The politics of Luke Cage are kind of tricky.
To be fair, a lot of this has very little to do with the show itself. Luke Cage is the first Marvel Studios project headlined by a black character. It is also the most high-profile black superhero project since Catwoman and Blade: Trinity in 2004. More than that, it is the first major African American superhero story of the modern franchise age, arriving on Netflix two years before the scheduled release of Ryan Coolger’s Black Panther adaptation. This means that Luke Cage carries a phenomenal burden of representation.
More than that, Luke Cage arrives at a time when racial politics are more overt than they have been in a very long time. The politics of race have long been an essential part of American political discourse, but they have seldom been placed front and centre in the way that they have been over the past couple of years; the shooting of Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman, the high-profile deaths of young black men at the hands of law enforcement, the protests in Ferguson, scandals like the poisoned water in Flint.
When Luke Cage was released to stream, the United States was in the middle of a particularly heated (and racially charged) election cycle. The Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, was threatening to deport Mexican immigrants and build a wall along the border. A cornerstone of the Republican primaries had been a debate about limiting immigration of Muslims. Trump described African American communities in apocalyptic terms, while also arguing that talk of racism was more damaging than racism itself. Trump appealed to resurgent white nationalism.
This was the climate in which Luke Cage was released. As such, the show was always going to be political, whether it chose to engage with those politics in a literal manner or otherwise. As showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker argued at Comic Con in 2015 and as Method Man explicitly states in Soliloquy of Chaos, the world is ready for a bulletproof black man. No matter what story Coker and his team chose to tell, there would always be a raw political element to the story.
At the same time, there is also a certain clumsiness to the show’s politics that become clear in the way that Take it Personal deals with some of that baggage.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: luke cage, take it personal | Leave a comment »
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