Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (22 page)

Without a sustained critique of class power and class divisions among black folks, what is represented in the mass media, in cultural production, will merely reflect the biases and standpoints of a privileged few. If that few have not decolonized their minds and choose to make no connection between the discourse of blackness and the need to be engaged in an ongoing struggle for black self-determination, there will be few places where progressive visions can emerge and gain a hearing. Coming from a working-class background into the academy and other arenas of cultural production, I am always conscious of a dearth of perspectives from individuals who do not have a bourgeois mind-set. It grieves me to observe the contempt and utter uninterest black individuals from privileged classes often show in their interactions with disadvantaged black folks or their allies in struggle, especially if they have built their careers focusing on “blackness,” mining the lives of the poor and disadvantaged for resources. It angers me when that group uses its class or power and its concomitant conservative politics to silence, censor or delegitimize counter-hegemonic perspectives on blackness.

Irrespective of class background or current class positionality, progressive black individuals whose politics include a commitment to black self-determination and liberation must be vigilant when we do our work. Those of us who speak, write, and act in ways other than from privileged class locations must self-interrogate constantly so that we do not unwittingly become complicit in maintaining existing exploitative and oppressive structures. None of us should be ashamed to speak about our class power, or lack of it. Overcoming fear (even the fear of being immodest) and acting courageously to bring issues of class as well as radical standpoints into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to the bourgeois insistence that we think of money in particular, and class in general, as a private matter. Progressive black folks who work to live simply because we respect the earth’s resources, who repudiate the ethic of materialism and embrace communalism must gain a public voice. Those of us who are still working to mix the vision of autonomy evoked by X category with our dedication to ending domination in all its forms, who cherish openness, honesty, radical will, creativity, and free speech, and do not long to have power over others, or to build nations (or even academic empires), are working to project an alternative politics of representation—working to free the black image so it is not enslaved to any exploitative or oppressive agenda.

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SPIKE LEE DOING MALCOLM X

Denying black pain

Shortly after the brutal assassination of Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin predicted that “White America, not the Negro people, will determine Malcolm X’s role in history.” At the time, this statement seemed ludicrous. White Americans appeared to have no use for Malcolm X, not even a changed Malcolm, no longer fiercely advocating racial separatism. Today, market forces in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy have found a way to use Malcolm X. Where black images are concerned, the field of representation has always been a plantation culture. Malcolm X can be turned into hot commodity, his militant black nationalist, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist politics can be diffused and undermined by a process of objectification. Calling attention to the dangers inherent in this marketing trend in his essay “On Malcolm X: His Message and Meaning,” Manning Marable warns: “There is a tendency to drain the radical message of a
dynamic, living activist into an abstract icon, to replace radical content with pure image.” Politically progressive black folks and our allies in struggle recognize that the power of Malcolm X’s political thought, the capacity of his work to educate for critical consciousness is threatened when his image and ideas are commodified and sold by conservative market forces that strip the work of all radical and revolutionary content.

Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.

At this cultural moment, this critical militancy aimed at the realm of the visual must be reinvoked in all serious discussions of Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X. Celebrated and praised in mainstream media, this joint project by white producers and a black filmmaker, Lee’s Malcolm X risks receiving no meaningful cultural critique. More often than not, black admirers of Lee and his work, both from the academic front and the street, seek to censor, by discrediting or punishing, any view of the film that is not unequivocally celebratory. Black folks who subject the film to rigorous critique risk being seen as traitors to the race, as petty competitors who do not want to see another black person succeed, or as having personal enmity towards Lee. Filmmaker
Marlon Riggs powerfully emphasizes the dangers of such silencing in a recent interview in Black Film Review. Calling attention to the example of audience response to Spike Lee (who is often quick to denounce publicly all forms of critique as betrayal or attack), Riggs stresses that we cannot develop a body of black cultural criticism as long as all rigorous critique is censored.

There’s also a crying desire for representation. That’s what you see when audiences refuse to allow any critique of artists. I’ve witnessed this personally. At one forum, Spike Lee was asked several questions by a number of people, myself included, about his representations in his movies. The audience went wild with hysterical outbursts to “shut up,” “sit down,” “make your own goddam movies,” “who are you, this man is doing the best he can, and he is giving us dignified images, he is doing positive work, why should you be criticizing him?” I admit that there is often trashing just for the sake of trashing. But even when it is clear that the critique is trying to empower and trying to heal certain wounds within our communities, there is not any space within our culture to constructively critique. There is an effort simply to shut people up in order to reify these gods, if you will, who have delivered some image of us which seems to affirm our existence in this world. As if they make up for the lack, but, in fact they don’t. They can become part of the hegemony.

This is certainly true of Spike Lee. Despite the hype that continues to depict him as an outsider in the white movie industry, someone who is constantly struggling to produce work against the wishes and desires of a white establishment, Lee is an insider. His insider position was made most evident when he was able to use his power to compel Warner to choose him over white director Norman Jewison to make the film. In the business to make money, Warner was probably not moved by Spike’s
narrow identity politics (his insistence that having a white man directing Malcolm X would be “wrong with a capital w!”), but rather by the recognition that his presence as a director would likely draw the biggest crossover audience and thus insure that the movie would be a financial success.

Committed as well to making a film that would be a mega-success, Spike Lee had to create a work that would address the needs and desires of a consuming audience that is predominantly white. Ironically, to achieve this end his film had to be made in such a way as to be similar to other Hollywood epic dramas, especially fictive biographies; hence there is no visual standpoint or direction in Malcolm X that would indicate that a white director could not have made this film. This seems especially tragic since Spike Lee’s brilliance as a filmmaker surfaces most when he combines aspects of documentary in fictive dramas, providing us with insights we have never before seen on the screen, representations of blackness and black life that emerge from the privileged standpoint of familiarity. No such familiarity surfaces in Malcolm X. The documentary footage seems more like an add-on that aims to provide the radical portrait of a revolutionary Malcolm lacking in the fictive scenes.

To appeal to a crossover audience, Spike Lee had to create a fictive Malcolm that white folks as well as conservative black and other non-white viewers would want to see. His representation of Malcolm has more in common with Steven Spielberg’s representation of Mister in the film version of The Color Purple than with real-life portraits of Malcolm X. By choosing not to construct the film chronologically, Spike Lee was able to focus on that part of Malcolm’s story that would easily fit with Hollywood’s traditional stereotypical representations of black life. In her insightful essay on The Color Purple, “Blues For Mr. Spielberg,” Michele Wallace asserts:

The fact is there’s a gap between what blacks would like to see
in movies about themselves and what whites in Hollywood are willing to produce. Instead of serious men and women encountering consequential dilemmas, we’re almost always minstrels, more than a little ridiculous; we dance and sing without continuity, as if on the end of a string.

Sadly, these comments could be describing the first half of Malcolm X. With prophetic vision, Wallace continues her point, declaring

I suspect that blacks who wish to make their presence known in American movies will have to seek some middle ground between the stern seriousness of black liberation and the tap dances of Mr. Bojangles and Aunt Jemima.

Clearly, Spike Lee attempts to negotiate this middle ground in Malcolm X, but does so unsuccessfully.

The first half of the film constantly moves back and forth from neo-minstrel spectacle to tragic scenes. Yet the predominance of spectacle, of the coon show, whether or not an accurate portrayal of this phase of Malcolm’s life, undermines the pathos that the tragic scenes (flashbacks of childhood incidents of racial oppression and discrimination) should, but do not, evoke. At the same time, by emphasizing Malcolm as street hustler, Spike Lee can highlight Malcolm’s romantic and sexual involvement with the white woman Sophia, thereby exploiting this culture’s voyeuristic obsession with interracial sex. It must be remembered that critics of Lee’s project, like Baraka, were concerned that this would be the central focus so as to entertain white audiences; the progression of the film indicates the astuteness of this earlier insight about the direction Lee would take. While his relationship with Sophia was clearly important to Malcolm for many years, it is portrayed with the same shallowness of vision that characterizes Lee’s vision of interracial romance between black
men and white women in Jungle Fever. Unwilling and possibly unable to imagine that any bond between a white woman and a black man could be based on ties other than pathological ones, Lee portrays Malcolm’s desire for Sophia as rooted solely in racial competition between white and black men. Yet Malcolm continued to feel affectional bonds for her even as he acquired a radical critique of race, racism, and sexuality.

Without the stellar performance of actor Delroy Lindo playing West Indian Archie, the first half of Malcolm X would have been utterly facile. The first character that appears when the film opens is not Malcolm, as audiences anticipate, but a comic Spike in the role of Shorty. Lee’s presence in the film intensifies the sense of spectacle. And it seems as though his character is actually competing for attention with Malcolm Little. His comic antics easily upstage the Little character, who appears awkward and stupid. Denzel Washington had been chosen to portray Malcolm before Spike Lee joined the producers at Warner. A box office draw, he never stops being Denzel Washington giving us his version of Malcolm X. Despite his powerful acting, Washington cannot convey the issues around skin color that were so crucial to Malcolm’s development of racial consciousness and identity. Lacking Malcolm’s stature, and his light hue, Denzel never comes across as a “threatening” physical presence. Washington’s real-life persona as everybody’s nice guy makes it particularly difficult for him to convey the seriousness and intensity of a black man consumed with rage. By choosing him, white producers were already deciding that Malcolm had to be made to appear less militant, more open, if white audiences were to accept him.

Since so much of the movie depicts Malcolm’s days as Detroit Red, the remainder is merely a skeletal, imagistic outline of his later political changes in regard to issues of racial separatism. None of his powerful critiques of capitalism and colonialism are dramatized in this film. Early on in the second part of the
film, the prison scenes raise crucial questions about Lee’s representation of Malcolm. No explanations have been given as to why Lee chose not to portray Malcolm’s brother and sister leading him to Islam, but instead created a fictional older black, male prisoner, Blaines (played by Albert Hall), who is tutor and mentor to Malcolm Little, educating him for critical consciousness, leading him to Islam. This element in the filmic narrative is the kind of distortion and misrepresentation of individual biography that can occur in fictional biographies and that ultimately violates the integrity of the life portrayed. Indeed, throughout the film Malcolm X’s character is constructed as being without family, even though some member of his family was always present in his life. By presenting him symbolically as an “orphan” Lee not only erases the complex relations Malcolm had to black women in his life—his mother, his older sister—making it appear that the only important women are sexual partners, he makes it appear that Malcolm is more a lone, heroic figure, and by so doing is able to rein-scribe him within a Hollywood tradition of heroism that effaces his deep emotional engagement with family and community. Lee insists, along with white producer Worth, that there is no revisionism in this film, that as Worth puts it, “We’re not playing games with making up our opinion of the truth. We’re doing The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Yet the absence of any portrayal of significant family members and the insertion of fictional characters who never existed does indeed revise and distort the representation of Malcolm. That misrepresentation is not redeemed by Lee’s uses of actual speeches or the placing of them in chronological order. He has boasted that this film will “teach,” educate folks about Malcolm. In By Any Means Necessary, the book that describes the behind-the-scenes production of the film, Lee asserts: “I want our people to be all fired up for this. To get inspired by it. This is not just some regular bullshit Hollywood movie. This is life and death we’re dealing with.
This is a mind-set, this is what Black people in America have come through.”