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Ryan Coogler's Black Panther: A hollow "defining moment" cloaked in identity politics
A review of the film 'Black Panther'

Barrickman, Nick
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/22/pant-f22.html

Publisher:  World Socialist Web Site
Date Written:  22/02/2018
Year Published:  2018  
Resource Type:  Article

A conventional Hollywood "blockbuster," chock full of action sequences, explosions and the rest.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

We are supposed to look upon this silliness as having a profound import for the simple reason that Black Panther is the first Marvel film, as was the comic series in its time, starring a superhero of African descent. Needless to say, the identity politics crowd is having a field day proclaiming the film to possess a vast social and artistic significance.

Apart from its racialist theme, the film is nothing more than a conventional Hollywood “blockbuster,” chock full of action sequences, explosions and the rest. But moviegoers have been told it is their civic duty to go see it because it shows black people in “positions of power.”

The premise that in today’s world a black superhero represents some kind of social or moral breakthrough is itself absurd. The United States, after all, elected Barack Obama as its head of state twice and has seen a highly-privileged section of African-Americans—no less reactionary than their white counterparts—in some of the highest offices of the state (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Eric Holder, etc.). The presence of blacks at the head of capitalist states, from the US to South Africa, has done nothing to improve the lot of the masses of working and poor people, black or white.

More fundamentally, the use of race as the basis for evaluating a film, or any other creative work is artistically bankrupt and politically reactionary.

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