Judas and the Black Messiah Review

Giacomo Bianchino

16/09/2021

Marxist-Leninists are right to be wary when Hollywood attempts anti-capitalism. Although Hollywood movies often deal with the brutalising affects of capitalism on the poor—the struggle against capitalism is typically shown without any recognition of the class as a central component of that struggle (Joker, The Purge). Hollywood also portrays struggle to polemicise about union corruption (The Irishman), ignoring the role of workers unions in overcoming poverty and injustice. When a rare piece of critical realism, for example Sorry to Bother You, does take on the class-struggle, it has very little to draw from in terms of successful models of revolutionary struggle in the West.

The attempt to portray history in film and literature has been a bugbear of Marxist critics since Marx’s own reflections on Balzac and Eugene Sue. Engels famously claimed that realist historical fiction had to portray a certain “type” of historical being (a fixed figure in the class struggle) in order to be effective. Over the course of the 20th century, avant-garde Marxists battled with the purveyors of Socialist Realism in the international writers’ movement to determine what “real” history looked like when transposed into fiction [1]. Hollywood, somehow, remained largely immune to this drama. When it turns to history, you can be sure that it does so with the standard bourgeois conventions of fiction kept firmly intact.

This is certainly true of Judas and the Black Messiah. The film, originally written by the Lucas Brothers and adapted by Shaka King and Will Berson, tells the story of Chairman Fred Hampton; the deputy chairman of the Black Panthers party (BPP) who played a pivotal role in the organisation of Chicago during the late 1960s until he was assassinated by the FBI at the age of 21.

Chairman Fred’s murder is of major historical significance. A young revolutionary was considered dangerous enough by the world’s most powerful country to have his party infiltrated and to have him killed. To put this into proper historical context would mean a sweeping account of the drama of Black Panthers politics and the realities of class struggle at an American and global level.

“In Judas and the Black Messiah, this manifests by removing the politics of Hampton to focusing on the persona of Hampton to prevent his story being used to inspire communists”

The film, however, suffers from the usual symptoms of historical storytelling. As Fred Jameson mentions in his Antinomies of Realism, it is difficult to “make history appear” in a text. Most historical fiction focusses on failed revolutions because it is much more difficult to capture the scale of a great success and to make this feel “realistic” by fictional standards. Judas does exactly this; choosing a moment where plebeian strength was overcome and focussing on the masses’ vulnerability to treachery. The central focus is the betrayal of Chairman Fred by William O’Neal, a car-thief-turned-FBI informant who became security chief of the Chicago BPP and coordinated Hampton’s murder.

As suggested by the title, the film is about the struggle of personalities. Indeed, Chairman Fred is “humanised” by his relationship with a comrade who falls pregnant to him, while O’Neal’s cognitive dissonance around the ethics of his involvement with the FBI becomes a meditation on self-delusion and self-interest. It is these personal relations that take centre-stage in the film, and the politics quickly becomes subordinate. The only glimpses we get are tensely charged meetings and speeches in which the masses of BPP supporters become a simple vehicle for call-and-response passivity. There is also the high drama of cowboy-style shootouts and some nods to Hamptons’ alliance building. This is all furniture, however, for the relationship at the heart of the drama: Hampton and O’Neal.

In a sense, all film and all literature is an attempt to fit a set of events into a certain system of meaning. Creating a narrative means deciding which events to prioritise, and which things to leave out. This can function in so subtle a way that what one thinks one is watching or reading ends up imposing the opposite message. In Judas and the Black Messiah, this manifests by removing the politics of Hampton to focusing on the persona of Hampton to prevent his story being used to inspire communists. As Lenin once famously said:

“After their death, attempts are made to convert (revolutionaries) into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

Indeed, politics retreats from the narrative as the central plot emerges: the betrayal of Hampton by O’Neal, rendering it just one more bourgeois tale of a personal moral failing. To its credit, it paints the rat. It also points to FBI conspiracy, and the very personal racism of its higher staff. However, it is unclear whether any concrete politics can be recovered from this deeply personal narrative.

Hollywood cleaves to the notion that putting a broad narrative in personal terms makes it more “realistic” or intimate for the audience. But the personal betrayal narrative prevents any real novelty from emerging, as a complex political story is forced into a thoroughly bourgeois narrative structure.

What are communists to do with Chairman Fred’s tragedy? We avoid an idealised view of history where possible (though it has at times proved an invaluable propaganda tool) or veneration of heroes. In fact, for the materialist, there isn’t a story of Fred Hampton at all; rather there is a story of the black working class coming to terms with bourgeois rule and forming a coalition with other groups across identity lines. Telling such a story is difficult, but it is important to reject Hollywood’s idealism and embrace a truly material approach to historical fiction.

Notes:

[1] Indeed, the latter had its own branch here in Australia: the “Realist Writers’ Group,” and we boasted such eminent materialist writers as Christina Stead and Jack Lindsay.