14
Popular Culture Review
Hilliard asserted his hope that Panther would “serve as a catalyst for today’s
youth—black, white, Latino, Asian, women—and spur them to create new
movements challenging the powers responsible for the degrading and decaying
conditions permeating our communities across America. We need these
movements today as desperately as we did in 1966.”^^
The mainstream press, perhaps fearing the revolutionary potential
described by Hilliard, expressed considerable reservations regarding the politics
of Panther, Rita Kempley of The Washington Post appeared to mirror the
sentiments of Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, attacking the
film as “a purring, sleekly crafted hagiography of a Black Panther Party without
claws.” Kempley, displaying little knowledge of BPP history, criticized the film
for its lack of a factual basis in presenting Seale, Cleaver, and Newton as
“selflessly focused on helping their people.” A similar sense of ridicule was
evident in Janet Maslin’s piece on Panther for The New York Times, Finding the
film simplistic, Maslin wrote, “Throughout the film, the Panthers’ motives are
correspondingly noble and unassailable. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents
and local law enforcement authorities are presented as vicious, hysterical, and
conspiratorial white men.” Maslin concluded that Panther mixed “politics,
celebrity, nostalgia, and fiery grandstanding into an incongruously pop
concoction, aiming for audiences with a limited attention span and taste for
HistoiyLite.”^*
But even more scurrilous was the review by Richard Corliss in Time
magazine, which termed the Van Peebles film a ‘Svhitewash” of the BPP’s
Marxism, violence, and sexism. Corliss argued, “The early Panthers—^who took
their rhetorical cues fi-om that noted protector of civil liberties. Chairman Mao—
were a confused blend of boys’ club and militia. Their gun battles with the
police were macho street theater run amuck. And their thug posture, as later
adopted by drug dealers and rap artists, further isolated the black male from the
American mainstream.” And Corliss simply dismisses as “preposterous” the
film’s conspiracy theory regarding the government’s role in the introduction of
cocaine into the black ghettoes of the 1970s.^^ Of course, the reactionary
politics and trivializing of the black liberation struggle in Forrest Gump were
not preposterous to these mainstream critics.
Not all reviews of Panther were so negative. Thelma Adams of the
New York Post found some flaws in the film’s characterizations as well as
downplaying of gender issues, but she applauded the political courage displayed
by Van Peebles in making the film. Adams wrote, “It entertains, it provokes, it
energizes. Van Peebles c^tures the excitement and hope of a time when the
phrase ‘come the revolution’ was not yet soaked in irony, when social change—
and change for the better—seemed not only possible but inevitable.”^® The
potential of a film like Panther to form a dialectical counter to mainstream
pabulum was most evident to Adams.