Letitia Wright is the new Black Panther in Wakanda Forever.
In December, 2016, Carrie Fisher died of a heart attack shortly after finishing her final scenes for The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s film turned out to be the best Star Wars title in thirty years, but the franchise had a big problem. The final film, Duel of the Fates, was to have focused on Leia as the last surviving member of the original trilogy’s band of heroes. With Fisher deceased, the script was scrapped, and the director fired. J.J. Abrams was brought in to guide the saga to a safe landing. Instead, he crashed the ship. The Last Jedi remains controversial, but The Rise of Skywalker is universally acknowledged as an epic fiasco.
In August, 2020, another Disney department faced tragedy. Chadwick Boseman, the beloved star of Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43. Director Ryan Coogler, having made the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was faced with nothing but bad choices. Do you recast T’Challa, and assume the hero of millions of Black kids worldwide is, like James Bond, just a brand name fillable by semi-disposable himbos? Or do you try to write around the disappearance of one of twenty-first-century cinema’s brightest lights?
Coogler chose option B. He immediately announced that Boseman would not be replaced. That meant Wakanda Forever was written with the difficulty settings on “high.” Normally in the second film of a superhero franchise, we have dispensed with the origin story, and the hero really comes into their own. Instead, Coogler and writer Joe Robert Cole had to account for their hero’s offscreen death, deal with all of the resulting character and plot fallout, and shift the focus to a new protagonist, all while introducing a new antagonist and delivering all the super powered thrills and chills the audience expects.
It’s an impossible assignment. Coogler and Cole come very close to pulling it off by leaning heavily on the excellent ensemble they assembled for Black Panther. We open with the skeptic Shuri (Letitia Wright) praying to the cat god Bast as she races to find a cure for the mystery illness afflicting her brother T’Challa. She suspects the solution is related to the heart herb which gives the Panthers their power, but pretender to the Wakandan throne Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) destroyed the garden where the herb grew, so now she must try to create a synthetic version. She’s still struggling with the problem when her mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), tells her it’s too late.
Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
All this drama, and the moving, slow-mo funeral sequence, takes place before the opening credits. Flash forward a year, and the Queen is trying to help Shuri to come to terms with T’Challa’s death. Wakanda is still struggling with the same question that has always hung over the secret Afrofuturist society—should they engage with the world that has always been so hostile to Black people, or hide behind their vast technological advantage and huge supply of the alien wonder material vibranium? Stung by the trauma of her husband’s and son’s deaths, and the West’s quest to steal Wakandan resources, Ramonda is leaning back towards isolationism. Her political calculations are upended when a new variable presents itself in the person of Namor the Sub Mariner (Tenoch Huerta Mejía). He’s the king of the underwater realm of Talokan, which has their own independent supply of vibranium. Since Namor is a 400-year-old super powered mutant son of the Mayan civilization, he’s also suspicious of representatives of “Western civilization” looking for resources in his territory. It would seem the two civilizations’ interests would align, but instead they spiral into war as Wakanda searches for a new protector.
Coogler is the best director working in the comic book space. His deep knowledge of classic genre films makes him uniquely suited to this novelistic storytelling. He flawlessly executes a tension-building Zulu sequence leading to the film’s first set piece, a three-way, air, ground, and water chase through Boston. Basset carries the early acts on her sculpted shoulders, before passing the baton to Lupita Nyong’o’s super spy Nakia and Winston Duke’s grumpy warlord M’Baku for their own bravado scenes.
T’Challa was the moral center of the Marvel heroes, the one who best represented Stan Lee’s dictum “With great power comes great responsibility.” When Shuri takes up the mantle of the Black Panther, she faces the Wakandan conundrum of conquest or peace? T’Challa made the Solomonic choice to split the difference. Shuri’s choices, like the film itself, turn out much messier. Wakanda Forever tries very hard, but Chadwick Boseman is just too tough an act to follow.
Matthew Harris is the newest edition to the Contemporary Media team. He is a 2020 graduate of Rhodes College who interned with the Memphis Flyer and Memphis magazine before being hired as an editorial assistant. I persuaded him to watch all three hours and 20 minutes of Spike Lee’s epic 1992 biopic Malcolm X. Our epic conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chris McCoy: So tell me, what do you know about Malcolm X?
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X
Matthew Harris: I know what I have learned in the American school system. I know he was a civil rights leader. At first, he was anti- working with the African-American establishment. But then that changed close to his death, and he was really like, “You know we really need to stand together with the African-American civil rights movement. We need to be one unified voice.” But he died. A lot of what I know comes secondhand, from hearing my grandparents talk about it, my mom talk about it. But you know, I went to high school in Texas, and we didn’t talk about Malcolm X or any other outside-the-mainstream leaders. Ironically enough, I watched I Am Not Your Negro, which is a documentary based on the works of James Baldwin, two weeks ago. That was really the first time in my life where I was like, “Oh, wow. Okay. This was the movement. There were all these civil rights leaders like Fred Johnson I never really learned about in school.”
Chris: Well, you’re about to learn a lot more. What do you know about the movie Malcolm X?
Matthew: I know It’s a Spike Lee film, and it stars Denzel Washington.
Chris:Have you seen other Spike Lee films?
Matthew: I’ve seen Do the Right Thing, BlacKkKlansman. I ended up watching Da 5 Bloods very, very late last night. Chi-Raq was also by him. I’m a huge Spike Lee fan. I was talking to my mom and told her I was watching Malcolm X because I was helping a friend for something at work. She said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to be mad at the end. You’re going to be mad because Denzel didn’t win an Oscar for his performance, and he was amazing.”
Chris: Not to bias the experiment, but I think your Mom has a point.
201 minutes later …
Chris:Okay, Matthew Harris. You are now someone who has seen Malcolm X. What did you think?
Matthew: Oh, it was really, really, really good. The first half was very hard to watch. There were a lot of decisions that were made where I found myself saying, “No! No! Don’t do that! Just walk away!” The conversation he has with his wife Betty, where she says, “Open your eyes!” is now in my top five movie moments. That’s such a hard scene. He really owes his life to the movement, and is ready to do anything for them. But they were taking advantage of him. You can just tell, knowing this is based on his book, you know it was hard for him to do, and it was such a hard conversation to play. But they just knocked it out of the park. It was so well done.
Chris: Are you upset, like your mom said, that Denzel didn’t get the Best Actor Oscar?
Matthew: I’m pretty angry. Angela Bassett was amazing as well.
Chris: Oh yes. She’s always amazing.
(left) Angela Bassett as Betty Shabazz
Chris: Do you know who actually won, instead of Denzel?
Matthew: Who?
Chris: Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman.
Matthew: Huh.
Chris: I know. That was one of those awards that was a “He’s done so much good stuff, we need to give him one” kind of thing. But come on! Denzel’s so good. The way he carries himself from phase to phase in this movie, you can sort of watch the moral maturity of his character evolve, just from the way Denzel holds his shoulders. It’s stunning.
Robbed
Chris: So what do you think about watching this today? What does this movie say to 2020 America?
Matthew: There were a lot of messages and shots that were so very poignant, especially in the latter half. There’s one shot of Malcolm near the end that I want to say is a fisheye effect, or something like that. And then there’s a lady on the street who stops him, and says, “Don’t let them get you down, don’t let them talk to you like that.” And that’s something Spike Lee does. It’s in BlacKkKlansman as well, with a burning cross. The message of that … As a Black man, there have been times when there’s so much pressure and social tension going on. There’s a weight there. You find yourself with these moments where you’re just on autopilot. I remember there would be days at Rhodes where something would happen, and I would just walk past my friends. They would be like, ‘Hey, Matt, how are you doing?” And I’m just not there, because I’m not in a moment. Keep moving, keep moving on. You have to put yourself into that mindset. That’s how you get from day one to day two because you don’t know any other way. You hear the slight against you, or you see systemic racism, and you’re like, I just can’t deal with that today. You really zone out. I loved that scene.
Chris: That’s one of Spike’s signature shots. It might not have been the first one, but it’s the best one, because of Denzel’s face. What’s going on is pretty simple. It’s a dolly shot with the camera angle pointing up. The actor is just riding on the dolly with the camera. He’s in motion, but he’s not walking. It looks like he’s gliding. He’s ascending, because the motion of the trees in the background is downward, so it’s like he’s ascending to heaven. It’s kind of a Jesus moment. He’s in the Garden of Gethsemane, awaiting his betrayal. Not to be insensitive to him as a Muslim. I think Spike kind of calls himself out there. The woman you were talking about who stops him on the street says “Jesus will protect you.” I was like, yeah, probably not the best thing to say to this guy at this moment. But she meant well.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (6)
Chris: This movie came out when I was in college. I was already a big Spike Lee fan, because I was a film nerd and I loved She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing. This is Spike doing the prestige studio movie, 1992 style. It’s a formal exercise for Spike, where in Do the Right Thing, he’s free form. He’s just doing his own thing. But this is a big studio thing, and he did it so much better than anybody else at the time. He’s just good at everything. I’m so jealous of him. He’s great with actors. You just watched Da 5 Bloods, right? What did you think of that?
Matthew: It was good. I think you can sort of categorize Spike Lee films in two ways. There’s the overtly politicized movies, like Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman. Then there’s the sort of more internalized African-American movies, like Do the Right Thing.
In Da 5 Bloods, the entire premise of the movie is bringing back money to the community that they feel is rightly theirs. But part of it is also dealing with how African Americans see themselves. How do they deal with their struggle, their problems? BlacKkKlansman and Malcolm X, you have characters who live in a political sphere. It’s about how they navigate the space around them, how they exist in the space around them. So, one thing I harken back to in BlacKkKlansman, you have this really strong African-American lead who has to go through changes. But then at the end of the day, he realizes it doesn’t matter what changes he goes through. He’s just found a way to live, but the world doesn’t really care.
In Malcolm X, we have a character who goes through significant changes. We follow him throughout his entire life, and in the end, nothing changes. He’s murdered, Black men and women are still facing prejudice, the injustice is still occurring, and the movie ends. That’s one thing I’ve always liked about Spike Lee movies, especially the politicized ones — they don’t have happy endings. That’s real life. Even Da 5 Bloods is not a super happy ending.
Chris: Most of them die. And Delroy Lindo dies sort of unredeemed. Did you notice him in this movie? He’s so good as Malcolm’s criminal mentor.
(left) Delroy Lindo as West African Archie, Malcolm Little’s criminal mentor.
Chris: I was keeping track of the timing. The first hour is basically a gangster movie.
Matthew: It’s like a gangster movie, then it’s like The Green Mile or Shawshank Redemption, then it becomes a political movie.
Chris: And when it’s The Shawshank Redemption, it’s better than the actual Shawshank Redemption! Spike’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do this!” Another one he does is JFK, the Oliver Stone movie that was out the year before this. I really noticed it during the part where Malcolm made the comments about the assassination. It’s cut like an Oliver Stone montage in that moment. Spike is just casually doing everyone else’s riffs better than they could.
Like you said, it’s kind of a hard movie to watch, because it’s almost three and a half hours long. But it doesn’t feel like I’m wasting my time. I’m the biggest nerd you’ll ever meet, but when I spent three hours with those Hobbit movies, I felt like I was wasting my time.
Matthew: There’s no space wasted in this movie.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (3)
Chris: One thing that struck me this time was, this isn’t just a movie about racism. It’s exploring racism as a phenomenon. It poses the question, which Malcolm’s life does — when he was a Black separatist in a cult of personality, as the Nation of Islam was — was he a racist? Ultimately, he comes around to cosmopolitanism after he goes to Mecca and sees everybody worshiping together. He gets a new perspective when he leaves the racist environment of America. I don’t have the answer to that question, and that makes it uncomfortable to watch for a lot of people.
Matthew: Being a younger African American, and going to college at a PWI, a Primarily White Institution, I met people on different ends of the spectrum. In Texas, I grew up as pretty much always the only Black person in the room. People are always going to ask me questions. People are going to do microaggressions towards me. But they don’t know. I have very curly hair, and some of my earliest memories from middle school are people playing with my hair. … They had never been around people with Black hair.
So, when I came to Rhodes, I was very different than people there, because I was like, “Hey, you know it’s okay to tell people that they’re wrong and to educate people.”And I met a lot of people who were like, “No, they should know, and they’re either with us, or they’re against us.” I saw so much of that in Malcolm X, with the kind of transformation he makes. At Boston College, there’s this one white lady who asks, “What can I do to help you?” And he says, “Nothing.” To this day, I know people who are like that. “There are no good white people. They’re all out to get us.” I’ve seen people, as they get older, make the transformation that Malcolm makes. I think a lot of African Americans make that change in their life. They’re like, “Is my outlook toward other people, toward people who are trying to be allies, problematic?”
‘Nothing.’
And it’s so crazy because I had a conversation with my mom last week. We were talking about Juneteenth. We’re from Texas, and Juneteenth is a state holiday. We got the day off. My mom never celebrated. She thought it was really dumb. And with everything that was happening, people were wishing her a happy Juneteenth. And she’s like, “Am I a jerk or an asshole if I email people back and tell them I don’t celebrate Juneteenth?” We had a really long conversation where I told her I think that she’s being a little hard. Because these are people who don’t know any way to ally. This is the way that some people told them that they can be an ally. They’re doing their best, they’re making an effort, and you’re basically just shitting on them for making an attempt.
Chris: I think that the tribal instinct, you know, the instinct toward being a member of a group of people who are like you, a sort of extended family group, is natural. And it served humanity well for a really long time. But it also turns toxic. We just have to figure out a way to extend that feeling in people toward all of humanity at once, if that makes any sense. I don’t know if I’m making sense right now. That’s the way forward. And what Malcolm says in the letter that he writes to Betty from Mecca is that racism is leading toward an inevitable disaster. That’s someone who has seen a higher wisdom.
Matthew: That reminded me of Kendrick Lamar at the end of To Pimp a Butterfly. In the song “Mortal Man,” he has a conversation with a recording of Tupac. One of the things he talks about is that there’s going to come a point in time when African Americans are going to start shooting back. He likens it to Nat Turner. That’s something I’ve always thought about, with things going on today. You can only push and push and push so much before people push back. I’m not going to compare 1960s America with 2020 America, but I think a lot of the pushback we’ve seen recently is due to 400 years of systematic oppression, of taking people’s voices away. Of saying, no, you can’t protest like that. You can’t say this, you can’t kneel. You eventually back people into a corner, where they say, “How can I speak out on the injustices that are in front of me without breaking the law?” If the only way you’re going to listen to me is by breaking the law, and that’s the only way change is going to happen, what other choices do you have? I care about my family, and I care about the people around me, and I care about the people who look like me. Every time I’ve tried to raise my voice, you’ve shut me down, but when I go out and shut down a street, that’s illegal. So when I first saw that, that’s all I could think of. All that anger and frustration, and people are going to rise up. And people are rising up.
Never Seen It: Watching Malcolm X with Flyer Writer Matthew Harris (2)
There’s so much to say about Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, I don’t know where to begin.
One of the film’s themes is the nature of power. Since its inception, the film industry has been characterized by a struggle for power between directors, producers, stars, and writers. As seen in Trumbo, the first to lose the battle were the writers, so they decamped to television. The power of the old-line Hollywood studios declined in the late 1960s, so the 1970s saw the ascendance of the director and, as a result, a second golden age of American film. In 1980, the directors’ power was broken on the rocks of Heaven’s Gate, and by the end of the decade, movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenneger and Tom Cruise were in charge, commanding high salaries and exerting creative control. The indie film revolution of the 1990s, which Spike Lee helped kick off, was on some level an attempt to reclaim the directors’ power. Now, in the twilight of the movie stars, power has reverted to the producers, and so resources are tied up in making endless sequels and reboots of proven properties. Enter Amazon, the internet retail powerhouse who is making a big push into video. For their first foray into theatrical film, they tapped Lee and apparently gave him free rein. Lee responded by going absolutely insane.
Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata
2015 finds Lee in a familiar state: energized with righteous rage. The director could have taken a look at widespread reports of police brutality against people of color and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, pointed at his 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing, and said “I told you so!” Instead, he made Chi-Raq, which is like nothing else in theaters today. It’s a satire, a comedy, and a musical. It’s also based on a 2,500-year-old Greek play called Lysistrata, and so it is written mostly in rhyming verse. And yet, Chi-Raq is even weirder than it sounds. The first five minutes or so are essentially a lyric music video for “Pray 4 My City,” with nothing but text and an animated image of a map of the United States made up entirely of guns. When we finally do see someone on screen, it’s the rapper Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) rocking a packed club. Then the action freezes, and we meet Dolmedes, the narrator/chorus played by national treasure Samuel L. Jackson in full Rufus Thomas mode.
I would be content listening to Jackson speak in rhyme for two hours. Fortunately, Lee introduces us to Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a powerhouse of confidence and sexual energy. After witnessing the horrors of street violence and having her apartment burned down by a rival gang out to kill her boyfriend Chi-Raq, Lysistrata is inspired by Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) to organize a sex strike, asserting their power by “seizing the means of reproduction.” The gangs will either end their senseless violence or go without booty. The sex strike spreads until, as Dave Chappelle says in a hilarious cameo as a strip-club owner, “Even the hoes is no-shows.”
The sprawling cast includes Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Hudson, and token white guy John Cusack as a priest who shouts himself hoarse at a funeral for a little girl killed in the gang crossfire. Cusack looks more engaged and passionate onscreen than he has in years, but his big scene is also a symptom of what’s wrong with Chi-Raq. In isolation, it’s a powerful scene, as Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott indict the whole sociopolitical system that keeps African Americans locked in cycles of poverty and violence. But in the context of the film, it’s a momentum killer. Free to follow his wildest impulses, Lee constructs one killer image after another, but little thought seems to have been given as to how it all fits together, which means Chi-Raq adds up to less than the sum of its impressive parts.
It’s inspiring to see a talent of Lee’s caliber swing for the fences. Chi-Raq may not be perfect, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
