I chose the movie Black Panther.
It’s a polished counterrevolutionary (anti-revolutionary, reformist, or opportunistic) superhero movie. What is particularly interesting is that this superhero movie is apparently spawned by the so-called “left-wing culture” of contemporary America, and takes a particularly acute social conflict — racial discrimination — as its theme. So it’s a very good example of what kind of culture wars contemporary capitalism is waging.
Today in the 21st century, racial conflict in the United States has intensified along with the economic crisis. The black poor are still suffering from poverty, drugs and street violence. The news that the American police wantonly shot innocent black people challenged the bottom line of the public again and again, and riots occurred in many areas where the black population gathered. Black elites also launched a social movement represented by “Black Lives Matter”, calling for the rights and interests of black people in all cultural occasions. The sharp contradiction creates a strange spectacle: on the one hand, the elite has created the shackles of “political correctness”, which makes everyone speechless and afraid to act, on the other hand, the poor of all ethnic groups at the bottom are still practically oppressed by exploitation and discrimination. The new social bomb is gathering energy, and no one knows when it will explode, or when the next Martin Luther King will appear.
(Film still)
Different from Martin Luther King in the old era, a large number of black people have become the top social elites in the new American society — sports stars, movie stars, politicians, singers, scholars and bosses… They don’t live in The “Wakanda” of the African jungle, but in the “Wakanda” of American high society. They have their own “modern lives” to defend. The poor African Americans, and the poor and war-torn blacks of Africa, who live outside Wakanda, continue to languish in misery. In order to change the status quo, some people themselves become more and more radical. Thus the movie Black Panther was born with the metaphor of reality. The new Martin Luther King, Jr., still propagates his strategy of nonviolent struggle in the face of black injustice. By this time, however, he was already outfitted with a vibranium suit as the new Avengers superhero.