The AmHi Thru PopCul Bonus: Malcolm X Essay Draft Excerpt

 Note: this is not my Libra post, this is part of something that I wrote for American History Through Popular Culture (heavily recommended btw) that I thought was relevant to the concept of History as Fiction.

Malcolm X follows the titular character from his beginnings as the teenage hustler Detroit Red and, while dipping strategically into his childhood in flashback sequences, follows him as his career leads him to a years-long prison sentence. In prison, Malcolm Little meets Baines, a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), who encourages Little to educate himself, and to recognize and dismantle the destructive influence of the white-dominant culture around him by becoming part of the sect. Malcolm is swayed, and converts to the Nation of Islam’s beliefs. Although this largely not mentioned in the film, it is important to note that the Nation of Islam’s beliefs differed from those of mainstream Sunni Islam during the timeframe of the movie. After his release from prison six years after being sentenced, Malcolm becomes an influential spokesman for the Nation of Islam, meets and marries fellow NOI member Betty, and becomes acquainted with the leader of the NOI, Elijah Muhammad, whom he idolizes, and who tells him to change his name to Malcolm X. Malcolm is supportive of Black pride and denounces whites and integration, in favor of more Black nationalist leanings. After news comes to light on the subject of Elijah Muhammad’s more disreputable doings, including impregnating his young secretaries, Betty encourages him to meet with the secretaries and think for himself instead of doggedly following Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X becomes estranged from the NOI and goes on hajj to Mecca. He changes his name again, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and, as a result of interacting with the larger, interracial, ummah and seeing that racial unity is possible, he becomes less anti-white. As Malcolm X strays further from the NOI, he is targeted by them, in an attempted assassination, a successful firebombing of his house that fails to kill his family, and finally in a successful assassination at the Audubon Ballroom, where he was scheduled to give a speech. In the wake of his death, Malcolm X is eulogized by Ossie Davis; the film concludes on a hopeful note in South Africa, where the real—not an actor—Nelson Mandela is shown teaching young children about Malcolm X. 

Malcolm X has a complicated genealogy. It incorporates various facts and untruths from different sources, passing through enough voices to let it truly be categorized as myth—not in the sense of inaccuracy but more so in the sense of folklore. Malcolm X is largely inspired by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, to the extent that it includes a scene of Malcolm’s father trying to defend his family from the Ku Klux Klan, an event that never happened, and that appeals more to ideas about Southern white supremacy than the ways white supremacy manifested in Nebraska during Malcolm X’s childhood there. (1) Additionally, as a co-writer, Alex Haley controlled the structure of the book, even though Malcolm X controlled its contents, and this, according to writer Mark A. Sanders, “often creat[ed] meaning at odds with the overt intent of [Malcolm X].” (2,3) For example, Alex Haley wanted to stick to more traditional American myths about the self made man, and conceptualized the autobiography as something that traced a life until it caught up to a final form in the present, whereas Malcolm X wanted to emphasize the mutability of the self. (2)

Out of a selection of possible scripts to use for the movie, Spike Lee chose the Baldwin-Perl script. (4) This script was written by James Baldwin for Columbia while Elijah Muhammad was still alive—this is likely the reason why he is replaced with the fictionalized character of Baines in this script. (5) Lee describes the situation as being one where Perl was enlisted to help Baldwin write. (6) Baldwin became disillusioned with the Hollywood industry over the pressures they put on him, and he eventually published what was essentially his version of the script before Perl began work on it as the book One Day When I Was Lost. (6) While Lee did add Elijah Muhammad back to the script, he retained Baines as the one who introduces Malcolm X to the Nation of Islam, instead of his siblings. It is important to note that Lee also had to deal with the pressure of not upsetting the Nation of Islam, now reincarnated from an offshoot under Louis Farrakhan. In Spike Lee’s book on the making of Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Trials and Tribulations of the Making of ‘Malcolm X’, Lee includes Louis Farrakhan among those thanked at the beginning of the book. (4) Apparently, Farrakhan also implicitly threatened Lee. (5) From this bouncing around from Malcolm to Haley to Baldwin to Perl to Marvin Worth, the producer, to Norman Jewison, the original director who left due to outside pressure for a Black director to tell Malcolm’s story, to Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, we see that Malcolm X is a movie of many hands.  

This storied beginning continued into the actual making of the film. Spike Lee decided that despite being handed a budget of $18 million from Warner Bros, he was going to make the movie to the length and specifications that he saw fit, despite the fact that this would make the movie cost more like $33 million—to this end, he sold international rights for around seven to eight million dollars. (5) Lee lamented the studio’s treatment of him and the comparatively stingy budget he was given in comparison to white directors with similar projects in his book. (4) He also engaged in an extensive advertising and merchandizing campaign to market the movie, knowing that Warner Bros would not do it for him the same way they would for a white director. (4) Conflict over this funding lead the studio to fire the editors, leaving Lee to “fend for the film in postproduction.” (5) The movie was saved due to the donations of wealthy African Americans like Janet Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey. (5) This rescue demonstrates that not only had the film reached prominent Black celebrities, those celebrities were supportive enough of the film—or though that their audiences were supportive enough of it—for them to use their personal funds to endorse it. This was a deeply wanted movie.  

Some audiences, such as James Baldwin aficionados, and known critics of Lee like Amiri Baraka and bell hooks, were less receptive, with the former type critiquing that Lee had flattened much that was admirable about Baldwin’s work, and the latter complaining respectively that Lee was a class enemy, and about Lee’s treatment of Betty Shabazz. (6, 5) There are retorts to be made about this, including that Lee was making a film, and that as Baldwin’s finished product is a book, there are differences in what can be done, in part because of the already stretched timescale of the movie that is still hugely abridged compared to the possible length of a book. Other critics complained that the film was too conventional (5).

Film critics well acquainted with art films and Spike Lee’s previous work as an indie director may have decried conventionality, but to a popular audience unfamiliar with Lee’s earlier work, the movie is quite innovational. The film combines footage of real events such as the beating of Rodney King and the hosing of Civil Rights protestors. To further confuse the lay audience, the movie uses black-and-white footage of Denzel Washington as Malcolm X, seemingly inserting him into the past and overwriting history with Spike Lee’s version of it. This culminates with real footage of Malcolm finally being used in the montage of film shown after his demise. The eulogy given for Malcolm makes use of verbatim theater—Ossie Davis, the original eulogizer, re-recites the actual eulogy that he gave. It is as if the jarring seriousness of Malcolm X’s death pushes the movie more into the real, using the real footage and verbatim theater where previously X’s speeches themselves were written specifically for the movie. Malcolm X also uses Spike Lee’s signature non-naturalistic camera work technique wherein the subject is made to appear as if they are gliding through space without walking. This is used to force a considerable effect of sick unreality and the unyielding march of time as Malcolm X, already fearing his own death, walks towards the Audubon ballroom. The film also practically dances on the fourth wall with its taunting foreshadowing of Malcolm X’s death, including both an early scene in which Detroit Red plays gunfighting with a friend (Shorty, who is significantly played by Spike Lee himself) in the park, and, later in the movie, the song “Shotgun,” by Junior Walker and the All Stars. From this, we can see that Lee blurs fiction, foreshadowing, and reality in interesting ways in the movies, something that is further exacerbated by the hand-me-down fabrications from Baldwin and Malcolm X himself. 

 

 

Citations (in Chicago footnote style) 

 (1)  Nell Irvin Painter, “Malcolm X across the Genres.” The American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 432–39. https://doi.org/10.2307/2166842. 

(2)  Garrett A. Felber, “‘A Writer Is What I Want, Not an Interpreter’: Alex Haley and Malcolm X—Conceiving the Autobiographical Self and the Struggle for Authorship.” Souls 12 (1): 33–53, 01 March 2010. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999940903571304.   

(3) Mark A. Sanders, “Theorizing the Collaborative Self: The Dynamics of Contour and Content in the Dictated Autobiography,” New Literary History 25, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 446

(4) Spike Lee and Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, (New York : Hyperion, 1992), https://archive.org/details/byanymeansnecess00lees.

(5) Dennis Bingham, “Spike Lee’s Malcolm X: Appropriation or Assimilation?” In Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre, 169–90. Rutgers University Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj3pz.12 

(6) D. Quentin Miller, “Lost and ... Found?: James Baldwin’s Script and Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X.’” African American Review 46, no. 4 (2013): 671–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24589861.