Luke Cage is a Bulletproof Black Man in a Hoodie

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Luke Cage has been unveiled on Netflix and has caused quite a stir with the streaming public, and mostly in two opposite directions.

I’m loving the trend of filmmakers placing cultural “Easter eggs” in contemporary film, offering subtle or explicit confirmation that they understand the contextual time and place of their work. For example, the second episode of Luke Cage features an imaginary cameo with Jamel Shabazz, the man responsible for one of my favorite all time photojournalism books, A Time Before Crack.

Luke Cage was introduced to the Marvel Comics lexicon in 1972 and was also known as Power Man. His story is one of an escaped convict who was framed by a former friend for heroin possession. While in the infamous Seagate Prison, Cage was experimented on, apparently resulting in his superhuman strength and resistance to gunfire.

The overall buzz has been that while black audiences have been loving the show, white audiences have offered mixed reviews. The one regular white character I’ve seen in the show is a detective, and at that a dopey one who makes bad dad jokes. This affects me none.

Luke Cage doesn’t provide the stereotypical black characters one commonly finds in “mainstream” media. The female lead is a beautiful, educated, athletic, independent adult-aged woman with a career. The characters are quick, witty, and aware of the various forces that swirl around their neighborhoods such as gentrification, dirty politics, dirty cops, and imperfect family and friends- some trying to do good and some not.

The emotional center of the story initially revolves around a barbershop, and I won’t go too much further into that because I don’t want to ruin the story for you. Pop’s, the barbershop where Cage sweeps hair and washes windows in earnest, is a sanctuary where kids and adults can enjoy their games, basketball and chess, in the same multigenerational space. There is a swear jar, and everyone is expected to contribute when offending.

In my media, I’ve always looked for a blend of comfort food, yes, but something new I could learn from. The first two cassette singles  I ever purchased were by the Beach Boys and Run DMC, so while I was a white suburban kid in the 80’s, I was curious about the world beyond our cul de sac. That curiosity hasn’t changed for me.

So maybe Luke Cage wasn’t made for me, per se. He doesn’t look like me. But does that matter? Did it matter to the young black men who were expected to swallow all those years of unabashed Schwarzenegger, or Stallone, or Van Damme? Or, to put it in the more recent superhero sphere, Wolverine, Ironman (second fiddle Terrence Howard or Don Cheadle), or Superman? At least Jamie Foxx had some decent screen time as the villain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But he was still the villain.

It seems like once a generation the black community is granted a strong male hero character. Shaft was the man in the 1970’s, then there was…Oh. I guess they’re more than due, huh? I loved Beverly Hills Cop, but being a comedian at heart, I’m guessing Eddie Murphy doesn’t exactly fit that archetype.

Interestingly, Luke Cage isn’t on television. It’s on Netflix, a streaming service with a monthly fee. A person has many options of shows and movies and documentaries available to them at any time when subscribing to Netflix. Viewing or not viewing Luke Cage doesn’t take away from any other programming. It’s not like it’s taking up the 7 p.m. time slot on a cable channel. Any person who doesn’t like the idea of a black superhero who lives in a black neighborhood and listens to black music while combating the (for the most part) black crime in his neighborhood, is welcome to just not watch it.

In generations past, white folks not living in the city might hear about popular black media, but it often wasn’t right in front of them. When Malcolm X, the movie about the man was released, some kids in inner city schools went to watch it during school as a field trip. Those movies didn’t play at my local movie theater in Menomonee Falls, and adults around me sneered at the idea of taking time off from school to watch a movie (never mind that our suburban field trips visited places of which the educational value could be debated). But that’s how much of a rarity it was, black history being celebrated in cinematic grandeur was such a rare occasion that it was completely understandable to take the school bus to watch the movie for social studies class. Nobody I knew thought it was especially attention worthy when Braveheart came out because heroic movies about white people aren’t that unique (or more accurately Scottish, before the American amalgam of white came to exist).

Additionally interesting is that, in our contemporary sociopolitical climate where we routinely see the documented killing of black men by police, Cage appears impervious to bullets. Not by accident, he puts up the hood on his sweatshirt when going to work against the bad guys. Perhaps not getting shot while wearing a hoodie – not flying, or invisibility, or heat vision, or metal claws – is the most important superpower in the black community.

I guess the overall question is: What do you seek in your entertainment? Do you want to observe through a different pair of eyes, or do you want to see people who look just like you? For black folks, the latter may be a new experience. For white folks, getting all dyspeptic about Luke Cage, maybe it’s time a black guy finally gets to wear the white cowboy hat for awhile. And maybe that white hat is actually a bulletproof black hoodie.