The Black Panther: Marvel teaches us something about healthy narcissism.

Marvel's Black Panther is a film I have seen twice in the theater, something I rarely do and also something I was initially reluctant to do with this one; but I was ultimately glad that I did.  I first saw it with the reluctant son while visiting him at college.  It was a father/son weekend, so the reluctant wife did not go along.  In between, I watched Infinity Wars and also dialed up Captain America – Civil War on the home video front just so that I could more deeply immerse myself in the Marvel universe.  Why not?  It seems that most of the world has done this – and that an entire army of CGI specialists are being employed and having their moment on the screen as the theater stays full waiting for the enigmatic teaser at the tail end of the credits after each “episode”.  Something this enthralling to so many of us must have something to say about us, n’est pas?

Well, the Black Panther turns out, I think, to have a lot to say about us, and stands in a very interesting relationship to the predominantly white and male universe that Marvel has rolled out to this point.  And one of the things that it has to say has to do with the importance of women, something that I was so unused to looking for in this type of film, but perhaps in films generally (OK, if I want to heap more concern on it, maybe I overlook women’s roles outside of the movie theater, too), that I didn’t pay enough attention to the women the first time I saw the film and did not notice the different roles that the women around the Black Panther played in helping him be the character that he so nobly portrays.

The Black Panther is T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman), the leader of an (imaginary) African nation Wakanda that has existed in secret for hundreds of years.  T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka (played by John Kani) was killed at the beginning of the Captain Marvel: Civil Wars film where the Black Panther first appeared.  In that film, the Black Panther does not take sides in the Civil War – he is consistently focused on finding the perpetrator of the crime that sets the action in motion and, because he is not caught up in the posturing and bickering and fighting, he gets the man who killed his father and brings him to justice.  He is the quiet superhero who gets the job done while everyone else is raging at each other.

He is also distinguished from the other superheroes because he is understated and self-effacing.  He does not call attention to himself in the vain, preening, OK, narcissistic ways that the other heroes do.  We are drawn, I think, to Iron Man, for instance, because he so clearly needs our approval.  The Black Panther is more like Bruce Banner, as played by Mark Ruffalo.  He is deferential, with a wry sense of humor, but also a wry sense of himself.  There is a kind of “how did I get here?” expression that pervades his character.

So I will talk about the complicated movie that gives the backstory on the Black Panther from the point of view of the women in the story – they, his connection with Africa, and perhaps the mysterious substance Vibranium – may distinguish the Black Panther, I think, from the other superheroes in this universe.  In the process of doing this, I may shed light on certain aspects of the movie, but will miss some of the important plot lines – lines that were clearer to me on first viewing.

Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett) was the female figure that I could distinguish on the first showing.  Wise and older, Ramonda is T’Challa’s mother and a regal queen who, as a mother, has a good handle on the strengths and weaknesses of her own children.  She knows them, she is proud and unquestioningly supportive of them; she also very quickly moves from being Queen to being a refugee when T’Challa is presumed dead.  And, as important as she may be, she stood out to me as kind of a stock character. 

The problem I had was with distinguishing between the other three women who supported and protected T’Challa.  I think I had this problem for multiple reasons.  Probably the first reason was because of my male chauvinism, which is intimately bound up with focusing on the male hero – not on those who are supporting him.  This was aided and abetted, however, by the cool irreverence with which each of the three treated him – irreverence that bordered on disdain – and it could be read as that except that they were also clearly deferential.  Each was attached to him, in her own way, and each was ultimately caring for him, concerned for him and supportive of him, but also cool to him.  They were, none of them, subservient even though each was ruled by him.  These similarities in their relatedness to T’Challa served to group them, in my mind, into a sort of female archetype that hid the differences in their characters and in their relationship to T’Challa.

I remember once lounging at the pool with three of my women friends around me.  A male friend swam over from the other side of the pool where he had been observing us.  He commented that seeing me from across the pool allowed him to imagine that the interactions between us were much lovelier than it felt when he joined us – where he experienced the women – in relation to him and to me – much more like the many sisters he grew up with than whatever it was that he was imagining – and envying – from afar. 

The first woman of the troika in the movie that we are introduced to is Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).  She is the general of the royal army.  She is striking for her shaved head and laser like focus on threats and how to address them.  Her irreverence/disdain is expressed towards T’Challa in the opening scene when she predicts that he will freeze when he comes face to face with his former lover whom they are bringing her back from her work as a spy.  Okoye, the head of the Wakandan special forces and T’Challa’s chief body guard, is deeply loyal- but it turns out that this loyalty is to Wakanda and not primarily to T’Challa, despite the fact that she is very personally attached to him.  When he has been apparently overthrown, she, in spite of herself and her personal loyalties, pledges her support to the usurper and to the continuity of Wakanda.   

The second woman, Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong’o), is the ex-girlfriend whom T’Challa “rescues” from her undercover mission of protecting women who are being enslaved in Nigeria.  In fact, she doesn’t need rescuing, but he needs her to be present at his coronation.  She has the power both to freeze T’Challa – he stumbles to be coherent when first seeing her again, almost costing them their lives - but also to encourage him, especially if he wants to win her back, to reconsider the non-interference policy that Wakanda has practiced for centuries, hiding their technological superiority from the western world.  As his potential queen, she holds considerable power – but she is in no hurry to utilize it – if he does not agree with what she proposes, she will go back to doing what she loves – and, though she will be disappointed that he did not see the light, she is not dependent on his doing that nor does she “need” him.

  

Finally, Shuri (played by Letitia Wright) is T’Challa’s kid sister who is brighter than T’Challa, sassy, and plays Q to his James Bond, providing him with gadgets, including his suit.  Shuri makes fun of T’Challa, checking whether he froze and delighting in the fact that he did, but also suckering him into a prat fall and disparaging his forever bringing in broken white boys for her to fix.  She is also the one of this troika that is most able to express the ways in which she idolizes him and is most open about how attached she is to him and fearful of losing him.

In so far as comic book characters are shaped by their relationships, including their early relationships with other comic book characters – so in so far as this is a work that expresses something true about human relationships and human development, T’Challa’s character is different from the other superheroes, I believe, because of the relationships with these four women.  And the particular way in which his character is different is that he is a narcissistically healthy individual.  His powers are more thoroughly and complexly woven into who it is that he essentially is rather than being add-ons or unwanted intrusions or the result of some traumatic transformation.  He is thoughtful about his powers in ways that the other superheroes are not, and he is grounded in his sense of himself in ways that he will use them in ways that they are not.

Now, as I write this, I realize that only Thor has grown up in a culture where his powers are an expected part of who it is that he is.  But Thor’s royal family does not provide the kind of nurturance that T’Challa’s does.  Of course, T’Challa’s family includes the shameful secret of T’Chaka’s murder of his brother for telling the secrets of the culture – and the subsequent abandonment of T’Chaka’s brother’s son, T’Challa’s cousin – the usurper who comes home to challenge and apparently successfully overthrow T’Challa - N'Jadaka or, by his American name, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan).  But let me return to that later.

Narcissism, or self-love, is, I think, a necessary and central component of every single person’s development. In successful narcissistic development, self-esteem is woven seamlessly into who it is that the person is – so much so that the issue does not seem to emerge.  Adjectives like self-confident, easy to be with, centered, psychologically healthy, and, apparently paradoxically, selfless - characterize these people.  So the last thing that we are likely to think about is their narcissism.  Narcissism has a bad connotation.  The narcissist all but screams “Look at me!” partly as a result of fearing that if we don’t do that – if we don’t admire them – they will cease to exist – it is only in other’s eyes and minds that they feel alive because they haven’t been able to internalize a stable sense of themselves as valuable that allows them to navigate the most painful moments in life – the moments of narcissistic injury.  But I think the narcissistically “healthy” individuals have not somehow been able to bypass the painful process of narcissistic development and facing moments of narcissistic injury, but they have actually engaged in integrating self-confidence into their core selves as a result of experiencing and surviving these moments – more or less intact.

T’Challa, as narcissistically competent as he is, is vulnerable to narcissistic crises.  The “freezing” that occurs is at the moment when the object of his love – the person he admires, but also the person whom he most wants to be admired by – is in his sights.  He questions whether she will admire him.  Now, he may also, perhaps, be swept away by her beauty and being in her presence, but all three women emphasize and don’t let him not know that they know that he froze.  That he asked himself, “Am I worthy?”  And he knows that he cannot answer this question, it must be answered by others – by her.  That is, his value is ultimately not internally determined, but determined by others.

When Barry Larkin, the gifted shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, was inducted into the baseball hall of fame, he related the following story.  When it was apparent that he was not just going to be a professional ballplayer but a star, an older star had him lie on his back at second base in the one the large baseball parks.  The other player asked him how he felt.  Larkin responded that he felt small.  The other ballplayer remarked, “Good.  Remember that feeling.  Baseball is big.  You are small.  Baseball is bigger than you.” 

T’Challa is reminded by these women who love and adore him that, as important as he is, he has limits, that he does not know it all, and that it is the tribe, not the individual; it is the country, not the person, that matters.  T’Challa is selfless not because he is not narcissistic, but because he is deeply narcissistic and deeply narcissistically loved, but also known by others and because he knows himself that he has limits and that he is loved not in spite of those limits – but partly because of them.  Despite his becoming the king, it is the country that he is king of that is important, and he should be working to be worthy of the honor of his crown, and the country is there to be served by him, not the other way around.

I think it is far from accidental that the most comfortable and human of the Marvel Superheroes is African and that he radiates not the external powers that we might envy, but the internal power that we hold most dear, but that is very hard for us to achieve.  James Cone, in his theological position that the cross and the lynching tree are equivalent,  articulates the ways that being the one who is “done to”, which is the basis of the Christian religion, is an easier position from which to consolidate a character of integrity than from the position of the one who is “doing to”.   In so far as T’Challa is a thinly veiled African American character, but also a representative of an entire continent that has been “done to”, I think he is being used to represent how this development can perhaps best take place from a position of apparent disempowerment.

Of course, the story of his cousin, N'Jadaka, is the cautionary tale that clarifies that just being done do does not make one noble.  In fact,  N'Jadaka is ultimately depicted as terminally wounded and unsavable, even with all the Wakandan resources, and his wounds lead him to destroy many lives and nearly the country of Wakanda.  He represents the taking on of a false version – a comic book version, if you will - of the white power approach to the world – the approach that the only way to power is to subdue others – to subjugate them and to exploit them – to become colonizers who are better at it than the white man.  This is a failed narcissistic path that is all too common. This is not T’Challa’s path.

I think that T’Challa, determined by the dynamically complex relationships he maintains with the four female characters, proposes that narcissistic fulfillment does not come as N’Jadaka proposes from taking what was not given to you by using the full measure of your powers (as the colonizers do – taking home their booty and then protecting it to essentially prove their worth), but it comes from continuing to live – openly and constantly -- in tension with those around you who are constantly evaluating you and from whom you are therefore in constant danger of narcissistic failure – but these selfsame people are the  those who love him most deeply and part of that love is to both support but also help keep his self-love in check.  Another way of saying that is that narcissistic health is not some goal that is achieved, but a constant state of self-regulation that occurs in the context of our relationships with people who (when all is going well) love you.  In T’Challa’s case, though he has the resources to move ahead, he is constantly in danger of losing them, and the women around him continually remind him of that so that he does not forget that and lose their esteem and value that he ultimately depends on.  

What is endearing about T'Challa's character is that he wears the mantel of this complex set of interactions lightly.  He knows that the judgment, critical though it may be, comes from a place of love and caring.  That those around him are not saying, “You have to live up to this standard or I won’t love you,” which is the kind of message that creates problematic narcissistic development, nor are they saying, “Whatever you do is fine with me because I love you,” which is a promise that is very hard for people to keep.  Instead they offer a reality based and orienting message, “We hold you to a high but we believe achievable standard based on who you we know you to be.”  And he says, in effect, “Yeah, I am that guy – or I’m trying to be.  Sometimes I will fail.  Sometimes I will disagree.  We will talk about it when that happens and work something out.”

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we all had a network of at least four people who were working with us at all times to help us maintain our internal equilibrium?  In the real world, this kind of attuned connection, ideally, takes place early in our development.  We carry forward the expectation that some form of it will be available through the connections that we have with others.  Narcissistic issues - problems with managing interpersonal relationships - emerge when there hasn't been enough early attunement for us to reasonably expect it later - so we withdraw from the world at the slightest hint of rejection - or we parade our accomplishments before others as if that would make up for what is missing.  An important part of long term treatment of narcissism is providing the kind of reparative attunement that will afford people the opportunity to join in the network of sustaining interactions, that include survivable narcissistic injuries, in the course of everyday living.

I watched the movie 42, another Chadwick Boseman film, as part of the process of grieving his loss.  I have written also written about The Avengers End Game, Captain Marvel, Age of Ultron and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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