Talokan Forever
As an archaeology writer living in Mexico City, I spend an above average amount of time imagining life in pre-colonial Mesoamerica and early colonial Mexico. So I was thrilled when I learned the second Black Panther movie, Wakanda Forever, would introduce Talokan, an uncolonized, underwater Mesoamerican kingdom just as powerful as Wakanda. I don’t typically watch Marvel movies—in fact, I avoid them—but I saw Black Panther in the theater and, like everyone, fell in love with Wakanda and the richness with which the uncolonized African nation was imagined and depicted. I was excited to see what the Black Panther team would do with a Mesoamerican equivalent.
Reader, I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. I’m clinging to what there was to love. First and foremost, there’s our man Tenoch Huerta serving international movie star in the role of Namor, the Talokanil king, which is enough to justify any caliber of movie to me personally. (For more on him, I recommend this profile in Vice by my friend Emily Green.) As is to be expected in the Black Panther franchise, the costuming, by Ruth Carter, and the production design, by Hannah Beachler, are staggeringly good and overflowing with references to the Mesoamerican past and present, which are fun to spot. (Here’s a Twitter thread with some of them.) I was especially taken with the Talokanil lieutenant’s hammerhead shark headdress, which calls back to Mesoamerican warriors wearing the accoutrement of apex predators like eagles and jaguars, updated for 450 years of life in the ocean.
What I didn’t love is that I had no idea what the Talokanil lieutenant’s name was until I Googled it after the movie. (It’s Attuma.) Same goes for any Talokanil character who wasn’t Namor, of whom there are only two or three who are identifiable enough to conceivably have names, let alone personalities. I can’t say it better than Angelica Jade Bastién did in her review in Vulture:
The look of Namor is beguiling—as are the ideas behind his Talokan lineage (he was born in the 16th century and witnessed, as a young child-king, the morally repugnant, heartbreaking violence of Spanish conquistadors). But despite the film’s nearly three hours, there is seemingly not enough time to flesh out his people and culture. It constructs a rushed origin story never focused enough on building out Talokan. Who are its people beyond their isolationism? What do they worship and delight in? What powers their beliefs in a world where a godlike being like Namor exists? Within this part of the film’s tapestry, no character possesses a hint of interiority.
What’s so frustrating is that the Black Panther movies excel at exactly this kind of character-driven world building when it comes to Wakanda, and they barely need dialogue or a narrative to do it. Scenes like T’Challa’s coronation at the waterfall in the first movie, or his funeral procession in the second, are so densely packed with visual and character detail that it feels like hundreds or thousands of years of Wakandan history and culture are contained in every shot. In one of only two crowd scenes in Talokan, meanwhile, everyone is literally a silhouette, any possible sign of individuality or character obscured.
The depiction of Indigenous and colonial history in Mexico, too, is deeply generic. We see one pyramid on a beach—not a city, or a town, just a pyramid—to represent the pre-marine-metamorphosis community of Talokan, and we are told they were so frightened by Spanish violence and smallpox that the rain god Chaac helped transform them so they could escape to the sea. As a child, Namor accidentally visits a hacienda, witnesses the enslavement and exploitation of Maya people, and burns the whole place to the ground. And then he just…hides for another few centuries? This guy is a superhero, functionally invincible and immortal, and that’s the choice?
The whole thing, especially the invocation of smallpox, feeds into the erroneous argument that the decimation of Indigenous societies in the Americas was inevitable, something even all-powerful Namor is powerless to resist or even reimagine. In reality, many Maya communities did both, building and living in a parallel world colonial society could barely see and, thus, still hardly acknowledges. A superhero fantasy should have no limits on its imagination, but in this case it can’t even match the extraordinariness of what really happened. When Wakanda Forever looks at Mesoamerica, it can’t escape the colonial gaze.
As Bastién writes, Talokan’s sole characteristics are its isolation and fear. It exists only in relation to its would-be colonizers, trapped in a simplistic version of history instead of being allowed to break free of it the way Wakanda is. The love and specificity poured into creating Wakanda makes a powerful argument for what European colonialism and the slave trade destroyed in the real world, without needing to resort to facile parables that, at best, say nothing new about how or why that destruction happened and, at worst, implicitly justify it as the way things had to be. Talokan deserves the same.
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