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

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

Though Baldwin's screenplay was canned in 1972, Spike Lee, in conjunction with Warner Brothers, realized Malcolm X 20 years later. The film follows closely the model of the Autobiography where each "chapter" in Malcolm's life comes alive in stunning visual images and where Malcolm-now is present as narrator to sew together the picaresque and to signal the inevitable movement toward enlightenment. Lee's movie adds to the Autobiography a posthumous reclamation of Malcolm X: in a coda of global solidarity, school children across the world, as well as Nelson Mandela, announce "I am Malcolm X." The film achieves the aim of the Autobiography by imagining successful protest as a seamless grafting of readers/viewers into the life--and voice--of Malcolm X. The ending scene extends Malcolm X's project outside the bounds of America and beyond the time of his assassination in 1965; at the same time it imagines Malcolm X's project completed simply because it is the subject of a major Hollywood film. Describing his personal skirmishes with Warner Brothers executives, Lee explicitly casts his film as the endpoint of Malcolm X's challenge to a racist America: "We had to fight tooth and nail, fight like hell to get what we wanted on the screen" (Lee xiiv). Thus, at the moment Malcolm X adorns the silver screen, the projects of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism enter the past tense.

In a symposium in Cineaste, the film is deemed "remarkably subdued" and its packaging described as "placing stress on themes of personal redemption in a cinematic style thought most appropriate for younger people and a crossover audience" Crowdus 4). bell hooks castigates the film for its failure to get outside (hetero)sexist stereotypes: "Indeed, in Lee's cinematic world, every relationship between a black man and a woman, whether white or black, is mediated by his constant sexualization of a female" (hooks 14). (7) Amiri Baraka publicly protests the film accusing Lee of being a mere opportunist "buppie" intent on using Malcolm X's story to propel Lee's own movement up the class ladder. In short, William Lyne explains, what was lost was any residue of a "transformationist politics" that questions society on a macro level in terms of systemic oppression. What is left, for Lyne, is the easy binary between integrationists and separatists, between Civil Rights and Black Nationalism, between King's eloquence and Malcolm's scary unintelligible terrorism--between white capitalism and black capitalism. Instead, Lyne argues, the exculpatory binary allows those he considers "political conservatives" like Spike Lee and Alex Haley to appear as radicals even when the story of Malcolm X is read "not as a fulcrum for mass activism but rather as a bible for personal improvement" (55). Lyne further notes that the tendency of Lee's films to simply reinforce American traditional values lies in the ways his artistic production follows his absorption into an untransformed system: Lee moves from independent film maker to Nike employee; Hollywood siphons off creativity by appropriating the work of independent filmmakers. For Malcolm X, Lyne argues that Lee relies on the tradition in American "realist" storytelling that hop-scotches between "epiphanic" events: Columbus discovered America, Lincoln freed the slaves and, to extend Lyne's line, Malcolm X sparked a fashion craze for hats. (8) Lyne emphasizes that there is no longer a third choice, a space outside the current system; instead, he argues, all that is left after 1970's blaxploitation and a quashed Black Panther movement is bland complicity. The less popular collection of Malcolm's speeches, Lyne contends, is a better package for a transformationist politics--not an untransformed call for a black-owned and operated movie studio that accepts the American promise of "40 Acres and a Mule" at face value. (9) Yet the "closet screenplay" does offer a "third choice" that refuses to equate a Hollywood budget with complicity and historical irrelevance. Though a much smaller audience has bought the "closet screenplay" than Lee's popular film, Baldwin's "third choice" nevertheless circulates.