Gator Purify (Samuel L. Jackson) and his girlfriend Vivian (Halle Berry) are desperate crack addicts in Jungle Fever, Lee’s first film to deal seriously with America’s drug epidemic.
3
DEEPER INTO POLITICS
Lee created two of his most strikingly political films in 1991 and 1992. The first, Jungle Fever, is an interracial romance, a family melodrama, and a dissection of American hypocrisies, but it is also Lee’s first all-out assault on the scourge of drugs in the African-American community. The second, Malcolm X, is a historical biopic that follows a man, a movement, a religion, and a turning point in American race relations through tumultuous vicissitudes over many years. These ambitious movies are among Lee’s most outspoken and deeply felt creations, and they remain key works in his filmography.
JUNGLE FEVER
Spontaneity
Upon its release in June 1991, Jungle Fever was publicized as a taboo-breaking look at interracial romance. In fact, the picture broke no taboos and was about much more. The main characters are Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), a married and successful African-American architect, and Angela Tucci (Annabella Sciorra), an Italian-American office temp.1 Roger Ebert described the basics of the story in his 1991 review:
[Angie] comes to work in [Flipper’s] Manhattan office one day, their eyes meet, and the fever starts. Their halting, tentative conversations expand into “working late,” eating Chinese food from the take-out, and finally having sex right there on top of the blueprints….
[Flipper] comes from a traditional, God-fearing Harlem family. His father . . . is a self-righteous former preacher called the Good Reverend Doctor Purify [Ossie Davis] by one and all. His mother [Lucinda, played by Ruby Dee] . . . is loving and sensible. There is another son, Gator [Samuel L. Jackson] …, who is a crackhead [and] has gone as far down as Flipper has gone up….
The office worker comes from . . . Bensonhurst. [She] is engaged to Paulie [John Turturro] . . . who works all day in the luncheonette owned by his father [Lou, played by Anthony Quinn] …, a hidebound old man who sits around upstairs praying to the photograph of his wife. When word gets back to the local communities about the new romance, it does not go over well. Flipper’s wife [Drew, played by Lonette McKee] is enraged and his father deeply offended (not least by the adultery), and all of Angie’s relatives and friends react with shock….
Later we learn that Drew is half-white, and when Flipper leaves her, she fears it’s because he married her for her light skin, and has now succumbed to the lure of even lighter skin. By contrast, Paulie doesn’t particularly mind losing Angie; but when he then grows fond of an African-American woman who gets her coffee at the luncheonette, his friends beat him up. Angie’s father beats her up, too.
Critics generally agree that the film’s most striking set piece – and it is definitely a set piece, with a tone noticeably different from the movie’s other scenes – is a conversation among Drew and her female friends after she has kicked her unfaithful husband out of their home. Lee’s screenplay describes the scene as “a wake. a mourning for another sister who has been wronged. [They] sit in the living room, laughing, crying and discussing the state of the black man.” According to their diagnosis, the state of the black man is not good. Samples:
Most of them are drug addicts, in jail, homos. . . . The good ones know they the shit so they got ten women at a time, leaving babies all over.
How many men do you know . . . black men . . . who can effectively deal with a mate who has more education . . . and makes more money? Not many. They freak.
Everything in society . . . we keep doin’ the same thing over and over; we keep telling ourselves, negatin’ ourselves. Look at the brothers who are successful. Look at them! Most of the brothers who have made it . . . got white women on their arms. That’s true.
Much of this was improvised by the performers. “For the actresses,” journalist Samuel G. Freedman reported,” the performance ventured deeply into their personal lives.” Lee rehearsed the scene for three days before filming it with two cameras over the course of a whole day. The sequence stands out by virtue of its spontaneity, which is both a plus and a minus – a plus because the conversation rings remarkably true, a minus because it isn’t of a piece with the movie’s other scenes, and its immediacy isn’t necessarily superior to the moderately stylized tenor of the picture as a whole. But however one judges its quality as cinema, one should credit Lee with knowing his limitations on this occasion. As he remarked later, “I can’t write dialogue as good as they’re gonna say it” (Freedman).
The dialogue in Jungle Fever is less finely tuned than that of Do the Right Thing, and a sociolinguistic analysis of the sort conducted by Margaret Thomas vis-à-vis School Daze would most likely produce fewer revealing insights. At times it’s almost fatuous. More samples:
The dialogue can’t get much worse, but it sometimes does when Italian-Americans speak.
Character names of the order of Flipper and Gator Purify further reduce the sense of narrative authenticity in a film that never quite settles on experiential realism or Brechtian distanciation as its major discursive mode, oscillating uncertainly between the two.
The other big set piece in Jungle Fever is Flipper’s search for Gator through the horrific hellholes of New York’s hard-drug underground, culminating in a crack house that resembles a circle of Dante’s Inferno – perhaps the third, which is populated by gluttons. Dante pictures their sin as “a cold sensuality, a sodden and filthy spiritual wretchedness,” as Dorothy L. Sayers writes in her commentary. “Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbors – ‘a sightless company’, Dante calls them” (Alighieri 107). While this descent into a heart of darkness is clearly Lee’s belated response to the charge that Do the Right Thing overzealously cleansed its portrait of drugs and other inner-city ills, it is also the most powerful portion of Jungle Fever in its own right. Lee claims, in fact, that black–white romance was merely the “hook” for the film. “I think a lot of people got tripped up into the whole interracial thing,” he said later, “but for me, that wasn’t . . . the most important part of the story. For me, the thing was the devastation that crack is afflicting [sic] upon families, and generations and generations just being wiped out” (Lindo 169). Lee is incontestably right about the ravages of crack cocaine, which appeared in poverty-plagued inner cities in the early 1980s, marketed for as little as five dollars in small “rocks” to be smoked in pipes. “Users found themselves bingeing for hours or days,” according to an authority, “smoking up hundreds of dollars of the product.” Efforts by crime networks to safeguard their profits “produced significant spikes in rates of homicide and assault,” while users turned to “theft and sex work” to finance their habits (Anderson 137).
Gator Purify (Samuel L. Jackson) and his girlfriend Vivian (Halle Berry) are desperate crack addicts in Jungle Fever, Lee’s first film to deal seriously with America’s drug epidemic.
Importantly, however, the film’s two spheres of interest – interracial relationships and the crack-cocaine epidemic – are not as distinct from each other as they may first appear. The vast, labyrinthine crack house of Jungle Fever, called the Taj Mahal by its denizens, proves to be a multiracial community, populated by black and white users who, judging from appearances, represent more than one class, ethnic, and professional status. The crack house is a “mausoleum and abode for the living dead,” but it is a “happily integrated” one where “black hustlers and hookers, white businessmen and laborers, black and white couples . . . have realized a dystopia of interracial intimacy,” in the vivid words of philosopher Ronald R. Sundstrom, whose analysis captures some – not all – of the complicated psychosocial dynamics at play in the Taj Mahal scene.
It is possible, Sundstrom speculates, that if such characters as the Good Reverend Doctor and Angie’s father Mike (Frank Vincent) were to visit the Taj Mahal and witness its mingling of races and classes in circumstances of addiction and squalor, they might regard the spectacle as an embodiment of “the nightmare brought on by miscegenation.” These and other characters feel the same about the affair between Flipper and Angie, an exercise in racial mixing that is undermined and destroyed by the conflicted, guilt-laden mindsets of the participants, but strikes onlookers as a self-evident instance of the spiritually fatal malady known as jungle fever. Considered from this perspective, the multiracial apparitions in the Taj Mahal are at once tangible casualties of a society gone insanely off the rails and projections of what Sundstrom calls “the generational disappointment of the fathers . . . as they confront old age and reconsider the goals for which they fought” (153–4).
The archetypal father in Jungle Fever is the Good Reverend Doctor, whose chosen honorific title bears a certain similarity to that of the protofascist Julian – Dean Big Brother Al-might-ty – in School Daze. The Good Reverend Doctor is no fascist; he is, in fact, a veteran of the civil-rights struggle as well as a retired minister who has presumably done his best to follow the ways of the actual Almighty both personally and professionally. Lee does not take the strength, the dignity, or even the decency of civil-rights-era veterans for granted, however. Returning home one night, the Good Reverend Doctor comes upon Gator trashing his home and terrorizing Lucinda for money; telling his stoned, desperate son that he is better off dead, he shoots the young man and leaves him to die a whimpering death in the arms of his bewildered mother.
This scene and its repercussions underscore the savagely ironic meaning of the family name: the Good Revered Doctor has physically purified the household by extinguishing its most disruptive element; he has symbolically purified the clan by firing his deadly bullet into Gator’s genitals; soon Flipper will reaffirm his racial purity by relinquishing Angie and white romance; and in the film’s last moments he will begin to morally purify his neighborhood by embracing a pathetically young crack whore and shrieking “Noooooooo!” to her and all she represents. Except for the last, every one of these purifications is rash, fatuous, and heartbreaking, and even Flipper’s wail of protest is more a reflexive cry of rage than a sign of social or psychological transformation. It’s true that the Good Reverend Doctor would probably see the Taj Mahal as a contradiction and betrayal of the sociopolitical goals his generation fought to actualize; but by committing filicide he contradicts and betrays them all over again, revealing himself as a tired and terrified old man rather than the upstanding American purifier he once thought himself to be.
Actually, of course, the Good Reverend Doctor does not reveal his own failings; it is Spike Lee who reveals the lamentably defective father as what the Bible calls a whited sepulcher. And it happens that Spike made Jungle Fever during a very fraught period in his dealings with his own father, Bill Lee, who had composed the music for all of his previous films but was not involved in this one. It also happens that drugs and interracial romance played key roles in the conflict that undermined their relationship. Tensions apparently began as early as 1976, when Spike’s mother died and Bill moved in with Susan Kaplan, a white woman whom he later married; they began living together when “my mother wasn’t even cold in her grave,” Spike said later, in a remark redolent of Hamlet. Strains increased when Spike went to work on Jungle Fever, a film “directly talking about me and my wife,” Bill angrily told Jonathan Mandell of the Los Angeles Times. It didn’t help that Bill Lee was busted for heroin possession in 1991, and that early the next year Spike refused his request for a loan of a few thousand dollars to help with household expenses, saying no with what Bill claimed was a “very insulting . . . attitude.”2 Spike tried to remain above the fray – “Why should I dignify comments my father said or play it out in a public forum?” – but Bill Lee never did music for a Spike Lee joint again, and Lee did state publicly that he and his family were devastated by his father’s arrest.
With chronic resentment over the timing and perhaps the nature of Bill Lee’s relationship with the white woman who became his wife, and acute resentment over Bill’s surrender to the narcotics that were defiling the African-American community, Spike may well have infused his new movie with bitterness toward his father’s generation in general and his own father in particular. The sarcastically named Good Reverend Doctor and the roughly named Gator are thus the symbolically scrambled Jekyll and Hyde of a single corrupt personality: the drug-abusing son betrays the father in the film much as Bill Lee fell short of Spike’s expectations in real life, whereupon the momentarily berserk father murders his degenerate offspring with a bullet in the groin, actualizing the worst unconscious fears of every conflicted son by nightmarishly reversing the normal outcome of the oedipal struggle. One needn’t be a vulgar Freudian to see this scenario as a harrowing variation on a well-established psychoanalytic theme, the resonance of which is felt in many other Spike Lee father–son scenes, starting with the mingled love and antagonism of Pino and Sal in Do the Right Thing and the contrasting first and last scenes of Mo’ Better Blues, which opens with the father of little boy Bleek failing to moderate the mother’s strict trumpet-practicing schedule and ends with Bleek allowing his little boy to run off and play against the mother’s better judgment. Father–child psychodynamics also play out importantly in such later films as Crooklyn and Get on the Bus, and the major turn they take in 25th Hour is one of the factors making that 2002 drama such a milestone in Spike’s career.
Continuity between Jungle Fever and Spike’s earlier films comes through in other respects as well. Much as the ending of Do the Right Thing paid tribute to fallen victims of white-power brutality, for instance, the first image in Jungle Fever is a photograph of Yusuf (spelled Yusef in some sources) Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old black boy who was murdered in 1989 by a mob of thirty or so white men armed with baseball bats and the handgun that fired the fatal bullet. The killing occurred in Bensonhurst, the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of Brooklyn where Sal and his family reside in Do the Right Thing; those involved in its aftermath included the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who accurately predicted that the tragedy would help David Dinkins get elected as New York City’s first African-American mayor. Hawkins was not murdered for wandering into a white neighborhood, but rather because he was mistaken for the companion of a white woman who was despised for dating black and Hispanic men,3 and this plays into the theme of the movie, wherein the old civil-rights warrior speaks about the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy lynched in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. Lee links such incidents with “sexual inadequacy,” noting that “black men who got lynched . . . usually got castrated, too. There’s something about black men being with white women that threatens white men. And that’s why Yusuf Hawkins was killed.” It is also why Angie and Paulie get beaten up in a film that explores, in Freedman’s words, “the nexus of race, sex and place that in one instance cost a 16-year-old innocent [Hawkins] his life and in a broader historical scheme has tormented America for centuries.”
Jungle Fever is a conservative film in some respects, as the race and literature scholar Celia R. Daileader has demonstrated. On one hand, she observes, Lee’s depiction of African-American sexuality as natural and positive reverses the dominant cultural narrative. Yet, on the other hand, he makes no essential change in “the position of the white female in the inter-racial dyad: Angela is the white devil – or ‘that white bitch,’ as Drew calls her repeatedly.” While this is true as far as it goes, I see a more dialectical set of forces at work, countering the white woman’s subordinate position with recognitions of her authenticity and selfhood. Daileader acknowledges this when she notes the film’s candid treatment of schisms in attitudes toward racial pedigrees within the African-American community. “No children . . . No half-black, half-white babies for me, no,” Flipper says to Angie in a moment when his hopes for their romance are collapsing. Angie turns the tables on his hypocrisy, though, pointing to the mixed blood of his own child and wife, and finishing with, “You know, you’re not much different from my family.” Flipper rejoins, “Except that your family is racist.” “And what’s this stuff coming out of your mouth?” rejoins Angie in turn. The film thereby “gives her the last word,” as Daileader rightly declares (210). Spike often disappoints when it comes to creating strong female characters, but this moment in Jungle Fever redounds to his credit.
The genuineness of both protagonists is central to Jungle Fever, which stands or falls for many moviegoers on its quality as a haunted love story, supercharged with sociohistorical complexities but reaching out to the hearts as well as the minds of its viewers. On this Lee himself deserves the last word. “What’s important about this film,” he remarked in 1991,
is that the characters . . . are not drawn to each other by love but by sexual myths. When you’re a black person in this country, you’re constantly bombarded with the myth of the white woman as the epitome of beauty – again and again and again – in TV, movies, magazines. It’s blond hair, fair skin, blue eyes, thin nose. If you’re black, you never see yourself portrayed in that way – you don’t fit that image, you’re not beautiful . . . [Angie] bought into the myththat the black man is a stud, a sexual superman with a penis that’s two feet long. So those are the two sexual myths that bring these two people together.
Despite all this, Lee adds, “We’re not saying that a black man with a white woman won’t work. I think if two people love each other, that’s great,” and if Flipper and Angie had built their relationship on a deeper, firmer foundation, “love would have enabled them to withstand the onslaught of abuse from their family and friends and the two neighborhoods they live in” (Richolson 28–9). The absence of that foundation is what dooms them to split apart, two more sad victims of America’s vast and ineluctable racial mythos.
MALCOLM X
Hopeful and Angry
An outstretched American flag goes up in flames as the opening credits roll, intercut with shots of urban friction and violence, including the beating of Rodney King, which sparked ferocious riots in Los Angeles earlier in 1992. The viewer is set up for all the pyrotechnics one might expect from the combination of filmmaker Lee, black leader Malcolm X, and the never-ending tensions of American race relations. But as the credits end and Malcolm’s story starts to unfold, the unexpected happens. Turbulence and confrontation fade, and in their place appears a biopic in the old Hollywood tradition, telling the story of a hero’s life in straightforward, conventional terms.
Following the outline of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by the eponymous leader with the assistance of author Alex Haley, the film begins with flashbacks to Malcolm’s early life, showing him as a child (Matthew Harris) with a loving mother (Lonette McKee) and a deeply dedicated father (Tommy Hollis) whose defiance of white supremacy leads to his untimely death. The movie then follows Malcolm as an adolescent (Zakee Howze) and an adult (Denzel Washington), evolving from a street hustler to a prison inmate to a Nation of Islam convert – and chief public spokesman for Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.), the movement’s leader – to a free thinker whose discovery of Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy drives him to split with the organization and establish an Islamic institution of his own.
Through these events the film traces Malcolm’s gradually shifting conception of the white power that dominates his social and cultural background. First he shows a sad capitulation to white hegemony by straightening his hair in a painful and degrading process. Later he grows hostile to the entrenched strength of white people, deciding they are literally “devils,” as Elijah Muhammad’s paranoid theology calls them. In the end he explores the roots of traditional Islam and learns that men and women of all colors and races can be united in divinely inspired love. A quest for harmony and understanding replaces the separatism that surged through his earlier teaching. And just then Malcolm is gunned down by forces that may include hate-mongers from the Nation of Islam, the FBI, the CIA, or all of them. But his lately found message of love and hope lingers. Lee points up its continuing relevance to American society by recruiting contemporary public figures, black and white, to play cameos in the film: among them are Bobby Seale, a founding member of the Black Panther Party, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, both cast as street preachers; the radical left-wing activist and attorney William Kunstler as a judge; and Ossie Davis, the towering black actor, activist, filmmaker, and cultural icon, who repeats in voiceover words from the eulogy he delivered at Malcolm’s actual funeral in 1965, concluding, “Our own black shining prince who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”
Most strikingly of all, the film includes an appearance by the antiapartheid militant Nelson Mandela, the soon-to-be president of South Africa, who had recently been freed from his long captivity as a political prisoner in his native country. In the final scene, an African-American schoolteacher (Mary Alice Smith) in Harlem celebrates Malcolm’s birthday by saying to her class, “Malcolm X is you, all of you, and you are Malcolm X!” Pupils then stand and shout, “I am Malcolm X!” and the film jumps to a classroom in Soweto, the township that was an internationally known embodiment of South Africa’s governmentally enforced racism, where children are seen identifying with Malcolm as enthusiastically as their New York counterparts.4 Explaining this moment, Lee said, “We make the connection between Soweto and Harlem, Nelson and Malcolm, and what Malcolm talked about – pan-Africanism, trying to build these bridges between people of color” (Rule).
Lee’s decision to end the film on this upbeat note stemmed from his strategy of deemphasizing the “angry black man” image often pinned on Malcolm and other African-American activists by a white majority that prefers the racial status quo to prospects of meaningful change. “I think one can be hopeful and angry at the same time,” Spike told me and a few others when the film premiered, “because that’s what I am. I think any black person in this country has a right to be angry, [but] we’ve got to give people hope. We want people to come out of the theater uplifted.”
Indeed, countering impressions of Malcolm’s angry, violent nature was a high priority for many people involved in producing and promoting the film. Among them were Malcolm’s widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz, the director of communications and public relations at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York and a consultant to the production, and Malcolm’s oldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, who ran a theater and film production company called Nucleus Incorporated with Martin Luther King’s daughter and helped with the film’s launch. “My husband was not violent,” said Dr. Shabazz in the same discussion.
He was never part of any violence. The only violence was his death, and he did not commit it. . . . He said [there should be] freedom and respect for members of the African diaspora . . . by any means necessary. That’s not a violent statement, it’s a comprehensive statement. . . . It means you might accomplish your ends by political or social or religious or academic activities. . . . Malcolm’s point was that if you are a member of the human family, as we are all made in the image of God and the likeness of God, then all of us should be able to aspire to positions of influence and gravity.
Attallah Shabazz sounded a similar theme, saying the biggest misconception about her father was “that he was inspired by anger, motivated by vengeance.” Malcolm was “serious, focused, dedicated,” she said. “He knew his self-worth and was hoping that people would get a sense of their own self-worth. . . . But when he came home, I saw a warm human being – not in spite of his day’s work, but inclusive of his day’s work. I got to see someone who loved my mother, who nurtured his children” (Sterritt 1992b). This is the Malcolm whose spirit is evoked in the later stages of the film.
From Malcolm Little to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
An epic biopic of Malcolm X was Lee’s longstanding dream project, and, true to its subject and main character, the venture stirred up controversy long before its premiere in November 1992. More than a year prior to that, for example, the African-American activist and author Amiri Baraka, speaking for the United Front to Preserve the Legacy of Malcolm X, held a widely disseminated press conference on the project in Harlem, where he called Lee a “buppie” and a “petit bourgeois Negro,” and urged moviegoers to resist the blandishments of Lee’s forthcoming “exploitation film,” which he presumed would “trash” the Malcolm X story “to make middle-class Negroes sleep easier.”5 This was unsurprising in itself, since Baraka had previously chastised such pictures as She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing for trivializing social issues as important as women’s rights and police violence against minorities. “Based on the movies I’ve seen,” Baraka said at the press conference, “I’m horrified [at] seeing Spike Lee make Malcolm X. I think Eddie Murphy’s films are better.”6 Spike responded in similarly unsurprising terms, charging that Baraka had “appointed himself the grand pooh-bah of all blacks.” Observing that Baraka was hardly a Malcolm X expert, Lee said that when Malcolm was alive, “Amiri Baraka was LeRoi Jones running around the Village being a Beatnik. He didn’t move to Harlem until after Malcolm X was assassinated. So a lot of these guys – not all – weren’t even down with Malcolm when he was around. . . . I was seven years old so I had an excuse. I had to be home by dark” (Ansen 1991). In pretty much the same breath, however, Lee exercised uncharacteristic caution by promising to engage in dialogue withthe African-American community – and no less important, the Muslim community – about the many sensitive spots against which his film would inevitably brush.
Many filmmakers wanted to tell Malcolm X’s story in the seventeen years between 1975, when he was assassinated while delivering a speech in a Harlem auditorium, and the advent of Lee’s movie in 1992. Rights to The Autobiography of Malcolm X were owned during much of that time by Marvin Worth, a Hollywood producer who had known Malcolm, and whose documentary Malcolm X was nominated for an Oscar in 1973. Those who wrestled with the idea included black writers James Baldwin and David Bradley, white writers David Mamet and Calder Willingham, and white directors Stuart Rosenberg, Bob Fosse, Mark Rydell, and Sidney Lumet; all had solid records and reputations, but none could get the venture off the ground.7 There are two main reasons for this. One is that Malcolm X was a hugely complex figure whose forty years were crammed with an enormous range of activities. Even his name and nickname were constantly in flux (Thompson 26). He was called Malcolm Little as a child; Detroit Red as a young hoodlum; Satan as a prison inmate; Malcolm X as a leader of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam movement; and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz as a follower of traditional Islam, to which he converted before breaking with Muhammad’s group. How would one go about condensing so much physical adventure, intellectual growth, psychological deepening, and spiritual exploration into a screenplay that captured not just the appearances but the meanings of Malcolm’s transformation from an unthinking thug into a white-hating radical and then a resolutely moral humanist and Pan-Africanist who rejected racism? The second big challenge facing would-be movie biographers was that many in the African-American community felt – and still feel – that their understanding of Malcolm X’s life was the correct one, and therefore other points of view were either actively harmful or beside the point. This is a common feeling within any group that combines diversity of membership with strong commitment to a person, philosophy, or cause. But recognizing the social dynamics of such a situation is a far cry from knowing how to correct the resulting tensions and dissensions. Hence the years of delay between Malcolm’s death and the movie of his life.
Acting from personal commitment, or as a sort of spiritual insurance policy, or both, Lee kept his promise to dialogue with blacks, Muslims, and Black Muslims as his project unfolded, and he did this internationally. In 1991 he went to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, for several days, explaining to interested parties back home that his government hosts “realize that millions and millions of people are going to see this film, and this will be their first introduction to Islam, and they hope it will be a positive treatment of the religion and it will be.” Whether such efforts were primarily a public-relations exercise or were sincere expressions of respect was an open question. When the production arrived in Cairo for a few days of shooting, a newspaper introduced the team to Egyptians withthe headline “Malcolm X crew converts to Islam,” a very loose interpretation of the facts. This was the first time a commercial film production had received permission to shoot in Mecca, where non-Muslims are not allowed to go, and some members of the technical crew found it expeditious to convert to Islam a few weeks beforehand.
Lee wasn’t with them at the time, and later he spoke with reasonable candor about his own relationship with religion. “Most black [American] people are Southern Baptists,” he told an interviewer. “I only went to church when I went down South to visit my grandmothers. I have always been honest about [my views on] organized religion. There’s a difference between religion and spirituality. It comes down to a personal choice.” Asked by Cairo journalists about the converted crew members, Spike gave a smart-alecky response, saying, “Robert De Niro gained eighty pounds for [Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film] Raging Bull.” Perhaps realizing that irreverence was not the ideal stance under the circumstances, he then changed his tone. “I have the utmost respect for the religion of Islam,” he said, and added later, “It’s no joke. You can’t mess up. It’s not just Islam; look what they did to Martin Scorsese – they [Lee presumably means Christians] wanted to hang him for [the 1988 film] The Last Temptation of Christ” (Berger). It remains unclear whether Spike’s utmost respect was motivated by spiritual stirrings in his soul or pragmatic stirrings in his mind telling him to avoid Scorsese’s quagmire by any means necessary.
Beyond his rhetorical gestures, Lee shored up the film’s credibility by bringing in Betty Shabazz as a consultant. He also enlisted the Nation of Islam’s defense arm, the Fruit of Islam, to provide security for the production. And he spoke to interviewers of the extensive reading and research he had done, as did Denzel Washington and other prominent contributors to the film. Washington also gave extra weight to the religious dimensions of Malcolm’s ever-evolving life. In a conversation with me and a few other journalists at the time of the film’s premiere, he said he put “a lot of prayer” into this aspect of his portrayal. “I had some very strong, spiritual men around me when working on this film. . . . Every day we started and ended the day with a prayer. I did anyway. There was a lot of spirituality involved” (Sterritt 1992b).
It is likely that no number of books read, research hours logged, prayers uttered, and knowledgeable people consulted would have stilled the apprehensions of Baraka and other African-American spokespersons who feared that Lee would turn Malcolm’s mighty life into an anodyne commercial product. By this time Lee was firmly established as a serious and groundbreaking filmmaker, however, and one can hardly blame him for proffering scrappy responses to his harsher critics. Still, a great irony of his rejoinder to Baraka was that Lee himself could hardly claim to be free of cultural hubris, being something of a soi-disant grand pooh-bah in his own right. So unshakeable was his confidence in the eventual excellence of his biopic, and so strong was his addiction to the American film industry’s most mercenary habits, that he was marketing Malcolm X commodities tied in with the still-unmade epic as early as the fall of 1991. Equally to the point, Lee too had been known to criticize an unmade movie when he didn’t like the cut of its jib or the color of its director.
Exhibit A is his 1990 attack on the veteran Hollywood filmmaker Norman Jewison, who had declared his intention of filming Malcolm X’s life from a screenplay by the African-American playwright Charles Fuller, the writer of Jewison’s well-respected 1984 movie A Soldier’s Story. Jewison was white, Fuller was black, and they made a formidable team. Jewison had built an important part of his career on socially conscious films with a left-liberal slant, such as the racially concerned In the Heat of the Night (1967), the labor-union drama F.I.S.T. (1978), and the criminal-justice satire . . . And Justice for All (1979); later he would make In Country (1989), about Vietnam War veterans, and The Hurricane (1999), based on the true story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a black prizefighter (played by Denzel Washington in the film) wrongly convicted of murder. A Soldier’s Story was adapted by Fuller from his stage drama A Soldier’s Play, which had won the Pulitzer Prize, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and numerous other honors in 1982.8 Academy Award nominations went to Fuller for best adapted screenplay, to Adolph Caesar for best actor, and to the movie for best picture. How could these people possibly do justice to Lee’s favorite African-American leader? He was livid at the very idea.
And he said so, promptly and publicly, insisting that such a quintessentially African-American topic should never be entrusted to a white director. “I have a big problem with Norman Jewison directing The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” he told a New York Times interviewer.
That disturbs me deeply, gravely. . . . Blacks have to control these films. . . . With a film of this magnitude, I wouldn’t trust a white to direct – to be honest – they just don’t know what it feels like. There’s stuff I go through every day – I still cannot get a cab in New York! I don’t care how many books they read, or if they grew up with a black nanny, or what friends they had.
Consciously or not, Lee was recycling the views of August Wilson, the African-American dramatist whose 1987 play Fences was a recent Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner. In a special edition of the rock magazine Spin, which Lee edited, Wilson recalled the response he gave Paramount Pictures when the studio proposed a movie adaptation of Fences:
I declined a white director not on the basis of race but of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans. . . . Let’s make a rule: Blacks don’t direct Italian films. Italians don’t direct Jewish films. Jews don’t direct black-American films. That might account for 3 percent of the films that are made in this country. The other 97 percent – let it be every man for himself. (Thompson 57)
To mention just one of this argument’s ridiculously obvious problems, it fails to tell us what makes a film “Italian” or “Jewish” or “black-American.” The characters’ skin color? Their accents? Their clothes? The food they eat? And how do all sorts of Spike Lee films, made before and after Malcolm X, fit into this scheme? Such movies as Summer of Sam and 25th Hour are surely “white,” which means Lee should have passed his scripts along to white directors, also calling one in to direct Sal and his sons in Do the Right Thing. And speaking of “every man for himself,” can a male direct a “female film,” can a homosexual direct a “heterosexual film”? Difficulties galore!
Of course it was Wilson, not Lee, who propounded the above-quoted “rule,” and Lee has never said anything quite so simplistic, on this subject at least. (Wilson asked him to direct Fences but his schedule precluded it.) Other movie people chimed in about the issue, many taking Lee’s side, some not. James Earl Jones: “Spike said the director ought to be black, which was Spike’s way of saying it should be Spike. When an important subject comes along and a Spike Lee suggests he must be involved, I think that’s destructive.” Sidney Lumet: “I understand the black point of view: what does a white know? But what does Spike know about life in 1942 – the Detroit period shaped everything. Where do you stop? Only an Irishman can direct Eugene O’Neill?” David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident and writer of three drafts of a Malcolm X screenplay that didn’t pan out: “It’s the story of a man who learns to transcend race. The history of Malcolm X has mostly to do withthe forces brought to bear on him by whites. It’s a stupid notion that there’s a black aesthetic, black experience. Malcolm never was a Christian – does that means you have to have a black Muslim director?” (Thompson 57).
All this aside, Lee lobbied fiercely to wrest Malcolm from Jewison’s hands. “I’m the guy. I’m the guy,” he chanted to Jewison on the phone (Denby 50). Their feud, such as it was, petered out when the screenplay Jewison commissioned from Fuller proved unacceptable to the director. “If I knew how to do it,” Jewison said when he gave up the project near the end of 1990, “I would move heaven and high water tomorrow to do it.” He also admitted that Malcolm remained “an enigma” to him. “I just haven’t licked it,” he said. “I know Spike Lee wants to get involved and, at the moment, I would encourage him to do it because the film should be made.” Lee immediately signed with Warner’s to write and direct the picture (Thompson 29). He wrote it with Arnold Perl, whose diverse credits included the 1959 documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day and Ossie Davis’s directorial debut, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), adapted by Perl and Davis from Chester Himes’s novel. Perl had also collaborated with James Baldwin on his “Malcolm X” script in the late 1960s. That screenplay was the best of the early efforts, Lee told critic David Denby a few weeks before his film’s premiere. “But Elijah Muhammad was still alive when they wrote [it] and they dodged the breakup between the Black Muslims and Malcolm, as well as the assassination. I put all that back in. Malcolm was always in search of truth. He was in that one percent able to repudiate their past [lives] because of what was no longer true” (50).
Among its other effects, putting all that back in ballooned the movie’s cost. Warner’s budgeted it at $20 million, and Lee raised another $8.5 million by selling overseas distribution rights. Costs then rose another $5 million or so, and Lee let it be known that he would not keep the final cut to the running time of two hours and fifteen minutes stipulated by the studio. At this point the Completion Bond Company, which provides insurance protecting studios from cost overruns, refused to allow additional funding and shut down the postproduction process. Lee made a direct appeal to Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Janet Jackson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Prince, and other African-American celebrities, who invested in the production and kept it in business (Denby 50). Final cost: about $34 million. Running time: three hours and twenty-two minutes. Domestic gross through 2011: $48,169,910.
Man, Myth, Movie
America was ripe for a Malcolm X movie, and Lee’s preoccupation with the project grew from his sharp awareness of its timeliness. In the three years or so before the film’s arrival, sales of The Autobiography of Malcolm X rose three hundred percent, and four of Malcolm’s books published by Pathfinder Press had a ninefold rise in sales between 1986 and 1991 (Ansen 1991). Lee acknowledged this factor when he claimed that “the studios were scared” of the topic until “the rising popularity of Malcolm,” paired with the box-office appeal of Washington and himself, “made it economically feasible for them to invest in the project” (Lee and Gates 1992). The film rode this swelling wave to considerable success, grossing almost $10 million in its opening weekend; this was considerably less than the pictures that opened at the same time – Home Alone 2: Lost in New York earned three times that figure, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula took in $15 million – but it was impressive for a historical drama almost three and a half hours in length. “No artist . . . has commodified Malcolm X’s identity more effectively than Spike Lee in his . . . superb cinematic portrayal,” a scholar of religion and black culture wrote later, adding that the film “inspired renewed interest and debate about Islam and black nationalism in black America” (Turner 240).
Among the honors accorded Malcolm X were Academy Award nominations for best actor (Washington) and best costume design; awards for best actor (Washington) from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Berlin International Film Festival, and critics’ organizations in Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, and elsewhere; Image Awards for outstanding motion picture as well as Washington for best actor and Angela Bassett and Al Freeman Jr. in supporting roles; selection in 2010 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry, to which twenty-five “ culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” movies are named each year; and more. Although it was neither a box-office blockbuster nor an unalloyed critical success, Malcolm X quickly established itself as one of the most broadly influential interpretations of its protagonist’s life, times, and career ever to enter the sphere of American popular culture.
Reviews were generally good. Rita Kempley (1992) of The Washington Post called it “a spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change” and “surely Spike Lee’s most universally appealing film,” presenting an “engrossing mosaic of history, myth and sheer conjecture.” She added that Lee “directs the way other people order Chinese food,” bringing “all manner of styles and moods to the film’s four chapters,” but she praised Washington for pulling all the elements together with “uncanny ease.” Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert (1992) called it “one of the great screen biographies” and saluted Lee as “not only one of the best filmmakers in America, but one of the most crucially important, because his films address the central subject of race,” not via sentimentality or slogans, but by showing “how his characters live, and why.” Ebert later deemed it the year’s best film, and later still he listed it among the ten best films of the decade. Vincent Canby used his New York Times review to embrace it as “an ambitious, tough, seriously considered biographical film that, with honor, eludes easy characterization.” Ansen (1992) wrote in Newsweek that the film brings Malcolm “very much to life again, both as man and myth,” and Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman (1992) lauded the film as “an intimate and engrossing . . . saga that is also one of the most passionate political films ever made in this country.”
In a more ambivalent review, Desson Howe (1992) of The Washington Post criticized Lee for shining too bright a spotlight on himself in the secondary role of Malcolm X’s sidekick, Shorty, and for confusing the concept of epic filmmaking with merely making an overlong film; yet he also suggested that the film might “do for Malcolm X what the federal holiday did for Martin Luther King: legitimize his beliefs nationally.” On the negative side, Variety critic Todd McCarthy (1992) wrote that while the film is “ambitious, right-minded and personal,” the climactic “montage of footage and stills of the real Malcolm proves infinitely more powerful than any of the drama that has preceded it.” Wittingly or not, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review in the Chicago Reader harkened back to Baraka’s lament, opining that the need to create “a pious ‘official’ (i.e., middle-class) portrait squeezes out too many aspects of Malcolm’s varied experience and mercurial intelligence.” My review in The Christian Science Monitor (1992a) took a similar view, calling the film “more inspirational than inspired” and “respectful to the point of hagiography, detailing [Malcolm’s] weaknesses (mainly in his misspent youth) so that his goodness will seem all the more triumphant in the later scenes.” Like almost everyone, though, I praised Washington’s acting, saying it was “never less than riveting to watch and hear, capturing the subtleties of Malcolm’s personality and the magnetism of his public persona without lapsing into shallow imitation or showy grandstanding for an instant.” I have the same opinion today, and I still find it highly ironic that after forcefully explicating why only an African-American filmmaker could properly handle this quintessentially African-American topic, Spike Lee created a movie that is true in every respect to the most time-honored Hollywood traditions of the biopic genre – traditions that were originated, developed, and locked into place by the white men who have controlled the white-dominated studio system since the beginnings of modern American cinema.
