I have seen a few articles recently expressing how the villain of Marvel’s Black Panther is truly not a villain but a victim. These articles often call for Eric ‘Killmonger’ to be regarded with sympathy or even argue that the character may be justified in his objectives and methods.
(Minor spoilers for Black Panther will follow.)
I think in part this point of view is easier to arrive at if you are starting from a life history that echoes may of the ones that Killmonger experienced. (That is not to say you share the regal blood history but rather the one of prejudice and abandonment.) Over all having some sympathy for the antagonist is not a bad thing. An antagonist with a complex and compelling backstory is often relatable leading to a richer enjoyment of any narrative and often illuminating aspect of the human condition. There are also time when a less nuanced villain is required, when the character presenting the threat is more like an invincible force that a person with flaws and motivations. Killmonger is clearly deeply drawn character with very understandable motivations.
The fact that his motivations are understandable is not the same as saying that they are excusable. It is possible to understand with condoning and in fact that difficult balance is critical both as someone experiencing the world and as someone creating a fictional one.
Among the many non-fiction books I have read there have been several on the subject of serial killers. The history, study, and nature of serial killers is something I find fascinating and a subject that is often portrayed quite poorly in cinema. Serial killers do not simply wake up one day and start killing without ‘reason.’ (Reason here is a very loose term because what is compelling to them is often incomprehensible to those removed from their history.)
As the character, and monster Hannibal, said in The Silence of the Lambs, ‘Billy was not born a monster, but made one through years of systematic abuse.’ Is this not exactly the case with Eric Killmonger? Where Buffalo Bill’s abuse was heaped upon him by people close to him, and if you read about actual serial killers there is always a pattern of deep and prolonged abuse in their formative years, Killmonger literally was abused by the systems around him, both American and Wakandan.
I find Killmonger’s motivation fully understandable and I have sympathy for the character, but we must not confuse sympathy with excuse. Murder to sate a psychological wound is not admirable, not when performed serial killers, abused villains like Killmonger, and justifiably terrified ones like Magneto in the X-Men franchise. This to me is one of the defining difference between a hero and a villain; chasing their objectives a hero has lines that they will not cross while the villain is willing to make anyone suffer, no horror is too great, and their ends justify all means.
Killmonger was not wrong in the evils he saw in the world, but he was too blind to see that he himself had become that same evil. The character may not have understood the historical significance of one of his lines but the writer/director Ryan Coogler certainly understood the British Imperial echoes of ‘The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.’
