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There are many reasons for the unbroken attraction of the resistance and protest movements around the fateful year 1968. Drugs, music, group sex and of course the unbeatable style of the revolution. In Shaka King’s film “Judas and the Black Messiah” about the Black Panther Party in Chicago, however, it is much more idealistic the certainty that the struggle was fought for a better world at that time and not against natural disasters, inequality and a racism that evolved increasingly persistent in the social heritage of the USA. And because every story about American injustice is always a meta-story for the rest of the world, “Judas and the Black Messiah” works quite well as a prequel to the presence of the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Simultaneous strength and weakness of film is its genre. “Judas” is an excellent political thriller. It tells the true story of the car thief Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who is caught right at the beginning. FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) makes him an offer. If he infiltrates the Black Panther Party for “the office”, he is free. And so O’Neal slowly works his way up to the chairman of the Chicago faction of the Panthers Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). The FBI even gives him a car so that he can win the group’s trust as a driver for Hampton. When he began to get his Rainbow Coalition together in 1969, O’Neal was one of his closest colleagues.
Politicians prevent class struggle by inciting racial conflicts
As a gifted speaker and diplomat, Hampton recruited the similarly militant Puerto Rican emancipation movement Women of the Young Lords, the left-wing aid organization for impoverished white southerners Young Patriots, and a martial street gang. Together they should fight for justice, for education, nutrition, health and living space. The real Hampton was a visionary there. And a danger. Shifting the class struggle into the polarization of racial conflict has always been a trump card of power in Washington. FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) demonized Hampton as an enemy of the state.
King tells this story of battle and betrayal with the utmost suspense. As an Afro-American director, he stays away from the clichés of guerrilla romanticism, to which the Black Panthers are so often reduced. Certainly he cannot resist the temptation to stage the aura of revolutionary pop in the always cool ambience of the neon flickering Chicago of 1968. In the case of historical dramas from this time, the question always arises whether the revolutionaries with their sense of style weren’t already staging themselves as pop icons back then. And whether the retro culture of the 21st century still leaves room to recreate the world of that time without the gesture of style fetish.
The actual accusations that can be made against the film are much more subtle, and above all due to the genre. The two main roles are played by two actors who are both around ten years older than their historical models. O’Neal was 18 when he became the FBI’s puppet. Hampton was 21 when he started the Rainbow Coalition. Ten years make a difference if you want to authentically portray the Panthers as a movement of young Afro-Americans and especially young parents. Even if Daniel Kaluuya embodies Fred Hampton’s fighting spirit and charisma so convincingly that he rightly received the Oscar for best supporting actor. What falls by the wayside is Hampton’s love story with the poet and activist Akua Njeri. Dominique Fishback plays her, who already shone in the HBO series “The Deuce” with a tightrope walk between vulnerability and superhero-like assertiveness, which is also manifested almost exclusively in looks in “Judas”.
Terrifyingly little has changed in America in the past 50 years
Ultimately, however, Hampton and O’Neal remain primarily characters who drive the thriller’s tension forward. One suspects how much the betrayal is tearing O’Neal inwardly, to whom the movement and its leader are becoming more and more sympathetic, although he is ultimately supposed to destroy them. When FBI agent Mitchell tells him that he has already caught the Ku Klux Klan men who murdered civil rights activists in Mississippi four years earlier, and that the Panthers are no better than the racially separatist Klan, the doubts gnaw him tremendously.
So the tension increases, regardless of whether you know the ending from the history books or not. Not least because the anger at a country that persecutes its citizens with such consistency and brutality grabs you in the course of the film. That’s the point at which you realize once again that “Black Lives Matter” is a direct continuation of that time, because not so much has changed in America in the last fifty years or more. And that makes this film not only exciting, but also authentic. But even there remains a question that goes beyond the film. Is “Judas and the Black Messiah” such a universal story because it exemplifies the state’s unconditional will to oppress and destroy all those who oppose it? Or has “Black Lives Matter” become such a meta-story for the world because Hollywood has always told such stories with such brilliant generality?
Judas and the Black Messiah, USA 2021 – Director: Shaka King. Book: Will Berson, Shaka King. Camera: Sean Bobbitt. With: Daniel Kaluuya, Lakeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback. 126 minutes.
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