A very strange thing takes place in the final act of Wakanda Forever, the sequel to the Black Panther movie. After taking a hallucogenic drug, Shuri (T’Challa’s sister) ‘communes with the ancestors’ before taking on the mantle of the Black Panther. In a dream sequence she meets Killmonger, the cousin of the King, and the villain of the previous film. He presents her with a choice. To be noble like her brother, or ruthless like himself.
For anyone familiar with Walter Benjamin’s thesis that ‘civilization is always an act of barbarity’, this should immediately strike us as a false choice. After all, what is nobility? Not a moral code, but a birthright. To be ‘noble’ is to belong to a group of people who form the ‘noble’ class, and whose power relies on the disavowal of the structural violence required to remain noble. Shuri is the queen, the head of the royal family and the court of nobels, here conveniently called ‘elders’. Instead, Killmonger, the cousin of the King, grew up in exile, living amongst disenfranchised African Americans. This experience has made him realize that nobility is a lie, obscuring the pain of the not-Noble. Recall a scene in the first film, where Killmonger addresses the court:
“Two billion people all over the world who look like us who have it much harder, and Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all. (…) Where was Wakanda?!”
Nobility, in other words, means accepting the structural violence and invisible suffering of others. This is what Judith Butler calls ‘precarious life’, or lives that are not truly recognized as such. Wakanda, a land of great wealth and technological advancement, chooses to isolate itself and look down upon black people in the rest of the world. In contrast to this, Killmonger posits a properly revolutionary ‘ruthless’ approach; that of the universal liberation of black people. The means required to do so are most definitely not noble. His body is covered with scars, each marking a ‘kill’. This is the central choice of the first film: not nobility versus ruthlessness, but false consciousness versus painful truth.
What makes Killmonger a revolutionary villain is his willingness to go all the way. At the end of Black Panther, he is offered amnesty by his brother, and yet chooses to die instead. Here we have the ultimate ‘ruthlessly noble’ act, the willingness to die for one’s belief, refusing to become a reformed villain. In his ‘defeat’ he triumphs, leading Wakanda to open its borders and begin outreach programs across the world. It is not Killmonger who has been redeemed, but Wakanda.
In contrast to the first film (which I thought was a superior movie), the sequel features a villain named Namor, an Atlantean mutant of ambiguous Mesoamerican identity, who makes the exact opposite choice. In the climactic final battle between Shuri and Namor, she offers him the same choice T’Challa once offered Killmonger. Join us, or die. Whereas Killmonger chose death, Namor chooses to admit defeat. The two leaders form an uneasy alliance, with each hoping the other will come out the worst. Here we have what the film presents as the ‘noble’ offer of reconciliation, a mutually upheld marriage of convenience in order to stave off destruction by the ‘colonizers’. In other words, their alliance is a noble lie.
It’s a sign of the current political climate that the first film’s idealist and tangentially revolutionary politics have been substituted for real-politik cynicism. The struggle for liberation is now simply a fight for isolationism. The film offers no hopeful vision for the future. The ‘peace’ between these two hidden nations, rests solely on a common fear of destruction’. And where the previous film left off suggesting that the fight for survival was an ideologically false narrative, which had to be replaced by hegemonic struggle, this new film concludes that all that is left is a fight to the death. It is not only a bleak vision, but an ideologically suspect one. ‘Peace’ is simply a means of staving off the inevitable.
What the film tries to dress up as an act of solidarity between threatened sovereignties, is in fact something much more cynical and disturbing: a fight between Wakandans and Talokanlis rendered into ‘peace’ through the positing of an absolute Other, a shared enemy. It is a far-cry from the beautiful solidarity between the dying Killmonger and the, as we now know, also dying in real life, Chadwick Bozeman, as they gazed out at the setting sun over Wakanda’s horizon. Black Panther gave us ruthless, revolutionary love. Wakanda Forever gives us loveless nobility.
