Paradoxically, then, a film like this appeals not by depicting that marginalization but by inverting it. We want our dreams, not just our realities, to be represented.

The same goes for “Black Panther.” Let me go out on a limb and say that the fictional land of Wakanda isn’t a very representative picture of black life on any continent. What made the film so important, the writer Allegra Frank tells us, is that “an entire group of people that look like me” got to be heroes in a big-budget blockbuster. Yes, actors of color are often stars of such movies, but that usually feels like a casting choice, not an indelible feature of the character. It mattered that the characters in “Black Panther,” not to mention the film’s Afrofuturist vibe, were specifically and not contingently black.

What such films deliver is a way of “looking like me” that’s as much about aspiration as identification. We say that their characters look like us; maybe what we mean is that we wish to look like them.

Lil Nas X, whose song “Old Town Road” galloped to the top of the charts and set up a homestead there, wasn’t exactly speaking his “truth” when he rapped, “I got the horses in the back.” A young black man from Atlanta, Lil Nas X had never been on a horse. The “yeehaw agenda” — the trend of black cultural figures in rancher attire that fueled and was fueled by his country-trap hit — is chiefly an aesthetic, the cowboy counterpart to the tech-infused offerings of Afrofuturism. It proceeds in defiance of social realism, that default mode of early-stage minority representations. It’s a mash-up of memes, an exercise in cultural unbundling. That’s why Lil Nas X didn’t think twice about releasing a remix with a Korean rapper titled “Seoul Town Road.”

Or consider Tessa Thompson, the mixed-race actor who played the superhero Valkyrie in “Thor: Ragnarok.” “I think it’s really great that young comic book readers that look like me can see themselves in a film,” she said. The Valkyries are an inheritance from Norse mythology, no doubt signal-boosted by the cliché of the Wagnerian soprano wearing horns. Should black girls be encouraged to identify with the ultimate Nordic icon? Well, why not?

What these fantasies ask is, Who gets to tell you what you look like? It’s not a representation of identity so much as it is a renegotiation of it.

How identity relates to identification is, of course, a complicated matter. Consider Gurinder Chadha’s recent film “Blinded by the Light,” based on a memoir by the journalist and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor. Set in the late 1980s, the film is about a teenager from a Pakistani family in the working-class English town of Luton. His father loses his job at the auto plant; racist hooligans pose a regular menace. Then our protagonist discovers the albums of Bruce Springsteen. The lyrics — about restive dreams amid disappointment, about a desperation to leave the hardship town of his childhood — hit him with the force of revelation.