Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom AKA #atlantissowhite
There were some interesting aspects to this movie. Please don’t read if you haven’t seen it and want to.
MAJOR SPOILERS.
So the first movie was alright, a good story, the plot was one of integration.
An Atlantean of racially-mixed origins is bred and raised to be the catalyst for gradual integration of the world ocean and its diverse denizens and the surface world with oceanic humanity, and DC’s coterie of heroes and villains.
The action was good, it is a rousing tale of familial love and tension, brother against brother. Loved the CGI and the story was of an epic scale. Relatively benign, as far as inferenced meaning is concerned.
Sociologically speaking, it’s the same theme you bear witness to in most of the media these days, with the deliberate and sometimes jarring — to older folks, mostly, of all racial persuasions — multicultural casting in commercials, series and movies. Jason Momoa’s indeterminant ethnic appearance serves the visual and subliminal purpose of representing the symbolic and continuing global diffusion of the Pan-American sociological model — and ever-increasing proportions of the world population — as all ethnicities mix and match in an increasingly global society. This is resulting in a transformative genetic shift of a type — but of a much greater scale — that has accompanied every empirical expansion this world has even experienced. And it has experienced quite a few of them over hundreds of millennia, quiet as it is kept.
A sub-plot of the first movie was the defeat of Black Manta, the son of a diver who died in a feeble attempt at piracy, foiled by Aquaman as an aside. His battles with Aquaman were fun but sort of comic relief, as his power capacity was nowhere near that of the son of the surface world and Atlantis. It’s important that we understand his role in the first movie because it is key to understanding the second movie.
Black Manta, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, reprises the role but is immeasurably empowered by a trident he finds at the bottom of the world ocean, along with an ancient Atlantean ship from the Lost Kingdom. Come to find out that the trident is possessed by the ensorcelled King Kordax of Necrus, the Lost Kingdom.
Also the brother of an ancient Atlantean king, King Atlan, the relationship between Aquaman and his brother mirrors that conflict between their royal ancestors multiple times, to good effect. Whimsy and the uber-American bro-bravado of Aquaman combine to draw the stiff, Atlantean-bred ex-King and brother, Orm, out of his hatred as they face a greater foe, Kordax, who was imprisoned by Atlan, along with the entire kingdom of Necrus, under the Antarctic ice.
There are so many supporting plotlines for this sequel that to detail and correlate them all would make this post way too long. There is a power source that the ancient city of Necrus used called orichalcum, which increases global warming, resulting in more powerful storms, droughts, floods and such all over the world.
Ostensibly, Aquaman and Orm fight together in the movie to prevent the reanimation of Kordax who, for almost his entire role, is a discarnate entity inhabiting the trident and gradually possessing the hapless villain, Black Manta. Defeating Kordax also saves the world and stops the burning of the orichalcum which is being done by the human shell that Black Manta increasingly becomes as the bewitched ancient king takes over his body and mind.
This storyline plays out in a typical fashion and, on the surface, the movie seems to be a buddy comedy with great visuals and an endearing story of a family coming together and the world being saved by Aquaman once more.
But what I believe is the real plot was in the visuals and the nigh-subliminal symbolic orchestration of larger, spiritual themes that we are currently experiencing as a world society.
In th DC universe, as with Marvel, technology and magic are indistinguishable and often accompany each other. This comports with the alternative view of earth planetary history, in that many believe that ancient civilizations truly existed that had a form of technology far beyond that we boast of today.
The corrupt power source that threatens the destruction of earth’s biosphere by global warming, orichalcum, is indeed a real word that represents an ancient metal (alloy) sort of between gold and copper. They repurposed the word effectively, evoking the idea of a superior yet flawed alloy that did indeed serve as a source of power, albeit the personal kind that weapons generally represent.
The spiritual technology of the Atlanteans is primarily highlighted by the kingdom of Necrus. The choice of this name was an etymological one, as the Greek root of the word means death.
There are many points in which the word “black” is used to describe the major city of Necrus, the trident was called the black trident and the first human to find the trident and use it and subsequently be possessed was a black villain, Black Manta.
The trident of Aquaman, Arthur — an obvious grail mythos evocation- on the other hand, is golden and releases a white energy, with no hint of possessive potentiality or other-dimensional consciousness. The implication is that the golden trident is pure and comes from a higher source, while the black trident is corrupt and its power originates in a transcendently selfish and narcissistic ruler to whom power is the ultimate aim.
This corresponds to the service-to-self versus service-to-others orientations as expressions of polarity and duality. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Newton’s third law of thermodynamics. The deployment of this ancient hermetic truth in the context of a movie that seeks to reconcile dualism by ultimately bringing the surface world and the oceanic world into unity is served by larger forces personified by the characters and the ethnicity of the actors themselves.
I have to mention #atlantissowhite.
Atlantis is sooo white. The only other person of color in the entire city was Karshon, played by Afro-Taíno beauty Indya Moore, who’s also the villain Shark according to DC lore. The rest were white people, fish people and entities of every conceivable imaginative take on some kind of oceanic creature taking on bipedal form.
It’s so obvious that it is striking, considering the aforementioned predominance of multicultural marketing. The diversity is indeed present, but markedly and, perhaps diabolically purposeful. Even at the end, when Atlantis reveals itself to the world and Aquaman is speaking on a global stage, they never show any phenotypically Africoid peoples in the montage of world cultures gathered to watch his speech on big screens around the world. They show America, numerous European locales, what looks to be India and other countries watching, but not one African nation was shown celebrating the meeting of the two earthly realms.
The invariable association of evil, possession and dark magic with African-descended people is almost too apparent to mention and seems to fail when, at the climax of the battle, Arthur’s Atlantean half-brother — Orm, a blonde-haired blue-eyed European-presenting ubermensch — is possessed by the trident and its resident evil, Kordax. Orm’s hatred for his brother and lust for power have weakened him at his core and his selfishness is an opening that invariably fails as filial bonds come to the fore and he releases his desires to capitulate to Arthur, Atlantis’s apparent One True King.
It doesn’t really fail, though. Possession is far from a racially-oriented skill: it is on full display and is celebrated in the ascendent New Age, with the channeling of entities and aliens and angels of all sorts available on every social media platform. Horror movies also use this trope to associate spiritual possession with evil. So the synaptic connections that fire whenever it is used are already in place for most Westerners.
The fact that the environment and even the battle against Kordax are not the primary plot is proven by how quickly the supposedly demonic entity is defeated. They blow up the orichalcum generator and the evil king is skewered by Aquaman’s trident. It is anticlimactic. The personal victory of the Atlantean brothers ends the threat that supposedly heralds the climate-driven end of the earth. But their win is far from being the rest of the story.
By the end of the movie, the observant viewer is left with the realization that we have just watched a story where the All-American, mixed-ethnicity and white service-to-others oriented protagonists have joined forces against service-to-self oriented black, brown, foreign and supernaturally evil forces to gain ascendency in this phase of the eternal battle between elemental forces of light and dark.
The primary plot comports with the narrative that media is proselytizing that urges us subliminally to accept people who are similar to us socially and culturally — or are physically beautiful in an ethnically ambiguous way — and join together to create a new world. It sets this stage clumsily and with little subtlety, indicating to me that the writer, James Wan, was not well-versed in the archetypal forces he was attempting to deploy. This failure to comprehend the symbols he was using fully resulted in a mish-mash of sub-plots that work, barely, and that leave the observant viewer aware that there’s more going on and, perhaps, wondering what it was they really just watched.
The only black character in the movie, Black Manta is, by the end of the movie, once again reduced to comic relief, his mythic powers gone with the black trident. He refused assistance from a magnanimous Aquaman who held out a hand to save his enemy from certain death. This was atonement for his choice to leave Black Manta’s father to die in the first movie. But the villain’s aching desire to avenge his father doomed him and he was so not interested. Black Manta released his tenuous grasp on life and fell into an abyss, perhaps to his death, but this is DC, so who knows, really.
Overall, I can’t say I liked the movie because of the disturbing racial aspects inherent in the messaging. It looked good, the CGI was great and the story moved along at a steady and exciting clip. But the underlying meaning was disquieting.
In the current American trajectory, the United States and the Western nations find themselves on a collision course with the rest of the planet. Our stated aims are noble, but the execution of American hegemony follows the problematic ‘ends justify the means’ philosophy. The depiction of the global audience as Aquaman gave Atlantis’s coming-out speech looked disturbingly like a montage of our closest global allies.
Pitting the diverse American Empire against the planet is not a good idea, and yet, it seems to be where we are headed. The superhero metaphor serves the purpose of presenting an interpretation of this elemental and world-changing clashes under the guise of entertainment. Clearly, phenotypically black people still maintain a stereotypical presence in the DC alternate universe. One wonders if that is the intended end goal of this movie in our universe, as well.
