"The Worst Thing You Can Do": Black Panther's Museum Scene And Killmonger's Mask Explained By Mythology Expert Gives The MCU Movie Even Deeper Meaning

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Black Panther

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Discussing Black Panther's wider connection to Greco-Roman mythology, Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University, broke down why he found Killmonger's museum scene so impactful. The professor told Vanity Fair:

"You know, ancestor worship is an enormous part of both Greek and Roman culture. The old had very high status in ancient societies because they were the fount of knowledge. The Romans actually would take death masks of their ancestors, clay versions of them, and then at certain festivals they would wear the masks of their ancestors, and they would parade through the streets in them."

"To take that mask and put it in a glass case in a museum is the worst thing you can do to that mask. That mask's supposed to be worn by a performer who's been imbued in a whole culture of dancing and performing and telling those stories over centuries. And now it's become like an aesthetic object with a price on it, and I think this movie actually shows that really well."

"Here's a character from that culture who's not really allowed to interface with material from his own culture and is actually being schooled on it by somebody who's not from that culture. It's about access, right? And I think one of the things this does is it shows us how if you remove an object from the stories that are told about it and the way it's performed, is that object still operating the same way?I love it that he takes a mask at the end, and that becomes his character. And even though he uses it in a negative way, for him, it empowers him and that's his connection with his ancestors. You know, I think often we see these objects in museums, but we don't think about them in their real cultural context. The 'Black Panther' movie makes people think about that."