Reading a "closet screenplay": Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms and the threat of historical irrelevance

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Brian Norman

I am attempting to read this odd thing I can only call a "closet screenplay"--James Baldwin's written version of a film about Malcolm X never realized in the visual medium. The reading skills that literary studies offer this anomalous and necessarily politically charged bastard genre are limited given that there is no film, and therefore no film stills, to "read" for Baldwin's representation of the image of Malcolm X on the American consciousness. (1) There are Baldwin's parenthetical narratives of shots and scenes, dialogues and narrator monologues, directorial notes for conjunctions of voice-overs and images, and succinct utilitarian descriptions of the actions of characters. In short, there are components of a narrative without the visual form to join them into a seamless story about the life of Malcolm X.

But the "closet screenplay" seems an appropriate vehicle for a version of Malcolm X written by a queer writer caught between a virulently homophobic Black Nationalist movement in one corner and a reactionary Nixon-era America in another. (2) The media are in tension, the shapes in the work don't fit, the pieces of a written film pull in multiple directions: outward, inward, between themselves. This literature is not "safe" or "healthy," as Baldwin condemns the status quo. The "closet screenplay" offers a formal lesson in the politics of "mainstream" markets, crossover campaigns, and race relations at the salt point in American history where calls for integration recede and self-determination surfaces on a national scene increasingly dominated by visual culture. Further, the circulating print script might offer an example of a "queer" reading practice that does not shut down questions of history, experience, and self-examination with the trump card of settled identity. For Baldwin, history is something to revisit continually in the light of new experiences and political stances. Therein the "story" of Malcolm X becomes not an autobiographical analog to discrete historical eras; rather, it becomes a necessarily unfinished project that accrues new meanings and significance when its parts enter new fields, eras, injustices, and groupings.

For Baldwin, his un-filmed screenplay is an index to America's failure to invest in Black history and artistic production. Nevertheless, the awkwardness of a "closet screenplay" becomes a great asset in a text whose very title bespeaks an inability to fit Malcolm X into one narrative location: One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The clunkiness of the project and the multitude of subjects (Haley, Malcolm X, Baldwin, and "I") point to what I see as the positive potential of Baldwin's historical meditation. Baldwin referred to his project as a "scenario": one version of Malcolm X aware that it exists among other extant versions--and even more possible versions. The significance of Malcolm X for Baldwin was as yet undetermined and, ultimately, undeterminable. Baldwin creates a space that accounts for, without containing, what is often mutually exclusive in the story of Malcolm X: black and white, man and woman, self-determination and integration, wealth and politics. The "I" that is the announced subject of the "scenario" is not necessarily Malcolm nor Baldwin. Rather, the "I" of the scenario is a subject space that negotiates between poles: between the reader/viewer and Malcolm X/American history. Contrary to the ordered, developmental versions of Malcolm X in popular circulation in The Autobiography and in Spike Lee's 1992 Hollywood film, Baldwin's "closet screenplay" does not provide a roadmap to an inevitable present. Instead, Baldwin's "scenario" induces a lost-ness, an awareness both of the orienting function of historical markers and of the simultaneous possibility of alternate markings and orientations. Thus Baldwin constructs a story of Malcolm X as a project that remains relevant to an American political landscape even after the subject of the story has been removed--by assassination--from the national script.

Historical Irrelevance

In Atlanta [Baldwin] visited the monument to Martin Luther King a monument "as absolutely irrelevant as the Lincoln Memorial." Making monuments was "one of the ways the Western world has learned ... to outwit history [and] time--to make a life and a death irrelevant.... There's nothing one can do with a monument." David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (354)

By 1963 James Baldwin had become a famous literary figure and firmly established as the spokesman of the Negro race--for white America. (3) Baldwin had always disparaged--and would always disparage--America for its willful amnesia that entombed history into static monuments and expressed sincere shock at each new news story of racial violence. (4) When Black Power's threat erupted into the American consciousness a few years later, inevitably Hollywood sought a Malcolm X movie that could offer consumers a palliative version of racism as a past historical era with the bribe of token inclusion in the pantheon of Hollywood heroes. Indeed, the telling of the story of Malcolm X in visual form after his assassination is positioned at an important nodal point for American stories of progress after Civil Rights. Amidst the threat of what he called "historical irrelevance," Baldwin argues in a 1970 dialogue with anthropologist Margaret Mead that history only matters inasmuch as we carry it with us now. To Mead's hollow pleas that we "forget" history in a liberal dream of color-lessness where America's (white) children are not punished for their "fathers' sins," Baldwin vilifies any refusal of genealogical inheritance by insisting on "the recognition of where one finds one's self in time or history or now" (177). Baldwin's project of self-recognition necessitates a complex, un-predetermined process of self-examination within an intricate racial matrix of a now-present history. Baldwin's "scenario" of Malcolm X, then, could not present a history of racial progress settled once and for all.