Vanishing Point: Chadwick Boseman’s Body and the Still Image

Abstract:The desire to read Chadwick Boseman’s body of work in a traditionally representational way is already complicated—in an interview with The Atlantic, Spike Lee describes his casting choice of Boseman in Da 5 Bloods: “Here’s the thing for me. This character is heroic; he’s a superhero. Who do we cast? We cast Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and we cast T’Challa. Chad is a superhero! That character is Christlike!” The conflation of Boseman’s body with these iconic figures moves beyond simply reading the image as representational specifically beside analysis of temporality. Lee’s film was released streaming in June of 2020, the same month that saw significant numbers of protesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, four months into a national response to a pandemic, and three and a half years into what felt like a never-ending presidential term. The narrative of the film takes this into account; it acknowledges the Black Lives Matter Movement and slides a notable side-eye to the Trump presidency. The film is timely, cutting, and grounded contextually in the here and now and significant for what it discloses, however, this paper is focused on how the still images which ground the film complicate the possibility of any full disclosure, and any clear, uncomplicated representation due to a collapse, leverage, and slippage of time. The question at the center of this analysis is: under what temporal circumstances does Boseman’s body have a chance in its ability to live up to (or perhaps trouble) over-representation? What must happen to give the body voice? This paper relies heavily on aesthetic interventions into race and visuality as posed by Alessandra Raengo, Grant Farred, and Fred Moten as well as the discussions of indexicality put forth first by Roland Barthes and deconstructed by Shawn Michelle Smith.