Notes on Luke Cage, season two
Jean-Michel Basquiat hangs like a totem above Harlem’s Paradise in season 2 of Marvel’s Luke. Cage. First appearing at the end of season one, when Mariah, who has taken over he club after killing her cousin Cornell (the gangster Cottonmouth), the Basquiat hangs in the background even as its presence helps drive the plot forward.
Mariah’s goal is expansion and legitimization. She wants to move the Stokes organization into the light. She needs cash and, rather than sell the painting as her confident and lover Shades recommends, she sells off a lucrative gun business to a Jamaican gang headed by the revenge-obsessed John McIver (Bushmaster).
The choice signals her ultimate doom, while raising a set of unanswered questions that prove to be more interesting than the show’s convoluted and disappointing narrative and its failed and unnecessary attempt to deepen Luke’s character. (Fame, family, anger, power — the creators threw all of these conflicts into the air, hoping one would make sense. Ultimately, all of these conflicts crash in what my buddy Bill called a cynical ending.)
Mariah proves to be the lynchpin for the entire story, her actions reverberating throughout all of its tentacles, informing the actions of each character, setting their narratives moving and deciding their fates. And, all the while, the Basquiat — a 1981 painting called “Red Kings” — offers sly commentary on the narrative.
The crowns in “Red Kings” are both ironic and to be admired, a critique of a desire for power and evidence of ambition, a paean to personal revolution and quite deadly. The blog Every Painter Paints Himself points out that Basquiat buried the letters BSQ in the left half of the image, while the skull on the right “strongly suggests one of Picasso’s last self-portraits, drawn nine years earlier”
Picasso and Warhol were the two artists Basquiat most admired as a teenager and he knew their work well.3 Red Kings thus places Basquiat’s portrait as king next to Picasso’s portrait as king, a succession he intended to fulfil (sic).
The skull, of course, also is used in many artistic media to stand in for death. The argument is that Basquiat used the crowns and skull to Demonstrate and denounce his own ambitions.
Chaédria LaBouvier, writing on the blog, Bevel // Code, makes a similar argument. She calls “Red Kings” an early and powerful example of the “tension of success and struggle” that runs through his work, “the unbridled ambition, the majesty — real and willed — and the determination to be visible that runs through the painting.” LaBouvier describes Basquiat as a hustler — offering it as a positive descriptor, a hustler who had “an ad man’s savvy.”
Basquiat, like so many young Black creatives slash DIY hype-men then and now, knew that he could not depend upon a world that was expertly trained to render him invisible, to in any way legitimize his presence, much less his work. In a modern society where inclusion often comes down to the task of de-centering Whiteness as a constant and infallible reference point, the perseverance and audacity of a young Basquiat hell-bent on making it, and making it his way, resonates still today.
One can see this tension in the Mariah Stokes Dillard character, this struggle against invisibility, the demand that she be paid attention to on her terms and not just as a member of a powerful crime family. Her refusal to part with the Basquiat can be seen as the character’s self-identification with the artist — though the painting contains several other potential meanings within the story.
The Basquiat, as it is referred to through out, represents both culture and wealth. Shades sees it as easy money, while Mariah sees it as something more, perhaps as tangible evidence that she is not the ruthless criminal her cousin and grandparents were. It’s why she replaces the large portrait of Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie) with “Red Kings,” replacing low art with high art, gangsta culture with a version of revolution filtered through the commercial lens, and why Shades can not convince her to sell.
As she gets swept up in Bushmaster’s revenge plot, she comes to see her role differently, and she embraces her gangster side, commits fully to it, as Shades has been asking. But she goes beyond the “rules,” slaughtering a restaurant full of Jamaicans. Suddenly, the painting is removed, replaced once again by Biggie’s image. The painting is sold, Mariah consolidated power and ramps up the violence, using innocents on the streets of Harlem to draw Bushmaster, who has gone underground, out into the open.
The tension in her character has evaporated, gone with the Basquiat, her soul like the painting sold for material gain.
Ultimately, the battle between the Basquiat painting and Biggie portrait symbolizes the central conflict — in the second season and within the chief characters. Harlem, as the season ends, is Biggie’s town.