'The Woman King' Is The Black, Female Avengers
#194, Part 1: "The Woman King," "Moonage Daydream"
Edition 194, part 1:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: With three new movies hitting theaters that I wanted to write about, I literally broke my outbox. Substack informed me my email was too long, and so (for the first time in newsletter history!) I’ve split this week’s movie talk into two separate emails. Hope you enjoy both.
Here in part 1, I’ll explain why the surprise hit The Woman King is just like Marvel, and why the new David Bowie doc is so good.
The Woman King
The word used most often to describe The Woman King, in every review and article about the movie’s surprisingly strong box office opening or A+ audience score, is “fresh.” It’s a “fresh” action adventure movie.
The word is coded and about as subtle as when they call white athletes “scrappy.”
Let’s call the movie what it is — unapologetically Black and female. Focusing in on the real life, all-female kings-guard of an African kingdom in the 18th century, it’s a celebration of the Black, female form in motion, and that effect is truly powerful. It’s awesome to see these powerful women fight, dance and simply exist in the way they do in this movie. No elegant way to say it’s just really, really cool.
There’s zero precedent for this kind of story on this scale told from this perspective, a fact that should be both applauded and pitied, and in fact there are so many examples of white erasure in similar war stories that this movie has become almost unassailable. To hate it is to hate progress.
So rather than say I hated it, I’ll introduce my own form of coded language and say this was literally a Marvel movie.
I mean that in every sense of the world. Its storytelling decisions are simplistic and patronizing to the audience. Stakes and consequences are (almost, I will say almost not entirely!) non-existent. Emotional manipulation was in full force with the string music and the characters’ waterworks. Even some of the action sequences were gray-colored and bloodless in the classic Marvel house style (seriously, for a movie featuring literally hundreds of point blank sword deaths, you’d be amazed how little blood there is).
As is the case with many Marvel movies, the performances are excellent and the actors overqualified. Viola Davis might have the most commanding and captivating screen persona on the planet right now, matched almost beat for beat here by newcomer Thuso Mbedu (fresh off of Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad”). Lashana Lynch, lest we forget, was briefly given the “Agent 007” title in the latest James Bond film. John Boyega impressed me in Breaking.
So I know when I register my dislike of this movie it comes with the enormous grain of salt, an admission that it’s not my type of movie. Despite its social messaging, I hold it to the same standard, and I’d like to believe that reading this newsletter has helped several of you shake loose of the Marvel brainwashing trance that holds the industry captive at the moment (although it’s slipping with every new MCU bomb). I won’t go so far as to accuse those who like this as being simpletons, I’d just say that the trance breaks down quickly here the moment any sort of critical thought is applied to it. I visibly eye-rolled and shook my head at a few moments.
Now, dumb war movies have always been crowd-pleasers. For the past 100 years, movie goers have watched movies like Braveheart, Rambo, The Last of the Mohicans, 300, Troy, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai and dozens of others paper over shoddy storytelling with the propaganda of white, male bravery. Villains — most of them non-white, and the rest vaguely Russian — are reduced to almost comical levels of evil, and their henchmen nothing more than cartoon characters, all so that the audience feels nothing when our hero cuts them down two at a time.
That’s exactly what happens here. In fact, this movie is basically a greatest hits medley of war movies gone by, sometimes with painful obviousness. And what’d’ya'know, producers of Hollywood, that the same story told with Black characters would be just as effective?
If anything, it’s a testament to moviegoers that they’ve embraced what is perhaps the most anti-white and anti-male mainstream movie to have ever been released. White people here are slavers, and they’re systematically sliced, bashed or set on fire. These days, that’s one of the few things we can all cheer for unapologetically.
I’m just not really sure that alone earns the movie a free pass from criticisms that it’s a shallow, cheesy big budget punch fest, one which halted all surprise and innovation after the premise and the casting process. Thanks, but no thanks.
Moonage Daydream
Theaters
The new David Bowie documentary is one part concert film, one part abstract cultural essay, and three parts philosophical magnum opus. It doesn’t attempt to explain the life or impact of the rock n roll icon as much as it simply presents the unadulterated gospel according to Bowie — which I could sum up as the following: life is chaos and we should embrace it.
The movie is an overwhelming sensory overload, cut like a two-hour psychedelic music video that manages to walk through Bowie’s long career without a hint of exposition. Each phase is presented like a thought experiment.
Bowie exploded onto the scene in early 1970s, after the cultural chaos of the late 60s seemed to confirm the Nietzsche-n idea that “God is dead and we have killed him,” prompting an era where people were ready to let their freak flags fly. Bowie’s outlandish, androgynous, alien-like Ziggy Stardust character was artifice upon artifice, which Bowie spent the rest of his career slowly stripping away until amazingly in his later years he seemed to have found the enlightenment he spent so long searching for. His restless creativity and courage to take risks is on full display in this film and serves as a major inspiration to anyone who dabbles in the creative arts.
I loved this movie, but to be fair I came in already being a huge Bowie fan, and I had the privilege of watching this movie in IMAX, with the full benefit of sound and fury it provides. I think the movie works no matter your preexisting knowledge or size of screen, but if you can copy my experience, I highly recommend it.