Discussion of What Makes a Hero in Capitalism Society

What makes a hero? When we think of heroes in film, superhero films like the Marvel series are what first comes into our minds. For example, T’challa in the movie Black Panther is unquestionably a hero who selflessly puts his nation and others before himself. Unlike those films, “Sorry to Bother You” is not a typical hero movie. It is even skeptical if the protagonist, Cassius can be considered as a hero. On the other hand, while Sorry to bother you shows a clear confrontation between the protagonist and the villain, it is obscure to count Black Panther’s Killmonger as a villain. While both films blur the line between hero, anti-hero and villain, each of them suggests different kinds of a hero and their strategic logic countering capitalism.

T’challa is a classical hero with the responsibilities and duties of kingship. He is born with his background as a son of T’Chacca, king of Wakanda, a prosperous country with advanced futuristic technology and abundant natural resources. Wakanda disguises itself as a poor nation to be free of external threats and abuse of Vibranium. After the unexpected death of his father, T’challa ascends the throne and contemplates what would be the right way to rule his nations. At first, he believes that his mission is to protect Wakanda’s tradition and his nation safe. Despite his lover Nakia, who believes that Wakanda should aid those outsiders who are suffering, he still chooses to remain isolated for the sake of his nation’s security. He tracks down Klaue to stop him selling and vibranium and exposing the truth of Wakanda to the outside world. But after realizing that it is right to help and share their resources to help others outside the border, he makes a big decision to changes the long-kept tradition of isolation and benevolently invests resources on helping underserved by building the first international outreach center. His character as a hero is also well depicted in the scene where he takes agent Ross to Wakanda to save him risk-taking of revealing their real identity to the outsider.

Unlike T’challa, who is born royal with responsibilities and personalities as a hero, Cassius is just an ordinary underprivileged working-class, aiming to climb up the social ladder. The film portrays him as an ambitious man who dares to turn his back on his friends, girlfriend and even gives up being himself for success. The very beginning of the film starts with Cassius striving for his basic needs, forging his work experience and trophies to get employed and become socially stable. He also lives in his uncle’s garage, who is also at stake of getting his house foreclosed. Hopefully, as he gets a job as a telemarketer in Regal View, his basic needs started getting fulfilled. On his first day at Regal View, he ‘sticks to the script’ but fails to make any sales. Then Langston, one of his coworkers, gives the advice to use his “white voice”, sounding like “what white people are supposed to sound like”. Apparently, it turned out that he was gifted with his talent for making a good white voice and deploys it to make more sales and climb up the social ladder. As he makes more sales and gets promoted, he pays his uncle’s debt and prevents him from signing up with Worry-Free and gets his own house. But ironically, his job as a power caller is to sell Worry Free’s labor. Even though he clearly sees that his job is selling slave labors he continues to employ his white voice for his successful career, which is not a normal demeanor expected for the heroes. His cost of being successful in a capitalist society is quite painful. He loses his friends, who are striving for their rights at work and he also loses his girlfriend, who was his motive to be successful. Most importantly he starts to lose himself, trying to get into the upscale society. He starts to speak in his white voice without even realizing it.

However, Cassius starts to realize that he shouldn’t be involved in this evil plan after attending the party thrown by Steve Lift, the CEO of Worry-Free. From the beginning of when he started to work for Worry-Free, he knew that it was morally corrupt. However, by actually witnessing the deepest part of the evil plan of transforming people into Equisapeins his moral compass starts to activate. Then his moral thoughts become fully awaken as this evil plan starts to affect him. After watching the video about the mutation process, he freaks out realizing that what he snorted might be a fusing catalyst that turns humans into Equisapiens. What we should notice in this scene is what made Cassius change his stance. It seems like rather than Cassius finding out his mistakes by himself, he was forced to confront the ugly head of capitalism and this awakened him. Though Cassius does not seem to be perfectly moral as T’challa, he acts as a hero in the end. He leads the plan of involving Equisapiens to the protest. Even after the protest, after the catalyst activates and he turns into Equisapien, the film ends up showing Cassius leading the Equisapiens to attack Steve Lift’s house. Rather than becoming a fake Martin Luther King as Steve Lift planned, his appearance in the last scene is more of a Malcolm X, actively fighting against capitalism villain.

While there is a great discrepancy between the two protagonists, their relationship with antagonists also conveys a different meaning. Sorry to bother you shows a typical hero and villain conflict. Steve Lift is an undeniable villain who takes advantage by creating a new form of slavery and turning the working class into a horrible hybrid. It is true that Killmonger was a great obstacle to T’challa as he takes down him from the Throne and tries to weaponize vibranium. But what makes it unique about the Black Pather’s relationship between Killmonger and T’challa is that the protagonist eventually buys into the antagonist’s idea even though they confronted each other. T’challa learns from Killmonger that the tradition he was trying to keep was wrong. And Killmonger’s stance also seems to be quite plausible and somehow sympathetic to the audience.

Killmonger’s ends under his plans are quite plausible. The problem lies in his ends, not the means. His desire for revenge is not only personal but rather cultural. The only problem was that he was too blinded by vengeance that he chose to carry out in a violent way. Throughout his whole life, serving in the army of ‘colonizers’ he witnessed and even experienced the oppression among African Americans. On the other hand, Wakandans neglected other black nations with the excuse of protecting the vibranium being exploited but mostly for the sake of their own protection and benefits. Killmonger’s idea of reaching out to the oppressed ones outside the border was right. Even T’challa was convinced of this idea and eventually chooses to be involved with the outside world. When T’challa eats the magical heart-shaped herb and meets his ancestors and his father, he reproaches them for ignoring those who need help by saying they were wrong to turn their back on the rest of the world and that they let their fear stop them doing what is right. Then, in the end, our righteous hero T’challa changes Wakanda’s traditional political system of hiding and decides to open the door to foreign countries. He gives a speech about his lesson that “In times of crisis the wise build bridges while the foolish builds barriers.” In a nutshell, Killimonger played a key part in Tchalla’s journey of deciding what is right to do as a king of Wakanda.

Overall, the movie Black Panther is about T’challa navigating the right way to rule as a King of a sovereign nation. Challenge among the mainstream is always tough and lonely. Not only because of the strong stable power that the mainstream has but because of the inner division caused by different viewpoints. Black Panther, by portraying the unique relationship between the hero and antagonist, focuses on the inner difficulties that the minorities have. Moreover, their viewpoints and background story remind of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Killmonger resembles Malcolm X, whose father was also murdered when he was a child. His idea of revolting against the colonizers and killing them and building is similar to Malcolm X’s idea who believed that freedom cannot be achieved without violence. Contrastively, T’challa is a Martin Luther King kind, who left a famous quote that peace cannot be kept by force. In then end by T’challa opening their doors to the outside to share their resources and technology, the film stresses the importance of combating racism and capitalism with peace and benevolence.

Unlike T’challa who is always good-hearted from the beginning to the end, Cassius commits misdeeds justifying that he is finally doing something important and meaningful, making money. But when capitalism starts to rear its ugly head, he starts to change. Not only he realizes his faults, but he becomes an activist who does not stand idle anymore. However, there are a lot of other characters besides Cassius who seem to be more fit into a hero. Squeeze, for instance, goes from place to place helping people organize a union and secure their rights. Detroit is also an activist who exposes the injustice of capitalism and racism through art. His friend Salvador is truly devoted to the union. But why Cassius? By setting an ordinary character with less courage and morality as a character, the film communicates to the audience that they don’t need any heroic qualities or high moral standards to make changes to the world. What is important is facing the issue and acting against it.

Furthermore, while Black Panther emphasizes peaceful strike for equality like Martin Luther King Jr., Sorry to Bother You seems to be supporting Malcolm X’s strategic logic. Capitalism not only whitewashes their dark side, but they use fake political frameworks in order to gain their power among the minorities. For instance, Steve Lift, after he believes that Cassius can be someone who he can trust and work with, he reveals his evil plan of turning people into Equisapiens and putting up a fake Martin Luther King who controls them and works for him. It seems like Bob Riley is taking Malcom X’s that in a capitalist society, where everything is unreliable and deceptive, activism can involve violence if necessary. Regarding the last scene where Equisapiens using their mutant power and being a hero by fighting against the armed police and saving the protesters and Cassius leading the Equisapiens to attack Steve Lift it is quite probable that Bob Riley is not restricting violence as a method to achieve equality.