That's a pretty inflammatory way to start a post if you don't know what I'm going to say next. It suggests that Black people are uniquely suited to play a trusted insider who betrays the person he loves the most.
That's not it at all. It's just that Carl Anderson etched an image of this character in my head that has never gone away.
Anderson, the man to your left in this photo, played Judas in Norman Jewison's 1973 film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Although I'm not religious -- or maybe because I'm not religious -- the film has become one of my most cherished over the years, such that it is now in my top 20 of all time on Flickchart.
Because of that lofty position, it has also come up quite a lot in a monthly movie challenge I participate in on Facebook with other Flickcharters. Each month you are randomly assigned the highest ranked film you haven't seen on another participant's chart, and because Jesus Christ Superstar currently sits at #16 for me, it seems to get drawn pretty much every other month. Most people, you won't be surprised to learn, don't get it. So while it's in the top 1% of my own chart, it might be closer to the bottom 1% of theirs.
I've been wanting to catch back up with this beloved favorite, for the first time since 2015, for some time now, as each new failure of another Flickcharter to get this movie spurs an interest in reminding me why I love it so much. In fact, I was going to watch it at the beginning of 2020, only I had no way to play it on our DVD player -- long story short, you couldn't press play from the buttons on the front of the DVD player and our remote control app no longer worked on our phones. It was shortly after that we discovered that the device's actual remote control was working, even though we'd long since given up on it as broken. Anyway.
But the actual excuse for watching Jesus Christ Superstar on Thursday night ended up being that I saw Judas and the Black Messiah on Wednesday night. (For some reason I want to call this movie Judas and the Black Iscariot.) Which gives us another prominent Black Judas, played by recently Oscar-nominated Lakeith Stanfield, though in this case the Christ figure (also Oscar-nominated Daniel Kaluuya) is also Black.
Stanfield's strong, conflicted performance reminded me of the strong, conflicted performance of Anderson in that movie from 48 years ago ... not to mention a stage version in which he appeared in the late 1990s or early 2000s, also alongside the actor who plays Christ in the film, Ted Neeley. I got tickets as a Christmas present for my mother, who always loved this show and was integral in getting me interested in it, whether she knew it or not. (I could also tell you about how I waited afterward to meet Neeley, and how he was hugging everyone, and how I hugged my own most dominant mental image of the personification of Jesus Christ, but that would be getting sidetracked.)
In that film version of JCS, Anderson uses his whole body to express the inner torment of a man who thought he was doing the right thing by kneecapping a beautiful soul whose thirst for power and glory had perverted his message. Anderson's wiry frame makes it all that much easier. As he makes impassioned pleas that fall on deaf ears for Christ to right his ship, his body twists and turns and undulates. When he runs, his body flails, powerless against the rushing waters of fate.
This is not just a performance of great physicality and exquisite singing, though. It's a big performance, but it contains small moments of brilliance. One of my favorites is the exact moment of Judas' betrayal. As the pharisees have dangled his bag of 30 silver pieces and dropped it in the dust for Judas to retrieve, he actually parts with the information they need, about where to find Jesus to capture him on Thursday night. The last words in the sentence yield the location: "In the garden of ... Gesthemane." And on that last word, the camera does one of many wonderful zooms employed by Jewison in the film, so only the very agent of Judas' betrayal -- his lips -- appear in the shot.
Stanfield's performance in Judas and the Black Messiah is not all that similar. How could it be? This is not a musical. He wears mostly dark black outfits, as opposed to the red technicolor getup that is Anderson's most regular garb. No dancing is required, and very little running.
But there's something at the core of Stanfield's performance that he shares with Anderson, that any good portrayal of Judas should share: the sense of how the conflict is tearing him apart. Bill O'Neal's scenes with the FBI agent played by Jesse Plemons have that same uncomfortable dynamic of Judas with the pharisees, a clear sense of the power and the ability to manipulate one has over the other. There's an ideological difference here, to be sure, and some of the parallels are imperfect. While Judas betrayed Jesus of his own free will, an attempt to rein him in, O'Neal is planted with Fred Hampton's Black Panthers as an attempt by O'Neal to avoid prosecution, only becoming more ideologically aligned with Hampton as he goes along. Judas, on the other hand, is falling out of that alignment with Jesus.
The moment of O'Neal's final, ultimate betrayal -- drugging Hampton in order to allow him to be assassinated -- takes very literally something Judas may have only done metaphorically. And how Stanfield plays that moment, trying to smile and speak clearly through tears that he knows could give him away, reminded me of the masterwork of Anderson.
Now, back to that opening comment, the one that seemed so controversial at the time.
I'm glad Jesus Christ Superstar was made in an era when, for better or worse, we had a simpler perspective on matters of racial representation. Obviously much of the time it was for worse, and I don't even need to get into all that here because you know I understand the horrible racism of the films of decades past. But there were times when it was for the better, such as allowing Anderson to be cast in this role.
Today, we would never see a Black Judas next to a white Jesus. It would just be way too fraught. Even if there are ways to argue that Judas is the hero of the piece, there are many more ways to argue the opposite, and no modern production would want to court that kind of controversy. Of course, the image of Judas hanged near the end of the film -- lynched, even if by himself -- would be highly triggering to today's audience, and avoided at all costs.
But without a more naive view of what constituted a good look or a bad look at the time, we would never have gotten the great performance of Carl Anderson as Judas. The interesting thing was that it seems Judas was specifically conceived as Black. Anderson was an understudy for Judas on Broadway. Who initiated the role? Why none other than film and stage legend Ben Vereen, also a Black man.
It doesn't appear to have been written that way by Rice and Webber. After all, as I learned from a little poking around on Wikipedia this week, Ted Neeley originally auditioned to play Judas, as he found that the more interesting role. I doubt they ever seriously considered him -- I mean, he just looks like Jesus Christ -- but that it was a possibility means that Judas had not yet been fixed as Black.
With the work of first Vereen and then Anderson, though, his racial identity seemed to solidify. To the point where, when I saw a little bit of a filmed version of the stage revival from around 20 years ago, I saw the actor cast as Judas and immediately dismissed him because he was white.
This seems like a strange perspective to have, though it's consistent with my theory that the first version of something you experience is usually your favorite, and subsequent versions can't measure up. But I also think there is an inclination toward "othering" Judas in other works in which the Judas-Jesus relationship is depicted. With just one example off the top of my head, Garth Davis' 2018 film Mary Magdalene features Tahar Rahim, an actor of Algerian descent, playing Judas to the white Jesus of Joaquin Phoenix. Interestingly, Peter -- who also betrays Jesus by denying him -- is played by the Black actor here, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It's a different story with Judas and the Black Messiah, as both characters are Black, and the true personification of evil is Plemons as the FBI agent. He is this film's pharisees. So I'm not sure if it makes a useful comparison in this case except to say that the comparison did occur to me, and I think that's because this is another Black Judas, one who harnesses the spirit of Carl Anderson whether he was trying to or not.
As I've said, I'm not religious, and I am far more interested in both Jesus and Judas as literary figures than as religious ones. They are great characters loaded with human frailties, but particularly Judas, a man beset by conflict about the right thing to do. Judas' reputation as a character has been burnished by one of our finest Black actors today, continuing the legacy started by a Black actor who was underappreciated at the time. Who left us in 2004 ... a fact I was reminded of while watching a little bit of the DVD commentary by Jewison and Neeley, which they happened to record only a month after his passing.
I hope neither actor regretted his casting in the role. I assume Anderson didn't, as he continued to play it on stage in the ensuing decades. And hopefully Stanfield won't either, something that seems unlikely considering that he's been nominated for an Oscar. True progress is not casting Black actors only as morally upright characters. True progress is reaching the point where it's okay for them to play seriously flawed ones.
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