Inside Black Panther's all-black universe

This movie is a conversation between black people — and that's what makes it so good

The stars of 'Black Panther.'
(Image credit: Matt Kennedy/Copyright Marvel Studios 2018)

What sets Black Panther apart from our vast stable of superhero films is that, beyond being entertaining and beautiful, it manages every aesthetic and narrative choice with a pained intelligence that cuts to the contradictions it has to traverse. Director Ryan Coogler doesn't just celebrate black might, black technology, black women, and black men; he organizes the celebration around that old dogwhistle: "black-on-black violence." This is a movie so marvelously and normatively black that the white adversary — played by a maniacally colorful Andy Serkis — fails to arouse much interest. His premature death announces that this is not a medicinal "sermon" for white people; it's a conversation between black people.

That conversation is thrilling and rich and substantive and hard: What should happen when an African Black Panther fights an Oakland Black Panther? The film takes on isolationism, diaspora, and the case for total war. It ends with an ostensible third-world country ethically (rather than ethnically) colonizing a first-world city in order to rescue its neglected children. Freed to think strategically rather than reactively about America — Wakanda's technological superiority to and distance from the United States makes the country almost ancillary — Black Panther allows its characters to clash over philosophies of governance without having the terms of that disagreement set by the usual de facto antagonist.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.