Pretty much, they fall where my movies do: science fiction and superheroes. Time travel, robots, superhuman kung fu, it’s all great.
My movie collection is full of the stuff.
Hell, I’ve seen Dune multiple times. (The Spice is the life!) Batman – the 1989 movie, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson – is my favorite movie and one that I used to watch once a week at one point. I had the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan jigsaw puzzle that glowed in the dark. When I really got into Star Wars, I had to watch them until I knew the scripts.
But ask me what black character I’d want to be in sci-fi and superhero movies, and I’m stuck.
I am.
Just … stuck.
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| “Do me a favor? After you defrost him, tell him I’m really, really sorry.” |
Nope, because he gets a bad rap for betraying Han Solo while macking on his woman, plus he’s all pimped out. Not my style. No one ever remembers that he blows up the second Death Star.
Benjamin Sisko from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?
Not bad, but he’s so Angry Black Man in Space. Even though Avery Brooks is awesome, especially at being angry. Who else can seem even scarier by yelling at you … with perfect pronunciation?
Mace Windu?
Samuel L. Jackson is one badass Jedi Knight, but he’s not on screen enough, and he dies.
Morpheus from The Matrix?
He dresses well, doesn’t die, knows kung fu and is good with a gatt. But even in the Wachowski’s millennial-era multi-culturalism, Morpheus plays on the ultra-religious Magical Negro who helps the white male protagonist on his journey and sacrifices himself.
How did I ever first think about this topic?
It began with Miles Dyson from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Recently I introduced my fiancee to the Terminator movies.
Somehow, in 2012, she’d never seen the first two films. Now, I could get not seeing The Terminator; she was 8 when it came out. But T2? Didn’t everyone who was alive in 1991 see T2? It was the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater, for cryin’ out loud.
But nope, she’d never seen it.
Anyhow, amid all the liquid-metal awesomeness and a billion things getting shot and blowing up, my family always brought up Joe Morton.
He played Miles Dyson, the scientist and inventor who ends up creating Skynet, the robot-controlled defense system that built the Terminator machines.
“Of course, a black man’s responsible for ending the world,” my parents would say. Yes, one more piece of negativity to attach to black people, who function under the weight of any one depiction of us possibly being used to define all of us. That concept has a name: the burden of representation.
Chances are, James Cameron wrote the character as race-neutral and the casting director picked Morton as a bit of color in the picture. It’s a time-honored Hollywood practice of adding black actors to supporting and bit roles in movies alongside the white lead actors.
But it’s also interesting how the role can be re-read through the race prism. How I knew black folks who saw Dyson’s character as another play on the racist idea that an educated black person is dangerous. It’s his fault that the Terminators came to be, right?
That’s why Sarah Connor breaks into his house with a gun drawn on him, his wife and kids? Yet we’re supposed to feel sorry for her when she breaks down in tears, realizing what she’s done. How about future-Lt. Van Buren’s tears for her husband staring death in the face? How about Dyson’s son covering his injured father, begging Connor to stop?
But you can read the bigotry one level deeper, into the bigotry of low expectations. The film sets it up that perhaps Dyson possesses the first Terminator’s CPU chip and a piece of his arm and hand like some futuristic, magic monkey’s paw. Was Dyson smart enough to invent Skynet on his own, or did he do it only because he had the cyborg pieces?
And you can go even deeper than that – the conspiratory theory level. Who were the mysterious “they” that Dyson references for finding the Terminator stuff? Do “they” want him as a fall guy?
But we don’t get any answers to those far-fetched ideas. This is a sci-fi action blockbuster from 21 years ago that’s still wicked awesome. Those answers are not in the script. But in another classic trope of black characters, Dyson becomes a heavy believer and is martyred for his trouble.
How ironic, for the original Brother From Another Planet.
