Judas and the Black Messiah: When Hollywood Co-opts Radical History
Agreed
-Hampton also had all the complexities that make us human. Yet there was no point while watching
Judas and the Black Messiah — the film based on his state-orchestrated murder — when I felt a hint of emotion. I felt no swell of joy at the exceedingly brief moments of Black communion. No warmth watching the thinly developed romance between Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and Deborah (Dominique Fishback), who connect over Malcolm X speeches like “The Ballot or the Bullet
.” I didn’t even feel horror witnessing the bloody violence wrought by white hands, in service of white supremacy.
Judas gets neither the beauty and complications of Blackness, nor does it capture the outright depravity of white supremacy. From the poorly developed performances to the muddled script, this film by co-writer/director Shaka King and producer Ryan Coogler fails the history it seeks to embody.
Chicago and its suburbs, with its strict racial divides, are crucial to understanding who Hampton was and what drove him. Hampton attended Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois, where he was elected to an interracial council that handled racial tensions that arose in the school. Even after graduating, the school’s principal asked him to come back to handle growing issues along the lines of race among the student body. There he demonstrated his skills in listening as well as an expansive perspective on possible futures and the importance of community, all of which fueled his activism. (After his murder, the tumult between the white and Black students of the school would grow so fiery, the administrators had to cancel classes for several weeks.) Hampton set up a Black cultural center in Maywood. He studied the speeches of Malcolm X, as the film outlines. He also read Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, and felt communion with leftist struggles beyond the borders of the United States.
“Fred’s evolution cannot be separated from the political events and movements around him,” writes lawyer Jeffrey Haas — who previously represented the Black Panther Party through Chicago’s People’s Law Office and fought for material justice in the wake of Hampton’s death — in his 2009 book
The Assassination of Fred Hampton. He points to events such as the 1964 Public accommodations Act and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that “did nothing to change the conditions of Blacks in ghettos outside the South.” In
Judas, we never get a proper display of the community dynamics that motivated Hampton. We never fully learn the depth of his politics, and that undercuts the potential of the film as a whole.
Ultimately, Kaluuya’s Hampton reads as a blustering showman more than a preacher-poet. In a scene following Hampton’s release from Menard Prison, the camera follows Kaluuya from behind as he walks up the staircase to enter into an auditorium with a rapturous crowd chanting “Chairman Fred.” Kaluuya’s steps have a heaviness to them. He stoically stands onstage before the crowd, surveying what’s ahead of him, before smiling and declaring, “I’m free.” He tells the crowd to repeat after him: “I am a revolutionary.” His performance consists mostly of these kinds of speeches. This gives his character a stilted quality, a bundle of poorly portrayed political ideas rather than an actual human being. To understand Hampton is to understand his actions and humanity, not just his loftiest speeches.
And yet the film whittles down some of Hampton’s most important work to little more than a montage
The only things I felt as the credits rolled were a profound sense of disappointment and a frustrated queasiness at what happens when the industry seeks to adopt an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, undeniably radical figure such as Hampton. Hollywood is more of a capitalist enterprise than it is a haven for artists. What it can’t co-opt, it discards.