Why has 'Black Panther' stormed the box office?

Vibranium might be fictional but it acts as a metaphor for the wealth and weaponry that gives Wakanda the gift of freedom from white dominion.

A still from Black Panther.

As this goes to press, Black Panther has ruled the box-office for five straight weeks and is just days away from becoming the biggest superhero smash-hit to date. That this Walt Disney movie should be so successful seems just as well-timed as the story of the film itself, and comes not long after 'Wonder Woman' swept audiences off their feet. A woman and a black man — both categories so long relegated to the peripheries of filmdom that their storming the earnings citadel alongside grabbing the storyline is the stuff of sweet history.

As scripts go, Black Panther isn’t spectacularly original and follows the usual superhero arc: wonder substance vibranium; Black Panther body suit; thingamajig to teleport folk from forest to sitting room; a car from car heaven; oodles of hi-tech high jinks; and ample smart-alecky one-liners to warm the cockles of any superhero film fan’s heart.

So why exactly has it crossed the $1 billion global earnings mark in such a hurry? It’s hard to explain, but one suspects that much of the reason is that it speaks to the times. Despite living in a world that has Trump’s unabashedly white-first politics to show for itself and rising right-wing belligerence, the thumbs up for

Black Panther shows that the globe is not so far perhaps from seeking and appreciating an alternative vision.

Untouched past

Its triumph is the back-story it creates for the Black Panther by conjuring up a Utopia, the fictitious African country of Wakanda, which has managed to escape colonialism and the slave trade. Where black people rule themselves and their resources secretly, wisely and well. Where native gods and voodoo charms are alive and kicking and not a single white missionary has had to come by and save anybody’s heathen soul, nor a white nation has had to fly in to save democracy.

Vibranium might be fictional but it acts as a metaphor for the wealth and weaponry that gives Wakanda the gift of freedom from white dominion. Now, it must decide if King T’Challa, who morphs into the Black Panther, will opt to keep Wakanda hidden and isolated from the world, or use vibranium’s powers to fight for a modicum of justice for oppressed black people around the globe.

 

The sense of pure and primeval African power that director Ryan Coogler channels — the music, the costumes, the baobab-dotted savannas — makes the movie uniquely moving in its vision; a yearning for an untouched past, an undamaged psyche, an unbroken strength from which to start anew. Of course, it’s a romanticised vision, but setting the film in the superhero format manages to make it a fairy tale that’s at once believable and aspirational.

More important, the film doesn’t make either vibranium or ancient magic the single-point source of Wakanda’s strength, but uses these to make Wakanda a technological wonderland. It has a high-speed maglev subway, livefeed holograms, a suit that stores and reuses kinetic energy, and much, much more. This simultaneous straddling of the past and the future is what gives the film its resonance across generations. It’s a lesson our own myth-makers might want to learn — incessantly harping on brahmastras without investing them with modern science can only go so far.

Buttered popcorn

In the same spirit, the film’s women don’t go whining ‘swami’ or jumping into pyres to save their honour but are Wakanda’s spine. T’Challa’s sister Shuri is the kingdom’s tech genius, and Okoye, Wakanda’s greatest warrior, heads the country’s special forces. These powerful women dominate the screen with a matter-of-fact ease that resonates with progressivism.

Interestingly, the film might use the time-worn superhero frame but it fights contemporary issues: racism, sexism, neo-imperialism. And its solution isn’t triumphalism, but a world where wisdom might prevail.

Black Panther may be touted as heralding a new world order, but of course that won’t happen. As The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane says, one must not expect too much from “anything that is accompanied by buttered popcorn”. What the film does though is to bring marginalised people to the centre of the universe in a joyous, self-confident and unselfconscious way, and that centring in itself can herald the beginning of new ways in which stories can be told and movies made.