Potential and Power in Black Superhero Film Comedies

Abstract

This article revisits a small subgrouping of Black superhero comedy films that were critically denounced at the time of their release but which merit reevaluation in light of contemporary calls to move away from an overemphasis on traumatic narratives in twenty-first-century Black films. Whereas films and other media fixated on Black trauma frame their characters' experiences mostly through the abusive and dominant power of individuals and institutions that wield racialized violence, Black superhero comedy films are useful in reframing expectations for the power and potential of their characters. Robert Townsend's The Meteor Man (1993), Mike Binder's Blankman (1994), and Louis CK's Pootie Tang (2001) are films in which the absurdity of the titular heroes, that is the way they stand out against prevailing norms, provides both the characters and their communities with a salvific equilibrium. Functioning in part as parodies of conventional superhero narratives, these films share events such as threats to family and/or community, the acquisition or construction of costumes specific to crime-fighting, and uneasy relationships between the news media and the superheroes saving cities. To varying degrees, all of these elements are played for laughs. The movies also share some of the exaggerated aesthetic conventions of comic books and film/television treatments of superhero stories, further reiterating the relationship between these broad comedies and their source material. However, my particular interest in analyzing the characterizations and plots of these films is in how they positively express the way the Black superhero figure realizes and fulfills his purpose, transcending the schemes and systems of criminals and other powerful figures that would bring him down.