Which brings us to our biggest problem with the show, and the thing that arguably makes it the biggest missed opportunity in the Marvel world so far: this is a show about a black superhero set in modern-day New York, in which there appears to be virtually no racism, and certainly no systemic racism.
Superheroes are, at their heart, a power fantasy, god-like individuals who can stand up to the world’s bullies and tormentors, and so often created by those who are oppressed themselves. And in advance, Coker seemed to be emphasizing this element of the show: at Comic-Con, he made headlines by telling the crowd, “The world is ready for a bulletproof black man.”
A similar sentiment is said within the show itself, with Method Man, playing himself, telling a radio interview that there’s “something powerful about seeing a black man as bulletproof and unafraid.” Initially, it proves powerful in practice — the decision to make Cage’s superhero outfit a simple hoodie brings to mind Trayvon Martin, and it feels immediately iconic.
And yet the show seems almost pathologically afraid of being in any way provocative or controversial, and steers away what could have been incredibly fertile and powerful dramatic territory. We meet, essentially, one unambiguously racist character, the police guard featured in the prison flashback episode who inadvertently gives Luke his powers. But opportunities to invoke the grossly disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans (an issue tackled in Ava DuVernay’s upcoming documentary “The 13th”), or the infamous Tuskegee Experiments (as Robert Morales did in his excellent Marvel comic “Truth,” about experimentations on African-Americans before “Captain America”) are pretty much squandered in the same episode.
For a show so clearly nodding to “The Wire” (drawing much of its supporting cast from there), it fails completely to show really any evidence of systemic racism in Luke’s world, whether in the political world, the justice system or, most notably, the police. Occasionally, the show attempts to brush against some of these issues through the invocation of a dashboard video, and the assault of a child by a police officer. But it’s incredibly hamfisted in the way it does it — in the dashboard sequence, Luke is the unambiguous aggressor, and the cop that beats the kid up is black too. Indeed, basically every cop we see is a good guy (even Frank Whaley’s corrupt Scarfe is painted sympathetically), and police violence is instigated mostly by ex-cops. Indeed, in a weird ret-con that suggests that Marvel were afraid of anything but making Cage incredibly saintly, he’s turned into having been a former cop himself.
Furthermore, the major, and most evil, villains are all African-American, who are the ones pushing guns onto the street, up to and including a woman who on the surface appears to be a crusading politician attempting to protect the neighborhood. In the grossest political moment, the show even links a Black Lives Matter-type movement to the militarization of the police, with Marla. As Justin Charity points out at The Ringer, those elements (along with Cage’s oddly Bill Cosby-ish aversion to swearing), and many other things, makes the show feel oddly conservative, more All Lives Matter than Black Lives Matter. Charity writes, “Any other uptown native might’ve been quicker to discover that Harlem’s greater, untouchable menace is the NYPD. But what, Luke Cage wonders, about black-on-black crime?”
It may be that the show isn’t consciously trying to do this (though it’s perhaps worth noting that Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, who still oversees the TV division, and his wife have between them given nearly $1.5 million to Donald Trump or his charity…), that it’s just that the muddy writing means that the points its trying to make don’t land. It feels like Coker and co. wanted to namecheck hot-button issues, but didn’t really want to properly examine them.
Perhaps you could say that the show is just meant to be escapism, that its wish-fulfillment doesn’t just involve a black Superman, but one where he lives in a world without racism, where he simply has to deal with the issues that any other superhero does. But by invoking police brutality, and the names of Trayvon Martin, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Freddie Gray, and the almost countless others, it suggests a willingness to be a more ambitious, important show. In a few moments, it even threatens to step up and be that show — there’s a good scene in episode twelve where a white cop talks about how Cage makes him feel impotent and scared that’s nearly onto something before it blinks and becomes an I-banged-your-wife joke.
Those moments demonstrate that there was a way to make a really vital, important “Luke Cage” in a world post-Ferguson and post-Charlotte. To examine the role of criminals within the black community, but not to put the blame squarely on them. Not to demonize the police, but to show the institutional problems that still need to be tackled. That its potential feels so palpable, sadly, just makes the squandering of it seem like so much more of a waste.
