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

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

"You could have done something for me once--.... The only way for you to marry me now would be for you to have a boyfriend on the side. I don't go that way no more, except for bread.--You're funny. You're shocked. Why are ministers always shocked? You're supposed to know chore about life than other people, not less" (One Day 182-83).

The failure in this scene to bring Laura to salvation--be it political, spiritual or economic--directly juxtaposes the crowd-pleasing success of the previous scene of easily identifiable racism and the power of racial solidarity. For Baldwin's Laura underscores the failures of Malcolm X's message substantively to account for the experience of women. After all, Laura has sought the very same project of self-determination on the streets that Malcolm Little and Shorty sought. Furthermore, through Laura, Baldwin subjects Malcolm to the same baiting of sexuality to which Baldwin was subjected within a masculinist Black Power movement. Here, however, Laura's gay baiting opens up the project of a gendered analysis of the possibilities and limits of Malcolm X's protest.

If Laura's fate is sealed, so is Malcolm's sealed, as he is ultimately "saved" by the model of progress in the Autobiography that is so much a part of the American historical record. Baldwin calls our attention to those persons existing outside normative gender and sexual relations who do not fit into the familiar narrative of Malcolm X's enlightenment. And whereas in the Autobiography and in Lee's film the character of Betty El Shabazz offers the perfect spousal complement to Malcolm, Laura offers a critique of marriage to mark a failed alliance to Malcolm, and an unfinished project of gendered political critique that is now the responsibility of the viewer/reader to see and to continue. Against the pull of the hero-centered biopic, the camera stops and, for a parenthetical moment, the chronology and centrality of Malcolm is ruptured. Baldwin directs, "(He goes. She stays where she is, watching him.)" (One Day 184). We cannot identify solely with the main character now that he has left what has momentarily become Laura's scene. Earlier, a voice-over asks, "Where's Malcolm?" (One Day 27). Baldwin impels the reader/viewer to locate Malcolm as a project or idea, not necessarily as the hero of a biopic.

Baldwin uses the technology of film to engage in a process of political identification to present Malcolm and his protest as a shared project that gets lost or delegated when the viewer is split from the subject, when white cultures and economies are split from black cultures and economies, or when the oppression of women is understood as distinct from racial oppression. Feminist theorists of visual culture have advanced our understanding of identification as more than a psychoanalytic process divorced from anything outside of the individual's self-development. Rey Chow tracks the technologies of visual culture as prime sites in the creation of "difference" itself: the splitting of subject/object, intellectual/spectacular. And popular versions of Malcolm X have created similar differences--as uncrossable as they are politically paralyzing--between history/present, black/white, Malcolm X/King, Civil Rights/Black Nationalism, and so on (Chow 105-06). Contrary to Chow's genealogy of visual technology creating difference, however, Baldwin, in drafting a screen version of "Malcolm X" amidst the initial optimistic call for Black ownership of Hollywood visual and marketing technology, looked to cinema as a chance productively to blur the divide between subject/object, speaker/listener, historical fact/present now, narrator/plot. (12) Moreover, such a creation of a binary along the lines of black/white, man/woman is precisely where the Autobiography fails by imagining a picaresque chronology and a confessional conversion narrative where the "saved" Malcolm is always present as narrator to direct us in an expedition into his delicious past that will inevitably lead us to the already-enlightened present. Lee's film further offers many stark visual binaries as the successful culmination of Malcolm X's protest. In addition to the NYPD scene, for instance, Lee presents a striking image of gender division at one of Malcolm X's speeches where the male and female members of the Nation of Islam occupy opposite sides of the screen/aisle. Though the image of division might appear so hyperbolic as to be critique, Lee's image of binary orderliness with the men dressed in black on the left and the women dressed in white on the right is in stark opposition to the colorful and mixed audience occupying the upper screen in the balcony. Like the powerful scene of solidarity in front of the NYPD, it is the orderly members of the Nation of Islam who offer an effective leadership front to Lee's disorderly representation of the rest of Black America.