The Press Box - Dystopia in the USA and the Search for Utopia in 'Black Panther' | Damage Control (Ep. 420)"

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins discuss Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address (2:52), why Representative Joe Kennedy III’s Democratic response was underwhelming (8:06), and the complicated reactions to Marvel’s upcoming film 'Black Panther' (15:36). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The BS podcast, Cousin Sal and I playing guests the lines. More importantly, the Ringer NFL show, subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Cameron Collins. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Today, we're talking about the State of the Union.

We're talking about the Democratic response to the State of the Union, and we're talking about the State of the Union. of the Democratic Party. And then it's Black Panther season. We're going to talk about Ryan Cougler's upcoming Marvel epic, Twitter zealousness, and how we are already exhausted and also amused by the hype for this damn movie.

But first, Cam, let's talk about a few of the other things that people were excited and upset about this week. First and foremost, I feel like it's Bruno Mars at the Grammys. Destroying Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z and a few other people for the album of the year award. A few other people, including Lord. Yeah, including. I mean, but that's the thing.

It's like, Bruno Mars is so ubiquitous at this point that it seems to me pretty just. I can't hate on that. I don't know. I don't know. People are mad and no. People have decided because the Grammys polarize us. They divide us. Bruton Mars is bad now.

And I can't get with that. Well, how about the Cleveland Indians deciding to ditch their problematic mascot, Chief Wahoo? People have a lot of feelings about this. Yeah, I feel like I know with absolute clarity before knowing that much about sports at all that people are being annoying. about this. And all I can say is as someone who grew up in Richmond and has ties to Washington, D.C., the Redskins, you're next. And Migos has another album out. It's called Culture 2. It's way too long. That's all anyone wants to talk about about the new Migos album is that it's way too long. It's like 20 plus tracks. I'm old enough to remember when the Migos' whole schick was that

their albums were way too long. They would be like 26 tracks long. So this is a throwback to classic Migos in a way. And people should calm down. Yeah, I particularly don't care because who listens to albums anymore anyway. I listen to singles, man. I listen to popping records. You know what was also too damn long was the State of the Union address that Donald Trump gave Tuesday night. The State of Union started at 9 p.m. and Donald Trump spoke for 90 minutes. And it was exhausted.

My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to be. to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American dream. Because Americans are dreamers too. It's interesting because it didn't sound like a lot of other sort of high-profile Trump speeches because he was actually pretty low-key and sounded like he wanted to go to bed. But it's otherwise was this conventional Trump speech in that he basically ran it about immigration in MS-13 for 90 minutes. The press seems to think that it was a conciliatory speech just because it wasn't super loud and obviously angry. Right.

And I'm kind of frustrated by that response. Well, we could talk all day about how easily impressed people are when Trump has a different attitude, IRL than he does on Twitter. Yeah. But I think we're not only are we past that conversation. We're past being surprised by the political press when they're surprised. I didn't watch all 90 minutes. I did what I did with SNL, which is I wish.

wait for everyone to point out the most important parts. And I watched those. And what I got from those was, as you said, just sort of a deliberately toned down hoodwink. And I have to say, I'm more angry at, I'm more angry at, I'm more angry at, like, the press than I am at him. I think he's doing what he does, which is roping us into thinking that he's more moderate than he is,

and then finding ways to undercover, do something really damn. dangerous. This is a familiar rhythm to me, but the press is still buying it. Yeah, Trump is very good at giving bear hugs. I'm old enough to remember the beginning of the White House's immigration debate where the whole tactic was Trump coming out of nowhere and being like, I love Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. I would love to make a deal in immigration. And then everything that followed after that from an actual policy perspective has been a dystopian anti-immigrant campaign. Right. But again, it's weird. Trump had this way of setting the stakes in the beginning by pretending to be overly friendly and approachable and then

revealing himself to be a reactionary. Except the fact we all knew he was, you know, we all knew how he felt about immigration and Mexicans, et cetera, et cetera. Well, what did you want out of the State of the Union? Uh, to go to bed. Oh, well, you know what? Okay, so here's the thing. Watching the State of the Union, I didn't really want anything either way out of Trump. What I really wanted was to see the Democrats do something. Right. I'm not saying. saying, I'm not necessarily saying that I wanted the Democrats to have their own Joe Wilson, you lie moment yelling at the president from the box. Although maybe I kind of did want that in my heart.

It would have been cathartic. It would have felt like someone was awake over there, you know, on the Democratic side. Right. I tuned into the city of the union to just see how the Democrats would handle having to sit in that room and sort of play their usual respectability about like, we're in the house chamber and this is a hollowed American. tradition and have to sit there and react to these applause lines despite the fact that the president they're reacting to is this unconventional offensive man who almost transcendently offends

everything about the democratic sensibility. And I don't know, I just watched it with this sense of, I hope they all get up and leave in the middle of it. Right. State of Union night is always hard for me because I dislike speech writing language. I dislike the vagueness of it. I dislike the role that giving a speech at a moment like this plays in our conception of how that person approaches policy. I dislike, you know, it's like you could not check your phone all day, have this whole queue of NYT push alerts about Trump trying to make the FBI seem more fraudulent than

it is, about people being wrongly deported, about whatever else, about the opioid crisis, about all of these things. And then still some people will see a speech like this and think, you know, I think that he's calming down. And it's like I, the whole, the whole thing is incredibly insipid to me. Right. I mean, in a sense, this is true of Obama in his best moments. It's absolutely true of Obama.

True. Trump in his best moments that political speeches are often bedtime stories. Absolutely. And the problem with last night is that apart from Trump's being too long, there were then responses from the Democrats. There was more than one. I should say that, and in fact, they're not even done because Maxine Waters is giving a state of the union response later. I'm curious about.

It's on BD. That's a political speech that I'm actually excited for. That one might have a little flavor. Yeah. Bernie Sanders gave a Facebook live rebuttal that I watched and that was fine. It was. But the official response from the Democrats, the Trump's state of the union address, came from Kennedy. It came from Massachusetts Congressman Joe Kennedy, the third.

I think you had it right when you said a Kennedy. A Kennedy, to be honest. One of the Kennedy's. You could end it there, right? The latest in the Kennedy series of... Right. Totally. The Kennedy extended universe.

The Kennedy extended universe, exactly. Joe Kennedy, who honestly, I had not heard of Joe Kennedy. He replaced Barney Frank, by the way. He was like a famous liberal firebrand for Massachusetts. He replaced Barney. Frank and the House and a lot of people had not heard of Joe Kennedy. And when the Democrats announced last week that he was giving the response, there was a lot of eye-rolling.

The contrast between the Democrats and Trump is that Trump is, he's sort of this figurehead who's adored within like white nationalist politics currently. And if you're the Democrats, the easy thing to do, if you're trying to mount an existential counterargument to Trump, you tap the women and black people and people of color not only in your base, but just in your representation in Congress. And you have that sort of person be the mouth of the counter argument to Trumpism and specifically the, again, a lot of the white nationalist themes of Trumpism. Absolutely. And instead, the Democrat's dollar judgment was to pick the white redheaded Kennedy who no one has heard out. Right. What I felt watching this was a, was a mix of

things. On the one hand, I felt like, good for this guy. He's being anointed. This is, you know, like, this is, this for me is a sign, but this is who we're going to be, by we, I mean, the Democratic Party powers that be, are going to be putting their weight behind. Good for him. He looks young. He looks excited. I, on the other hand, this is like when Vanity Fair has a Marilyn Monroe cover or a Kennedy cover, where I'm just sort of like, oh, all right, this, again, you know, like, it's not only that I'm tired of dynasties. It's not. It's not. It's Not only that to your point, I think that represented, like in terms of demographics, this was not the right choice. It was also just, I don't want another well-manacured, politely spoken, politely passionate guy who knows how to hire really good speech writers very sort of distant from anything, no matter what he actually stands for, distant from my lived reality of being a person who is under attack by Trump.

I just am not in the mood. I'm not in the mood to facilitate that. I'm not in the mood to enable it and act like I think it's a good idea. And so for this to be the guy, it's not even a matter of disappointment. It's whatever the most insipid for of boredom is, because it's just like, all right, all right, this is it. You know, like, this is the guy. This is the guy. All right.

He's definitely, I want to characterize Joe Kennedy, the third for our listeners a bit. I mean, his name is Joe Kennedy. Joe Kennedy. I want to say, first of all, I think his speech was decent. The theme of his speech was basically, he's kind of doing like the polite white boy version of the Denzel's speech in Malcolm X about sending alcohol to Harlem to pacify us. He's just wanting to Trump saying that basically the reason Trump so's division is to pit different groups of Americans against each other so that the Republicans can pick our pockets while we're not looking. That's the theme of his speech. And I thought that was a, I thought it was a well-written speech.

But here's the thing about Joe Kennedy that I think apart from all of the interrogation of his identity as a white man and whether that's the ideal person to represent the Democratic Party right now, I will say that Joe Kennedy talks and presents himself like a guy who is splitting the difference between Barack Obama and Cory Booker. And the whole time I watched that speech, I was just like, this is too post-Aaron Sorkin, two theater kitty. In the performance. Yeah. His way of speaking, his cadences just seemed very, like he's going for this soaring, transcendental quality.

That it's weird because I think in the aughts, maybe that was just really how Democrats wanted to think about ideal political rhetoric. But now, post-Trump, and also just like after two terms of Obama, it seems so quaint, unless you're somebody who has real pathos. Like you said, you described him as distant. He's sort of distant. Again, he's a rich Kennedy descendant, right?

Right. I mean, I think it was a fine piece of writing. But, man, I like this quote that everyone who's in support of him online or was his port of him online on Twitter last night sort of landed. on this quote that goes, Bullies may land a punch. They may leave a mark, but they have never,

not once in the history of our United States, managed to match the strength and spirit of a people, united in defense of their future. End quote, end my interest. I feel so many ways about this on-paper innocuous statement. A, yeah, if you're a Kennedy, bullies don't win. But bullies are winning every day. Bullies win all the time.

talk to people who've been bullied. Not to be too much of a literalist about this, but there's a way in which a statement like this, but they have never, not once, in the history of the United States, it's like that's a funny way to gloss over something like slavery, as not slavery in itself, for example, but the hope toward a better future when slavery was ending, you know?

It's like, yeah, yeah, there were definitely people the entirety of slavery who were hoping for slavery to end, but let's have a conversation about the actual Subjection, the dark period, a period that we would seem to be in right now. Like, his take on the Trump administration was, you know, it was a good think piece. I read it before. I read it a number of times. People write that think piece every day.

His speech writer has a lot of tabs open, I can tell. But I just, man, I just am completely, this is what I mean by, bored by speeches. There's really nothing that that guy can say to me that is going to be exciting or interesting or give me hope that Trump is actually not going to be successful. for the foreseeable future. I don't get it. But whatever, y'all want to lose, so. This isn't even necessarily like, this is not the Bernie Bro podcast.

Like, I'm open to Democratic politicians. I'm just not open to this sort of throwback respectability appeal of somebody like Joe Kennedy, even though I think ultimately he gave a decent speech. And more importantly, he kept his short. It was 12 minutes. just listened to a 90-minute speech. I mean, he clearly is ill. You know, he's got all that froth on his mouth.

He had weird froth on his mouth. I will say, if there's anything that's going to scuttle his future is that his debut moment, man. He had a weird chapstick rabies situation going on with his lips. It was not great. It didn't look good. It was the weirdest thing since Marco Rubio sprinting for that water bottle. Kamala Harris ain't got a lip problem. I'm just saying that he's starting from behind the pack.

So catch up, Joe. Catch up Joe Kennedy. You got time, though. All right, enough about the dystopic United States. Let's talk about Wakanda, the Black Utopia. Wakanda. My king. Stop it.

I have some new tech to show you. It is lighter. It's uprogy energy. And it's got some swag. Very nice. Finally, after two years of hype, Marvel's latest superhero movie, Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, hits theaters in a couple of weeks. Charity, I don't know if you know this, but Black Panther is actually the first Black

movie ever made. Milestone. At least that's my sense from the conversation so far. Black Panther premiered in L.A. earlier this week, and the earliest word of mouth from people who saw it suggest that this conversation is going to be fucking exhausting. Lots of posturing. On the one hand, you have very well-meaning white critics acting like this movie is the second coming that it is a civil right.

act that voter ID laws never happened because this movie is coming out and they can feel good about it. On the other side, you have a lot of POC critics pretending that they've never seen a black movie before, I don't understand what's happening. Pretending that we've never had black art.

Pretending like, Blade never happened. So, there are a lot of good tweets about this, good in quotation marks. Charity, what are some of your favorites? Quote unquote, good. Oh, man. Okay. Here are some good tweets. Black Panther is exceptional. the James Bond of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

You've seen nothing like this in a superhero movie. It's bold, beautiful, and intense, but there's a depth and spiritualness that is unlike anything Marvel has ever done. It's 100% African, and it is dope A.F. Tell me my 100% African podcastos. How do you feel? This is from a white critic.

Right, that tweet. You're not a white critic. To be clear. To be clear. Tell me how you're feeling. about the state of criticism in regard to this movie. Well, I think it's interesting because in general, right, Marvel movies and Marvel movies, Ryan Coogler, who directed this, is an interesting director, I guess, to give a Marvel movie to.

But otherwise, it's just strange to see people engage with Black Panther as this 100% African thing, despite the fact that it's a movie that exists in a very broad universe of non-black films. Beyond the fact that it's obviously not the first black movie ever made, and I've seen black people in movies before. You've seen black people in superhero movies before. Right. About black people. Right. The ethnic overdetermination of Black Panther has become a sort of meme, and it's become an exhausting sort of meme.

And that meme has lived since the cast for this movie was first announced, however many. years ago that way. To be fair, almost every black person is in this movie. Literally every black person except for Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy just, I don't know where he is. He's not an movie. I think he was probably busy. He's busy. Everyone who's not Eddie Murphy is in this.

It is one of those kinds of movies. And I don't want to downplay. You know, it is significant to have a Marvel movie that has like a majority black cast. Yeah, for sure. Black people plus Andy Circus. Can we shout out the two? Is it two white people? It's Andy Circus and Martin.

Freeman. Yeah, that's right. Shouts out to... They can hang. They can hang. I really genuinely do not want to downplay that. I absolutely see why, in particular, people of color are really excited about this. Black people. We're really excited about this. But I think that there's something about the I feel seen moment. A corporate conglomerate has given me this movie, and I freak out in this movie disproportionate, I think, to what this movie actually is, which is A, a movie. It's not a political act in itself. It really isn't. It can't be. It was made by Disney. Disney, Song of the South, Disney. Disney, the Crows are Black people, Disney. Disney, Princess and the Frog, hardly win anywhere, Disney. There's that, but there's also just, why do we always do this? Whenever a black movie, a mainstream big black movie comes out, we seem to have this amnesia about the history of black art. And this is a kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. Why is it that a lot of the responses so far and in the foreseeable future do have this tone of, they just feel like they're coming from people,

like black people who didn't have access to black art growing up, who didn't listen to black music, never saw black people in movies. Like there's just this way that there's this difference between Hollywood doesn't make enough black movies. Absolutely true. People of color don't have enough of a role in Hollywood. Absolutely true. But that's mutated into this. There are never any black movies. There's never any black art. Hollywood never does anything for us. And it's like, I don't know. I grew up seeing a lot of black movies. I grew up seeing a lot of black art, being a lot of black books, watching a lot of black TV. I never really relate to this is the first black thing. Yeah, people forgot Tate Egg's whole life. How did this dude? That is wrote Tate

eggs out of black history. I don't like this. Morris Chessonaut just never happened. But also, no, I think it's validation, right? Absolutely. There's a sense in which it's not so much about the fact that, oh, Ryan Cooleer is interesting and it's a superhero movie. It's that it's a big budget thing. It's a big budget product. It feels like black people going up on the stock market, right? Like it's a, it feels like stock and black people is at an all-time high.

Right. In a way. Right. I think part of it is also the fact that. It's a movie called Black Panther and Trump is president and people are, you know, there's small things like that. Yes. That if I'm too cynical, can seem like a sort of overdetermination. But, yeah, I mean, at face value, I get it.

The thing that seems more stressful is it's almost like there will be a quiz at the end of this for all black people. What do you mean? It's almost like this a weird obligation to like this movie, even if I could not care less about Marvel movies. movies in general and don't see that much of a reason to think that much more excitedly about Black Panther than I have felt about any of the Avengers movies, for instance. Right. I'm particularly excited because I really believe in Ryan Cougler as a director. I guess I just, I don't want to treat this like just a black product.

No matter how many black people are in it, no matter the fact that it has a black director, all of that is great. And I, like everyone else, I do feel seen. This is a big deal. but it is also, it is just really hard not to be cynical about, for me, not to be cynical about the fact that it is still ultimately the product of a corporate conglomerate who has done their testing and knows how to satisfy the broadest range of us, knows how to get us excited on the red carpet. People were wearing royal purple. It's like, it's, I love it. But I'm also just like, all right, you know how to play this game.

We are a demographic. You are treating us like one. I don't want to overinvest in the, I guess, I don't want to ascribe too much political importance to this. I think that's the thing that I'm a little bit feeling weird about. You know, like I, in part because the story of Hollywood for the last number of years has actually been that black movies catering to black audiences do do really well. Movies like Straight Out of Compton that Hollywood underestimated. Kevin Hart routinely does really well the box office. He is a legitimate Hollywood star.

You know, movies like Hidden Figures, et cetera, outpaced their expectations. So it is, on the one hand, very smart for Disney to be like, well, there's this trend that black journalists have been writing about for a while now that Disney's not the first one to notice. They're capitalizing on it. It is a good moment for this. It is the Trump era. This precedes the Trump era. But it is the Trump era. But it's, you know, I don't want to act like this is going to save me.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like early on when the cast was announced, around that time, I remember Marvel recruited Tarahassee Coates to do writing for the comic for Black Panther, Box and Gay as well. Right. So in a way, it's not just, I don't think the fandom is just sort of manufacturing the sort of ethnic stakes for Black Panther out of nothing. You know, it seems like Marvel and Disney are encouraging it a bit. Someone there reads the New Yorker and knows who the smart black people are to hire. Again, as much as I understand excitement, it's more so that the movie has taken on a loaded meaning. Not just a loaded expectation, but a loaded meaning that I'm not, again, I'm just not really comfortable with it because it is, again, it's a black director, but it's a black director working in a system that is not actually. Fubu. It's not for us.

No, totally. Like that some of the vehemence is sort of disconnected from the means of production for this kind of thing. Right. And I think that we're at a point where I don't think we can keep leaving that, you know, leaving that to the side. Because, in part because part of the reason I want us to not put so much pressure on this movie or describe so much meaning is because generally when we do that, and I don't just mean black audiences, I mean anyone who ever ascribes any sort of meaning to these things. When we're actually sitting with the thing, it is as if we're watching it with this checklist of things that are, you know, like this movie's got to be woke as hell. Right. It can't just be Black Panther.

It can't just be the Black Marvel movie. It has got to come correct in every conceivable way and a way that other movies just don't, you know, like other movies don't have to. This is a debate that happens every time any sort of demographic gets a movie and it feels like a rare. thing. It's happened to the LGBT community all the time. There are so many debates about movies like Call Me By Your Name and the sexual content and all these things because people have a certain set of expectations for even when these things enter the mainstream and straight people or white people are going to see them, a certain set of expectations for how they still have to feel like they're in-house in some way. And I just feel like we're always setting ourselves up for disappointment in this way that is impossible to make a piece of art that checks every box.

Because for black people in particular, you've got, yeah, you've got the woke side. You've also got like the HOTEP side. You've got the upper middle class blacks. You've got the sort of lower class, like economically blacks, et cetera. You've got a diverse polity of people who are not all walking into this movie with the same set of expectations, but who all have expectations because we are receiving this movie in the context of I feel seen. So that just makes it impossible to make a movie that's going to please everybody. You know, it's just like, part of me just sort of wants this movie to be quietly released

and for us to not have expectations. Much in the way that I faced to get out, didn't really know many of the people, you know, like the people involved aren't huge stars. No one had expectations really for a Jordan Peel horror movie was going to be. And then we walked out of it sort of having various responses, but largely satisfied because, you know, that, like that excess scrutiny, it just doesn't match up with the way art works. Listen, the bar it needs to clear for me in terms of create black superhero movies is Blank Man. I'm going into Black Panther and it's got to beat Blank Man.

It's got to clear that hurdle for me. I have to make the world a secret place for my children. You got to be with the win. David Williams. Please call me Blank Man. Blank Man. That's my critical standard is Blank Man. I think you are the one person whose standard can be satisfied by this movie.

All right. Well, on that note, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Cameron Collins. We both have a lot of packing to do. We're going to Wakanda. We're going to be gone for a bit. But we'll see you next time on damage control.