By Jacob Walters, PhD Candidate, Cornell University

Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X announces itself as both a clear, forceful vision and a deep, abiding conundrum right in its opening credits. Denzel Washington, as Malcolm X, speaks off-screen while an American flag burns from the edges, and an “X” is whittled out of the flag’s tattered remains. Inverting the meaning of mainstream American iconography, the scene offers not only the film’s thesis but the question that haunts it: can an old-fashioned Hollywood epic accommodate a radical critic of America without being burned to the ground? Even if Hollywood could tell Malcolm’s story, would Malcolm – who approached popular culture with simultaneous fascination and interrogation – want it to?

Lee can’t answer this question – could anyone? – but the film presents itself as a problem, not a solution. Malcolm would likely have approached the question differently at various points, and the film takes its cues from its subject. A sly, shape-shifting study of self-contradiction, Lee’s film evokes Malcolm’s own acts of “reinvention”.¹ Malcolm X suggests that watching a Hollywood Malcolm X entails engaging the irony of a Hollywood Malcolm X. To see it is to question it.  

Fashioning itself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Malcolm X initially seems like a traditional Hollywood biopic adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.² It covers his youth hustling on the streets of Harlem and Boston, his imprisonment and conversion to Islam, and his work with the race-centric Nation of Islam. After falling out with the Nation, which emphasized self-reliant black capitalism and metaphysical notions of race, Malcolm formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which was anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and increasingly anti-capitalist.³ Drawing from the Pan-African political philosophy of the Organization of African Unity, Malcolm was instrumental in the emergence of the secular, political wing of the Black Power movement and the radical arm of the civil rights movement. Malcolm retained a commitment to black self-determination but tied these to a prefigurative politics dedicated to transforming the world, overthrowing imperialist shackles via grassroots resistance. Malcolm’s transformation was cut short with his assassination on February 21, 1965, but his final months saw his self-evolution growing exponentially.

Yet if it masks as a traditional biopic, Malcolm X is a surreptitious stylistic critique. It draws us to its tensions rather than its capacity to resolve them. It moves between parts of Malcolm’s life without clarifying how much time has passed, often elastically skipping years in a cut. Elsewhere, Lee eschews the demands of a storyteller and fashions himself a montage artist. In a note to Autobiography’s co-author Alex Haley, Malcolm asks “how is it possible to write one’s autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?”⁴ Malcolm X responds by becoming less a biography than an anthology. 

      Early on, Lee revels in the ambiguities of Hollywood’s capacity to remake identity by emphasizing a younger Malcolm’s interest in popular culture. In a crane shot following      Malcolm’s friend Shorty (Spike Lee) strutting through Roxbury, Boston in a zoot suit (courtesy of Ruth E. Carter’s magnificent costuming), Lee offers a sterling showcase of cinematic mettle. As his camera sashays in a lustrous city, Lee and cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson mobilize Hollywood grandeur to expressionistically project Malcolm’s soul. However, a similar shot featuring Malcolm and Shorty acting as Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney killing one another in a Hollywood shootout suggests the contours of their imagination, and the dangers of Lee’s. Elsewhere, when Malcolm and Shorty are photographed wearing outfits on loan from a Hollywood film, Lee emphasizes the flash of the bulb twitching between transparent and opaque, revealing and denying selfhood. Later, when Malcolm initiates a Russian Roulette game to display risk-taking competence, Lee frames him out-of-focus behind the bullets, diffused behind an overpowering image of mercurial masculinity. 

Although Malcolm would minimize his early investment in American pop culture, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that he still called on his “trickster” days, where “success depended not only on cunning” but on understanding “how the powerful thought.”⁵ Describing himself as “costum(ing) like an actor” on the way to the military draft, Malcolm preaches radical anti-racism to frighten them, knowing the officials’ critical read of him will keep him from being drafted.⁶ Malcolm’s Roulette game, similarly, is shadow-play (he palmed the bullet), a cunning visual fabrication. It is not for nothing that after describing hustling in Autobiography, Malcolm remarks “it was at this time that I discovered the movies.”⁷  

On one hand, then, Lee bestows cinema with messianic potential. When Malcolm meets Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) in his imagination, Muhammad is superimposed in Malcolm’s jail cell as a cinematic vision. Later, Lee frames his cell so the only shaft of light comes diagonally from a food slot, suggesting a film screening in a dark theater, a fount of perhaps delusory, perhaps revelatory nourishment. The film theater resonates with the revolutionary tradition of the prison as an enclosed cauldron of mental dissent. A truer reality is suggested in the formally closed, but imaginatively open, space of cinematic vision.

Yet if Hollywood can be enlightening, Malcolm soon discovers its shadows. After his realization that Elijah Muhammad sexually assaulted several Nation of Islam members, Malcolm      played back the years he spent with Muhammad as “a motion picture.”⁸  Cinema’s capacity to rewind and fast-forward allows for stepping outside to re-examine life, yet Lee’s version of this realization suggests a darker, autocratic cinema. When Malcolm’s wife Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett) confronts him about Muhammad, the camera shifts to a handheld shot following them. When they slam the door on the camera, it cuts to them, refusing their escape. Cinema becomes penetrative, revelatory potential and potential intrusion.

When Malcolm delivers a speech about the importance of African American self-sovereignty to the Nation of Islam, the camera visualizes this tension. As Malcolm demands liberation, the camera cuts to a banner claiming “we must protect our most valuable property, our women.” The camera fixates on an immense painting of Elijah Muhammad leering, his eyes like two giant cameras telegraphing the event. Lee indexes the contradictions of the Nation of Islam and the paradoxical potential of imagery. Much as cinema attempts to circumvent the portrait’s stasis, Malcolm, nimble manipulator of cinematic idioms, must evade replicating mastery. 

It would be understandable to see Lee’s film less as an honest negotiation than a way to succeed within the system. Consider Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, in which a black police officer confuses a local chapter of the KKK into thinking he is white. Lee ties this to cinematic style by intercutting shots from D.W. Griffith’s racist 1915 film Birth of a Nation and a character (played by Harry Belafonte) exposing the KKK’s racism, weaponizing Birth’s famous montage editing against its politics.⁹ Yet this is critique as absolution. Mainstream institutions (Hollywood cinema and the police) are celebrated for exposing only those overt racists excised by color-blind racism. The wider system is metaphorically acquitted.

Malcolm X’s version of this conundrum refuses such celebration: a breath-taking, mythic image of Klan members on horseback in front of a luminescent moon. Presenting terror as seductive allure, Lee and Dickerson conjure an image that, in a classical Hollywood film, would suggest divine heroism, yet here portends doom. Hollywood radiance goes both ways, often simultaneously. 

Nonetheless, Malcolm X is guilty of reproducing what it critiques. Several scholars have noted the film’s obfuscation of Malcolm’s sister Ella Little, who was instrumental for his political consciousness.¹⁰ Lee also obfuscates the ideological divisions between Malcolm and the NOI, sometimes reducing political resistance to Hollywood personal growth. 

Yet if its elisions reveal its corporate status, Malcolm X isn’t unaware of them. The film draws us not only to its Hollywood subterfuge but to how its own tactics can become tools for oppression. Lee’s beautiful representation of Malcolm’s 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, for instance, alternates between cinematic compositions and 16mm home-video recordings, both from semi-hidden white men, likely CIA observers, and from Malcolm’s own camera. The technology Malcolm uses to search for collectivity also surveils him. 

Indeed, this tension between revelation and repression manifests in the film’s most heroic images. When he controls a crowd’s movement with a gun-like point of a finger, Washington’s finger is framed in-focus in foreground, as though pointing at the head of an out-of-focus white police officer.  Rather than being rendered out-of-focus by the mystical glow of a Hollywood archetype, as in the Roulette game, Lee now binds the focus to Malcolm’s control. Here is a political organizer as film director, a charismatic mobilizer who works in shadow and light as well as flesh and blood. This is Hollywood cinema coming home to roost.¹¹

Yet cinematic subterfuge is not without risks. The scene mobilizes classic Hollywood order, control, and clarity, and Malcolm dresses like a G-man, a government pawn, in a ‘50s film noir. “Them cameras are as bad as any narcotic,” Elijah Muhammad remarks, and in lionizing a Hollywood Malcolm, the camera risks becoming a “narcotic,” Malcolm’s and Lee’s. The heroic progression of a charismatic leader in Hollywood biopic style risks destroying, as Audre Lorde might say, the master’s house with the master’s tools.¹² 

But perhaps this risk is unavoidable. If it cannot be negated, it must be constantly attended to.  Sentenced to prison in the film, a prisoner named Baines (Albert Hall) has Malcolm read the prison’s dictionary, noting the positive synonyms for “white” and negative for “black.” Malcolm must critically “read between the lines,” utilizing the dictionary against itself, master’s tools against master’s house. In Autobiography, Malcolm describes the dictionary’s thrill: “from the dictionary first page … ‘aardvark’ springs to my mind … (a) burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites”.¹³ Later, analyzing resistance, Malcolm calls black Americans “termites in the catacombs … preparing the grave of the mighty Roman Empire!”¹⁴ The termite inhabits the structure it corrodes, working within the master’s house to destroy it. The clandestine swarm being devoured becomes the underground collective dismantling structures of power. The film leaves us to decide which framework applies to Lee weaponizing Hollywood cinema to bite the hand that feeds.

That is perhaps why the film eats at itself. It is crystalline and cloudy, spacious and tightly-wound, controlling our senses while inviting debate. We get Malcolm the clear-sighted, masterful organizer-director and Malcolm the curious, uncertain amateur filmmaker who wielded a 16mm film camera, wondering whether its sights could be unified into a legible whole. Malcolm becomes not a protagonist but a constellation formed through currents of twentieth century popular culture, and Malcolm X becomes a forceful argument against reclaiming a “reality” unimpeded by the (presumed) mystifications of popular media. Lee’s film is less a myth than a film about how life is composed of fashioning and critiquing myths.

Treatments of black cinema, Michael Boyce Gillespie writes, often take sociological veracity as the final metric for measuring cinematic blackness.¹⁵ Malcolm X reminds that black cinema is about possibilities black people imagine, not only realities they reflect. It is not a sociology of the mid-century but a cinematic prose-poem that offers no guidebook for visualizing radicalism “authentically.” “Black film,” Gillespie writes, is “always a question, never an answer.”¹⁶ Malcolm X frames it similarly. “X,” Lee’s Malcolm notes, “in mathematics” represents “the unknown.” This takes us back to those opening credits – the X carved out of the American flag – to a creatively destructive orientation to whatever structure one inhabits. If impurity and contradiction can feel like the curse of any radical life, Malcolm X asks us to not forget their gifts.

Jacob Walters is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University, studying African American Intellectual History. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of African American History, The Black Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Seminar.

1.  Historian Manning Marable titled his long-gestating biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (NY: Viking Press, 2011). ↩︎
2.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NY: Random House, 1965). ↩︎
3.  Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam for multiple reasons. Some concerned the organization’s hierarchical structure and controlling practices, but the differences were also intellectual, political, and philosophical. With an evolving view of the inseparable intersections of race, class, gender, and imperialism, Malcolm increasingly believed that each had to be tackled together.  ↩︎
4.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 469. ↩︎
5.  Robin D.G. Kelley, “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (NY: Free Press, 1994), 161-181, 170. ↩︎
6.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 122. ↩︎
7.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 115. ↩︎
8.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 420. ↩︎
9.  BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee (Universal City: Focus Features, 2018). ↩︎
10.  bell hooks, “Consumed by Images,” Artforum 31, 6 (February 1993). Nell Irivin Painter, “Malcolm X across the Genres,” American Historical Review 98, 2 (April 1994): 396-404. ↩︎
11.  Malcolm famously called the assassination of John F. Kennedy “chickens coming home to roost.” ↩︎
12.  Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007) (1984), 110-114. ↩︎
13.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 199. ↩︎
14.  Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 278. ↩︎
15.  Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).  ↩︎
16.  Gillespie, 16.  ↩︎