The titular spook from Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, is a double agent. The novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman, is the first Black officer in the history of the CIA, and to make up for being a token agent of the state, he takes his newly acquired intel and tactical skills to his community in Chicago to train up its working-class Black youth as freedom fighters. The 1973* film adaptation, directed by Ivan Dixon, was subsequently yanked from theaters for its radical content — or, in the words of cinema scholar Samantha N. Sheppard, for the way it “dramatizes, as revolutionary, the theme of African American freedom and equality being gained through a political consciousness of armed resistance.” In February, FX announced a pilot order for a Lee Daniels Spook TV series, which is now in production, with Insecure’s Y’lan Noel and MacGyver’s Lucas Till set to star. That same month, Amazon announced an upcoming Marcus Garvey biopic, with Winston Duke playing the activist, that vows to focus on the Hoover-sanctioned informant who infiltrated Garvey’s organization. They’re two entries in a run of recent projects — including the movies Judas and the Black Messiah and The United States vs. Billie Holiday as well as the FX series Snowfall, which has been renewed for its fifth season — that represent a growing interest in Black people enmeshed in the state’s web of surveillance.

Yet unlike Greenlee’s infamous character, a man with hidden ties to his community who intends to use his unprecedented government access for liberation, this current crop of fictional and dramatized Black informants rarely espouse those sorts of ulterior motives. What we’ve typically seen instead are Black informants who have served as proxies for state power — wolves in sheep’s clothing within the narratives of fictional and real-life Black revolutionary figures. Judas, a biopic of Illinois Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton (whom Daniel Kaluuya won an Oscar for portraying), largely follows the story of Bill O’Neal, the FBI collaborator who facilitated Hampton’s assassination. In Billie Holiday, federal agent and love interest Jimmy Fletcher is the “entry point into Holiday’s world.” Though the inclusion of these informant figures generates suspense and tension, the characters have been one-note — the informant, whether persuaded by the state or coerced, is presented as though only cowardice, greed, and/or self-righteousness could explain their actions. These films fail to name the well from which their informant’s apathy springs or the conditions under which their betrayals are bred — and in so doing, the films sabotage whatever critiques they seek to make of state power, laundering its actions through stories of intraracial disloyalty.