In bell hooks’ seminal essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” she defines an oppositional gaze as a form of critical spectatorship in which the marginalized spectator derives pleasure from resisting the dominant interpretation of a film or the absence of representation within a film. Her idea of the oppositional gaze was in response to Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze within mainstream cinema, which identified women (implicitly white women) as the object of an erotic male gaze. hooks’ claim that “subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional (hooks 248) is based on racialized looking. In this essay I will expand Kara Keeling’s idea of “any identity category, indexes a dynamic investment of time and labor rather than a stable identity.” (Keeling 575) to construct an oppositional gaze based not on categories of race, gender, sexuality or class (although I will address those issues) but on the experience of oppression that is defined by emotions like fear and rage. It is through this experiential gaze that I will look at anger as a product of binary opposition that reinforces a traditional stance of anger as bad and deserving of punishment and instead propose a view of anger as a site of resistance with the potential to effect change as a future text that “releases black representations from rigid signifiers” (Cartier 151).
Ryan Cogler’s Black Panther has been widely hailed as a groundbreaking work of black visibility. It presents competing visions of African experience, one of a non-colonialized prelapsarian utopia and one of systemic oppression resulting from the legacy of colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade. In King T’Challa, an African royal with isolationist tendencies, and Erik Killmonger, a militant American with dreams of violent de-colonialization, Ryan Cogler creates a complex but binary world that ultimately reinforces the idea that anger within marginalized groups is something that needs to be punished.
Erik is defined by his anger. It fuels his plan to help the African diaspora take over their respective nations and to avenge his father’s murder at the hands of his uncle, T’Challa’s father. His past as a Navy Seal and participation in black ops both accepts and participates in the colonialism that created the material reality of his childhood and reinforces the stereotype of an angry black man.
Throughout the film Erik’s anger is portrayed as outsized, even when it’s justified, even when he has an explanation. His desire to take over Wakanda in order to force the world to redress the wrongs inflicted by white capitalism and its history of colonialism is too aggressive and plays into an idea of the Other as savage thus justifying the colonizers’ own savagery. Cogler chooses to posit Erik as unwilling to compromise despite the fact that he is both educated and smart (and I purposefully make that distinction), as though his graduate degree from MIT cannot ameliorate his irredeemable savagery. It also allows T’Challa to represent a palatable blackness that isn’t angry and doesn’t infringe on white capitalist society but instead allows for an assimilationist neo-liberal participation in capitalism.
But despite this, Erik’s portrayal throughout the movie is complex. The viewer feels a kinship with him and his anger even as Cogler positions him as too extreme: he readily kills his girlfriend when she no longer serves his purpose and violently destroys the source of the Black Panther’s power thus insuring he is the last Black Panther. By the end of the film he is clearly a villian and conversely we understand that T’Challa, with whom the spectator is to identify, only needs to rethink some of his policy positions to be redeemed and reinstated as our hero. This positioning sets up an opposition that allows us to understand the final ascendency of T’Challa as the only option given Erik’s ruthless and unquenchable rage. The movie concludes with T’Challa deciding Erik is right in theory and moving from his isolationist stance to a more active, but not militant, role in advocating for justice and reparation. But why did Erik have to die for that to happen?
T’Challa, ensconced in comfort in his thriving kingdom and not having experienced direct oppression, can co-opt Erik’s ideas and present them without any anger. We live in a culture that actively discourages any show of negative emotion as unproductive and delegitimizing if it comes from a marginalized group. Unless, of course, from white men. Because white men are allowed to have the full range of emotions including anger and not be vilified for it. From the suppressed rage of Tucker Carlson to the outsize rage of Alex Jones, all are welcome and understood. And so Black Panther’s easy dispatching of Erik negates the very valid anger that is a rightful legacy of marginalization and more troublingly it reinforces the lived experiences of Black men – that their anger will get them killed.
It is the valid anger of all marginalized groups: black people, LGBTQ people, women, the poor, and people with disabilities who have been traumatized by the hegemonic control of white capitalist men and their allies that needs to be attended to. And until we find a way to heal the trauma of the people affected by the white capitalist patriarchy there can be no change to the structures that reinforce the oppression that created it. If, as hooks’ says, we “construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race” (hooks 255) and Cartier says that this opposition simply flips the binary (Cartier 151) then reframing anger as something redeemable and acceptable creates a future text that can effect revolutionary change. The rehabilitative framing of anger can look to someone like Erik and say, “You have things to teach me” or even “I’m not afraid of your anger, I can hold that for you” which imagines a different future. And film, especially film that positions itself as a realization of underrepresented positions, is a fertile ground for that kind of insurgent imagining or impossible possibility (Keeling 566)
I loved other aspects of Black Panther: its radical positioning of women as equal agents in the narrative, the more fully realized vision of black femininity and the celebration of black culture. At the same time I felt disappointed that we are still so married to a culture of oppression which punishes even the most righteous anger that we can’t make space for the reality of being oppressed, the anger that entails and use that anger as a way to envision a path toward change. If I got to rewrite the end, T’Challa would have said “Please Erik, there are things you can teach us. Help us” and if people thought that was unrealistic, well, it’s a movie about magical space rocks that bestow superhuman powers, I’m okay with unrealistic.
Cartier, Nina. “Black Women on-Screen as Future Texts: A New Look at Black Pop Culture Representations.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4, 2014, pp. 150-157.
hooks, Bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Movies and Mass Culture:, 1996, pp. 247-269.
Keeling, Kara. “Looking for M– Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future.” A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2009, pp. 565-582.
Early in Lynne Ramsey’s film Morvern Callar (2002), after the titular character, Morvern, has decided to ignore her boyfriend’s suicide and go out to a house party with her friend, she escapes the party and goes out to the water. Standing there alone in the dark she is caught in the lights of a passing boat. The lights flick on to her and then off, then back as though surprised to see a person on the cold shore and once the light settles on her, once she commands its attention, she slowly lifts her skirt, and stands unmoving, staring out at us. 
Feminist Film Studies Fall 2018 