Malcolm X · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A flag burns down to the shape of an X. Spike Lee holds the image while a voice — Denzel Washington's, pitched like a sermon — indicts white America, and spliced into the burning is the camcorder tape of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, over and over, in 1991. The film has not begun its story yet and it has already made its argument. Before we meet Malcolm Little, before Roxbury, before prison, the screen tells you what kind of object you are holding: not a costume drama about a dead man but a live charge laid against the present.

That opening is built by collision. Lee cuts the King footage against the flag against the X, and the third thing — the meaning — is in neither shot. It detonates between them. Deleuze called this dialectical montage, the Soviet inheritance: shots set against one another so that an idea leaps from the gap, the qualitative jump the image alone could never state. Eisenstein used it to make a people rise. Lee uses it to fuse 1965 and 1991 into a single accusation, and the documentary grain inside the drama is doing exactly what Pontecorvo did in The Battle of Algiers — manufacturing newsreel not for atmosphere but as testimony. The film inherits its newsreel-and-archive grammar straight from Perl's 1972 compilation documentary, and it weaponises it the same way: juxtaposition as indictment.

Then, having told you it is a tribunal, the film becomes something more classical. For most of its three and a half hours Malcolm X runs on what Deleuze named the large form of the action-image — the engine of the Hollywood epic. A global situation (Black life under American racism) presses on a man until acts must answer it, and the act here is speech. When Washington stands at the Audubon podium and the camera lets the oratory play at full historical scale, hundreds of extras packed into the frame, this is the sensory-motor circuit at full power: a situation calls, a man responds, and the response is meant to change the world. Lee gives the rally the documentary density of an encompasser — Deleuze's synsign, the milieu that summons the act. The form is borrowed openly from Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and Attenborough's Gandhi: anamorphic prestige, a life carved into spiritual phases. Lee replicates Gandhi's three-act liturgy almost measure for measure — agitator, prophet, martyr.

But to read the film only as action-image is to miss what makes it Malcolm's and not Gandhi's. The deepest Deleuzian key here is the one Deleuze reserved for his most modern cinema: the forger, the protagonist of serial, shifting identity who does not discover a true self but forges one, then kills it, then forges the next. This is the literal architecture of the film. Malcolm Little dies in a prison cell and Malcolm X is born. Malcolm X the Nation of Islam minister dies on the road back from Mecca and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz walks out of the blinding white. Lee and his editor Barry Alexander Brown even give each life its own film stock and rhythm — the warm, jazz-saturated Harlem of the zoot suit; the cool institutional compression of prison; the formal symmetry of the NOI chapters; the overexposed dissolve of the hajj, where Dickerson lets the image itself burn racial categories away in a crowd of white-clad pilgrims. Each phase is a death and a rebirth, complete in itself. Deleuze's word for this is the powers of the false — not lying, but the truth a man makes by becoming, where there is no original self underneath to be faithful to. The name changes are not labels on one identity. They are the identity, in the act of being forged.

Watch, too, how the film reads bodies. Deleuze called a posture that exposes a social relation the gest — the body itself carrying the argument. Ruth Carter's costumes are gests before they are clothes. The zoot suit is Black style as defiance, theatrical and loud; the Nation's bow tie and immaculate dark suit are discipline made visible, a puritanical containment of exactly the volatility it was meant to hold. Malcolm's bearing changes with each suit because the suit is the self he is currently forging. Lee's signature floating dolly — the man gliding forward while the world drifts behind him — arrives at the moments of ascent and exposure, the body moving as if pulled by a destiny it is also choosing.

What lifts the film into Deleuze's modern political cinema is its ending. Malcolm is murdered at the Audubon, the gunfire brutally plain after the elevated rhetoric, and then Lee refuses to let the death close the story. He films Nelson Mandela — not yet president, an act of pure solidarity — and classroom children, and the dead man's words are taken up by living mouths. Deleuze called this fabulation: a people that does not yet exist caught in the act of legending itself into being. The film does not commemorate a finished icon. It hands his sentences forward as a task. "The people are missing," Deleuze said of political cinema's deepest move — the work conjures a people who are not there yet, who must be invented. The coda is that conjuring. Malcolm becomes available to be repeated, claimed, continued.

So the burning flag at the start and the children at the end are the same gesture. The film never asks you to look back at history. It asks what you will forge out of it. Watch the suits change, and you watch a man make and unmake himself four times — and dare you to begin your own first revision.