Black Lightning
I’m a complete sucker for the superhero genre. If someone can fly, swing from buildings, or in this case, shoot lightning out of their body, then I am a quick and dedicated fan. For me, one of my favorite things about the superhero genre is the assumptions these productions (comics, tv, movies, video games, etc) make about justice and visually represent criminality.
Black Lightning is a new member of the DC television universe on the CW. Black Lightning first appeared in DC comics in 1977 (Black Lightning #1) with a number of narrative ups and downs that include him getting superpowers, losing superpowers, and being rejected from the justice league. This new iteration of Black Lightning on the CW cashes in on the old aesthetic and tropes of the Black Lightning character while injecting some new life into the story by situating the show in a cultural context full of gang violence and racial politics.
The significance of a black superhero responding to racial injustice is an easy sell to me. Black Lightning checks my boxes of superheroes that have to figure out what justice looks like in relevant social situations. Most telling, the fan consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, comments that “Black Lightning doesn’t reinvent superhero TV, but it does give the genre a necessary jolt with real-world plots…” The hordes of amateur critics at Rotten Tomatoes aren’t wrong––Black Lightning is an exciting jolt to the bland superhero shows on the CW (God knows I can’t bring myself to watch another episode of Arrow).
However, my skepticism lies in just how “real” the “real world plots” actually are. Episode 1: The Resurrection opens in media res on Jefferson Pierce (aka Black Lightning) sitting in a police station waiting on a report of his kidnapped daughter (the major plot point of the episode.) While he waits, he stares vacantly at a television reporting on ongoing community unrest and a recent protest.
Interestingly enough, across the screen of the news report flash images real protest footage. However, there’s a quick asymmetry drawn between the real images employed in the Black Lightning narrative. The real protest images were generated from the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore––uprisings fueled by police violence and systemic injustice. Whereas within the narrative of Black Lightning, the images support a narrative about gang violence.
The motivating social issue of the citizens of Freeland (the city where the show takes place) is not police violence, as it was in Ferguson or Baltimore, but instead, a gang called The 100.
Gang violence is certainly a problem to be considered, but it strikes me as a bit disingenuous to appropriate the images of real protest, real uprising, and real direct democracy that oppose police brutality to support a narrative only partially naming the real problem at hand. The narrative’s focus on gang violence is a stand-in for the issue of systemic police violence in black communities across the U.S.
The possible power and cultural meaning behind Black Lightning relies on how a superhero could possibly generate an alternative understanding of justice in situations of pervasive police violence, however if the show cannot even sufficiently name the problem as it has appeared in the contemporary discourse, then it’s power and efficacy to speak about justice may wane. It’s not that Black Lightning is not incapable of addressing these issues, but that this stand-in waters down it’s possible message.
