A political hustle and horror show
HBO’s Lanterns respects nothing so great or simple as realism. It mixes several genres (science fiction, detective, neo-Western, domestic melodrama) to update the 1940 DC comic book Green Lantern. It then goes on to address Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) for 21st-century naifs.
The series shuffles time periods from 1996 to 2016 to 2026, pitting the original Green Lantern, now middle-aged white guy, Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), against the young black Green Lantern recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). Both are members of the Green Lantern Corps, a branch of the United States Air Force, and they train to use a ring that emits a green ray, endowing them with supernatural powers against extraterrestrial beings. Their actions are monitored by other aliens, Guardians of the Universe.
Showrunners Chris Mundy and Damon Lindelof refuse to let Lanterns be kids’ stuff. They manipulate the story’s jumbled conceit shamelessly. As perhaps the most scandalous race hustlers in contemporary Hollywood, they emphasize racial disparity and inequity to make Jordan and Stewart’s mentor-mentee relationship reflect age and race tensions.
The shamelessness begins with the unequal focus on Stewart as a figure of black American anxiety. Pierre’s modern fashion-model elegance (is it resentment or just runaway hauteur?) contrasts with the cowboy gruffness of TV veteran Chandler, with his handsome squint and perpetually tousled salt-and-pepper hair. Their exploits and buddy-buddy badinage center on violence, distilling the narrative to the question of whether Stewart is motivated by fear or anger.
Mundy and Lindelof’s berserk ideas of entertainment reflect their respective backgrounds in media junk (Mundy’s celebrity-mongering at Rolling Stone and Lindelof’s TV series Lost and Watchmen), which betray an unacceptable fascination with political and cultural exploitation of race.
The show’s decadal timeline highlights what Obama popularized as “inflection points,” mirroring changes in leadership to handle questions of masculinity, character, and national image. But Mundy and Lindelof do this childishly — from the same adolescent perspective seen in the competition between Marvel and DC comics — specifically Marvel’s recent Spider-Man offshoots that brand-shifted from white Peter Parker to the black-Latino Miles Morales (Into the Spider-Verse).
Lanterns can only keep pace with Marvel by heightening anxieties in the same mode as HBO’s race-baiting atrocities Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, and The Underground Railroad miniseries. Mundy and Lindelof’s psychological profile of John Stewart’s youth carelessly borrows the Swiss legend of William Tell, primarily for the shock image of a black father endangering his son (shooting an apple on young Stewart’s head). What originally symbolized resistance to tyranny and individual courage now becomes an irresponsible metaphor for reckless parenting and black pathology. Mundy and Lindelof don’t seek out genuine black American or African culture (John Henry or Stagolee); it suits their white liberal perversity to debase European legends.
Stewart explains his family history to one of the Guardians: “Humans are not programmed, they’re raised.” When the alien (Laura Linney) responds, “I don’t understand the distinction,” Stewart answers, “Well, there is none.”
Clearly, the concept of genuine black American family experience has been exhausted by sociological fantasies that overtook the culture industry after the 2008 and 2016 elections. Episode 3, titled “OutKast,” pilfers the Atlanta-based hip-hop group OutKast (makers of the 1996 album ATLiens) as if to authenticate Stewart’s manhood crisis — the fear, then anger, confused by juvenile hip-hop. But here it’s grounded in his peculiar family dysfunction.
Mundy and Lindelof don’t enlighten us about the breakdown of the black American family structure. Instead, its subplot about Stewart’s shrewish mother Bernadette (played by Jasmine Cephas Jones as a nutcase who is by turns violent and nurturing) offers even more pathological behavior. She’s an outrageous refutation of the old white liberal myth of the persevering black mother that Diahann Carroll memorably portrayed in Claudine (1974), reprimanding her teenage son, “You better be afraid. That world out there will kill you! If you ain’t scared, you don’t have no need for guts.” Such fragile domestic themes and filial communication of values also appeared in Fantastic Four and Chronicle and were probed more exactingly with the Cyborg character in Zack Snyder’s Justice League than in Mundy and Lindelof’s twisted fantasies.
Lanterns demonstrates that there’s a subculture of political progressivism naïve viewers may not be aware of, though its madness surges through Hollywood (“OutKast” episode scriptwriter Vanessa Baden-Kelly boasted of working with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass prior to Lanterns. Baden-Kelly should study Claudine). This horror-show contrivance is what turns cultural idiots into DSA voters. We’re dealing with some serious unseriousness here.
