Critique of an American feature film using critical analysis frameworks

Malcolm X: Director Spike Lee's Portrait Of An American Hero

Malcolm X was not a man who could be easily characterized and the same is true for Spike Lee's 1992 film. Malcolm X was a labor of love for Lee, who was only thirty-five at the time of the film's release. Lee had been a young child when Malcolm X was assassinated, so his knowledge of the man was not based on any personal recollections. Instead, he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a junior high school student and has said it changed his life forever (Hopkins, 2004). Lee's goal in making the film was to introduce Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X, to a new generation of African-Americans. He felt it was an important piece of history that may otherwise be forgotten. Lee realized that Malcolm X was a controversial figure, both in life and in death, and said that, for this reason, he wanted to make the film as accurate as possible. Lee succeeded in creating a film of epic proportions that shows the different facets of Malcolm's life. As a record of historical facts, however, the film has some major flaws.

The film's opening shot is dramatic and leaves no doubt about Lee's feelings regarding Malcolm X as an American hero. With a voiceover using Malcolm's words, the screen is filled with an American flag. It is reminiscent of the opening shot in Franklin Schaffner's Patton, the 1970 Oscar-winner about another controversial American. The degree of controversy swirling around General George S. Patton, however, can be considered minimal compared to the controversy surrounding Malcolm X, so the comparison is a bold one. In Patton, the General (played by George C. Scott) is standing to the side of the enormous flag and making a rallying speech designed to show his strength and determination while providing the filmgoer some insight into the character of the man. His tone is proud and impassioned. Malcolm X speaks in an impassioned voice as well; his rhetoric grows stronger as the edges of the flag begin to burn. The now-famous video of the Rodney King beating is cut into shots of the burning flag.

The burning of the flag is meant to be shocking. It cues the viewer that the film that follows is going to make a strong statement and one that will definitely be considered controversial. When the flames are extinguished, what is left is an X made of the remains of the Stars and Stripes. It alludes to the hell that Malcolm X found in white-dominated American life and the trial by fire that made him the man and the activist, in his words not American by virtue of being born in this country but " a victim of America."

The use of the Rodney King video in the opening (the first time the Warner Brothers' logo was not used in a film [Boyd, 1993]) is significant for several reasons. For one, the use of black and white footage is meant to add credibility to the film as a factual account of Malcolm's life and work. Throughout the film, Lee intersperses actual historical footage with reenactments filmed in black and white.

Rodney King, often described in the press as a "motorist" was driving on the Los Angeles Freeway with friends one night in 1991. The California Highway Patrol (CHP) detected he was speeding and attempted to pull him over. King, on probation for a robbery offense, feared the consequences of a traffic violation and instead of stopping, led the CHP on a high-speed chase. By the time King was caught and ordered to leave his vehicle, additional CHP officers had arrived on the scene. King was tasered when officers decided he was uncooperative and when further efforts to subdue him failed, several officers beat him viciously with their batons The entire incident was videotaped and even in the days before YouTube, the images made their way around the globe quickly. For African-Americans, particularly those in L.A., the video affirmed their belief that racial profiling and abuse by police was rampant (Gray, n.d.).

Lee's Malcolm X was released in November 1992, about six months after the devastating violence that occurred in the aftermath of the King verdicts. When white police officers were acquitted of charges by a predominantly white jury in suburban Simi Valley, the nation's worst race riots erupted. Ultimately, fifty-three people died and there was over one billion dollars in property damage (Hopkins, 2004). The King beating, the trial and the riots were terrible moments in American history that ttragically coincided with the release of Lee's film. In a way, however, the film could not have come out at a better time because of the heightened social and political awareness surrounding race relations. The video made a powerful statement about the treatment of African-Americans and set up perfectly the story Lee was poised to tell.

Lee said that his film did not glorify any one phase of Malcolm's development as a black leader but rather looked at "all the different Malcolms as making up one Malcolm" (Rule, 1992).

It can be argued that the film divides Malcolm's life into three sections, his early years, his time in prison and growing awareness of Islam, and his post-prison activism. It can also be argued that Lee glorified Malcolm in each of these phases and used his actors, the script and techniques of cinematography to glorify him in different ways.

As the story opens, Lee's cameras zoom in on the action from above. The director characteristically used dollies to move cameras over and around his actors. The scene is Roxbury, Boston's equivalent of Harlem, of the 1940s. The set has an almost Disney-esque quality to it. The city looks not so much like a real street but a soundstage, and this is emphasized with Terence Blanchard's jazz score and the bright colors worn by the zoot suiters and their women.

The teenage Malcolm eagerly surrenders to the ministrations of a Roxbury barber, who paints his head with a lye mixture in order to "conk" (straighten) his hair. Malcolm grimaces as the stuff burns his head but is delighted with the results and exclaims, "Looks white, don't it?"

Malcolm (played by Denzel Washington) leaves the barbershop and, in a bright blue zoot suit, jive walks with a friend directly towards the camera. Washington, more handsome and disarming than the real-life Malcolm X, radiates with boyishness and a fun-loving nature. It is a stark contrast to the scene that shortly follows, a recollection of a Klan attack when Malcolm was a boy in Omaha.

In an interview with Bruce Perry, author of Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, Malcolm's mother denied the incident ever happened. It certainly lacks credibility. Omaha, even in the 1930s, would not have been as rural as Malcolm suggests and it is doubtful that the Klansmen would have arrived on horseback. The story was taken directly from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written in 1965 and based on interviews with Alex Haley. Lee wanted to be true to the autobiography, which in some cases played fast and loose with facts (Rule, 1993). The Klan attack is one such instance. Lee acknowledges the improbability of Malcolm's claim with his use of an impossibly gigantic full moon, against which the Klansmen are silhouetted as they ride away from the burning Little house. Savvy filmgoers will recognize the irony in Lee's dramatic recreation of Malcolm's version of events. It adds to the almost cartoon-like mood of the first part of the film, a mood that is broken intermittently with somber commentary by Malcolm and scenes from his father's murder.

The dance scene at Roseland is overly long and elaborately choreographed, designed to show a lighthearted but sexually-charged Malcolm that will provide greater contrast to the serious Malcolm revealed later in the film. The frantic energy of the dancers provides the perfect backdrop for Malcolm's meeting of Sophia, a blonde "bad girl" whose presence at the all-black club is never explained, although it is implied that she is bold, reckless, and looking for a kind of trouble she cannot find in her own white neighborhood. Malcolm takes home his date, a nice girl who dismisses his promise to phone ("I'm not white and I don't put out").

Malcolm's scenes with Sophia are highly stylized. Once again, Lee moves in for close-ups from above when shooting Malcolm and Sophia kissing in the back seat of the pale yellow Cadillac, almost cartoon-like with its exaggerated round shape, red upholstery, and shiny paint glistening in the moonlight as it is parked along the river. Later, they walk on the beaches of Cape Cod and although they are fully clothed and not in swimsuits, their passion in the sand is reminiscent of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Karr in From Here to Eternity. The relationship between Malcolm and Sophia is also reminiscent of Lee's own Jungle Fever and according to some critics reinforces the stereotype that a black man uses a white woman to "get" the white man. It also implies that there could be no real basis for a black-white relationship other than lust and curiosity (Bell, 1993). In the beach scene, Malcolm tells Sophia, "I wish your mother and father could see us now." The relationship is clearly about defying society's rules; there is no real affection between the couple.

In one of the final scenes of the first part of the film, Malcolm and a friend are shown breaking and entering. Lee makes the scene comic by showing Malcolm vainly struggling to pull a ring off the finger of a man slumbering next to his wife. There is almost a sweetness about Washington's Malcolm in this scene and we nearly forget that we are witnessing a crime. The "profoundly flawed" (Marable, 1993) Malcolm barely exists. As Locke (1993) pointed out, "Lee depicts with clarity the horrors of racism that were beyond Malcolm's control, but he minimizes what Malcolm portrays in his autobiography as self-degradation, the acts of an animal."

The film changes with Malcolm's arrest and incarceration. The bright, cartoon-like colors are subdued and Washington becomes an older, more serious Malcolm. The prison scenes are designed to show how Malcolm came to Islam and they represent a serious breach from factual events. The character Baines (Albert Hall) did not exist in real life but is a composite of Malcolm's siblings, most notably his half-sister Ella, who were involved with Islam before Malcolm and were instrumental in his conversion. It was Ella, in fact, who underwrote Malcolm's eventual pilgrimage to Mecca (Painter, 1993).

It is unclear why Lee would choose to ignore Ella and her influence and create a fictional character instead. Perhaps the director deemed Baines necessary to show Malcolm's development in prison. Perhaps it was a reluctance to give a role of power and influence to a woman; Malcolm was a sexist and misogynist, a fact Lee mostly glosses over, but perhaps gives a nod to with his creation of Baines. At three hours and twenty-one minutes, the film is already long enough; perhaps Lee made use of artistic license to combine the influential characters of the siblings into one character, Baines, to keep the story tighter.

Malcolm's abilities as a speaker are emphasized with a voiceover as the camera pans a row of black prisoner's faces. A choir sings in the background, the music swelling in perfect counterpoint to the forcefulness of Malcolm's words. Lee wants to make the moviegoer understand how Malcolm came to be who he was; he wants to be sure we realize that Malcolm, like other black men, was a "victim of American social order."

The third part of the movie shows Malcolm's activism, his relationship with girlfriend-then-wife Betty Shabbazz, who had a profound impact on his life, and his mentorship by and eventual break from Elijah Muhammed. Washington continues to give a mesmerizing and charismatic performance as Malcolm X Gone is the boyishness of the first part of the movie and the earnestness of the prison years; Malcolm is driven and determined to "take everything the white man says and use it against him."

Malcolm's rhetoric is inflammatory, with continued references to the "white devil." He disparages other blacks during a speech in which he goes on at length about the differences between "house negroes" and "field negroes," those who were content with the status quo and those who understood the need to rebel. He refers to the "Uncle Tom Negro leaders of today." It would be easy to dismiss Malcolm as an extremist except that Lee intersperses his speeches with actual and recreated documentary footage. We see the use of snarling police dogs against a crowd. There are scenes of Martin Luther King, Jr. And peace marchers. We see a horrible photograph of a young boy hanging from the branch of a tree, the victim of a lynching. We see the police use water cannon against a group of young women on the street and the riots that ensued after blacks dared to sit at the lunch counter in a Southern Woolworth's.

As Boyd (1993) pointed out, "The 'Americanization' of Malcolm X is achieved by depicting his political and spiritual growth in a manner that resembles a cinematic equivalent of the Stations of the Cross." Spike Lee's Malcolm X is a man driven to action by the terrible injustices suffered by African-Americans. Malcolm X was released not only in the wake of the Rodney King episode but following previously released epics Gandhi, Mississippi Burning and JFK. Lee, perhaps unconsciously, was influenced by all of these: Gandhi as a sweeping saga of one man's work to right the world's moral wrongs, Mississippi Burning for its similar subject matter, and JFK for its use of faux documentary footage. Lee recreated the Zabruder assassination footage for the end of his film; one would have to be familiar with the original to spot the difference. It is both testament to Lee's skill as a filmmaker and frightening to realize how easily the truth could be misrepresented with this technique.

As film critic Sheila Rule pointed out, use of simulated documentary footage raises "serious questions about a film maker's responsibility to the historic record" (Rule, 1993). This is a valid criticism and it removes Lee a step further from the truth of Malcom X's life, a truth that was already compromised because the film was based on Alex Haley's book and not on other primary source material. There are questions about some of the background information Malcolm provided in his interviews with Alex Haley. The Klan attack on his boyhood home has already been discussed. There is some doubt that Malcolm's father was murdered as depicted in the movie but instead fell in front of a street car while in a drunken stupor. Lee was not as interested in showing the unvarnished truth about the man but instead wished to bring to life the autobiography that had so affected him as a child. His choice of the handsome and charismatic Denzel Washington as star virtually assured that audiences would find something sympathetic in Malcolm X

The story of Malcolm X was told in chronological order with flashbacks to some traumatic events that shaped his life, including the death of his father and various injustices suffered by African-Americans because of their race. Some critics charged that the film was too long, but it can be argued that the length was part of Lee's plan to give a complete picture of Malcolm's growth from teenaged troublemaker to activist to influential leader. It was also a way to make the project large and important, a picture literally of epic proportions.