most of Klaue's dialogue because Andy Serkis irks me immensely. ("OI MAAIIDE IT RAYYIIN HA HA HA HA!") Which has led to distress on AO3 as the character is being tagged as "Erik Killmonger" which is wrong on a couple of counts. It might be how he's referred to in the comics, tho (you really don't want the backstory of M'Baku in the comics).

[sovay]

I love this script to pieces and totally want it to get an Oscar. It does so much so well.

Agreed. It should have a raft of nominations next year and some of them had better yield awards. (Cinematography! Actors in every category! Oh, God, part of the point of the movie is that Nakia and Okoye and Shuri never throw down with one another, I don't want to make them fight on the meta-level, can't we just give some kind of collective award to the female cast?)

[drwex]

The collective award is often Best Picture, but that gets conflated with Best Director a lot and often they go to the same work.

I think the best award here would be another movie. Vanity Fair reports that BP has now broken half a billion box office, which pretty much guarantees sequels of some sort, but the important thing will be what sort of sequels we get. Like, a Nakia/Shuri movie would be fantastic, particularly if you mentally think of it as a like a black-girl Bond with Nakia doing the missions and kicking the ass and Shuri supplying the tech and intel.

Another thing I've been tossing around in my head is an Agents of Shield-like sequel where the Dora Milaje are sent to fight problems throughout the black diaspora. Some (like the Boko Haram) require military solutions, some require tech, some diplomacy, some spy work - I can see an entire season here, easily, with a capstone movie.