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Character Types
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Religious Development
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Spike and Women
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A Hero’s Journey
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Malcolm X (1992)
Spike Lee’s first theatrical film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986)[i] was made for an estimated $175,000 but made over $7 million in the US. His next two films, School Daze (1988)[ii] and Do the Right Thing (1989)[iii] both got budgets of $6.5 million and grossed $14.5 and $27.5 million respectively with Do the Right Thing also receiving two Academy Award nominations including best original screenplay—Lee’s only nomination until BlacKkKlansman (2018)—and four Golden Globe nominations including Best Director and Best Picture.[iv] He then got $10 and $14 million budgets on his next two films, Mo’ Better Blues (1990)[v] and Jungle Fever (1991),[vi] which grossed $16 and $32 million in the US. Each of these had original screenplays written by Spike Lee and dealt, to varying degrees, with issues of race. The financial success of these films finally earned Lee the opportunity to direct a big budget epic. Malcolm X marked a turning point in his career as most of his subsequent films have been collaborations and most have also lost money.[1] Warner Brothers reportedly gave Lee about $20 million to make the film. Thanks to investments from black celebrities such as Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Janet Jackson, Lee was able to increase his budget all the way to $33 million (Donaldson 111). It would go on to gross over $48 million in the US.[vii]
Moviegoers (91%) and critics (88%) alike have appreciated Spike Lee’s efforts, with an average rating of 3.9/5 and 7.5/10 respectively on Rotten Tomatoes.[viii] “Top Critics” have been a little more critical with an average rating of 7/10 and one-third of them offering unfavorable reviews. The consensus seemed to be that the story itself was important and Denzel Washington’s performance succeeded in making Malcolm sympathetic and admirable, even with white audiences (Crowdus and Georgakas 69). Rita Kempley of the Washington Post hailed Malcolm X as a “spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change—and surely Spike Lee’s most universally appealing film.”[ix] Where it missed the mark was in its conventionality and occasional detours from the historical facts—common areas of difficulty for biopics: “Lee sketches Malcolm’s life colorfully, if by the numbers,” wrote Richard Corliss in TIME Magazine. “But he falls victim to the danger of movie biography: he elevates Malcolm’s importance until the vital historical context is obscured.”[x] Dolores Barclay, Arts Editor for the Associated Press, lamented that “the dramatization of Malcolm’s life should evoke some feeling—rage, sympathy, hope, anger, frustration, pride, sorrow. Snippets of the film should remain burned in our minds or our hearts. … But Lee’s movie, despite good intentions, does not inspire any visceral realities. It simply is too superficial, too theatrically poised.”[xi]
Character Types
Malcolm X is the hero of this story set against the backdrop of the African American struggle for respectability during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The journey of our tragic hero is structured around Malcolm’s relationships with subsequent mentor-types, each of whom fail him in some way: his father, Earl Little (Tommy Hollis), is murdered while Malcolm is still very young. West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo) takes Malcolm into his number-running enterprise, but then tries to have Malcolm killed after a disagreement. Baines (Albert Hall) fits the archetypes of herald, mentor, and shapeshifter while serving as the film’s primary antagonist. He “saves” Malcolm in prison [inciting incident] with the teachings of the Nation of Islam, but when Malcolm ascends to pride of place next to “the honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Baines becomes jealous and leads the plot to bring down Malcolm. Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.), a shadow type, becomes Malcolm’s primary mentor until Baines regains his influence [crisis point].
Hereafter, Malcolm becomes an independent leader, striving to do all he can while seemingly anticipating his assassination [climax]. “Lee has no doubt that thugs within the Nation of Islam planned and executed the assassination,” writes Richard Blake. “And he also has few doubts that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI may have expedited the killing and surely did nothing to prevent it” (Blake 262). Other archetypes in the film include the trickster, Shorty (Spike Lee), and a handful of allies including Malcolm’s wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett), and Brothers Earl (James McDaniel), Benjamin 2X (Jean LaMarre), and Gene (Keith Smith).
Religious Development
Throughout the film, Malcolm seeks empowerment and prosperity. Along the way he matures from a self-serving struggle, through an antagonistic struggle for justice against whites on behalf of the entire black community, to an ultimate focus on unity within the African American community in anticipation of universal racial harmony. These three stages correspond with developments in Malcolm’s social and religious identity. In the first stage, Malcolm Little is the son of a Christian preacher who frequently tries to fit in with white American culture. From beginning to end, black Christians are portrayed as either victims or accomplices of white injustice. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, upon which the film was based, quotes Malcolm:
The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. … It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! (Aftab 141)
In the second stage, Malcolm joins the Nation of Islam (NOI) and replaces his “slave name” with “X.” The NOI was started in the 1930s when Wallace D. Fard envisioned a community in which blacks would consider themselves members of the ancient Arabian tribe of Shabazz. Believing Fard to be the Mahdi (a messianic figure in certain strands of Islam), Elijah Muhammad (formerly Elijah Poole) became his prophet. When Fard disappeared from the scene around 1934, Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the Nation of Islam, teaching that blacks were a superior race and white people were from the devil (Smith 364-365). Although the NOI is widely regarded as heretical to “orthodox” Islam, Spike Lee remarked that “there’s never been a better program in America for black folks to convert drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals, whatever. Elijah Muhammad straightened those guys out and, once they were clean, that was that” (Crowdus and Georgakas 74).
The final stage of Malcolm’s development—in which he changes his name to El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz—coincides with his conversion from the NOI to Sunni Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca where he was deeply moved by an experience of brotherhood among all races. Anna Everett observes that Spike Lee here overstates Malcolm’s spiritual and political maturation (Everett 109). Blake suggests that “Lee sees Malcolm X continuing his growth in tolerance and bridge building,” but that such a level of inclusiveness was never reached: “In little more than a year after his return from Mecca, Malcolm X was dead” (Blake 261). But Lee was convinced by the fruit of Malcolm’s conversion: “If up until that point the man felt that every single white person was a blue-eyed, grafted devil, and he no longer believed that after his visit to Mecca, something must have happened”(Crowdus and Georgakas 74). In discussing the Autobiography, David LaRocca points out that there is a difference between “the fact and truth of empirical history and the truths made possible by a literary reading of history” (LaRocca 225). The same principle applies to the film: “All empirical facts are also potentially interpreted and interpretable, thus not simply or merely descriptive. The literary biography [or dramatic film] may be said to take interpretation further, but it may also be said to acknowledge the necessity of interpretation in any biographical project” (226).
These portrayals, which prioritize personal spirituality over organizational structures, are consistent with Lee’s own religious views. Like many African Americans, Lee was raised in a Southern Baptist milieu, but he only went to church when visiting his grandmothers. “I’ve always been honest about organized religion,” he told an interviewer. “There’s a difference between religion and spirituality. It comes down to a personal choice” (Sterritt 108). While he was never tempted to adopt Malcolm’s faith as his own, Lee admitted to gaining an appreciation for Islam:
Yeah, I mean you had to have respect. Denzel and I were reading the Koran before we began to shoot. We had to. If we didn’t have a sympathetic attitude toward Islam, why would the Saudi government allow us to bring cameras into Mecca to shoot the holy rite of hajj? … I think the Saudi government realized this film could be good publicity for Islam. (Crowdus and Georgakas 74)
Spike and Women
Spike Lee has been frequently criticized for his portrayals of women, and Malcolm X is no exception. Maurice Stevens quotes bell hooks saying that “certain stock, stereotypical, sexist images of both black and white women emerge in the movie—they are either virgins or whores, madonnas or prostitutes” (Stevens 335). In an interview, Lee was prompted, “In a historical film like this, the dilemma seems to be whether one can—or should even attempt to—deal with such an issue by presenting an anachronistic, retroactive ‘politically correct’ perspective on the Nation’s attitudes toward women” (Crowdus and Georgakas 71). “We just showed it the way it was,” Lee alleged. And regarding the banner that read, “WE MUST PROTECT OUR MOST VALUABLE PROPERTY: OUR WOMEN,” Lee said, “We didn’t make that up. That was an actual banner” (Crowdus and Georgakas 71). Elsewhere he defended himself saying, “You can’t come down on me for this second-class status the Nation of Islam gave women, because the brothers in the Nation always made the sisters ride in the back seat” (Everett 106).
Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, served as a consultant on the film, but was reportedly unhappy about her characterization, particularly in the scenes when she and Malcolm argue. Lee cannot necessarily be faulted here as he took these scenes directly from Alex Haley’s account in the Autobiography. In light of the Nation of Islam’s requirement that wives be obedient to their husbands, it may have been the strength and agency of Angela Bassett’s performance that upset the pious Dr. Shabazz (Stevens 335). Furthermore, Stevens explains how Lee’s cinematography and editing help to endear the viewer to Dr. Shabazz:
In most scenes in which Malcolm and Betty appear together, especially those in which they speak of their relationship or their family, Lee abandons the traditional shot-reverse-shot pattern he elsewhere uses to suggest the intimacy between two speakers. (337)
Lee made one choice, however, that is more difficult to forgive: the creation of the fictional character, Baines (Everett 104), who “symbolizes the successful efforts of the Nation of Islam in saving black males from crime-ridden pasts” (Donaldson 112). The invention of Baines as a mentor-turned-antagonist is completely understandable from a screenwriting standpoint, but it eliminated a woman who could have been one of the story’s most powerful characters: Malcolm’s sister. Ella Little-Collins and their brother, Reginald, were instrumental to Malcolm’s conversion (Warhol and Herndl 558).
A Hero’s Journey
In adapting Malcolm’s Autobiography for the screen, LaRocca submits that Spike Lee is “engaged in writing his own autobiography, … making a film that summons X’s life for his own ideological uses and political purposes” (235). Lee explains that purpose:
I did not want this film just to be a historical document. … I also wanted to tie the film into today. … That’s why we open the film with the Rodney King footage and the American flag burning, and end the film with the classrooms, from Harlem to Soweto. (Crowdus and Georgakas 66)
Everett compares Lee’s cross-cutting of the Rodney King beating and the (burning) American flag with Sergei Eisenstein’s use of intellectual montage during the 1920s. The message is that America equals racial oppression (Everett 101). Using the model of the hero’s journey, we might say that this state of oppression is the ordinary world, a wounded land. The heroic life and martyrdom of Malcolm X, then, represents the special world offering an elixir to heal the land. When Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X emerged on the scene, Lee saw downsides to both of their approaches: “If we respond within the terms of the situation, as Martin Luther King suggests, we risk allowing injustice to triumph, but if we respond excessively, as Malcolm X suggests, we risk becoming like those we are struggling against” (McGowan 97). The story of Malcolm X as posited by Lee, which synthesizes the best of King and X, is the boon that is offered to our ordinary world. Lee accordingly ends on a hopeful note with Nelson Mandela’s optimistic speech and children in Soweto and Harlem stand and proclaim, “I am Malcolm X.”
Footnote
[1] Exceptions include He Got Game (1998) & Bamboozled (2000) which were not collaborations but still lost money, Inside Man (2006) which returned twice its investment, and BlacKkKlansman (2018) which tripled its estimated budget [see IMDb pages for each of these films for specifics].
Bibliography
Aftab, Kaleem. Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It”. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Blake, Richard A. The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Crowdus, Gary and Dan Georgakas. “Our Film Is Only a Starting Point: An Interview with Spike Lee.” Lee, Spike. Spike Lee: Interviews. Ed. Cynthia Fuchs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, 2002. 65-78.
Donaldson, Melvin. Black Directors in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Everett, Anna. “”Spike, Don’t Mess Malcolm Up”: Courting Controversy and Control in ‘Malcolm X’.” The Spike Lee Reader. Ed. Pamela J. Massood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. 91-114.
LaRocca, David. “Rethinking the First Person: Autobiography, Authorship, and the Contested Self in Malcolm X.” The Philosophy of Spike Lee. Ed. Mark T. Conard. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 215-241. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcwgn.17>.
McGowan, Todd. Spike Lee (Contemporary Film Directors). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
Smith, Jane I. “Islam in America.” The Cambridge History of Religions in America (1945 to the Present). Ed. Stephen J. Stein. Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 357-379.
Sterritt, David. Spike Lee’s America. Malden: Polity, 2013.
Stevens, Maurice E. “Subject to Countermemory: Disavowal and Black Manhood in Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X’.” Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader. Ed. Janice D. Hamlet and Robin R. Means Coleman. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 321-341.
Warhol, Robin R. and Diane Price Herndl. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.