By John Bailey
This time last year actor Daniel Kaluuya was on our cinema screens as the beleaguered hero of Get Out, a modestly budgeted horror-comedy that managed to shatter conventional Hollywood wisdom. Mainstream audiences don't relate to black protagonists, warned the naysayers.
But the $US4.5 million film went on to earn more than $US255 million worldwide, along with Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Kaluuya himself.
Daniel Kaluuya, left, congratulates Jordan Peele, winner of the award for best original screenplay for Get Out at the Oscars last weekend.Credit: AP
Twelve months on, and Kaluuya is back on screens in another film that's turning the industry upside-down. This time it's a supporting role in Marvel's Black Panther, which in a mere three weeks has made more than $US1 billion, enjoying the fifth-largest opening weekend of all time and raking in more in a week than many blockbusters make over their entire lifetime.
Get Out and Black Panther are both genre flicks that centre on black characters, but it's worth considering where they part ways. The former taps into the real fears of young black men within an oppressive white culture, while the latter offers a vision of an African utopia that was never touched by colonisation.
One warns: this is how bad things can get. The other promises: this is how good things could be.
Black Panther is largely set in the fictional African nation of Wakanda, a techno-paradise of unalloyed wonder. This fantastic world-building might seem par for the course for any Marvel superhero film, yet in science fiction and fantasy today you're more likely to encounter an apocalypse than an idyllic Eden. Marvel's last outing, Thor: Ragnarok, detailed the demolition of the Norse gods' home of Valhalla – heaven itself given the wrecking ball treatment. Black Panther's Wakanda, conversely, is what sets it apart from the usual Marvel fare.
Billion-dollar success: A scene from Black Panther.Credit: AP
To make sense of the film's success, look to Afrofuturism. When cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term in the mid-90s, he was looking to those instances of pop culture that dared to imagine a future for the African diaspora as bright as the sun – think seminal jazz figure Sun Ra's radical self-reinvention as an alien from Saturn, or the elaborate “P-Funk mythology” constructed across George Clinton's entire career.
Celebrated African-American authors Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler employed their fictional time travellers and starfarers to reflect upon black history; more recently, the Afrofuturist visions of novelist N. K. Jemisin have seen her take home the Hugo Award for Best Novel the last two years running.
Afrofuturism might be most striking because science fiction has long been a notoriously unwelcoming space for people of colour. For Dery, simply writing the future through the lens of black experience is a political act: “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered our collective fantasies?”
Oprah Winfrey in a scene from A Wrinkle in Time.Credit: AP
2018 may be the year Afrofuturism achieves orbit. Black Panther will soon be joined by A Wrinkle in Time, another blockbuster sci-fi film featuring a cast of colour including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling and Storm Reid, and Brown Girl Begins, an adaptation of Canadian Afrofuturist favourite Brown Girl in the Ring.
The latest Star Trek series, Discovery, has promoted a black woman to the helm, while television adaptations of essential Afrofuturist literature including Octavia Butler's Dawn and Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death are in the pipeline.
Singer Janelle Monae's visual persona has always been heavily weighted with afrofuturist imagery, but her upcoming album Dirty Computer will be accompanied by a feature-length film stuffed full of hovercars and neon-studded jumpsuits.
Ryan Griffen is the creator of Cleverman, the SBS sci-fi/superhero series that mashes up a dystopian future and old stories of the Dreaming. From the outset Griffen saw Cleverman as the kind of superhero who could empower his son (the fictional character and the 11-year-old share the same name, too).
Koen West, played by Hunter Page-Lochard, the hero of Ryan Griffen's Cleverman series.Credit: Lisa Tomasetti
“It's just about making sure that we're getting those stories and those characters to be front and centre, and not just ones that are taking orders from a white general or as a sidekick," Griffen says. ''That they're a hero first and foremost.”
The dystopia of Cleverman might seem antithetical to Black Panther's African paradise, but Griffen says that even dystopias offer hope for change, especially when they're metaphors for the real experiences of people living right now.
“With dystopian futures, that's the world that black people have to live in today. Post-colonial settlement, their world was destroyed and they've a need to survive and to hope to bring our culture back to the forefront. Black Panther is obviously doing that on a grand scale for black people all over the world.”
A scene from Ryan Griffen's Cleverman.
Genre conventions are one way of easing viewers into considering real world politics, he says.
“When you're creating a story and it has black content, the first thing you're going to find from a universal audience is that they get their backs up already. This is black politics and you find a lot of people get on the defensive. In allowing genres to bleed through your message or to help frame that content, it breaks a lot of those barriers down and allows your audience to go on this journey and hopefully learn something without them realising it. Otherwise they can tend to feel like they're being preached to.”
Griffen caught Black Panther on its opening weekend with his 11-year-old son Koen. “I've never seen my son react to a film like this before. He was constantly tapping me on the shoulder, saying 'that was cool, look at that!'. Just seeing all of these huge, strong black characters. It was the energy of it. That hip-hop vibe that I play in the car. You constantly knew you were watching a film made by a black man.”
Superhero stories might be written off as kid's stuff, but that only makes representation matter more. A 2011 study found that longer television viewing times for seven to 12-year-olds correlate with lower levels of self-esteem – unless you're a white boy, in which case “regardless of what show you're watching ... things in life are pretty good for you''. The white male characters populating these kid's viewing habits often succeeded without really trying.
Letitia Wright in a scene from Black Panther. Credit: AP
Writer and performer Candy Bowers never identified as a blerd – black nerd – and found her white partner's geeky collection of Star Wars figures to be a source of amusement. In the wake of Black Panther, which she's seen three times already, she's had to make a confession to him: “I'm considering getting the figurines. Seriously. I'm thinking about the dolls, and not even for my nieces.”
When Bowers was growing up black in Australia, pop culture didn't offer her a lot of options when it came to costume parties.
“As a kid you grow up playing dress-ups and people would say 'who are you meant to be?' And you'd say 'I'm the black Wonder Woman'. I'm the black whatever. Now, suddenly, you can be the character. Even with Star Wars, now there are characters that girls and people of colour can be from the last few years of filmmaking.”
Candy Bowers (left) and her co-star Nancy Denis in their new show One the Bear.Credit: Hana Schlesinger
Bowers' most recent show is One the Bear, an afropunk fable for teens. “It's totally Afrofuturism, hip-hop from beginning to end,” she says.
One performance in Brisbane last year was attended by “a hundred 12-year-olds, lots of girls of colour, and there's this one feminist moment where the girls couldn't stop screaming and clapping. It was my rock star moment. Then one of the teachers said 'it's not really fair that this is the first play they see, because they may never see a play like this again'.
The students of University Prep Academy High School in Detroit are told they are all going to a screening of Black Panther.Credit: AP
"But there's this movement going on. They'll see Black Panther. There's stuff for them, finally. And that's the kind of thing that's really different to how it was for me growing up in Australia.
“Even hearing J.K. Rowling saying that if she had her time again she would have cast Hermione as a black girl, that would have changed everything.”
The world of Black Panther is one in which black is the default. There are only two white characters with more than a few lines, and even their inclusion feels tokenistic. Bowers jokes that Halloween this year will pose a dilemma for many of the film's fans: “if you're white there are only two characters you're allowed to play.”
'There's this movement going on': Candy Bowers.Credit: Hana Schlesinger
Don't expect the current surge of Afrofuturism to wane any time soon. Later this year an animated Spiderman film will introduce Afro-Latino Miles Morales in the webslinger suit, while Donald Glover's upcoming turn as Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars spin-off Solo has many betting he'll be given his own standalone film in the near future.
And Black Panther's box office success is virtually guaranteed to deliver sequels – the character's comic series has already attracted the likes of literary celebrities Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay in the writer's chair.
Bowers has already heard friends and trolls alike denying that Black Panther's Afrofuturist politics are an element of its success. “Racism is really f---ing hard to deal with. Not seeing yourself is really hard to deal with. Then when a film like this comes along and people want to say 'it's not about colour', yes it is. And my personal experience in this instance is more important than yours. It just is.”