| A dazzling, breakthrough movie from our time suddenly appears on a movie screen on a grey day in 1954. It explodes on the stolid certainties of the time with disruptive force. Disneyland, the rise of TV, the decline of movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, young love, forbidden love, the Catholic Legion of Decency, the ambitions of Richard M. Nixon, the suffering of Pat Nixon, the suffering of Paul Robeson, the Bush dynasty, the Dulles Brothers, the fever dreams of J. Edgar Hoover, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Edward R. Murrow, Ike, the Kefauver hearings into the depravity of comic books, the Superman complex…familiar signposts of the 1950s are blown off course as Black Panther suddenly and mysteriously shows up on a movie projector in a theater in a small Connecticut town. It plays on a continuous loop, sparking a sensation in the town that spreads to panic in Dwight Eisenhower’s White House. Ike forms a special task force to get to the bottom of the subversive film under the direction of his ever-vigilant Vice President, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon’s investigation disrupts the lives of young lovers Shep Ferrell and Rosemary D’Aleo, struggling to navigate their simple boy-girl relationship through the murder, racial tensions and H-Bomb anxieties aroused by the erupting controversy. Black Panther’s journey back to the past has the cultural impact of a meteor hitting earth, burying a large, hot vein of reflective truth beneath the United States and forcing a dialog between the 20th and 21st centuries. |
