ON THE SCREEN
The Borders of Wakanda:Otherworlding, Immigration, and Alterity in
Black Panther as Cinematic Parable
by Joel Mayward
The Borders of Wakanda:Otherworlding, Immigration, and Alterity in
Black Panther as Cinematic Parable
by Joel Mayward
Joel Mayward is a pastor-theologian and film critic. He is a Ph.D. candidate researching theology and cinema at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) at the University of St Andrews. He is an associate editor of ITIA’s journal, Transpositions, and is the author of three books, including Jesus Goes to the Movies; Leading Up: Finding Influence in the Church Beyond Role and Experience; and A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Sex and Dating: Beyond the Birds and the Bees. Find his film criticism at www.cinemayward.com.
Black Panther, filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s contribution to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is one of the best reviewed films of 2018. It has grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, and has broken a 35-year ban in Saudi Arabia as both men and women sat together in a cinema to watch a Hollywood production.1 Outstanding in its vibrant world-building, as well as for its fully realized characters, the film raises important theological and ethical questions not only about race, but also about borders and alterity. As T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) assumes his role as king of Wakanda, a fictional, technologically advanced, and isolationist African nation, critical questions arise about Wakanda’s (and T’Challa’s) moral responsibility. When T’Challa is challenged for the throne by Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), and thus for control of Wakandan foreign policy, it pits differing ideologies in literal combat, teasing the audience into active thought about issues of race, immigration, and justice, all in the context of political and religious traditions.
In this paper, I use Paul Ricoeur’s description of "parable" to consider Black Panther as a cinematic parable about the borders that divide us, both politically and personally. Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutic and concept of parable as a conjunction between a narrative form and a metaphoric process prompt a rich polyvalence of interpretations. I want to suggest that the very form, not just the content, of Black Panther is akin to the black theology of J. Kameron Carter in speaking a new filmic grammar beyond the pseudotheology of racial reasoning, a grammar of fostering belonging beyond borders, both Wakandan and American.
Ricoeur and Parable
So, what is a parable? Is it a genre, a style, a motif, a trope, or something else altogether? Consulting the Oxford English Dictionary brings up a smorgasbord of terms:
Black Panther, filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s contribution to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), is one of the best reviewed films of 2018. It has grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, and has broken a 35-year ban in Saudi Arabia as both men and women sat together in a cinema to watch a Hollywood production.1 Outstanding in its vibrant world-building, as well as for its fully realized characters, the film raises important theological and ethical questions not only about race, but also about borders and alterity. As T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) assumes his role as king of Wakanda, a fictional, technologically advanced, and isolationist African nation, critical questions arise about Wakanda’s (and T’Challa’s) moral responsibility. When T’Challa is challenged for the throne by Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), and thus for control of Wakandan foreign policy, it pits differing ideologies in literal combat, teasing the audience into active thought about issues of race, immigration, and justice, all in the context of political and religious traditions.
In this paper, I use Paul Ricoeur’s description of "parable" to consider Black Panther as a cinematic parable about the borders that divide us, both politically and personally. Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutic and concept of parable as a conjunction between a narrative form and a metaphoric process prompt a rich polyvalence of interpretations. I want to suggest that the very form, not just the content, of Black Panther is akin to the black theology of J. Kameron Carter in speaking a new filmic grammar beyond the pseudotheology of racial reasoning, a grammar of fostering belonging beyond borders, both Wakandan and American.
Ricoeur and Parable
So, what is a parable? Is it a genre, a style, a motif, a trope, or something else altogether? Consulting the Oxford English Dictionary brings up a smorgasbord of terms:
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An allegorical or metaphorical saying or narrative; an allegory, a fable, an apologue; a comparison, a similitude. Also: a proverb, a maxim; an enigmatic or mystical saying . . . a (usually realistic) story or narrative told to convey a moral or spiritual lesson or insight . . . an example or illustration, an exemplary case; a model, a lesson . . . a scornful speech, a taunt. Also: an object of scorn.2
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That a single word can contain so many definitions may startle or bewilder, which is appropriate to its form. In Greek, a parabolē is literally a throw or projectile which comes at or from the side. Etymologically, the word parabolē suggests indirection and subversion, eliciting the image of being blindsided or "sucker punched," a semantic surprise attack that successfully penetrates emotional and logical defenses via its formal approach. The parable is both invitational and confrontational. While I explore the differences between allegory and parable elsewhere, I will briefly state here that the two genres are quite distinct in both form and function, and should not be conflated.3 Indeed, Black Panther as parable is doing much more than serving as analogous illustration—it is subverting and upending both cinematic genres and cultural myths. In his book, The Dark Interval, John Dominic Crossan proposes a schematic theology of story with myth and parable as opposing poles. Within this typology, a myth acts to establish the world, offering clear definitions of reality and truth which comfort readers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, parable unnerves, provokes, and upends paradigms to "show us the seams and edges of myth."4 To quote Crossan: "Myth establishes world. Apologue defends world. Action investigates world. Satire attacks world. Parable subverts world."5 This subversion of myths and worlds is not mere deconstruction or critique, but rather a reimagined reality via the parabolic world itself, a critique via creation. Keep this myth-subversion function of parable in mind when we later turn to Black Panther and Carter’s theology.
Paul Ricoeur’s description of parable is best summarized in his 1975 article "Biblical Hermeneutics," where he describes a parable as the conjunction between a narrative form and a metaphorical process.6 The parable as narrative-metaphor relies on a third element, a qualifier, which points to an external reference beyond the parable.7 This third element, which Ricoeur refers to as "limit-experiences," requires the language of "limit-expressions" in describing a human encounter with the horizon of knowledge, imagination, and experience—the immanent nearing the surface of the transcendent.8 For him, a parable is a heuristic fiction that redescribes the religious dimension of human existence but without resorting to overtly religious language.9 It is a story that refers to something beyond what was literally told in the narrative, even as the story remains coherent in itself. Thus, in summary, Ricoeurian parables are: 1.) a realist narrative form in conjunction with 2.) a metaphorical process referring to 3.) an existential limit-experience which provokes a transformation. I will unpack each of these elements in turn.
First, narrative form. Ricoeur considers all parables as having a narrative structure, what he calls emplotment. In his work, Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s hypothesis centers on the narrativity of human temporal reality, suggesting that we make meaning and interpret all our experiences through narrative. In crafting his hermeneutical circle—what he describes as an "endless spiral" of interpretation10—Ricoeur suggests three levels or modes of mimesis: mimesis1 (prefigured time), mimesis2 (configured time) and mimesis3 (refigured or transfigured time).11 Mimesis1, or the world behind the film, entails a pre-understanding of the nature of narratives, what Ricoeur calls the "practical understanding" a reader has of the structural, symbolic, and temporal dynamics of the emplotted story.12 In cinema, pre-understanding allows a film audience to initially grasp the mise en scene, genre, and narrative structure as filmgoers bring their own context and beliefs, as well as film theory and film history, into the viewing experience. Mimesis2 is the mode of emplotment, bringing together the individual elements of the story—characters, events, actions, descriptions—and integrating them within the framing structure of narrative, transforming a succession of events into a meaningful whole; it is the world of the film. Mimesis3 marks the intersection of the film-world with the life-world of the audience, the world in front of the film.13 This final stage is one of personal application of the narrative. It is referential in that the film-world is applicable to the everyday life of the viewer. For cinema, it may refer to the literal ending of a film; on a theological level, it is the lingering of the film-world incarnated into the life-world of the filmgoer. Specifically, Ricoeur suggests a threefold schema as a basic parabolic narrative structure: ordinary-extraordinary-denouement.This parabolic narrative structure allows for a polyvalence of interpretations even as it resists distortive hermeneutical approaches—it provides boundaries while allowing for imaginative interpretive play.
Next, metaphorical process. Ricoeur posits that the metaphorical process provides the intermediary link between the formal structure of the narrative and the existential interpretation.14 Similar to his larger study, The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur argues for metaphor as resemblance and redescription. True metaphors, for Ricoeur, are untranslatable; they are ontologically new descriptions of reality. This does not mean they cannot be interpreted, paraphrased, or described, but Ricoeur is quick to note that any paraphrase or translation is "infinite," meaning possible legitimate interpretations cannot be exhausted or reduced to once-and-for-all propositional language.15 This raises a critical question: how do we discern whether a narrative is a parable with a metaphoric process (as opposed to a narrative that is just a mere story)? In searching for what he calls "signs of metaphoricity," Ricoeur finds his answer in the narrative structure: the dimension of extravagance within the ordinary realism of the story "delivers the openness of the metaphorical process from the closure of the narrative form."16 Such realism coincides with cinematic realism in film theory, such as Italian neo-realism or British social realism, as opposed to formalism or expressionism. Realist films attempt to mimic or imitate reality, while expressionistic films aim to change, distort, or expand upon reality. Filmic examples of realist parables range from Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City, Germany Year Zero), to the ten-episode Polish film Dekalog from Krzysztof Kieślowski, to the transcendent realism of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Le Fils, The Kid with a Bike). Indeed, the Dardennes’ films La Promesse, Lorna’s Silence, and The Unknown Girl all address similar questions of immigration, alterity, and ethics as Black Panther, only via a remarkably different formal aesthetic. In each of these films, the metaphoricity emerges via the subversive form of the extraordinary breaking into everyday mundane human existence, not by means of transcendent other-worldly idealism or the fantastical, but via concrete materiality.
The superhero genre certainly challenges definitions of this Ricoeurian realism— superhero films are rarely "realistic"—but parable can still apply as a descriptive qualifier for Black Panther. Coogler sought to create a world as tangible as possible, filming on location in Africa and imbuing each costume and scene with rich detail; Coogler says he wanted to create a lived-in feel, showing Wakandans making and eating food, using public transportation, and going about their daily lives. Even the technology via the fictional metal vibranium is shown to be tactile, such as a multi-purpose black sand table used in a variety of ways throughout the film. In emphasizing the mundane features of everyday life in Wakanda, Coogler grounds the fantastical elements of Black Panther, such as T’Challa’s superpowers or flying spaceships, within a tangible material world. The rich detail of every set, costume, and character are evidence of Coogler’s underlying realist vision. His first feature film, Fruitvale Station, can be considered more realist than expressionistic, and this realist sentiment carries on throughout his work. In this, I contend that Black Panther can be deemed a "superhero parable" or a "parabolic superhero film." Thus, Wakanda-as-metaphor can say something true about our reality even as a fictionalized world.
Finally, existential limit-expressions. Ricoeur directs his attention to the utilization of paradox, hyperbole, and other modes of intensification—like parable’s extraordinariness—to address the external referent of the parables, namely existential limit-experiences. Also described as "boundary-situations," Ricoeur suggests that the human condition includes those ineffable peak moments in life such as death, suffering, guilt, and hatred, but also creation, joy, grace, and love.17 As religious discourse via non-religious communication, cinematic parables attempt both to describe and to evoke these limit-experiences of immanence on the horizon of transcendence in a metaphoric montage between film-world and life-world. In his collection From Text to Action, Ricoeur suggests that as the reader interprets the text, the text also interprets and affects the reader; the reader discovers oneself anew via the parable-world, a reorientation by way of disorientation. How does this interpretive process work? Ricoeur proposes a dialectic between guessing and validating, where one intuits a proposed interpretation of a text—a guess based in probability—then seeks validation of the interpretation within the world of the text itself. The task of interpretation is completed only when the audience emerges from the hermeneutical circle with a reoriented theological and moral imagination; Ricoeur calls this "engagement in action"18 or "moral decision."19 In short, within the application phase of mimesis3, a personal, existential and ethical response occurs as readers emerge from the parable-world into their life-world with both a fresh understanding of reality and a propensity towards enacting this new understanding.
Let me summarize: First, filmgoers enter the cinema with a pre-understanding of reality—their own life-world experiences, beliefs, theology, and ethics (mimesis1, prefiguration). Second, the filmgoer accepts the invitation, enters into the parabolic film-world, and "reads" it (mimesis2, configuration) by means of the Ricoeurian hermeneutical circle in a dialectic between guessing and validation. This hermeneutical circle is not an endless tautology, but rather a spiral of deeper interpretations, even rival or conflicting ones, which emerge upon further meditation within and beyond the temporal progression of the film-world.20 In this hermeneutical circle, the filmgoer recognizes the cinematic parable’s metaphoricity by way of the extraordinary within the ordinary. Here is where the transcendent-immanent dynamic of the parable unfolds. Finally, filmgoers emerge from the film-world and re-enter their life-world, even as the film-world lingers and affects their moral and theological imagination and praxis (mimesis3, transfiguration). Following Ricoeur, I contend that the cinematic parable serves as a site for possible divine revelation as the poetic work of the narrative-metaphor creates a generative cinematic environment for encountering the transcendent. Black Panther is worth considering as a parabolic superhero film due to its distinct subversive forms and its counter-mythological messages, as well as its invitational capacity to create a film-world. With Ricoeur in mind, we can now enter into the world of Wakanda via its borders.
Wakanda as Parable
Let us apply this parabolic hermeneutic to Black Panther. First, what might be our pre-understanding of the world of Wakanda? Whether we are familiar with the comics or the MCU, we can recognize that Black Panther is a superhero film featuring a mainly black cast and production crew. We may also be familiar with Coogler’s previous films, Fruitvale Station and Creed. Beyond cinema, our present-day American context is marked by political unrest and anger, outrage at the injustices of black bodies gunned down in streets and immigrant families seeking asylum being separated and prosecuted at our borders. So, when the question of foreign policy about borders and assisting refugees arises within the story of Black Panther, our affections and imaginations are piqued. Just as the invisible barrier surrounds the borders of Wakanda, only revealing its marvels upon breaking through the illusion, so we too enter into the filmic world of Wakanda as audience, crossing its border and looking for Ricoeur’s "signs of metaphoricity." One such sign is in the narrative structure itself. Coogler frames Black Panther around two characters, T’Challa and Erik Killmonger, as protagonist and antagonist, respectively, giving both equal screen time and narrative arcs (in fact, the film opens with Erik rather than T’Challa). This is a story of two personas and paradigms clashing, the former of traditional conservative ethics and praxis, the latter of revolution and deconstructionist critiques. It calls to mind other such clashes in American civil rights—Martin vs. Malcolm—but the interests of Black Panther go beyond this. Indeed, all of Black Panther can be viewed as a dialogical form negotiating the boundaries of borders: America and African black experience; conservative traditions and progressive ideals; spirituality and science; younger and elder generations; male and female; justice and mercy. Will these borders be open or closed, and how permeable should they become?
This question of borders can be metaphorically discerned in the formal aspects of the film-world. The score from Ludwig Göransson is a dynamic mixture of African music—flutes and hand drums, chants and swelling polyrhythms—contrasted with elements of American hip-hop, such as the thumping bass and trap hi-hats. Similarly, the soundtrack curated by Kendrick Lamar spans three continents of black musical greatness in hip-hop, rap, and soul, a synthesis of musical borders. Coogler also intentionally uses color to tell what he calls a "color narrative." For example, blue is used throughout the film as a symbol of colonization—Killmonger is frequently shown wearing blue clothes or surrounded by blue backgrounds, and the cinematography uses a blue tint in many of his scenes (particularly those set in England) contrasted with the warm golden hues of T’Challa and Wakanda. The film also aesthetically and ideologically subverts the cinematic "male gaze" described by film theorist Laura Mulvey via its rich cinematography from Rachel Morrison, the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the 2017 film Mudbound. Moreover, women oversaw the casting, costumes, production design, and film editing of Black Panther. Thus, the parable-world of Wakanda was written by two African-American men (Coogler and Joe Robert Cole), crafted by a team of women and people of color, and is seen through the lens of Rachel Morrison.
Consider a brief scene of Killmonger ascending to the throne of Wakanda after defeating T’Challa in ritual combat. In this poignant and powerful scene, Erik has the remaining magic herbs and the Wakandan temple burned, a symbolic image of the profane decimation of past sacred institutions. Immediately following this, we see an inverted shot of Killmonger walking into the Wakandan throne room as his hip-hop theme plays on the soundtrack, the camera slowly tilting around to right-side up as Erik sits and tells his advisors of his foreign policy: that Wakanda should arm oppressed black people around the world to rise up and kill their oppressors in order to build the Wakandan empire.
In this scene, Morrison and Coogler are, quite literally, turning this world (and our world) upside down, flipping the script and our perspective, inviting us to reconsider the myths of both cinema and America by way of Wakanda. Paraphrasing film critic Roger Ebert, it is not only what the film is about, it is how the film is about it. In this, we now turn to the underlying formal parallels between Coogler and theologian J. Kameron Carter to discern better how the parabolic film-world invites interpretations not only about race, but also about immigration and alterity.
Coogler and Carter
I recently attended an academic conference where J. Kameron Carter spoke on race and theology. By structuring his argument poetically and bringing in literary and aesthetic works as genuine sites for theological insight, Carter was doing something remarkably disorienting for the mainly white, elderly, and male European theologians from analytic and systematic traditions: he was speaking with a different grammar, a poetical black theology addressing the theological problem of whiteness. As Carter puts it, "one can read Scripture within the theological grammar of the Christian faith and yet do so in such a way as to read within and indeed theologically sanction, if not sanctify . . . ‘the order of things.’"21 To be honest, while they appreciated his presentation, many at the conference remained perplexed, unable to grasp Carter’s methodology or message, the borders of their theological imaginations unbreached.
In recounting this, I want to draw connections between Carter and Coogler not necessarily by way of content—although both are expressing a distinct black liberation theology via their particular disciplines—but their form of expression. Both are exploring the borders and boundaries of being and belonging in a parabolic way which is, again, both invitational and confrontational, a subversion of the cultural mythologies and norms of whiteness precisely via those norms. By incorporating black poetics to overcome the syntax and grammar of white supremacy inherent in modern discourse, Carter reckons with theological questions of race more directly, which at first glance may not seem as indirect as the parabolic form I have suggested. But Carter subverts the dispositions of white supremacy by practicing alternative grammars not outside but within western theological academic discourse, a discourse shaped by and entrenched in the modern myth of white supremacy. The theological borders are breached from the inside. Carter describes this as a "preacherly breach . . . blackness as the breach of religio-secular administration."22 This is what parable does; it criticizes and reforms subversively from within. Carter describes African-American literature as "a tradition of complex interactions with traditions. Shot through with multiple voices, it attempts to negotiate stratified white-over-black relations by envisioning and creating a new literary space."23 We could say that Coogler is creating a similar cinematic space through the film’s dialogical border-crossing form. As a parallel to Carter, Coogler, to some degree, operates within the MCU formula and strategy. But his auteurist formal dynamics subtly infuse and flip the superhero genre on its head. He is offering a criticism of empires by means of an empire, that of the Disney/Marvel brand. Where other recent films addressing racial tension, such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansmen, use satirical methods (in Crossan’s terms) to overtly and blatantly attack white supremacy, Coogler is a clandestine independent artist operating subversively in these blockbusters, first via Creed and now via Black Panther.
Coogler is like directors of Third Cinema under what film theorist Teshome Gabriel calls an "Aesthetics of Liberation," in which an ideology of third-world liberation is linked with a film’s stylistic strategies.24 Gilles Deleuze, in his own description of Third Cinema, calls it a "cinema of speech-acts," which "destroy myths from the inside. . . . The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination."25 That is, Coogler’s two blockbuster films are extrinsically first-world white cinema (myth) even as they are intrinsically third-world black cinema (parable). Thus, both Carter and Coogler are working within, yet not defined by, the borders and boundaries of the myths they aim to deconstruct in order to offer an alternative story and consciousness freed from the shackles of white modernity.
The Borders of Wakanda
What does the above discussion about white supremacy and parable’s indirectness have to do with borders and immigration in an American context? The parabolic narrative-metaphor, per Ricoeur, contains a polyvalence of interpretations. So, while Black Panther is certainly about race, it can also challenge other myths via its parabolic form.26 Moreover, the myth of white supremacy and the issue of Mexican-American borders are not wholly distinct; indeed, racism and xenophobia are intimately integrated. Carter insists that overcoming the problem of whiteness requires moving beyond Kantian anti-Jewish universals to remember Jesus as distinctly Jewish. Similarly, Roberto Goizueta’s liberation theological aesthetics calls for us to consider the particularity of Jesus the Galilean Jew, that "the theological-ethical significance of Galilee as a borderland" is crucial to "the inherently subversive character of a Christian theological aesthetics."27 Therefore, in reading Black Panther, we must contend with a borderland Christology, the real presence of Christ at our borders.
Regarding the Ricoeurian signs of metaphoricity for American immigration, consider Erik Killmonger: where else in our contemporary culture have we seen an arrogant, ideological outsider with an ostentatious gold-hued aesthetic rise to sudden political power by unethical means, a person who objectifies women and betrays his allies as he focuses on building his empire and closing borders, drawing out violent tacit nationalist beliefs to the surface and dividing his own nation to the point of near civil war? In the words of the gospel narrator, let the reader understand. Indeed, Killmonger (perhaps unknowingly) perpetuates the myth of white supremacy via its political and social imagination rooted in war, violence, and oppression of the Other as he strives to Make Wakanda Great Again. As he says in the scene where he takes control of the throne, "I know how colonizers think; so we’re gonna use their own strategies against them." Such a theopolitical imagination likely took root via his social location—an orphaned black boy in urban America, later educated and equipped by American military forces and motivated by a distorted manifest destiny and vengeance. Herein lies a key difference between Erik and America’s current president—as an oppressed minority, Erik elicits our sympathies in his quest for retributive justice. His is a righteous cause distorted by an American mythology. Indeed, Erik is separated from his parents by an invasive and unethical governmental power intent on protecting its own borders at the cost of familial stability or justice. There are interpretive links between Erik’s story and the present-day immigration crisis at the U.S. borders, where thousands of children are illegally separated from their parents by the Trump administration as Latinx families seek asylum. When King T’Chaka (T’Challa’s father) kills his brother, N’Jobu (Erik’s father), then hides the act from history and abandons Erik to an orphaned life of poverty, the unjust incident sparks the transformation of Erik into Killmonger. One can draw a strong parallel to the present American foreign policy (and mythology) of oppressing refugees and immigrants seeking sanctuary—how many of the Latinx children separated from their parents or orphaned in the borderland desert will have their moral and theological imagination shaped by the violent mythology in the vein of Killmonger?
This mythology fosters nationalism as opposed to peoplehood. Carter describes nationalism as an inherently destructive identity "construed in binary terms and therefore as self-enclosure."28 The non-modern, mystical mythology of Wakanda—shared with Erik (and us) by his father N’Jobu in the opening scenes—has been distorted and co-opted by the myth of America. We see this in the final battle between T’Challa and Killmonger, their physical blows also representing clashing mythologies. This battle takes place on a literal underground railroad within Wakanda’s vibranium mines, an environment ripe with signs of metaphoricity. Indeed, Coogler describes the design of the vibranium mine as purposefully alluding to aortic valves and veins, indicating that this battle between ideologies is a fight for the heart of Wakanda itself. Though T’Challa mortally wounds Killmonger, he offers him mercy and restoration, taking him to a high cliff overlooking the beauty of a Wakandan sunset and reminding Erik that he is not beyond salvation or redemption. But Killmonger, his imagination still entrenched in a violent mythology, rejects the offered gift, choosing instead to end his own life.
For Erik, the divide could not be mended, but T’Challa is forever changed by these experiences. Instead of continuing in his father’s legacy of closed borders and covering up injustices, T’Challa confronts the broken history of his nation and seeks to open the borders and practice ways of reconciliation. It is interesting to me that T’Challa’s final decision in the film is not necessarily simply to open Wakandan borders to all outsiders, but to go beyond his own borders, to "colonize" the colonizers, by purchasing the building where Erik’s father N’Jobu died, transforming it into a Wakandan outreach centre in urban Oakland. Instead of America monetarily and militarily sending aid to Africa, it is Africa incarnationally sending aid to America. Yet the Wakandans are not invading with intent for cultural colonization, but bringing liberation by another means—a renewed vision of a self-defined black culture rooted in spirituality and traditions while embracing the future of technological and scientific advancement, a synthesis of cultural borders. In a post-credits scene, T’Challa tells the United Nations: "Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth; more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, but the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe." The audience of politicians and reporters are surprised—is Wakanda not a poor African nation with little to offer the world? While we may smile along with T’Challa at the ignorance of such a question, is this not the very question both Coogler and Carter are addressing in their work, an embedded hegemonic mythology and history where persons outside of whiteness have been relegated to a status of less-than? What could black and brown bodies and minds possibly offer?
This brings us to the "moral decision" of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic, where we emerge from the parabolic film-world with a fresh theological and ethical imagination. Recently, Carter has spoken of a theopolitical imagination freed from the binary grip of whiteness and blackness via "black malpractice," a countermyth of "underworlding" and "otherworlding."29 I quote at length from his earlier book Race: A Theological Account:
Paul Ricoeur’s description of parable is best summarized in his 1975 article "Biblical Hermeneutics," where he describes a parable as the conjunction between a narrative form and a metaphorical process.6 The parable as narrative-metaphor relies on a third element, a qualifier, which points to an external reference beyond the parable.7 This third element, which Ricoeur refers to as "limit-experiences," requires the language of "limit-expressions" in describing a human encounter with the horizon of knowledge, imagination, and experience—the immanent nearing the surface of the transcendent.8 For him, a parable is a heuristic fiction that redescribes the religious dimension of human existence but without resorting to overtly religious language.9 It is a story that refers to something beyond what was literally told in the narrative, even as the story remains coherent in itself. Thus, in summary, Ricoeurian parables are: 1.) a realist narrative form in conjunction with 2.) a metaphorical process referring to 3.) an existential limit-experience which provokes a transformation. I will unpack each of these elements in turn.
First, narrative form. Ricoeur considers all parables as having a narrative structure, what he calls emplotment. In his work, Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s hypothesis centers on the narrativity of human temporal reality, suggesting that we make meaning and interpret all our experiences through narrative. In crafting his hermeneutical circle—what he describes as an "endless spiral" of interpretation10—Ricoeur suggests three levels or modes of mimesis: mimesis1 (prefigured time), mimesis2 (configured time) and mimesis3 (refigured or transfigured time).11 Mimesis1, or the world behind the film, entails a pre-understanding of the nature of narratives, what Ricoeur calls the "practical understanding" a reader has of the structural, symbolic, and temporal dynamics of the emplotted story.12 In cinema, pre-understanding allows a film audience to initially grasp the mise en scene, genre, and narrative structure as filmgoers bring their own context and beliefs, as well as film theory and film history, into the viewing experience. Mimesis2 is the mode of emplotment, bringing together the individual elements of the story—characters, events, actions, descriptions—and integrating them within the framing structure of narrative, transforming a succession of events into a meaningful whole; it is the world of the film. Mimesis3 marks the intersection of the film-world with the life-world of the audience, the world in front of the film.13 This final stage is one of personal application of the narrative. It is referential in that the film-world is applicable to the everyday life of the viewer. For cinema, it may refer to the literal ending of a film; on a theological level, it is the lingering of the film-world incarnated into the life-world of the filmgoer. Specifically, Ricoeur suggests a threefold schema as a basic parabolic narrative structure: ordinary-extraordinary-denouement.This parabolic narrative structure allows for a polyvalence of interpretations even as it resists distortive hermeneutical approaches—it provides boundaries while allowing for imaginative interpretive play.
Next, metaphorical process. Ricoeur posits that the metaphorical process provides the intermediary link between the formal structure of the narrative and the existential interpretation.14 Similar to his larger study, The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur argues for metaphor as resemblance and redescription. True metaphors, for Ricoeur, are untranslatable; they are ontologically new descriptions of reality. This does not mean they cannot be interpreted, paraphrased, or described, but Ricoeur is quick to note that any paraphrase or translation is "infinite," meaning possible legitimate interpretations cannot be exhausted or reduced to once-and-for-all propositional language.15 This raises a critical question: how do we discern whether a narrative is a parable with a metaphoric process (as opposed to a narrative that is just a mere story)? In searching for what he calls "signs of metaphoricity," Ricoeur finds his answer in the narrative structure: the dimension of extravagance within the ordinary realism of the story "delivers the openness of the metaphorical process from the closure of the narrative form."16 Such realism coincides with cinematic realism in film theory, such as Italian neo-realism or British social realism, as opposed to formalism or expressionism. Realist films attempt to mimic or imitate reality, while expressionistic films aim to change, distort, or expand upon reality. Filmic examples of realist parables range from Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City, Germany Year Zero), to the ten-episode Polish film Dekalog from Krzysztof Kieślowski, to the transcendent realism of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Le Fils, The Kid with a Bike). Indeed, the Dardennes’ films La Promesse, Lorna’s Silence, and The Unknown Girl all address similar questions of immigration, alterity, and ethics as Black Panther, only via a remarkably different formal aesthetic. In each of these films, the metaphoricity emerges via the subversive form of the extraordinary breaking into everyday mundane human existence, not by means of transcendent other-worldly idealism or the fantastical, but via concrete materiality.
The superhero genre certainly challenges definitions of this Ricoeurian realism— superhero films are rarely "realistic"—but parable can still apply as a descriptive qualifier for Black Panther. Coogler sought to create a world as tangible as possible, filming on location in Africa and imbuing each costume and scene with rich detail; Coogler says he wanted to create a lived-in feel, showing Wakandans making and eating food, using public transportation, and going about their daily lives. Even the technology via the fictional metal vibranium is shown to be tactile, such as a multi-purpose black sand table used in a variety of ways throughout the film. In emphasizing the mundane features of everyday life in Wakanda, Coogler grounds the fantastical elements of Black Panther, such as T’Challa’s superpowers or flying spaceships, within a tangible material world. The rich detail of every set, costume, and character are evidence of Coogler’s underlying realist vision. His first feature film, Fruitvale Station, can be considered more realist than expressionistic, and this realist sentiment carries on throughout his work. In this, I contend that Black Panther can be deemed a "superhero parable" or a "parabolic superhero film." Thus, Wakanda-as-metaphor can say something true about our reality even as a fictionalized world.
Finally, existential limit-expressions. Ricoeur directs his attention to the utilization of paradox, hyperbole, and other modes of intensification—like parable’s extraordinariness—to address the external referent of the parables, namely existential limit-experiences. Also described as "boundary-situations," Ricoeur suggests that the human condition includes those ineffable peak moments in life such as death, suffering, guilt, and hatred, but also creation, joy, grace, and love.17 As religious discourse via non-religious communication, cinematic parables attempt both to describe and to evoke these limit-experiences of immanence on the horizon of transcendence in a metaphoric montage between film-world and life-world. In his collection From Text to Action, Ricoeur suggests that as the reader interprets the text, the text also interprets and affects the reader; the reader discovers oneself anew via the parable-world, a reorientation by way of disorientation. How does this interpretive process work? Ricoeur proposes a dialectic between guessing and validating, where one intuits a proposed interpretation of a text—a guess based in probability—then seeks validation of the interpretation within the world of the text itself. The task of interpretation is completed only when the audience emerges from the hermeneutical circle with a reoriented theological and moral imagination; Ricoeur calls this "engagement in action"18 or "moral decision."19 In short, within the application phase of mimesis3, a personal, existential and ethical response occurs as readers emerge from the parable-world into their life-world with both a fresh understanding of reality and a propensity towards enacting this new understanding.
Let me summarize: First, filmgoers enter the cinema with a pre-understanding of reality—their own life-world experiences, beliefs, theology, and ethics (mimesis1, prefiguration). Second, the filmgoer accepts the invitation, enters into the parabolic film-world, and "reads" it (mimesis2, configuration) by means of the Ricoeurian hermeneutical circle in a dialectic between guessing and validation. This hermeneutical circle is not an endless tautology, but rather a spiral of deeper interpretations, even rival or conflicting ones, which emerge upon further meditation within and beyond the temporal progression of the film-world.20 In this hermeneutical circle, the filmgoer recognizes the cinematic parable’s metaphoricity by way of the extraordinary within the ordinary. Here is where the transcendent-immanent dynamic of the parable unfolds. Finally, filmgoers emerge from the film-world and re-enter their life-world, even as the film-world lingers and affects their moral and theological imagination and praxis (mimesis3, transfiguration). Following Ricoeur, I contend that the cinematic parable serves as a site for possible divine revelation as the poetic work of the narrative-metaphor creates a generative cinematic environment for encountering the transcendent. Black Panther is worth considering as a parabolic superhero film due to its distinct subversive forms and its counter-mythological messages, as well as its invitational capacity to create a film-world. With Ricoeur in mind, we can now enter into the world of Wakanda via its borders.
Wakanda as Parable
Let us apply this parabolic hermeneutic to Black Panther. First, what might be our pre-understanding of the world of Wakanda? Whether we are familiar with the comics or the MCU, we can recognize that Black Panther is a superhero film featuring a mainly black cast and production crew. We may also be familiar with Coogler’s previous films, Fruitvale Station and Creed. Beyond cinema, our present-day American context is marked by political unrest and anger, outrage at the injustices of black bodies gunned down in streets and immigrant families seeking asylum being separated and prosecuted at our borders. So, when the question of foreign policy about borders and assisting refugees arises within the story of Black Panther, our affections and imaginations are piqued. Just as the invisible barrier surrounds the borders of Wakanda, only revealing its marvels upon breaking through the illusion, so we too enter into the filmic world of Wakanda as audience, crossing its border and looking for Ricoeur’s "signs of metaphoricity." One such sign is in the narrative structure itself. Coogler frames Black Panther around two characters, T’Challa and Erik Killmonger, as protagonist and antagonist, respectively, giving both equal screen time and narrative arcs (in fact, the film opens with Erik rather than T’Challa). This is a story of two personas and paradigms clashing, the former of traditional conservative ethics and praxis, the latter of revolution and deconstructionist critiques. It calls to mind other such clashes in American civil rights—Martin vs. Malcolm—but the interests of Black Panther go beyond this. Indeed, all of Black Panther can be viewed as a dialogical form negotiating the boundaries of borders: America and African black experience; conservative traditions and progressive ideals; spirituality and science; younger and elder generations; male and female; justice and mercy. Will these borders be open or closed, and how permeable should they become?
This question of borders can be metaphorically discerned in the formal aspects of the film-world. The score from Ludwig Göransson is a dynamic mixture of African music—flutes and hand drums, chants and swelling polyrhythms—contrasted with elements of American hip-hop, such as the thumping bass and trap hi-hats. Similarly, the soundtrack curated by Kendrick Lamar spans three continents of black musical greatness in hip-hop, rap, and soul, a synthesis of musical borders. Coogler also intentionally uses color to tell what he calls a "color narrative." For example, blue is used throughout the film as a symbol of colonization—Killmonger is frequently shown wearing blue clothes or surrounded by blue backgrounds, and the cinematography uses a blue tint in many of his scenes (particularly those set in England) contrasted with the warm golden hues of T’Challa and Wakanda. The film also aesthetically and ideologically subverts the cinematic "male gaze" described by film theorist Laura Mulvey via its rich cinematography from Rachel Morrison, the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the 2017 film Mudbound. Moreover, women oversaw the casting, costumes, production design, and film editing of Black Panther. Thus, the parable-world of Wakanda was written by two African-American men (Coogler and Joe Robert Cole), crafted by a team of women and people of color, and is seen through the lens of Rachel Morrison.
Consider a brief scene of Killmonger ascending to the throne of Wakanda after defeating T’Challa in ritual combat. In this poignant and powerful scene, Erik has the remaining magic herbs and the Wakandan temple burned, a symbolic image of the profane decimation of past sacred institutions. Immediately following this, we see an inverted shot of Killmonger walking into the Wakandan throne room as his hip-hop theme plays on the soundtrack, the camera slowly tilting around to right-side up as Erik sits and tells his advisors of his foreign policy: that Wakanda should arm oppressed black people around the world to rise up and kill their oppressors in order to build the Wakandan empire.
In this scene, Morrison and Coogler are, quite literally, turning this world (and our world) upside down, flipping the script and our perspective, inviting us to reconsider the myths of both cinema and America by way of Wakanda. Paraphrasing film critic Roger Ebert, it is not only what the film is about, it is how the film is about it. In this, we now turn to the underlying formal parallels between Coogler and theologian J. Kameron Carter to discern better how the parabolic film-world invites interpretations not only about race, but also about immigration and alterity.
Coogler and Carter
I recently attended an academic conference where J. Kameron Carter spoke on race and theology. By structuring his argument poetically and bringing in literary and aesthetic works as genuine sites for theological insight, Carter was doing something remarkably disorienting for the mainly white, elderly, and male European theologians from analytic and systematic traditions: he was speaking with a different grammar, a poetical black theology addressing the theological problem of whiteness. As Carter puts it, "one can read Scripture within the theological grammar of the Christian faith and yet do so in such a way as to read within and indeed theologically sanction, if not sanctify . . . ‘the order of things.’"21 To be honest, while they appreciated his presentation, many at the conference remained perplexed, unable to grasp Carter’s methodology or message, the borders of their theological imaginations unbreached.
In recounting this, I want to draw connections between Carter and Coogler not necessarily by way of content—although both are expressing a distinct black liberation theology via their particular disciplines—but their form of expression. Both are exploring the borders and boundaries of being and belonging in a parabolic way which is, again, both invitational and confrontational, a subversion of the cultural mythologies and norms of whiteness precisely via those norms. By incorporating black poetics to overcome the syntax and grammar of white supremacy inherent in modern discourse, Carter reckons with theological questions of race more directly, which at first glance may not seem as indirect as the parabolic form I have suggested. But Carter subverts the dispositions of white supremacy by practicing alternative grammars not outside but within western theological academic discourse, a discourse shaped by and entrenched in the modern myth of white supremacy. The theological borders are breached from the inside. Carter describes this as a "preacherly breach . . . blackness as the breach of religio-secular administration."22 This is what parable does; it criticizes and reforms subversively from within. Carter describes African-American literature as "a tradition of complex interactions with traditions. Shot through with multiple voices, it attempts to negotiate stratified white-over-black relations by envisioning and creating a new literary space."23 We could say that Coogler is creating a similar cinematic space through the film’s dialogical border-crossing form. As a parallel to Carter, Coogler, to some degree, operates within the MCU formula and strategy. But his auteurist formal dynamics subtly infuse and flip the superhero genre on its head. He is offering a criticism of empires by means of an empire, that of the Disney/Marvel brand. Where other recent films addressing racial tension, such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansmen, use satirical methods (in Crossan’s terms) to overtly and blatantly attack white supremacy, Coogler is a clandestine independent artist operating subversively in these blockbusters, first via Creed and now via Black Panther.
Coogler is like directors of Third Cinema under what film theorist Teshome Gabriel calls an "Aesthetics of Liberation," in which an ideology of third-world liberation is linked with a film’s stylistic strategies.24 Gilles Deleuze, in his own description of Third Cinema, calls it a "cinema of speech-acts," which "destroy myths from the inside. . . . The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination."25 That is, Coogler’s two blockbuster films are extrinsically first-world white cinema (myth) even as they are intrinsically third-world black cinema (parable). Thus, both Carter and Coogler are working within, yet not defined by, the borders and boundaries of the myths they aim to deconstruct in order to offer an alternative story and consciousness freed from the shackles of white modernity.
The Borders of Wakanda
What does the above discussion about white supremacy and parable’s indirectness have to do with borders and immigration in an American context? The parabolic narrative-metaphor, per Ricoeur, contains a polyvalence of interpretations. So, while Black Panther is certainly about race, it can also challenge other myths via its parabolic form.26 Moreover, the myth of white supremacy and the issue of Mexican-American borders are not wholly distinct; indeed, racism and xenophobia are intimately integrated. Carter insists that overcoming the problem of whiteness requires moving beyond Kantian anti-Jewish universals to remember Jesus as distinctly Jewish. Similarly, Roberto Goizueta’s liberation theological aesthetics calls for us to consider the particularity of Jesus the Galilean Jew, that "the theological-ethical significance of Galilee as a borderland" is crucial to "the inherently subversive character of a Christian theological aesthetics."27 Therefore, in reading Black Panther, we must contend with a borderland Christology, the real presence of Christ at our borders.
Regarding the Ricoeurian signs of metaphoricity for American immigration, consider Erik Killmonger: where else in our contemporary culture have we seen an arrogant, ideological outsider with an ostentatious gold-hued aesthetic rise to sudden political power by unethical means, a person who objectifies women and betrays his allies as he focuses on building his empire and closing borders, drawing out violent tacit nationalist beliefs to the surface and dividing his own nation to the point of near civil war? In the words of the gospel narrator, let the reader understand. Indeed, Killmonger (perhaps unknowingly) perpetuates the myth of white supremacy via its political and social imagination rooted in war, violence, and oppression of the Other as he strives to Make Wakanda Great Again. As he says in the scene where he takes control of the throne, "I know how colonizers think; so we’re gonna use their own strategies against them." Such a theopolitical imagination likely took root via his social location—an orphaned black boy in urban America, later educated and equipped by American military forces and motivated by a distorted manifest destiny and vengeance. Herein lies a key difference between Erik and America’s current president—as an oppressed minority, Erik elicits our sympathies in his quest for retributive justice. His is a righteous cause distorted by an American mythology. Indeed, Erik is separated from his parents by an invasive and unethical governmental power intent on protecting its own borders at the cost of familial stability or justice. There are interpretive links between Erik’s story and the present-day immigration crisis at the U.S. borders, where thousands of children are illegally separated from their parents by the Trump administration as Latinx families seek asylum. When King T’Chaka (T’Challa’s father) kills his brother, N’Jobu (Erik’s father), then hides the act from history and abandons Erik to an orphaned life of poverty, the unjust incident sparks the transformation of Erik into Killmonger. One can draw a strong parallel to the present American foreign policy (and mythology) of oppressing refugees and immigrants seeking sanctuary—how many of the Latinx children separated from their parents or orphaned in the borderland desert will have their moral and theological imagination shaped by the violent mythology in the vein of Killmonger?
This mythology fosters nationalism as opposed to peoplehood. Carter describes nationalism as an inherently destructive identity "construed in binary terms and therefore as self-enclosure."28 The non-modern, mystical mythology of Wakanda—shared with Erik (and us) by his father N’Jobu in the opening scenes—has been distorted and co-opted by the myth of America. We see this in the final battle between T’Challa and Killmonger, their physical blows also representing clashing mythologies. This battle takes place on a literal underground railroad within Wakanda’s vibranium mines, an environment ripe with signs of metaphoricity. Indeed, Coogler describes the design of the vibranium mine as purposefully alluding to aortic valves and veins, indicating that this battle between ideologies is a fight for the heart of Wakanda itself. Though T’Challa mortally wounds Killmonger, he offers him mercy and restoration, taking him to a high cliff overlooking the beauty of a Wakandan sunset and reminding Erik that he is not beyond salvation or redemption. But Killmonger, his imagination still entrenched in a violent mythology, rejects the offered gift, choosing instead to end his own life.
For Erik, the divide could not be mended, but T’Challa is forever changed by these experiences. Instead of continuing in his father’s legacy of closed borders and covering up injustices, T’Challa confronts the broken history of his nation and seeks to open the borders and practice ways of reconciliation. It is interesting to me that T’Challa’s final decision in the film is not necessarily simply to open Wakandan borders to all outsiders, but to go beyond his own borders, to "colonize" the colonizers, by purchasing the building where Erik’s father N’Jobu died, transforming it into a Wakandan outreach centre in urban Oakland. Instead of America monetarily and militarily sending aid to Africa, it is Africa incarnationally sending aid to America. Yet the Wakandans are not invading with intent for cultural colonization, but bringing liberation by another means—a renewed vision of a self-defined black culture rooted in spirituality and traditions while embracing the future of technological and scientific advancement, a synthesis of cultural borders. In a post-credits scene, T’Challa tells the United Nations: "Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth; more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges, but the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe." The audience of politicians and reporters are surprised—is Wakanda not a poor African nation with little to offer the world? While we may smile along with T’Challa at the ignorance of such a question, is this not the very question both Coogler and Carter are addressing in their work, an embedded hegemonic mythology and history where persons outside of whiteness have been relegated to a status of less-than? What could black and brown bodies and minds possibly offer?
This brings us to the "moral decision" of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic, where we emerge from the parabolic film-world with a fresh theological and ethical imagination. Recently, Carter has spoken of a theopolitical imagination freed from the binary grip of whiteness and blackness via "black malpractice," a countermyth of "underworlding" and "otherworlding."29 I quote at length from his earlier book Race: A Theological Account:
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The language and practices . . . of dark people who have lived into a Christian imagination can no longer be deemed theologically irrelevant nor made invisible, which is what white intellectuals in the theological academy have tended to do. . . . Instead, the languages and practices of dark people, most especially when they seek to comport themselves as Christians in the world, must be engaged precisely in their theological specificity: that is, as ways of narrating being beyond race, despite the surrounding world’s persistence in holding them and itself hostage to the metaphysics of race and its ontology of forgetfulness.30
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This ontology of forgetfulness is a willful loss of memory, ignoring the violent U.S. history of building its economic and political successes upon the backs of African bodies, the displacement of indigenous people, and the so-called military-driven "stabilization" of Latin American countries, the latter laying groundwork for the present waves and caravans of Latin American immigrants and refugees.
In the final scene before the credits roll, as T’Challa and Shuri begin to show a group of Oakland youth their advanced technology, one boy (portrayed by Moonlight’s Alex Hibbert) turns to T’Challa and asks him, "Who are you?" In interviews and the movie commentary, Coogler suggests that this question of identity is the critical inquiry Black Panther aims to explore: in the light of a Wakandan reality, who are we to become? As we have now seen a vision of the world of Wakanda—where borders are valued even as a sense of belonging is restored across nations, a world of tribes without tribalism—what will we do in our own world? Which myths need to be overturned, and how can new mythologies be told? What fresh theological and ethical grammars do we need to learn and practice, and who will we learn them from?
To conclude, Black Panther reminds me of Roger Ebert’s description of films as "empathy-generating machines" which transcend social and physical boundaries to close distances between peoples. As a distinct collaborative medium effectively bridging the borders between "high" and "pop" art, blending image and narrative, sound and movement, I contend that cinema is capable of doing theology, not just depicting it. Indeed, the parabolic form is inherently liberating—it frees the film-world for a multiplicity of interpretations without being didactic or coercive, releasing the audience from reductive cultural myths to imagine another world, one ripe for possible applications to our own. To paraphrase Ricoeur, understanding ourselves in front of the parabolic film-world is not "a question of imposing upon the [film] our finite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the [film-world] and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed." A master parabler like Ryan Coogler can craft and deliver such an aesthetically pleasing film-world that the audience is drawn in by the parable’s artistic craft only to have the metaphoric rug pulled out from beneath them, thus caught off guard and open to the parable’s theological and moral reorientation, and (potentially) an encounter with the divine. Even as T’Challa must undergo a conversion of sorts to open the borders of Wakanda, we as the audience may also be converted as the cinematic parable reforms the filmgoer via the form itself.
In the final scene before the credits roll, as T’Challa and Shuri begin to show a group of Oakland youth their advanced technology, one boy (portrayed by Moonlight’s Alex Hibbert) turns to T’Challa and asks him, "Who are you?" In interviews and the movie commentary, Coogler suggests that this question of identity is the critical inquiry Black Panther aims to explore: in the light of a Wakandan reality, who are we to become? As we have now seen a vision of the world of Wakanda—where borders are valued even as a sense of belonging is restored across nations, a world of tribes without tribalism—what will we do in our own world? Which myths need to be overturned, and how can new mythologies be told? What fresh theological and ethical grammars do we need to learn and practice, and who will we learn them from?
To conclude, Black Panther reminds me of Roger Ebert’s description of films as "empathy-generating machines" which transcend social and physical boundaries to close distances between peoples. As a distinct collaborative medium effectively bridging the borders between "high" and "pop" art, blending image and narrative, sound and movement, I contend that cinema is capable of doing theology, not just depicting it. Indeed, the parabolic form is inherently liberating—it frees the film-world for a multiplicity of interpretations without being didactic or coercive, releasing the audience from reductive cultural myths to imagine another world, one ripe for possible applications to our own. To paraphrase Ricoeur, understanding ourselves in front of the parabolic film-world is not "a question of imposing upon the [film] our finite capacity for understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the [film-world] and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed." A master parabler like Ryan Coogler can craft and deliver such an aesthetically pleasing film-world that the audience is drawn in by the parable’s artistic craft only to have the metaphoric rug pulled out from beneath them, thus caught off guard and open to the parable’s theological and moral reorientation, and (potentially) an encounter with the divine. Even as T’Challa must undergo a conversion of sorts to open the borders of Wakanda, we as the audience may also be converted as the cinematic parable reforms the filmgoer via the form itself.
NOTES
- See "Saudi Arabia’s first cinema in over 35 years opens with Black Panther," in The Guardian (April 20, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/20/saudi-arabias-first-cinema-in-over-35-years-opens-with-black-panther (accessed November 23, 2018).
- "parable, n." OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137268 (accessed November 23, 2018).
- I discuss parable and allegory in "Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and Cinematic Parables," Transpositions (November 2017), http://www.transpositions.co.uk/darren-aronofskys-mother-cinematic-parables/.
- John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma: Polebridge Press, 1988), 38.
- Crossan, The Dark Interval, 42.
- Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia 4 (1975), 30.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 33.
- Paul Ricoeur, "Naming God," in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1995), 230.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 32.
- Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 72.
- Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1.53. Ricoeur elsewhere refers to this latter stage of mimesis as "transfiguration." See From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 20.
- Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1.54–56.
- Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1.71.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 75.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 80.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 99.
- Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," 128.
- Paul Ricoeur, "The ‘Kingdom’ in the Parables of Jesus," Anglican Theological Review, 63/2 (April 1981), 168.
- Paul Ricoeur, "Listening to the Parables of Jesus," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 245.
- Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1.72.
- J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 233.
- J. Kameron Carter, "Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)," a working paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Theology, (April 10, 2018), 11.
- Carter, Race, 258.
- See Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983). See also Antonio D. Sison, "Reign-Focus: Theology, Film, and the Aesthetics of Liberation," in New Theology Review 24/3 (August 2011), 42–52.
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 222–23.
- As a tangential example, Black Panther upends the cultural myth of James Bond. Albeit popular, the Bond mythology’s treatment of gender, race, violence, sexuality, and morality as a whole—not to mention its individualistic and imperialistic underpinnings—require needed critical evaluation. In the second act of Black Panther, T’Challa, Okoye, and Nakia travel to Busan to capture and extract arms dealer Ulysses Klaue. In the framing, visuals, and set design of this sequence, Coogler deliberately portrays T’Challa as a new black Bond, but the myth is subverted: women are powerful warriors and allies, not bedded or seduced; T’Challa’s technological genius (the Q character) is his teenage sister Shuri, not an elderly white European man; the appropriated exoticism of foreign countries invaded and often left in shambles by an individual white man, regardless of geopolitical borders, is lessened as the black African team seeks to capture and bring to justice the reckless South African white terrorist. Finally, the white CIA agent character is no threat to the Wakandans; in an act of mercy, the Wakandans save him after he is shot by Killmonger. Instead of the (white) government agent as either oppressor or hero, he is relegated to a supporting character, while the African team brings about justice, all without the use of guns.
- Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ Our Companion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2009), 127–28.
- Carter, Race, 310.
- Carter, "Black Malpractice," 14–15.
- Carter, Race, 378.