Judas and the Black Messiah (3/5 Stars)

 

There is an inherent conflict in the mythology of the Black Panthers. Its supporters want it to be an important group and at the same time deems its enemies as overzealous. The title of this movie, directed by Shaka King, is illustrative. The Black Messiah is allegedly a descriptive title given by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, to Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers. Such a title imposes an importance on Fred Hampton akin to Jesus Christ. This movie wants you to think of Fred Hampton as an important, potentially dangerous, man. It also wants you to believe the FBI was wrong to treat him as such.

What I knew about the Black Panthers walking into this movie was scant. First, their name post-dates the Marvel comic Superhero by a few years. That is probably coincidental. Second, they were heavily armed and “patrolled” neighborhoods with the vague mission of defending the residents therein from the police. Third, they had some ancillary connection to the ideology of Malcolm X.

I was wrong about the third one. Whereas Malcolm X was staunch in his belief that black people had the right to defend themselves, with violence if necessary, I don’t recall him preaching civil war in his book. He seemed to be more interested in black self-reliance, going so far as to advocate segregation. To put it another way, he seemed less interested in affecting the white man and more interested in the white man not affecting the black man.

The Black Panthers, at least the Fred Hampton led ones in Chicago, are Marxists. They are preaching a racialized Marxist ideology. The movie does not shy away from this. Fred Hampton preaches revolution from the stage, and because he uses the terminology of Marxism, it is no metaphor. One listening to it would be justified in believing that Fred Hampton means to bring about a violent revolution, starting with the overthrow of the Chicago Police Department. The movie believes that the FBI thought that.

The movie makes a big deal about Black Panthers’ charitable works in the community. Apparently they ran food services for hungry children. This is hardly relevant as to whether the FBI deems them dangerous and no excuse for them to be considered harmless. Many dictators, gangsters, and totalitarian governments give away bread and circuses to the poor. It is not something only good and peaceful people do. It can be noted however that when good and peaceful people do it (like say the church) they don’t also walk around heavily armed.

Still they probably were mostly harmless. They were not, as argued by an FBI agent using a false equivalency, like the Ku Klux Klan. The Black Panthers did not have the same amount of numbers, had little to no political support in any level of government, and although they had guns, had no knowledge of tactics. A commendable thing about Director Shaka King movie is that even though he is clearly sympathetic to the Black Panthers, his movie is still honest enough in its portrayal to allow them to perform acts of extraordinary stupidity. At one point, after a Black Panther has initiated a shoot out with the police, several police cars nonchalantly stake out the Black Panther headquarters. One particular cop taunts the Panthers with a megaphone. A member of the Black Panthers reacts to this by opening the window and brandishing a shotgun. What results is the world’s most predictable shootout with the world’s most predictable ending: the cops win. What was the plan? Did the Black Panthers really believe that a show of force would intimidate the cops? Did they think that once the shooting started, that the cops would give up and go away?

(For all the bad things said about the moral impact of the video game Grand Theft Auto, one particular mechanic of the game should be taken to heart by all would be revolutionaries: Once you shoot a cop, the only option is to run. Because the cops will keep coming and coming until you are dead, at least in America.)

Fred Hampton is played by Daniel Kaluuya. The title “Judas” is Bill O’Neal, played by Lakeith Stanfield, the Black Panther head of security and also an FBI informant. Interestingly, although Hampton and O’Neal are the characters with the most screentime in the movie respectively, both Kaluuya and Stanfield were nominated for Oscars in the Supporting Actor category, Kaluuya winning. Kaluuya is a fine actor and Stanfield is a favorite of mine. Having said that, both are miscast. Fred Hampton was 21 at the time of his assassination (Kaluuya is 32). Bill O’Neal was 20 at the time (Stanfield is 30). The actors bring a gravitas to their roles that is misleading and blinds the audience to reasons for their behavior that would be obvious if younger actors had played the roles.

For example, Bill O’Neal’s career as an FBI informant started when he was a teenager. He had been caught impersonating a federal officer while trying to steal cars when he was 17. If you wanted a good reason why he was so impressionable and would betray all the Panthers for steak dinners, money, a car, and a business, all you need to know is that he is just a stupid kid. As for Hampton, it is illustrative of the actual pedigree of the Black Panthers (as opposed to their mythologized status as a dangerous terrorist group) that the head of the chapter is barely old enough to drink alcohol. In his wisdom he appointed a paid informant as head of security. These were kids playing dress-up, wearing silly fatigues and berets, walking around with guns they hardly knew how to use.

Really, the main character of this story is Bill O’Neal’s FBI handler Roy Mitchell (played by Jesse Plemons). He, along with the rest of the FBI are the adults in the room. They are the ones with the moral dilemma on their hands, the ones that have agency. The Black Panthers are outmaneuvered and outgunned at every turn, their ranks rife with informants. The movie ends with what can be categorized as an act of war by the FBI against the Black Panthers. It was a surprise attack in the dead of night with overwhelming force, no due process, ending in the assassination of an unconscious Fred Hampton. When such tactics are used against citizens, that’s called fascism. Who is the real Judas here? It’s the FBI and they betrayed all of us.

Black Panther (5/5 Stars)

I would hesitate to say this next thing if it hadn’t been for multitudes of people saying it before me. In fact, before seeing Black Panther I would have argued against it. I would have pointed to about thirty years of movies starting with Spike Lee and John Singleton to argue that black representation in film has been around for awhile. Important movies about the black experience in America have been made by distinguished filmmakers (say Amistad and 12 Years a Slave). There have even been black super-hero movies (Blade and Hancock). But Black Panther is a special movie. Never before has a very large studio thrown so much money and effort in such an unadulterated way towards making an arguably “African” movie. Black people have always been with us but not really like this. Like India in Slumdog Millionaire and China in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Black Panther can be categorized as a “coming out” party. And what a party it is.

For one thing, black people are being represented from a position of strength. The Black Panther, as a Marvel Superhero, is the crown-prince of the fictional kingdom of Wakaanda. Wakaanda is based on the old European myths of utopic cities such as El Dorado and Shangrila that stayed in static idyllic peace while the outside world suffered through the hell of progress. Wakaanda is situated on top of large deposits of Vibranium, a mineral that seems to literally do everything from providing energy, making airplanes, and cloaking entire cities from view of the outside world. As far as the country’s wealth in concerned, Wakaanda is a production designer’s magnum opus of contradictory elements. Wakaanda is essentially a science fiction version of Africa, traditional elements intertwined with technology several decades ahead of the rest of the world. The same can be said of the costumes and makeup of the movie, all three of which should run away with Oscars next year. Black Panther is a gorgeous movie in all its respects. Wakaanda is also an Enlightened country. Even though Wakaanda’s political model is based on fights to the death for dominance (this is a comic book movie after all), women apparently have equal status as men and actually form the most prestigious parts of the army as well as, as far as I could tell, the one and only scientific post in the whole country.

(For reasons that could fill several books, the idea of an isolated highly technological egalitarian utopia is stupidly wrong. The apparent location of Wakaanda, northeast Congo, also known as the world capital of anarchy, poverty, and rape, is the perfect location for the manifestation of a stupidly wrong idea. However, as this is a comic book movie, I will try to refrain from lecturing on the subject of economics.)

The main theme of the movie is whether or not Wakaanda should use its wealth and technology to help the rest of the world or to conquer it in revenge for the oppression of black people. In an interesting twist, the rest of the world is mainly represented by the projects of Oakland, California (where it should be noted, Director Ryan Coogler is from and where he made his first great movie Fruitvale Station). The movie handles this subject the way Nelson Mandela would handle it, with great maturity.

I’m not exactly sure what the black panther legend means in Africa or where exactly it comes from. Here, in America, the Black Panthers were a militant vigilante group that took it upon themselves to police the police, sometimes coming in direct conflict with them (I am also told they did community service). The Marvel superhero actually precedes the militant group by several years and simply does not have the same philosophy. Actually, the philosophy of the militant group is more closely aligned in Black Panther by the main bad guy, a man named Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. This is a black panther in the American sense. Fueled by resentment and hatred, he is bent on using Wakaanda’s wealth and technology to burn everything down. Coogler’s treatment of Killmonger is empathatic but not sympathetic. He develops the character well and explains his actions, but ultimately does not agree with him.

There is one particular scene that stood out to me. When the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) is first made a King, he goes through an ancient ritual in which he visits his ancestors in an ethereal version of the Serengeti. Later on in the movie, Killmonger goes through the same ritual. However, as his father was an exile from Wakaanda, Killmonger visits him where he ended up dying, a project in Oakland, California. It is a scene of great gravity and incongruity and one of the best manifestations of cultural displacement I have ever seen in a movie. It perhaps can be said that a King of a wealthy country like Wakaanda is privileged and can afford then to take a Nelson Mandela (also of royal blood) view of the world whereas Killmonger grew up poor and excluded and is entitled to his resentment. But no matter, the point I believe is that black people want to have the decision to choose to be included in the world. Given the choice, it seems that Black Panther is stating that they would choose inclusion. That’s fine with me. If that is where the words "black panther" lead now, I will follow.

So much of black culture seems to be simply reactionary to white culture (a dumb generalization but I don’t want to spend the space to get any more specific). By positioning Black Panther’s arguments and themes in a place outside of white influence, it allows the “peace and inclusion” choice to avoid the Uncle Tom label of appeasement. In recent years, I have been continually annoyed by other black movies (“black movies” another gross generalization but I won’t spend forever writing this) from the incompetent Selma to the insult-to-history which was Birth of a Nation to the multitudinous iterations of "untold stories" of the "first black ___ to do ___” like Hidden Figures that arrive in theaters in a ever-reliant stream. If the complete absence of white people in Black Panther indeed enabled its philosophical maturity and creativity, then we should start producing more "black movies" set entirely in Africa and/or space (having said that, the performance of Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman were fantastic in Black Panther). I also hope that Ryan Coogler can make some more personal movies. Chistopher Nolan got to switch between regular movies and blockbusters. Hopefully Coogler gets a similar deal.