Two Days in the Hamptons (Patreon)

Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021)

This is a film with a great deal of ostensibly political content, but it's not at all clear what its agenda actually is. One of my old profs, German cinema specialist Anton Kaes, used to always begin an analysis by asking, "what is the question to which this film is the answer," and that idea -- the social purpose of Judas, has been nagging at me since I watched it. Certainly it's not coincidental that this film, about Fred Hampton and the Illinois Black Panthers, arrives in the aftermath (and amidst ongoing concern) of the George Floyd murder and the heightened visibility of Black Lives Matter. But there are just enough discrepancies in this film to complicate, if not actually subvert, its overt messages about Black Power.

Organized like a biblical tale, in which informant Bill O'Neal (Keith Stanfield) offers up sacrificial lamb Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) by infiltrating the Panthers and giving information to an FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) intent on taking the organization down, Judas functions along a base / superstructure model. The direct engagement with radical politics -- Hampton and the other Panthers delivering Marx- and Fanon-inspired revolutionary rhetoric about white oppression - is in some ways belied by the broader religious themes of betrayal and the state of the human soul. In this way, the film always provides an "out" that lets viewers disengage with the political actions of the Panthers, because at its heart, Judas is about something more "universal," the stuff of not only the New Testament but Greek tragedy or Shakespeare. 

Even though King's film clearly marks FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) as its villain, we are supposed to empathize to some extent with O'Neal and even Mitchell. Both are ostensibly good men trapped in a corrupt power structure. And while it is always good practice to frame individual responsibility within larger institutional constraints, here the effect is to mitigate our condemnation, show the government as too big to defy, and in essence define the Black Panthers' revolutionary aims as quixotic. More subtly, Hampton's girlfriend Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) also complicates Hampton's radical program by being pregnant with Hampton's son. While Johnson remains within the Panthers' fold, she is presented as a figure whose job is to temper Hampton's political zeal with family considerations. ("I Hope the Panthers Love Their Children Too," to put it in cloying Stingian terms.)

So, if we assume that for most contemporary viewers, the Panthers' program and its liberation rhetoric are probably going to sound foreign if not wrongheaded, the film would have needed to provide more of a framework for understanding the movement, and more crucially, avoid the bourgeois-narrative tendency to make this a film about individuals and their choices. After all, Spike Lee's Malcolm X managed to show the man as a human being while never undermining what he stood for. Even in Do the Right Thing, Lee presents us with a dichotomy (Malcolm vs. Martin) that we must grapple with. The film doesn't proselytize one way of the other.

The Murder of Fred Hampton (Howard Alk, 1971)

It should be noted that virtually every scene in Judas and the Black Messiah that shows Hampton in action has been taken whole-cloth from Howard Alk and Mike Gray's investigative documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton. Every speech, every gesture, and even the bloody aftermath of the Chicago cops' raid on his apartment. While King's film is much more interested in O'Neal's hamstrung situation and his manipulation by the Feds, The Murder of Fred Hampton aims to show what the Panthers were about, why Hampton was so dangerous to the power structure, and especially the way that various institutions -- the police, the courts, even the Chicago Tribune -- closed ranks to defend the murder, even in the face of ample evidence contravening the official story.

Alk and Gray didn't set out to make a film about Hampton's death. They were involved in making a film about the Illinois Panthers and they found themselves in the middle of both a political crisis and a murder mystery. So the documentary took shape somewhat by chance, although the filmmakers' assembly of the final material, and their active role in the Panthers' counter-investigation into Hampton's murder, were acts the men took upon themselves. And although the resulting film ends up being as much about the Chicago police, especially Daryl Gates-like police chief Edward Hanrahan, the first half of the film demonstrates what the Panthers wanted to accomplish. We learn about the Rainbow Coalition, the youth groups, and most importantly, we see Hampton negotiating with fellow activists behind the scenes. 

In other words, Hampton's moral authority wasn't just about being a fiery speaker. His charisma was a byproduct of his passion and his intelligence. This is what is sorely missing from Judas, since it complicates the tidy narrative of a "Black messiah" who needed to be neutralized by the white establishment. Because in the end, Judas doesn't care all that much about the Panthers. Instead, it focuses on moral compromise, a theme that doesn't require political radicalism as its origin. It's so common as to be meaningless. Like so many other films, Judas asks its viewers "what would you do," without really explaining who and where you are in history.

And so, how does this relate to the present? For one thing, it shows that struggles for liberation are ongoing and cyclical, never really finished. But it also suggests that these struggles are probably doomed to failure. If we take Judas seriously, it tells us that the Black Panthers, and perhaps Black Lives Matter, are more likely to radicalize consciousness than society. The far-left will be little more than an unofficial opposition, never a guiding principle for social reorganization. The Pigs will always be the Pigs, and the best we can hope is that coalitions of the oppressed might serve as a counterweight, slowly convincing more and more people that the poor, Blacks, Muslims, and others are not expendable. Ultimately, Judas is an amicus brief against fascist tyranny, and not much more.