Judas and the Black Messiah. With a focus on the former. Don't know if that was the best possible way to go, but the film works. One comes away from it admiring Fred Hampton even more than before, if that's possible, but as for Bill O'Neal—the Judas—the filmmakers treat him as a victim of forces larger than himself, which can and will destroy him if he does not cooperate. Jean Renoir's conviction that everyone has his or her reasons is manifest here, and I'd say you can't really separate it from the fact that, at least sometimes, fiction or drama that gets near a villain's private self carries a certain interest that a story that does not would lack. Or, interesting villains make for strong drama. I don't know that Raskolnikov is a STRONGER personage than Father Zosima, but he's quite a character.

The inner life of an infiltrator/provocateur as a topic of fiction—Mailer wanted to do it but never got around to it; maybe it would take a writer with skills akin to Dostoevsky's to even come close to exhausting the possibilities. The real doubleness of O'Neal in the middle of his duplicity—in the PBS interview of the man from 1989, done shortly before his suicide, he always uses the word “we,” not “they,” in reference to both the Panthers and the FBI. He really felt himself to be a Panther even as he was helping the FBI's efforts to destroy the Party.

I was thirteen when Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by the Chicago cops, and I remember the frustration one had with the stupid, uninformed, and smug comparisons people would make between the BPP and the KKK, akin, it strikes me now, to my Cold-War-liberal parents' much-repeated, shout-it-from-the-rooftops conviction that communists were just nazis with a different accent. As the film shows, one person who might have understood that the BPP was not anti-white but rather anti-capitalist was J. Edgar Hoover. And that's what scared him, about the Party and Hampton in particular. Hampton's strong efforts toward making common cause with militant Puerto Ricans, poor whites up from Appalachia, the predominantly white antiwar student left, as well as the apolitical Chicago street gangs—this was the real threat to everything Hoover represented.