Wakanda is a comic book fantasy of a secret kingdom made powerful by a magical metal. Kings, slang, tech, you either buy into it or you won’t enjoy the movie.
Why are they speaking English at all? Why do they switch from English to Xhosa?
I’m sorry, but that’s utter nonsense.
That’s suggesting that there is no distinction between well-crafted fantasy and badly crafted fantasy. I reject that assertion. There is good and there is bad. Every choice can reflect the values of the author and the audience, and each choice is open to criticism.
The screenwriters could have created a Wakanda in which there is chattel slavery, or in which women aren’t allowed to serve in positions of authority. They could have gone full-Gorean. But they didn’t make those choices, and that was clearly deliberate. I’m outlining a couple of other areas in which I believe their choices affected the quality of the experience negatively.
The fact that they chose to make Wakanda an absolute monarchy with ritual combat means something. It is a deliberate expression on their part. They didn’t have to do that. They could have done something else. They could have made Wakanda a democratic republic. They could have made it a libertarian collective. They could have done lots of different things. And as a viewer, it’s my proper role to question their choices and deduct points when I believe they’ve chosen badly.
These aren’t difficult questions to answer, and they don’t weaken my complaint even a little. They are speaking English because this is a fictional work directed at an English-speaking audience. And their dialogue is sprinkled with Xhosa to give a flavor of their culture, and to hint that they aren’t actually speaking English at all. This is a common technique in fiction, and it works when it’s done well.
As I said, we see it all the time in fiction. We see how language is carefully chosen to make the speakers seem foreign or otherworldly while still speaking a language the audience understands. This isn’t a new concept.
Verisimilitude is a real thing, and it does matter. And it makes sense to question choices.
Wakanda is the way it is because that’s how the comics were. The whole thing makes no sense. How did they discover how to use Vibranium? In the real world, nations were sitting over seas of oil they didn’t know how to use because no one had invented the internal combustion engine yet. The Wakandans would have had to replicate the entire history of science independently and at a much faster pace than the entire rest of the world. That’s much more implausible than a King, but there it is. You either accept it or you don’t.
Also, if they aren’t really speaking English they are speaking idiomatic Wakandan, which has its own slang, presumably. When someone says “He froze” they are speaking the Wakandan equivalent.
The movie shows us that Wakanda has a monarch. It does not show us that it has an absolute monarch. Ordinarily, the King seems to rely heavily on and defer to his Council (the means of choosing of which we do not know), and rules by their assent. But like many modern crowned democracies, the relationship between the monarch and the rest of the leadership is set by unspoken tradition, and so there’s a crisis when a monarch defies that tradition.
And, of course, in a world with superpowers, monarchy isn’t actually such a bad idea to begin with. If you have the means to render someone superhumanly wise, why wouldn’t you make him your leader? The central conceit of democracy is that any random person is just as good as the President, but just any random Wakandan really isn’t just as good as T’Challa son of T’Chaka.
If I recall correctly, she wore a hat that covered her hair in earlier scenes. So it was very noticeable in her first scene, midway through the movie, when her hair was visible.
In real life, Basset (who is 59) has black hair. So apparently the white hair in the movie was either dyed or a wig.
Ascenray, did it also bother you that the inhabitants of Themyscira (the island where Wonder Woman was born and raised) spoke English?
The Marvel Universe is a quintessentially American set of myths, more American than Tall Tales. I see what you’re saying about the Americanisms in the Wakandan speech, but that doesn’t bother me, because this isn’t an African myth: this is an American myth about Africa.
As for the monarchy: are we really supposed to believe that Wakanda is more culturally advanced than everyone else? Technologically, sure; and there’s the idea that vibranium has led to a culture of physical comfort, in which nobody must be in poverty. But I’m not sure we’re supposed to believe that they’re actually enlightened–just that they think they are.
That has never been a limitation in adapting stories, either for a new medium or for a reboot. Choosing to keep an element from the comics is still a choice, an exercise of judgment.
This whole statement reflects a misunderstanding of how fantasy and good writing works. In fantasy, it’s a given that there will be some counter-factual elements in a created world. Does the existence or use of vibranium mandate a monarchy? It certainly isn’t self-evident that it does. If so, then the story has the obligation to make that case. Otherwise, it’s an independent choice.
I didn’t say that a monarchy is implausible. I questioned the choice on other grounds. To me it sends a questionable message to have a super-advanced African culture stuck in what seems like a backwards form of government.
Again, wrong. That’s not how reading (or watching) works.
Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. But that isn’t the only way to portray what they’re doing. They made certain word choices. I’m saying those word choices don’t work, because the language comes off as overly familiar to me. It steals away some sense of foreign-ness. I’m not saying anything new here. As I said above, other stories have chosen differently. And every choice can be judged. I’m judging it negatively.
This is a different argument, and we can disagree. The speech that Okone gave to Nakia about serving Killmonger implies something different to me.
Yet another argument. This would be an interesting conceit, but I should think it would require express explanation in the story, especially since there seem to be other countries with superheroes that don’t have a benevolent superpowered dictatorship government.
The scale seems plausible. Here’s an image from the movie of somebody riding a rhino. And here’s a real life image of a man next to a rhino. The movie scale seems reasonable, especially when you consider that they would use the biggest rhinos (like they use the biggest horses) in battle.
What surprises people are elephants. In pictures or on the screen, they look huge. But many people are surprised when they see one for the first time and discover how small they are in real life.
Why do you ask?
(1) I did not say that it bothered me that the Wakandan dialogue was mostly in English.
(2) The Themiscyrian speech didn’t bother me because it was written and spoken in a way that made it sound foreign, both in terms of accent and level of formality. In fact one of the things that impressed me about that movie is how well they handled this issue.
I’m almost certain this was done on purpose. “In universe” they were probably speaking in Xhosa with local slang and idioms. But it was portrayed this way because, I believe, this film was first and foremost meant to connect to and inspire black Americans (or at least first and foremost beyond the goal of any big budget movie – to be entertaining and make money). That seems like a solid reason to portray it this way, IMO.
It wasn’t disappointing to me, since this has always been part of Wakanda in the comics – a mix of the traditional and new. In a real life sense it’s silly to have leaders chosen by ritual combat, but this is a comic book that overtly mixes African (or American mythology of African) traditions with high technology, and this fits the story emotionally and stylistically, even if it doesn’t make sense logically. It’s also pretty much necessary for the story (or else some much more intricate and less straight forward way for Killmonger to almost kill T’Challa and take power).
Huh. This worked for me. Don’t know why it didn’t for you, but everyone will be different with this kind of emotional connection. The entire character screamed someone who was broken as a kid, IMO.
Ehh. Reasonable criticism, but it didn’t bother me.
I thought it was okay, but the really shoehorned romance was the one between Okoye and T’Challa’s best friend.
Just my two cents. Arguments about movies can be fun.
I’m not sure I quite understand the complaint about politics.
The whole reason stories like Dune have anachronistic politics – feudalism in space – is that by collapsing the political sphere into something easy to explain, you leave more narrative room open to explore and navigate a completely different set of ideas. In the case of Dune, this is geological and historical and religious and narcotic. In the case of Black Panther, it’s an American exploration of the idea of the Africa-that-could-have-been. It’s social-science fiction. Making the politics small allows other ideas to be big.
And they’re really god damn big ideas.
BP is by far the single most intellectually ambitious of any Marvel movie. Inflating the politics wouldn’t help, on net, because you’d lose way more from other ideas than you’d gain from a constitutional referendum or whatever. Preferences are preferences, people like different things, but I personally admired how Coogler managed that trade-off, and I think he made exactly the right choice. It’s no coincidence at all that it’s the same choice many other science fiction stories have made.
I think Freeman’s character was intended to give white people someone they could identify with, and I’ve heard a number of white people say that they did in fact identify with him, so he worked for that purpose. Personally, I found him unnecessary, since I already had someone else in the movie to identify with (even though we appear, by the standard demographics, to be completely opposite), but hey, not everyone is me, and not everyone identifies with the same characters in any story.
I didn’t see Ross as a white person surrogate in the film. I think any white viewers who were that superficial would be annoyed at how “their” character had so minor a part in the story.
I think Ross was supposed to essentially be Felix Leiter. T’Challa was James Bond; the main character who moved the story along. Ross, like Leiter, was the guy in the background who would offer material and logistic support when Bond needed it. He does the stuff that’s a necessary part of solving the case but wasn’t interesting enough for the hero to do personally. The hero confronts the villain while the support guy does the lab work and rounds up the henchmen.
There’s a difference, I think, between portraying a complex, technological culture that is less culturally advanced than they think they are, and constructing a fantastic society with easy-to-explain politics and on the other hand, setting up the most stereotypical “primitive tribal” depiction of an African nation’s method of choosing a government. It’s one of the worst stereotypes about Africa and other non-European people.
I don’t think there is a difference. One of the whole reasons “space feudalism” is such a popular concept in speculative fiction is that it’s a lot easier to write an interesting sword fight, than it is to write an interesting procedural call to advance a bill to parliamentary committee. “Trial by combat” is baked into the trope - it’s arguably why the trope exists in the first place. In Dune, to use an example already on the table, an epic story of political strife between the great houses of an interstellar empire ultimately culminates in two guys poking each other with knives in front of an audience. In the MCU, we already have Asgard, another super-science monarchy, where Loki is regularly able to assume complete control of the state by replacing one figure in government. And this culture, which is so advanced it can make an Einstein-Rosen bridge with a hammer and a pair of tongs, hasn’t figured out that maybe they should switch to a system of government with less centralized power, and maybe institute some checks and balances on the executive branch?
The point is that this is an advanced, contemporary black African nation being depicted as perpetuating a stereotypically barbaric practice like ritual combat as a basis for government. It’s one of the worst stereotypes to perpetuate in this context. It’s as bad as headhunters with giant lips and massive bushy hair wearing grass skirts cooking white men wearing pith helmets in a giant pot and dancing in a circle singing “boogeda-boogeda.”
This is a completely different context than for Asgard or Dune.
I don’t necessarily see it as an African stereotype. There are examples of rule by combat traditions in other societies, including European ones. And you still see it (at least in fiction) in groups like street gangs. Or other outlaw groups.
But it is an archaic tradition and that’s why I find it hard to accept. It’s one thing to think that maybe the leader of a tribe or a gang should be the best hand-to-hand fighter, but the leader of a nation? Who do you think would be a better choice for national leader: Franklin Roosevelt or Steven Seagal?
Nah, I just think you’re totally wrong here.
Consider: in Wakanda, there’s a treatment that allows a person to become super-strong and super-wise. One person in each generation is given this treatment; and traditionally it’s given to the one person who’s raised into power from childhood (thus the hereditary monarchy).
But there’s an improvement over traditional hereditary monarchy: anyone can challenge the prince to receive the treatment, claiming that they’re the best candidate. If the prince is challenged, the benefits of the treatment are removed, so that he competes on an equal playing field.
A few notes:
-This isn’t actually a pop culture stereotype of Africa. I’m really unaware of any stereotype of Africa that entails ritual combat for rulership of a kingdom–can you point to this stereotype in popular culture other than Black Panther?
-This is far from a perfect system. It seems to exclude women from the monarchy (that said I’m pretty ignorant of the character’s history; maybe there’s a history of queens of Wakanda that I don’t know about); AND it “tracks” children educationally, pretty much preventing the child of a cowherd from taking rulership; AND it prioritizes combat ability over other leadership challenges.
-It does, however, make for excellent action sequences, which c’mon, is the overwhelming rationale for this form of government.
I don’t know that I can agree. There is a history of ceremonial combat among African nations pre-colonization, and I can easily believe that the Wakandans keep this tradition in place. There’s an understanding of what the outcome should be, and the entire society is built around it- the ‘threat’ of regime change forms a check on the reigning family so that they only put forward their best and brightest. Since the monarchy doesn’t seem to have much operational control over daily Wakandans, why would one of the other tribes want to change?
We never get to see what a ‘normal’ trial for kingship means- the only two examples we have are from 1) a dispossessed tribe participating for the first time in generations and 2) an outsider with a ‘white’ understanding of what trial by combat means (to the death). Just as with the conventions of African slavery vs. western chattel slavery, it makes no sense to define one thing in the other.
As with many works, a reaction says as much about the viewer as it does the author’s intent. BP was not a perfect film, but I can’t find fault with them on this.