Black Panther, Wonder Woman and Ned Kelly: Pernicious marketing vs. Real culture.

Like many people that followed the roll-out of Black Panther featuring Chadwick Boseman in the title role earlier this year, I was eventually burnt out by the over-hyped cultural nonsense surrounding what was to all intents and purposes another naked pandering effort from the Marvel Comics universe, this time to the black community. Last year a similarly absurd phenomenon occurred surrounding DC Comics' similarly utopian superhero flick Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot.

Let's get a couple things out of the way: I watched both Black Panther and Wonder Woman in the theaters, and they both were good films that I enjoyed, even being as I am not much of a comic book buff. I thought that the dark imagery and wartime suspense of Wonder Woman and the byzantine family drama of Black Panther created  compelling plots around which both films were able to become massive box office hits.

Social Justice's parasitic relationship to fiction.

At their heart, both Wonder Woman and Black Panther relied on superhero caricatures in the title that hail from Utopian identity strongholds (Wakanda for Africans and Themyscira for Amazon women) and the plot revolves around the difficulties they encounter when their idyllic existence is threatened by problems that encroach from a dystopian outside world. In Black Panther it was a faction that wanted the kingdom of Wakanda to intervene on behalf of black people under duress worldwide, whereas in Wonder Woman it was the male dominated hellish reality of World War I. 

Another unintentional byproduct of this was the extreme identitarian reactions to both Black Panther and Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot, being an Israeli and a white woman, was attacked by far-left progressives that thought a #woke "Person of Colour" should have represented the female warrior on screen. There were equally ridiculous and pseudoscientific arguments put forward that as a Jew, even an Ashkenazi one, Gadot counts as a Person of Colour. There was even a gripe from feminist fish tank Refinery 29 that attacked the portrayal of the Amazon warrior woman for having shaved armpits. Yes, really. 

Similarly, fights broke out within the black community over Black Panther, Wakanda, and the conflict between the lead character King T'Challa played by Boseman and the more militant and arguably more charismatic Eric Killmonger played very well by Creed star Michael B. Jordan. Both Boseman and Jordan had already made their bones with significant turns in black American cinematic epics, with Boseman playing Jackie Robinson in 42 and  Jordan in both Red Tails (about the Tuskegee Airmen) and in Black Panther director Ryan Coogler's star turn Fruitvale Station. Yet the conflict between the isolationist T'Challa and the militant interventionist Killmonger became a wedge issue that drove many black fans of the movie to believe that the real villain of Black Panther was indeed the lead protagonist T'Challa. Even Boseman agreed, possibly due to public commentary by fans.

I have discussed these themes in Black Panther with a small number of people affiliated or once-affiliated with the black nationalist community, and even there the topic has become tiresome. Many people liked the message of this movie, and enjoyed the lively debate up to a point but have become worn out. The reason I feel that the Killmonger vs. T'Challa argument is so fruitless and given to nonsensical exaggeration are two factors: 

1. As a Marvel creation Black Panther's $1.274 Bn box office yield will be enjoyed not by the fans but by Marvel Studios and its distributor Walt Disney. That fact has not been lost on the film's fierce fans, who started a Change.org petition to drive Marvel Studios to donate 25% of the profits to "black communities". 

2. Like Wonder Woman, this film is based on an entirely fictional creation that is open to interpretation. A creator can have a unique rendition of the character and story, but its authenticity and spiritual integrity are open to the criticism from fans and journalists because there is no true story to judge it by. Coogler's film was fairly well-made, but because of the fact that the comic book series itself is completely fictional the garish costumes and over the top accents seemed to me to be low hanging fruit for critics on the identity-obsessed factions of the progressive movement. This is why Teen Vogue had to come up with a bizarre article justifying that black Americans dressed up in African costumes. That whole discussion has been the result of the "cultural appropriation" debate, one that has started as the beating of a butterfly's wings on campuses like Yale's where Halloween costumes were used as a backdrop for an entirely symbolic social justice crusade.

Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wigg, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon were an all-female, multiracial ensemble that included one lesbian (McKinnon) for Ghostbusters (2016). But nobody cared and the movie struggled both domestically and internationally.

It was social justice's disruptive effects on fictional cinema that led to fantasy adaptation A Wrinkle In Time bombing due to its dissociation from its Christian source material and confusing focus on racial identity. It was the same type of grandstanding nonsense that in 2016 led to the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters poisoning the well for many film viewers. 

Real cinematic art would be considered regressive and racist today

Heath Ledger's 2003 portrayal of Irish Australian bush ranger Ned Kelly was amazingly realistic, tragic, and gory. 

Last night I watched an unheralded film about a downtrodden hero. The man's parents were deported prisoners/slaves banished from their homeland by a tyrannical foreign ruler and placed in a harsh new colonial environment where they remained a disenfranchised underclass harassed by the police and pursued like a stray dog for crimes that he did not commit. Eventually he killed three police constables and became public enemy number one not just in the colony but in the entire empire. 

The subject of the film was not Nat Turner, Che Guevara, Mumia Abu Jamal or Assata Shakur. It was Irish Australian bush ranger outlaw Ned Kelly. Although obviously dramatized, the 2003 film-adapted version of Kelly played by the late Heath Ledger was a stunningly realistic one that included all of the gore, regret, and tragedy of the real Kelly's life. Living in the harsh 19th century Victoria colony in pre-independence Australia, Kelly dealt with the persecution of the Royal Victoria Police. The movie possesses all of the elements of a great historical epic: a gallant protagonist (Kelly played by Ledger), his crew of rough sidekicks (most notably Joseph Byrne played by Orlando Bloom) and the cunning villain (Superintendent Francis Hare played masterfully by Geoffrey Rush). 

When it came out Ned Kelly was hardly a hit even in the subject's native Australia, and to this day is not nearly as well-known as the similarly themed but over-the-top Scotland based Braveheart and the flop Rob Roy. However, whereas Braveheart contains numerous historical inaccuracies necessary to compress the movie's  timeline, and Rob Roy is itself an adaptation of a 19th century fictional novel, Ned Kelly is the perfect story of young outlaws that lived hard and died young. Kelly himself was hanged when he was 25, and tragically Ledger would die himself at age 28 of a drug overdose. 

Unfortunately, if released today Ned Kelly would not be recognized as a great portrait of colonial Australia showing social divisions between the bog Irish and the English Protestant ruling class as well as the harsh conditions of the Victorian countryside. Instead it would probably be attacked for these reasons: 

1. Eurocentric - One aboriginal shown, and several Chinese coolies and servants.

2. Misogyny - Kelly's mistress forsakes him, women are portrayed as weaklings.

3. Police - Though shown to be ruthless in pursuit, Superintendent Hare is seen as both perceptive of Kelly's mindset and conscious that he is a police officer and not an assassin. As such he arrests Kelly after the Glenrowan shoot-out, even though he himself was wounded. This would be shown as "white bias towards white criminals" even though in an earlier sequence the Victoria Police shoot several unarmed hostages held by Kelly. 

There are probably endless other angles where modern social progressives would paint Ned Kelly to be a regressive hate fest, but there's only one angle that is unassailable: It attempted to represent a real outlaw, executed under the death penalty by a colonial power who became a folk hero for an under-privileged sectarian minority and later an entire nation that came later. Even with their tremendous commercial yields in the theaters, neither Black Panther nor Wonder Woman could ever hope to show a genuine vision of the world as it is, and it is because they are so fantastical and fake that progressives cling to them as symbols rather than work with the world as it is.