Two Times Black Panther Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks
It’s no secret that I absolutely loved Black Panther. I’ve now seen it twice (and will be seeing it for a third time today at this insane theater) and even went to a roundtable featuring some of the brightest black minds in Hollywood. Obsessed is probably the right word to describe my feelings.
While I definitely want to dive deeper into a few specific themes and threads of the movie, there are two specific lines that I want to talk about today. Both of these lines stopped me dead in my tracks (for two very different reasons) when they were spoken in the movie.
Before we start, here is your obligatory spoiler warning. If you are one of the few who haven’t yet seen Black Panther, TURN AWAY NOW. I will be spoiling the shit out of some of the biggest scenes in the movie. You have been warned!
About halfway through the film, T’Challa finds out that his father killed his own brother, leaving behind a son, Erik Killmonger. The revelation shakes T’Challa to his core as it’s not something that a noble king should do. T’Chaka — T’Challa’s father — orphaned his own nephew and didn’t even give his brother a proper burial.
T’Challa had lived his entire life believing that his father could do no wrong. As T’Challa is now coming into his own as a young king, he was using his father as an example of how he should carry himself. Then he learns this and everything has changed.
As T’Challa is discussing all of this with Nakia, she says a single line that hit me like a ton of bricks.
“You get to choose what kind of king you are going to be.”
I watched the rest of the movie from the afterlife cause that line murdered me.
While the weight that I’ve been dealing with is nowhere as large as the one T’Challa is experiencing, a weight is a weight. So it really hit home hearing Nakia basically tell him that the sins of T’Chaka didn’t affect who he was or what he did.
Amen, Nakia.
The next line that hit me came near the end of the film, and boy is it a doozy.
After Killmonger is defeated by T’Challa, the two are sitting on a cliff overlooking Wakanda during sunset. Killmonger’s father had always promised to show him a Wakandan sunset, as it is the most beautiful in the world. T’Challa was helping Killmonger finally get to witness this during his last moments on Earth.
Then Killmonger tells T’Challa what his final wishes are, and I still can’t believe this is a line we got to hear in a Marvel movie of all places.
“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ‘cause they knew death was better than bondage.”
With me already being dead from the Nakia line, I then transcended from Heaven into an ever higher plane of existence after this line.
What a line! Hats off to Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole for putting that sentence in the movie because got damn is it powerful.
The Middle Passage, and slavery in general really, is something that many in this country don’t like to acknowledge. It’s uncomfortable to think about the time when blacks were thought of as less than human. But we can’t ignore that it happened. We can’t continue to shy away from the issue and just pretend that it was a distant memory when in actuality, it was just a couple hundred years ago.
The fact that this line is in a movie like Black Panther is monumental. If it was in something like 12 Years A Slave or Django Unchained (not to equate the two on any level other than directly dealing with slavery), it wouldn’t be that surprising. The plot of those movies are directly centered around slavery. You would expect something like that to be said there. In a comic book movie, though? It’s unexpected, but incredibly necessary.
Killmonger’s whole motive (which I will go into great detail later this week) centers around bringing these kind of issues to light. Capping off his run in this movie with that line was incredible.
These were just two of the many reasons that Black Panther really hit home for me. Not only did I feel a personal connection to T’Challa with the family issues he was dealing with, but Killmonger capped it all off with one hell of an ancestral exclamation point.
I am so glad this movie exists. Not only is it just a really good movie, but it’s one that has given us pause and made us think in ways we didn’t really anticipate.
Wakanda forever!