Representation or Escapism: Till & Wakanda Forever
Revisiting a New York Times article from 2011 titled, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” is always a starting point for me for thinking more deeply about some strange and rather baffling commonly held ideas about movies that critics are eager to regurgitate. Dan Kois likens the media one takes in to a diet - asserting in terms of intellectual or emotional nourishment, that dopey, exciting, expensive movies are to junk food as slower, longer or more “boring” artsy films are to healthier vegetables and that these experiences may not be initially gratifying as the cinematic equivalent of comfort foods pumped full of fat and sugar, but they are necessary for keeping one healthy and grounded. A bitter pill for middlebrow philistines to swallow.
The trouble with this mentality is the assumption that all audience members would choose loud, disposable escapist fantasies over smarter, more edifying entertainment options if we could. That we are precisely the petulant children major studios think we are. It implies that entertainment is to be defined solely as an unserious, inconsequential and diversionary use of one’s time rather than a consideration of work that elicits a slower-to-form, more complicated intellectual or emotional response.
That is to say that this latter, more complex assessment of “art” intrinsically befits movies that are apparently too serious to qualify as entertainment themselves. No possibility that running toward the world at large rather than escaping from it, seeking to learn something new and challenging about the world or about ourselves, is something many of us actually consider entertaining.
Even despite the insistence of Hollywood studiothink and the passionate anti-intellectualism of American society, unable to shake the fear and mistrust of art held over from its puritan genesis, it may be that thinking deeply about a complex, ambiguous and challenging movie for many people constitutes a wholly entertaining pastime. Ruled out of Kois’s assessment as a matter of two mutual exclusives is the idea that many people might actually enjoy eating healthy vegetables. Or, in going along with his analogy, that some us consider those impersonal, assembly-line tentpole productions (Marvel, Disney, Star Wars properties, Avatar, Dune, Tarantino) and Oscar bait-y “prestige” offerings (Green Book, Mank, King Richard, A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody or Don’t Look Up) to be those same obligatory bitter pills.
* * *
I was just barely able to get into a screening of Chinonye Chukwu’s incendiary and moving Till before it disappeared from theaters. That I was even able to see it all seems lucky as it was pulled from theaters early to free up screens for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. On the outside, it looks as if the dramatization of the leadup and aftermath to one of the most shocking and gruesome crimes in American history and the subsequent evolution in Mamie Till-Mobley’s turning her grief into social action was less appealing to audiences than Marvel’s anticipated sequel to its top-grossing property.
Audiences must have chosen the no-commitment, wish-fulfillment fantasy over the depressing historical drama (escape over engagement). For just a moment, I’m inclined to go along with the conventional studio wisdom which proposes that the audience for those two films don’t overlap. Though something in me should have known that monetary successes of major movies have virtually everything to do with their million-dollar marketing campaigns and much less to do with the content of the movie.
Progressive-minded people who believe in social justice talk a great deal about issues of representation in media but exactly what kind of representation do they mean? What do we mean when we say representation? I’d like to think it means more than swapping out white male action heroes for leads who are black, female, gay or physically disabled. I’d like to think representation also applies to what kinds of stories are being told.
It may apply to stories about poor people, or at least more earthbound examples of actual human beings than the current flavors of the star system, which studies have for years shown to no longer be a factor in ticket sales. Or that the idea of diversity and the supposed oppressive nature of binaries need not only apply to race, gender or sexuality. That there are such things as intellectual, ideological and historical diversity. What kinds of ideas are being dramatized in the picture? For some less visible demographics working on both sides of the camera in Hollywood, with its undoubted history of racial discrimination, perhaps starting to finally gain a pivotal foothold in commercial moviemaking, though encouraging, strikes me as not going far enough.
To me, it makes little sense to have a dozen movies playing in theaters featuring diverse casts and crews of non-white, non straight, non-males if each movie isn’t thinking any differently about what it has to say than any of the others. New bodies, same obsolete ideas about justice and heroism, the ancient cowboy’s appraisal of good and evil. Big deal. Truly anti-mainstream ideas - which can call us to action, threaten an oppressive status quo, hold our corporate owners accountable for their treachery - may be less common in American movies than the presence of black or female or LGBT talent, on or offscreen.
Likewise, I fear that a lot of people who likely avoided seeing Till assumed they knew what they were going to see - a tragic story, with a lot of crying and anguish that reminds us of America’s racist history. But there’s more going on in the movie than just pointing fingers at the source of a malignant social ill. The idea that people would avoid such a feature because they find it “depressing” happens to be what I find depressing.
the real Emmitt Till
Emmitt Till, a 14 year-old Chicago boy, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a racist mob in 1955 while visiting his cousin in Mississippi for whistling to white woman outside a grocery store. The subsequent journey by his mother in her relentless quest for justice is looked at as one of the sparks that ignited the Civil Rights movement. But the movie is about more than just the transactional racism and brutality committed by citizens. Though certainly not blind to the everyday racism of American society, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler in a strong, deeply invested performance) learns throughout the legal aftermath of the deeper and more insidious institutional structure of racism inherent in the media and justice system.
She must learn, the NAACP tells her, that her quest for justice is now part of something larger, and that she must suppress her rage and hysteria in public. There is a PR game to be played with the media, because the moral importance of the trial is still unknown to a public largely unaware of the damage segregation and racism are having on the country. Mamie can only think about her own grief and anger. Now she finds herself in a political morass that promises further unwanted attention.
Chukwu’s work here is stark and without melodrama. She considers multiple viewpoints on Mamie’s side of the ordeal. That of her mother (Whoopi Goldberg) and her father (Frankie Faison) who accompanies her to the trial in Georgia, her husband (Sean Patrick Thomas) who is not Emmitt’s father and has to stay behind or risk becoming part of the story, and early movement figures like Medger Evers (Tosin Cole) at an important historical precipice. Then there’s Emmitt Till himself (Jaylen Hall), who’s given enough screen time to register as more than a conduit to the main story, which humanizes him. Though this kind of movie tends to win awards primarily for actors, Chukwu’s film is not overtly soliciting them. Everyone on screen is just so damn good, an indelible and lasting impression is made.
Proper time is carved out before Emmitt Till’s trip to show us who he was. In a true-crime obsessive society, where the police have to waste precious time during an investigation addressing lies and conspiracy claims made by online sleuths and armchair tipsters whose knowledge of homicide investigation and concern for the victims is dubious at best, Chukwu is interested in Till himself. A mature focus is on the wronged party, who he was beyond his identity as a victim. Confident, extroverted, magnetic, with no knowledge of his place in the racial pecking order, Emmitt Till’s tragedy is suggested as an ironic failure on the part of Mamie as a mother, who just couldn’t bear to teach her son to fear white people. Her son was raised to grow up holding his head up high and proud of who he was. For this, he paid the ultimate price.
There's still another kind of representation to be considered. How is this story being told? What elements of the story is the filmmaker privileging? Representation as it pertains to style. Chukwu is less interested in the details of the crime and the outcome of the trial, which presents itself as a farce the moment Carolyn Bryant egregiously lies under oath about the incident to a white Baptist jury apt to believe her. Keith Beauchamp, whose tireless researching of the events over the course of 27 years caused the Till case to be reopened by the United States Department of Justice in 2004, used his findings as the basis for his own stirring documentary in 2005, The Untold Story of Emmitt Louis Till.
This new movie, partially scripted with Chukwu by Beauchamp, shows Mamie and her supporters leaving the trial before its conclusion, knowing full well in advance the outcome would be insulting to justice and decency, something the real Mamie actually did. It’s one of Till's most powerful moments. Mamie didn’t need to waste time hearing the lies of white supremacist murderers and their racist court system and neither do we.
It hurts to think that so many people who could have been compelled or charged by a film like this, in a narrow-minded and emotionally brittle conviction to avoid anything that might sadden or challenge them, avoided Till because of simplistic and shallow assumptions about what it offered and how it would make them feel. It is edifying and energizing, and not depressing to get affirmation and perspective from this kind of movie. This is the function of Drama, as true as was when it was created by the Ancient Greeks.
Despite how much this misbegotten demarcation baffles me, it occurs to me that black audiences may not always want to wallow in stories of persecution and victimhood or have their story defined by suffering and trauma. It’s not for a white liberal grouch like me and my banal guilt to tell black America what imagery it should value or how it should spend its disposable income.
But I can’t shake the thought that the lavishing of attention on a bloated item like Wakanda Forever is a flip side to the tepid response and performance of Till in terms of what stories people (of all stripes) in America prefer. We are, after all, living in an era when right-wing interests are actively covering up and suppressing education about the mere existence of the Civil Rights struggle which arguably has yet to end., as school textbooks in a shockingly large portion of the country are written and distributed by far-right organizations.
These texts downplay or outright omit Civil Rights struggles (or for example, Slavery as the cause of the Civil War, the genocide of indigenous native peoples, the histories of Labor unions, socialist movements, feminist movements and many, many other vital historical chapters viewed by the texts authors as a threat to their agenda). Sadly, where history’s teaching points about institutional injustice are being whitewashed in a willfully ignorant culture with such poor educational standards and so little curiosity about its own ancestral criminality, a film like Till may be a more important cultural item than it initially seemed.
In a bizarre echo, I noticed that mainstream and trade critics who were not fawning over the movie were reluctant to come out and say they didn’t like Wakanda Forever. I imagine the blowback for coming down on something that meant a lot to people in 2018 forced certain writers to sheepishly pad their language or focus on elements of the movie that they liked. Whether this comes as a result of not wanting to be called racist and lose any of their Twitter following or out of some somber attitude fostered by the untimely death of the movie’s star - the gifted and appealing Chadwick Boseman - the kid gloves were effectively on for this Marvel entry. It was amusing to watch many of these promoter critics squirm and BS their way through their reviews. Though some didn’t hold back. There were exceptions (like that of Angela Jade Bastién for Vulture) and they’re worth a look.
To some extent, I can see why many people have a personal connection to the first Black Panther. They saw its aesthetic as something attractive: A highly advanced black society with its own proud history, free of racist oppression and colonization, with cool, futuristic technologies that aid in the quality of life. We see that women are effectively in charge of much of this society. They're soldiers, strategists, inventors, protectors, dignitaries and scientists at the top level. They have a major say in how their society should be run and their council is informed by anti-macho sentiments of compassion, egalitarianism, collectivism and empathy. The kingdom’s aesthetic sports a unique and original style. Their community is autonomous, unmoored to the corrupt world where a dichotomy between colonized and colonizer is a common paradigm.
But in their justification or depictions, these furnishings, while initially exciting, stop short of anything that could leave much to chew over after the movie ends. We see that Wakanda is a matriarchal society, but this enterprise never goes deep into why this makes it a successful one. Any deep exploration of why men shouldn’t occupy all positions of power and influence, and why this society is better off with women in charge risks dipping into explicit political territory that could polarize the audience and affect profits.
We might go into the movie agreeing with the assumption that women should have a major say in managing civilization, but nothing in this milieu allows for a conscious articulation of this principle beyond Women + Power = Better Society. So it’s supposed to be enough for us to just see those Wakandan women in their positions of power; looking regal sitting on thrones or fierce in the heat of battle, to enjoy the fantasy Marvel is presenting us with, which, as long as it evades detailing how this vibrant society evolved this way and why our own society should emulate it, will remain a fantasy. So long as Marvel properties privilege female viewpoints without slowing the proceedings down long enough to explore or share them.
In a remark that typifies the myopia of most mainstream and trade film criticism, New York Times critic Wesley Morris has called Wakanda Forever’s message, “one of the most radical acts of mass capitalism I have ever seen.” He was speaking on a recent Vulture podcast with respect to how the first Black Panther changed the way the industry thinks about what stories people want to see. If a $250 million dollar production about Marine Mesoamericans in dialogue with fictitious Africans is his idea of radical, it doesn’t surprise me that so many great films pass through virtually unnoticed by the public. Because the story is “radical” within the confines of what Disney and Marvel’s studio guardrails will allow. It can only be nervy, risky or challenging within a set framework of what's permissible in big-budget, commercial fare and critics like Morris, whose interest - in keeping with the New York Times - is in business over art, display no interest in thinking outside those terms.
Only those elements of female ascendancy, Black Power, queerness of sexuality or gender, or anti-Colonialist sentiment that can be commercialized will be considered for a project like this. Addressing the struggles these groups face in a way that would truly inspire social action, or at least a much-needed helpful contribution to the discourse, would for the parent companies mean alienating potential ticket and video buyers (especially in the now crucial foreign market).
This property would probably wind up not even fitting into Marvel’s grand soap-opera at all as this aspiration would mean grounding stories in reality instead of pacifying the audience with abstract fantasies. Essentially, it would mean taking a side against its own financial interest which, being a business, is the only thing to which it is legally beholden. Noam Chomsky says have one political party in America: Business. In Hollywood, that business is wish-fulfillment and escapism. Sure, Till is a major studio film itself. It's when movies like Black Panther and its sequel get ascribed a certain hallowed cultural importance that I start to get wary.
There’s an urgency to stories of black characters as there is to stories of female characters, LGBT characters or physically disabled characters. Everything personal in these stories tends to become political, because implicitly, there is a power struggle about who owns the keys to the world and to what extent they are shared equally. I don’t think that righting every problem in the world is literally just a matter of correcting power differentials. But there’s a reason why black directors, writers and actors are taking hold of stories of black characters more readily. It’s not just to establish a sort of equality on screen, but also because there is a powerful and unexplored dramaturgical reserve that they want to seize and that we, the audience, would be wrong to ignore or underestimate it.
Giant studios like Disney want to seize those stories too, but for their commercial potential and for leverage against charges of discrimination rather than their capacity for cultural enrichment. We can get expensive, empowering images of these new and fascinating camera subjects so long as they're dressed up with enough fantasy pretense to rob them of their real bite. Any real-life social consequence that they do inspire seems miraculous considering that their revelations take place within a fictional world which is equipped to safely encompass them.
That is, if Hollywood is to be charged with the task of presenting striking new images of groups of people whose history is all too often related in terms of the injustices visited upon it, now living without oppression and taking control of their destiny, I wonder if people stop to take note that those images must always stay grounded in the world fantasy and action. They seem to be as far removed from the possibility of reality as they can be. As I mentioned, it probably depends on what you go to the movies to see.
Of course, fantasy can be used to confront the world we live in. But because these kinds of movies are too limited and set in their ways and ambitions as mercantile products to work as new paradigms, this potential is doubtful. More often, these ventures oblige us to escape from the world. Their disposability is evident in the way they’re made to disappear from sight and memory the moment they’re over. Any social consequence they inspire in people seems to happen by luck, not from any proven formula the industry can standardize beyond technical achievement.
It’s in this way these fantasies stroke us, flattering us with Utopian abstractions. Eventually, notions of a just, post-racial, hierarchy-free society - like hovering cars and sexy robots - become the stuff of fantasy fiction. The merchandising alone for Wakanda Forever should be evidence of Disney’s regard for Afro-Futurism not as an ideal to be achieved or emulated but for squeezing more revenue out of its top-grossing product, with everything from luxury cars to McDonald’s Happy Meal toys to a massive array of clothing and fashion accessories. Afro-Futurism was effectively corporatized before it could even enter the public consciousness.
In this context, one gets the sense that choice to center the film on Shuri (Leticia Wright), Wakanda’s sarcastic tech genius, was because she performed better with test audiences than Lupita Nyong’o’s ex-pat spy-turned-care-worker, Nakia or Danai Gurira’s battle-hardened general, Okoye. At this point, I think audiences are aware that big movies like this are basically a business. This is not to belittle the efforts or the intentions of the filmmakers or actors but it’s important to remember that each element of these films is worked over in a committee process that swears religiously by focus-group testing.
Whatever personal conviction that makes it into the picture in terms of artistry has to do so within the margins of analytical business calculations that would allow for it. I remember the audience’s warm reception to Shuri being mentioned in critical assessments of the first movie. But one senses that if Okoye had been receiving that kind of fanfare, target marketing would have dictated that Okoye would be the lead character. As sharply rendered and vividly realized as these characters are, they still somehow always feel interchangeable, at the service of the company store.
I suppose the success of the both Black Panther films has to do in part with storylines centered on deeper themes of birthright, mature leadership, sovereignty, national resources and socio-political autonomy rather than some all-powerful MacGuffin. It felt like there was more at stake, because we were dealing to some extent with why or what it meant that things were happening rather than simply what was happening to whom and how it happened. People responded to these somewhat deeper thematic elements and the first Black Panther movie did lead to social activism and education initiatives in various parts of the country.
In a segment devoted to the first film on Democracy Now on February 28th in 2018, mention was made of discussions of colonialism and cultural representation being added to school curriculum. Black Panther screenings were being used to organize mass voter drives by activists, and there was a renewal of calls for the release of actual Black Panther party members from prison. Wonderful.
Not much word of it in the mainstream press, but this is not surprising. I'd certainly credit those motivated citizens with these accomplishments and not Disney, who upon receiving a petition signed by thousands of people calling on it to invest 25 percent of the film’s worldwide profits in education programs in black communities, announced it would donate a million dollars (of its 1.3 billion dollar worldwide box office proceeds) to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America to help expand its youth STEM programs.
Once these pictures become cultural prestige items, the demands they must meet become insurmountable. It is constrictive to work on a Marvel feature because of these commercial calculations, especially in having to helm an entertaining sequel to a billion dollar franchise. The world of the franchise has to expand, this time to include still another hidden society. Now there’s a deceased star to work around, along with the emotional attachment the fans had to him. So the actors must navigate their own grief as it hangs over the production, both within the story and behind the scenes.
Director Ryan Coolger is all but set up for failure as he must now retain interest in a product that’s been elevated to a celestial status in fandom. In their shiny newness, the originary adventures of superhero outings virtually always leave more of an impact on audiences and perform better at the box office than the sequels and this franchise is no different. The task ahead of them is quite simply insurmountable because in the world of quick-to-congeal mega-productions (the become bitterest of all seasonal vegetables) and their easily distracted audiences, only the thrill of a new world can perform to or exceed projections. Too much is expected of these productions, and like a single server working a busy dining room, it shows on screen.
I can’t blast this Marvel entry too hard because it’s impossible to get any real sense of its true potential. No emotional or thematic element of the story can be given enough time to resonate because of the constraints of time, circumstance and the overstuffed narrative. Angela Bassett’s Queen-Mother figure, Ramonda has some potentially deep insights for Shuri into the process of grief, but there’s no room and no time to see its pathology affect her actions in a way that would engage or challenge us. There is no time for a character to have an interior life.
This A.D.D. touch-and-go mentality abounds in big budget filmmaking but Marvel has mastered it. It’s why nobody in these movies comes across as real to us: they’re usually (with slight variations that depend on the director) never given the proper time and space to be truly complex, dynamic characters. Just suggesting that they get any kind of exploration at all seems like a ludicrous demand for a viewer to ask of the cold, sterile assembly line products of Hollywood’s IP Industrial Complex.
Naturally, the casting department again winds up having to do the heavy lifting. Marvel’s strategy, which has worked for them in the past but may be untenable, banks on casting overqualified Hollywood legends in major parts and has them play to their “brand” to carry material that is now abjectly played out. That’s why you can sit through the egregious run times of these things and still come out of them with no edifying experience to speak of. How is it that we wind up with three-hour movies where so little - like the geopolitical effects of Wakanda’s arrival on the world stage or an ideological illustration of Namor’s kingdom of Talokan necessary for us to identify with them - winds up being adequately fleshed out?
With scant variance from entry to entry, the erratic rhythms of Marvel products like Wakanda Forever, hurried when they should slow down and lethargic when they should be lively, are so choked with obligation that they add up to an experience that is rarely outright awful (which would be interesting and discussion-worthy enough) but rather so detached and sanitized by committee-think as to be vacuous and hollow.
Within the neutrality of these experiences, only the professionalism of certain players like Basset and Gurira save the project from the passionlessness typical of impersonal, major-scale moviemaking. The action scenes suffer the most, offering no opportunity for release. They’re crowded in, unmemorably blocked and defanged of their ability to register an impact.
And this is supposed to be the exception, in which Blackness and indigenous identity play out their autonomous destinies of self-actualization in a dazzling and vibrant world of boundless possibility. Instead, these dreams of transcendence are pulled back down to this low plane by the same old Capitalist, consumerist impulses. They sink back into this dimension, one that finds new methods for subjecting disenfranchised peoples by hijacking their narratives and yoking them to sugary gratifications cooked up in the cauldron of an insatiable profit machine. I think it makes very good sense to view Marvel movies as Disney movies. If people honestly believe Disney cares about Afro-Futurism, then I can say none of us has any right to be shocked that giant corporations make our laws, run our government and just about everything else.
Major movies made in buildings like these.
Trusting big business to be responsible and fair with our cultural legacy has always struck me as fairly naive. What does Disney owe to any of us? Its interest is in whatever it can profit from at that particular point in the cultural history and that's about it. Not Black Lives Matter. Not MeToo. Marvel may just as well be owned by Monsanto, Exxon or Sinclair Media because essentially they're the same as Disney, which, in its steadfast practices of hegemony and ruthlessness, is to entertainment what those companies are to agriculture, oil and the news.
Capitalism cannot be radical on these grounds because it’s a process that absorbs all seemingly defiant, antagonistic potential threats to it into its body. It’s guided by its own capacity for self-preservation. This is the only radical thing about it. It cannot lift up the impoverished because it doesn’t believe in doing so. It believes in nothing. It is what remains at the collapse or diminishing of belief and all that remains is a consumer-spectator relationship.
This is why if cultural appropriation is to be considered any kind of social crime, then it's a crime of Capitalism, not racism. Foreign cultures aren't appropriated by big business interests in order to denigrate and marginalize them. Not in the abstract, they're not. Why? Because everyone’s money is equally green. It’s done to make a buck, a practice which will NEVER be universally frowned on in America no matter what incarnation it takes next.
A viral video in December of 2017 featured two young, black fans of the first Black Panther movie ecstatic about seeing a first-string pop culture extravaganza that was made just for them. It was touted on news programs as evidence of the movie’s box office success. In other words, the excitement was evidence of the profits, not the other way around:
MAN 1: So, we’re sitting here looking at this dope-[bleep] Black Panther poster. And the conclusion that we have come to-
MAN 2: All the time?
MAN 1: —is that this is what white people get to feel all the time.
MAN 2: All the time! All the time!
MAN 1: Since the beginning of cinema—
MAN 2: All the time!
MAN 1: —you get to feel empowered like this and represented.
MAN 2: This? This what y’all feel like all the time? I would love this country, too.
It’s in this cultural environment, in which the breaking of the billion-dollar mark is the angle the news media use as an entry point into the story, that such an impersonal product as a Disney movie can be seen as a defining cultural moment. This despite a system of racism that is so pervasive and has cut so deeply into people, that its place in determining how things shake out, who can get their claws on the lever of power, who gets to be rich or who has to die in a pandemic is ever more transparent, ever more impossible to hide to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention.
Of course, I’m white and have had the privilege of not being on the receiving end of any serious prejudice in my life. And I’m not saying people who love the Black Panther franchise or any of Marvel’s products should like them less. I’m not going to say, “no, this is not the cultural movement that you think it is.”
I'm only saying here that our willingness to see movies like Wakanda Forever as more urgent culture than the experience of Till, which is both incendiary and vital, is founded on limited and baffling ideas about the function and purpose of cinema and entertainment that are not to our benefit. Judging by how fed up so many of us are (myself included) with the institutionalization and normalization of social injustice and racism, I think we're letting Disney (and Hollywood) off the hook too easily.
I wish we regarded the spiritual nourishment that serious art provides as a good and benevolent thing for ourselves and our communities rather than as a corrective tonic and that movies can be this for us. We require so little from the stories we invest ourselves in. The studios don’t challenge us. Then they wonder why people aren’t making it out to the theaters, choosing instead to stream recycled TV fictions in solitude at home. I'm inclined to believe many people are already aware of these things. My fear is that they mostly don't care. After paying the draconian prices theater chains charge, they will justify their unchallenging assessment of the landscape by regarding movies like Till as depressing where going to the movies should remain a junk food diet centered on fun and escape.
Two thirds of the way into Chukwu’s film, Mamie Till-Mobely doggedly has to learn to accept that her success in her quest for justice will depend on playing the PR game, navigating the world of wholesale racism that enables the individualized crimes of retail racism to go unpunished. She realizes there’s a larger world out there. A larger hand that controls things. It doesn’t represent her and yet it’s making vital social decisions for her. Were this realization applied to superhero movies that are deemed so culturally important, audiences might think twice. They might wake up to the damaging, counterproductive practice of passively trusting giant corporations - the source of nearly all their woes - to speak to their social grievances. As long as it continues to work from these assumptions, the audience will never have the kind of media representation that it seeks or the culture that it deserves.
It will never be free.
Support Lee with Planet Nine below:
