King of the Black Millennials: Coogler Watch

Alright class, let’s review:  the homie Ravynn Stringfield and I are so unbelievably excited about the revival of the Black Panther franchise that we decided to write a serial about it. You can catch up on "King of The Black Millennials" with Ravynn’s first post  and my first post. 

Great, now that we are all caught up, we can move on to lesson two: Coogler. (Well, actually this is less of a lesson and more of me typing, rambling, and listening to Lauryn Hill at a DC Starbucks, but we weren’t all born to be professors, right?). He is the director of the upcoming Black Panther films. 

Okay, so we all know how much I love Ryan Coogler. And if ya don’t know, now you know...

Ryan Coogler is basically who I want to be, a young Black filmmaker creating major waves in the industry. He’s a 30-year-old USC graduate who writes and directs movies that make you stop, feel, admire…then think and likely cry. I remember watching his first feature, Fruitvale Station. I felt…. I felt everything in the world for my fallen brother, for my people. Right then and there, the desire for freedom became tangible, desperate, urgent, identifiable, and real. And what really hit home for me was the fact that he made me want to get up and make something. And that’s how I started this blog (that I hopefully keep writing…pray my strength in The Lord, y’all.) For me, that’s one of the marks of a great film. When a story is told well, it awakens my inner creator and I know it’s real. 

Coogler also did this in Creed, which he co-wrote and directed and also stared Michael B(ae) Jordan. I went to see the film mainly to see Jordan, who I’ve admired as an actor since Friday Night Lights, and also to see what all of the Rocky hype was about. Confession: I’d never seen any of the Rocky films before. But what I got was far better than the colorblind, star-studded sequel that I expected. It was compelling, and motivating, and beautiful, and thoughtful. Actually, I’ve written plays (yes, plural) based on one short scene where Adonis is unbraiding Bianca’s hair. I think that Bianca, Adonis Creed’s girlfriend, played by Tessa Thompson, is one of the most well written Black female characters that I’ve seen in a long time and deserves a film of her own. Coogler strikes again. 

What I like most about him is that he’s a force to be reckoned with…and he’s only 30. Think of all the great films he’s going to make. Gee. Whiz. 

Twice now Ryan (I’ve decided that we’re on a first-name basis now) has written stories and characters that speak to our souls and directed these pieces into the annals of cinematic excellence. 

 So my question is, can he make this happen for Black Panther and override the Marvel Machine?

T’Challa (aka Black Panther) is different than Coogler's other male protagonists: Oscar Grant III and Adonis Creed are unlikely champions. But, we are expecting T’Challa to save us—we are expecting him to be a super hero. A lot of people gravitate towards the mighty, the people that they know are perfect. I tend to gravitate towards and resonate with the unlikely when it comes to stories. I think that might be true for other Black people, too. We are constantly told by the world that we can’t and often must rise above the odds instead of just existing above them. So, every time we win, it’s a feat in some way or another (and if you don’t think it’s a feat, might I wake you up with some Ta-Nehesi Coates?) So, I hope that with Black Panther, we don’t see the inherent struggles that come with being Black, all over the world, just go “poof!" The odds need to be obliterated by our hero, not by some practitioner of colorblind, unrealistic, Hollywood “magic.” Our hero needs to know. 

On the other hand, like our Ankh-wearing, Malcolm-quoting, KRS-One-listening, brothers and sisters of the 90’s, I think that we need to see kings and queens—because that’s who we are.  T’Challa is, in fact, the King of Wakanda. We saw him walking fiercely in his well-tailored suit, cloaked in royalty in Captain America: Civil War. I’d like to see more of that. It will remind us of who we are, what lineage we come from, and what we can be. That’s revolutionary.

So Marvel was like “alright, Imma get me a director who can do both."

Really, when I watch super hero movies, I’m pretty uninterested in the flashy, computer-animated action scenes. I do kind of like the scheming though. But what I find most interesting is the story behind the figures that we deem as “super.” How did they get here? How do they deal with being not quite human? Who matters to them? Why do they feel responsible for fighting the fight that they are fighting? This is where I think Coogler will excel. He can make the distant people feel close and have significance in lives far away from theirs. I’m a middle-class girl from Kansas who goes to a PWI—I’m nothing like Oscar, but in Fruitvale he felt like my brother. Coogler does a good job of conveying universally Black struggle by fleshing out very particular character. I think that this director will be able to give us the ownership of a hero that we as Black Millennials are looking for. We will know T’Challa and we will love him. 

As we saw in Creed, Ryan also convincingly gives us a champion. Aside from the actual results of the matches, we see Adonis morph into an athletically superior man with crowds of fans and his fair share of haters. He is not just a boxer, but also a great boxer on the path towards becoming even greater.  #BlackExcellence. So it seems fair to say that he is 100% capable of not only giving us T’Challa, but also an aesthetically pleasing, super-human, commercially marketable Black Panther. 

Black Millennials, we should thank Marvel for getting this absolutely right by putting our King in the hands of the very best. Better yet, let’s thank God for gifting this world with a hero of a filmmaker…THE Ryan Coogler.