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January 16, 2006

Martin Luther King, Adult Swim, 2006

So, the day before MLK Day, 24 assassinates the first black president. Over on Adult Swim, the Boondocks envisions a great "What If?" fantasy of mine by bringing MLK back to life, only to proceed to (pretty much) flub the thing entirely.

Why flubbed? For starters, what's the news-flash in suggesting MLK would be disappointed in the state of the world and black America? I'm disappointed in the state of the world and black America and I'm just some guy. Of course MLK would come back against the war in Iraq and at extreme logger-heads with the cable TV war-entertainment complex. There's no new information or analysis in either, but by teasing those propositions out and turning them into sub-plots the show chooses cheap, easy cynicism over speculative, lucid dreaming. I mean, this is a cartoon on cable at 11pm doing a "What If?" riff. What more license does anyone involved need to go for imaginative broke than that?

Instead of lucid dreaming, last night's Boondocks settled for riffing on time-traveler agnosia. (All that rap and the giga-Ipods and the booty shaking! Oy!) The problem is that time travelers are always already shocked by future media, this even when their time machines are cardboard boxes. Remember Videodrome and the homeless shelter where hobos watch TV all day? The Boondocks moment where MLK and Huey stare aghast at BET is just a shaded, flipside echo of that imagining of TV as "the retina of the mind's eye." The untold story isn't in how the retina was detached. (That's the opening premise.) The real story is in the process of reattaching said retina, the big questions being how, through what means, to what end, does it hurt, and so on.

Or, put another way, last night's episode is a form of hero abuse. I'm all for deconstructing prevailing myths, but what's the upside in bringing MLK back only to write him as getting bullied by Bill O'Reilly? This is like imagining that Nelson Mandela got out of prison after 20 years only to wander around Johannesburg and stare melancholy through plate-glass windows of malls and McDonalds, all the while shaking his head at the deprivations of globalization. In so much as MLK comes back from the dead and interacts with O'Reilly at all, he comes back to (non-violently) destroy him, to make him obsolete, to out-point him in the ratings and so on. He comes back to end the ratings system altogether, to start his own cable company, bring back live mass rallies, whatever. These aren't science fictional, these are the questions and projects daily set before anyone engaged with media making or politics or just plain living in our particular kind of now. And sure, Cornell West's rap record was, like, lame. And Al Gore's cable station is a mite too earnest. But those dudes aren't responding the questions raised by the mass mediascape by submitting to bullying by idiots. Engaging the problem of the mass - the how, through what means, to what end, does it hurt, and so on - doesn't guarantee a positive result. (Like a good record, for example.) It does mean, though, that you were in the fight, and The Boondock's MLK was nowhere near it.

The moment in the episode in when MLK says fuck it and goes off to Canada feels right (in a self-immolated Buddhist monk kind of way), but mostly because his refusal to engage the bullshit is most immediately directed at his imprisonment in an episode of Boondocks in the first place. MLK's media implosion via n-word sets him free from the episode but only at the cost of his own existence and in the furtherance of the show's tendentious comedy-politricknal hijinks. That his exit speech somehow sparks a thoroughly pointless "revolution" is only insult to injury, as gassing all those thousands of pixellated nuccas on the White House lawn to install Oprah as POTUS is an Orwellian "victory is defeat" nightmare if there ever was one. I mean, Oprah?

So what could the episode coulda, woulda, shoulda looked like? How about an "Animal Man"-era Grant Morrison storyline? Or a Steve Erickson novel? The problem of a character's agency against the grain of his/her own imposed characterhood (up to and including war against their creator) is a staple of all those weirdo, meta "comics about comics." (Animal Man or Alan Moore's 1963, for example, or the various DC Marvel multiverse colonic series.) Imagining the return of MLK (i.e., imagining the return of "the movement") is always-already comic booky and science fictional, so why not fully deploy those genre's techniques to answer "What would MLK do?"

What does a dead hero do when he's brought back from the grave only to find himself used as a prop in another generations side argument? (In this case, the Boondock's ongoing rearguard defense of "nigga" as a kind of higher love.) What does a great speaker do when you take his words away and fill his mouth with silly and obvious things? (In this case the Coz's "Pound Cake Speech?") How does he respond when you reanimate him via the yuk-yuk straight-jacket of Murphian (as in Eddie) impersonation, as opposed to, say, an open-ended, loa-style, social-field-effect interpolation? (Imagine MLK hopping person-to-person like the devil does in Fallen. Who chases him? Who surrenders? Who catches MLK the way people catch cold?) When does this great leader resolve the question of being "this great leader?" When does he start peeling off from the narrative arc later/lesser minds have mapped out for him? When do his responses finally continue his own arc, which is to say, become completely unexpected?

Posted by ebogjonson in memory, screened, on January 16, 2006 9:06 AM

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