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But while Lang is an honorary POC when compared to the stuck-up rich white folks, his own whiteness is crucial in defining his character against actual people of color in the film. In particular, his half-comic, half-dramatic performance is pitched as a compromise between the uptight white suits and the frankly comic, less law-abiding people of color. In that introductory prison-yard scene, the film takes care to show that it's the big, menacing black guy who insists on a friendly fight before Lang is released—Lang himself finds the ritual odd and unnecessary. After he gets out, Luis is the one to push Lang to get back into a life of crime. But Lang insists on going straight in the name of his young daughter, his estranged wife, and what appears to be their thoroughly-bourgeois former life together.When he's in prison, or when he's hanging out with people of color, Lang, in short, is slumming. Even the reason he's in prison is fairly honorable: Lang, a systems engineer was convicted for electronically burgling a shady conglomerate and returning funds to people who had been ripped off. Unlike Luis, who is a straightforward burglar and thief, the film tells us Lang is more of a misunderstood hero, a white-hatted Robin Hood, resetting the scales of justice.[The filmmakers] use his race as a way to underline his exceptionalism compared to other prisoners, and his ultimate superiority.
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Similarly, for his first real battle as Ant-Man, Lang ends up taking on the black superhero, Sam Wilson, the Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The battle is as much farce as adventure—the tiny Ant-Man bounces around and thumps his oversized opponent, who spins and thrashes haplessly. The scene recalls the first introduction of Sam Wilson in Captain America: Winter Soldier, where Captain America literally jogs circles around him. "In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, viewers experience the white protagonist's superior physicality in contrast to a Black inferior," critic James Lamb writes at my site, the Hooded Utilitarian. Falcon serves the same purpose here: His inferiority (and the inferiority of the heist team) underline Lang's awesomeness—an awesomeness which is not incidentally linked to his whiteness.Lang is essentially treated as an honorary person of color.
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