_Spike Lee’s 1986 feature debut She’s Gotta Have It was the sort of picture where the raggedness didn’t much diminish the pleasure of seeing something new on the screen. We’d had blax-ploitation pictures, and black actors in socially conscious dramas or star vehicles. What Lee gave us was a recognizable, everyday, black world where blackness was simply taken for granted. Pauline Kael summed up the movie’s freshness in her review: “For whites, it’s like seeing how people sound and look in another country that’s a mir- ror image of the terrain we know. For many young blacks, it must be like seeing themselves on the screen for the first time and liking what they see.” The movie’s crossover success cheerfully messed up the studios’ notion that only blacks would go to black movies. Suddenly there was a black filmmaker about whom white and black audiences were excited.

The irony of Lee’s career is that he’s used the goodwill built up by She’s Gotta Have It to make movies that divide his audiences along race lines. But he hasn’t lost his white audience and now he’s more admired than ever. Spike Lee occupies a position of influence that perhaps less than half a dozen other American filmmakers do, and it won’t be much affected by the mediocre box-office take of Malcolm X. Like Woody Allen, Lee has assumed the mantle of “prestige” filmmaker. His movies don’t do huge business, but his loyal following, his critical cachet, and his ability to maintain independence by sticking to modest budgets, keep him relatively safe from the meddlings of prestige-seeking studio executives.

Lee has acknowledged the power of his position only by denying it. In Hollywood terms, Lee is a triumph and a rarity: someone who gets the studios to finance and distribute his movies, his way. But he continues to play the role of embattled director, the renegade outsider challenging film-industry racism, and he’s reaped extraordinary benefits by doing so. Lee maneuvered to direct Malcolm X by raising a stink in the press when it was announced that Norman Jewison was scheduled to film it. Jewison withdrew from the project after enduring weeks of attack on his abilities and his motives (from Lee and others), along with accusations that he couldn’t possibly do a good job because he’s white even though he had already shown a talent for dealing with race in pictures like In the Heat of the Night and A Soldier’s Story.

This isn’t to imply that Lee hasn’t had any opposition from the studios. Though the subject certainly warrants the length, Warner Brothers wanted Malcolm X to be shorter than Lee’s proposed three-and-a-half hour running time. And they refused to provide additional money when he exhausted the $28 million dollar budget, which, for a film of Malcolm X’s scale was relatively modest. (The average Hollywood movie costs between $20 and 25 million. Lee ingeniously got the money he needed to finish the picture by soliciting contributions from black celebrities.)

The problem is that Lee has insisted that the studios’ opposition to him comes from racism. In the published production diary of Do the Right Thing, he writes, “All they see are niggers, nigger director and nigger audience....Therefore, the picture is not worth their time and money.” But if that were entirely true, Lee wouldn’t have been able to go from the independents to the majors with the assurance of creative control after just one film. And there’s no other filmmaker who’s managed to publish a script and a production diary for each of his movies (not to mention opening Spike’s Joint a store—in two convenient locations, Brooklyn and Tokyo—devoted exclusively to merchandising, via apparel and accessories, his movies). When he runs into budget battles with the studios and screams racism, you have to wonder if he knows anything about the reality of making movies in America. Any filmmaker who wants to make risky pictures and maintain independence inevitably battles the studios. Does he honestly believe that a white director who wanted to make a three-and-a-half hour political epic would have had carte blanche from the Time-Warner Corporation?

Lee probably knows that he stands a better chance of remaining independent by avoiding Hollywood’s inflated budgets, but he probably also realizes that his melodramatic talk of showdowns with the studios enhance his role as a dangerous man. He sells a hip, romantic, racial version of the struggling artist, of the lone gunfighter who just won’t back down.

_A critic who tries to call Lee’s bluff runs into a parcel of old assumptions, like the one that says a filmmaker who takes on potent, divisive issues is important and daring, regardless of the quality of the movies, or the one that says anyone who resists a movie on a controversial subject is just unwilling to face hard truths. And the difficulty is compounded by the general timidity of Americans when it comes to the discussion of race. Playing on white guilt and black victimization, Lee has been able to accuse white critics who’ve challenged him of being racist, and black critics who’ve challenged him (notably Stanley Crouch, whose lacerating piece on Do the Right Thing is reprinted in his prickly collection, Notes of a Hanging Judge) of being traitors to the race. Lee refuses to recognize that the job of a filmmaker who takes on thorny issues isn’t just to provide discussion topics the way Phil and Oprah do; his films have to measure up to standards of intellectual and moral rigor, even more than other films, because the issues are so thorny. If they don’t, it’s the critic’s duty—and the audience’s—to call the filmmaker to account. Confronted with tough questions from the media, Lee’s tack has been to adopt a stance of outraged self-righteousness and complain that white filmmakers wouldn’t have to endure such questions. Lee’s career isn’t unimaginable without white liberal guilt, but his reputation certainly is. Though the public perception of him over the last three and a half years (from 1989’s Do the Right Thing to 1992’s Malcolm X) may have changed from that of a young firebrand to that of an accomplished artist, what his films are saying has remained remarkably consistent, and remarkably narrow. His scale may have become epic, but he still works out of a pipsqueak vision.

_In order to understand Do the Right Thing it’s necessary to recall the racial atmosphere of New York when the picture was released in the summer of 1989. Though the city was shortly to elect David Dinkins as its first black mayor, the story of race relations during that decade was a long and ugly one, stretching from the deaths of Michael Stewart (a graffiti artist who was strangled in a police chokehold), and Eleanor Bumpers (a grandmother shot to death by the police for allegedly brandishing a knife), to Bernard Goetz’s subway shooting of four young blacks, to the Tawana Brawley hoax and the Central Park rape, to the 1986 confrontation where three young black men whose car had broken down in the white Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach were chased by baseball-bat-brandishing white youths (one of the black men, Michael Griffith, was killed when he ran onto the highway and into the path of an oncoming car). Do the Right Thing was released to extraordinary praise, and a fair amount of nonsense. In New York magazine David Denby hit a hysterical high when he claimed the movie was going to spark race riots.

Do the Right Thing, which remains Lee’s most accomplished and controlled film, is about how the racial tensions in and around a Bedford-Stuyvesant pizzeria on the hottest day of the summer finally boil over in a release of pent-up anger and prejudice. It’s a powerful, impressive movie. That Lee allows the accumulation of small, sharp observations to be overwhelmed by rhetoric in the visceral climax makes it a simple-minded, self-righteous, and ultimately offensive one as well.

What the message of Do the Right Thing comes down to is, “No matter how we try to get along, it’s always going to be us against them.” The movie was somehow interpreted as a call to racial understanding; maybe that was the only way people could be comfortable with it. But it not only claims tacitly that, at heart, all whites are racist, but contends that the sooner the races stop the pretext of trying to co-exist and get the hell out of each other’s lives the better.

The two protagonists are Sal (Danny Aiello), the Italian-American pizzeria owner, and his black delivery boy Mookie (Spike Lee). Sal has been in business for twenty-five years, and if he doesn’t feel a deep kinship with his black customers, he long ago learned how to relate to them as people. Sal is the kind of guy who slips a few dollars to the neighborhood wino every morning and is gracious enough to make him feel he earned it. In the movie’s best scene, Sal talks of watching the neighborhood kids grow up, the pride he feels that they grew up eating his food, and the deep pleasure he takes in observing the procession of life going on around him. He’s a narrow but hard-working man, gregarious, generous, quick to anger if work isn’t done fast enough to suit him, quick to forgive in a sudden flush of affection. Sal knows this section of Brooklyn isn’t getting any better—even the repairman won’t come out to fix the air-conditioning—but he long ago gave up the thought of opening a place in his own section, Bensonhurst. There’s too much competition, and he’s settled into Bed-Stuy. (It should be noted that Do the Right Thing was made before Yusuf Hawkins was killed and Bensonhurst became a code word for a racist haven.) Bed-Stuy suits his younger son, the simple, passive Vito (Richard Edson) fine; he likes the neighborhood and enjoys his friendship with Mookie. But the neighborhood infuriates Pino (John Turturro), Sal’s oldest son, a hot-headed racist who can’t stand the “niggers” and above all Sal and Pino’s tolerance for Mookie.

Mookie has been working at Sal’s so long he’s a fixture, and as such he does just enough to get by. He shows up late, takes lengthy detours on his delivery routes, and Pino is forever at his father to get rid of him. But the antagonism between Sal and Mookie is probably, at some level, comfortable for both of them. When, towards the end of the film, Sal tells Mookie he’s always thought of him as a son, he’s not kidding; their constant bickering probably reminds Sal of his experience with his own family. Mookie knows he can continue at the pizzeria for as long as he wants, but he’s under pressure from his sister Jade (played by the director’s real-life sister, Joie Lee) whom he lives with and who’s sick of supporting him, and from his girlfriend Tina (Rosie Perez), who wants him to get a real job and fulfill his parental responsibilities to their son.

Lee has a knack not only for the comedy and community of urban neighborhood life. The camera roams the sweltering streets picking up people hanging out, cracking open cans of cold beer to beat the heat, messing around in front of an open fire hydrant, and it feels as if they were just caught as the camera passed by. Lee gives us free rein to wander without making the film seem aimless, and he always provides something to look at.

Working with his cinematographer, the gifted Ernest Dickerson, he makes the summer heat palpable. The opening shot moves from a close-up of the lips of Mister Senor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson)—the DJ whose storefront station, WE-LOVE radio, looks out on Bed-Stuy—to the street below, already yellowed in the early morning sun. The heat brings out the sheen in the brightly colored tanktops and bike shorts that the characters wear. Lee captures what other filmmakers have only talked about: street wear and street life as a sort of art. And as the day wears on, you can feel how the heat wears the neighborhood out, and how it intensifies each small frustration and resentment.

The trouble is, Lee’s style can wear you out as well. Characters break into arguments before you’ve been told what they’re bickering about, and Lee has an unfortunate fondness for sticking his camera in his actors’ faces so they stare us down, and for using a tilted angle to intensify a scene that’s already pitched so high it disrupts the rhythm of the film.

Lee features agreeable performers like Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, and especially the late Robin Harris as Sweet Dick Willie. Willie is the leader of this trio, who spend their time hanging out on the street corner, drinking beer and bragging, arguing and telling stories that each one has already heard a hundred times before. You’re not equally happy to see all of Lee’s characters, however. He’s too conscious of using Ruby Dee (as Miss Mother Sister, the neighborhood’s presiding conscience and elder states-woman) and Ossie Davis (as Da Mayor, the ubiquitous wino of the neighborhood) as icons of black dignity. Each gets a nugget of moldy wisdom—Davis even has to deliver a hearts-and-flowers speech about how the cries of his five hungry children drove him to drink. But no character is more of a downer than Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a retarded young man who stutters as he hawks pictures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X shaking hands. And two of the characters, Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), act as harbingers, not people.

Radio Raheem is a huge, imposing figure (made even more so by Lee’s constant use of low-angle shots when he’s around) who walks the streets with an enormous beatbox blasting the same song, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” over and over again. It drives almost everyone in the neighborhood crazy, and when he walks into the pizzeria, Sal, who has a rule against any music being played in the shop, tells him to turn it off. Raheem reluctantly complies but the fierce resentment of his glares is impossible to ignore.

It’s another of Sal’s traditions, the “Wall of Fame” on which he hangs glossies of Italian-American celebrities, that prompts his confrontation with Buggin’ Out. Buggin’ Out walks in, complains about what Sal is charging for two slices of pizza (but pays it anyway) and is just about to take a bite when he looks up at the pictures of Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro (whom Lee originally wanted to play Sal), and the others, and demands that Sal put some black faces up on the wall. Sal’s reply is a curt “Get your own place and do what you wanna do.” Sal banishes him from the pizzeria after the argument intensifies and Buggin’ Out leaves in a fury, vowing to organize a boycott.

Spike Lee is no dummy. He knows that Buggin’ Out is a loudmouth and a troublemaker; he shows us not only Mookie accusing Buggin’ Out of putting his job in jeopardy by trying to drag him into the argument, but also the reactions of people in the neighborhood, who tell him his boycott plan is cracked. The great disparity in Do the Right Thing, however, is between what Spike Lee knows and what he wants the movie to say. Buggin’ Out may look ridiculous, but Lee considers his request anything but, and he wants us to link Sal’s refusal to consider it to a larger, unnamed issue.

During the Civil Rights struggle, the argument “A man should be able to do what he wants to do in his own place of business,” was quoted to blacks as a rationale for why lunch-counter owners should be allowed to refuse them service (a refusal ultimately defeated by boycotts). Lee clearly has this in mind when Buggin’ Out tells Sal that since he makes his money from black people, they should be represented on the wall. Do the Right Thing's admirers voiced the same argument; one told me she felt it was Sal’s responsibility to the community to accede to Buggin’ Out’s demand. But a useful test of just how well the argument holds up is to reverse the situation and imagine what Spike Lee’s attitude would be if this were a film about a black business in a white neighborhood. Would he consider pictures of black celebrities on the wall an affront to the white community? Not likely, and the idea that a black businessman ought to make that sort of concession is certainly absurd. But in Do the Right Thing an Italian-American’s ex- pression of ethnic pride is construed as racism.

Sal’s responsibility to the community isn’t a question of interior decorating but of treating his customers with respect and courtesy, making sure he feeds them good food at a reasonable price. He does this, and more. Sal doesn’t banish Buggin’ Out because he’s black, but because he’s obnoxious and looking to pick a fight. Yes, Sal’s making money off the black community, but nobody’s forcing the black customers into the shop. And from what Lee shows us, none of them feels uncomfortable about buying pizza from Sal.

This isn’t a very long scene, but it’s the first time Lee tries to forge an association that the specifics of the movie just won’t support, and it’s here that the film’s precarious balance begins to slip. Lee takes pains to show us that no one in Bed-Stuy is free of prejudice: he does it in one terrible, obvious scene where five characters face the camera and spew forth a string of racial insults. But he does it in less showy ways, too, like having Mookie complain to Tina’s Hispanic mother that he wants his son to grow up speaking English, and showing the resentment some of the neighborhood people feel toward the Korean couple who’ve opened a successful convenience store. When one of the street corner trio complains that a black man could never do the same thing because American society is designed to keep blacks down, Sweet Dick Willie tells him he doesn’t want to hear that “tired old shit.” But, ultimately, that’s the “tired old shit” Lee himself falls back on.

The two brief scenes between Sal and Jade are small wonders of actors’ rapport. Danny Aiello and Joie Lee tune into each other and bring an undercurrent of affection to the encounters. Jade is one of the kids Sal has watched grow up and he’s amazed that she’s become such a beautiful young woman. When he sees her, the pleasure he says he takes in being a part of the neighborhood’s life crystallizes and he can’t resist whipping up something special for her. Sal’s got no designs on her—he’s twice her age and he knows it—but he likes her enormously. And for her part, Jade is grateful for the patience he’s shown Mookie. But while these two are talking, Lee scans the faces of Pino and Mookie in extreme close-up to show us the resentment each feels at the friendliness between Sal and Jade. When Jade leaves, Mookie follows her and tells her not to return to the pizzeria because he doesn’t like the way Sal looks at her, which he takes to be lascivious. We could read this scene as an indication of Mookie’s immaturity, but Lee pulls back to show us the graffiti on the wall behind them: “TAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH!” If, up to this point, you’ve held the illusion that Lee’s aim here is racial understanding, you can hardly keep believing it after that. So an innocent neighborhood acquaintance between a middle-aged white man and young black woman becomes paralleled with a story (proven beyond doubt to be a hoax, though Lee has told interviewers he still believes it) of abduction and rape at the hands of four whites, and by extension the abuse perpetrated on black female slaves by their older white owners—a comparison Lee acknowledges in the movie’s published production diary (also called Do the Right Thing). The other message of the scene—that a grown woman needs a man to warn her of potential sexual dangers—is entirely in keeping with the attitude toward women that’s been consistent in Lee’s other films.

But Lee fouls up when it comes to Sal, first by casting Danny Aiello, who brings something warmer and earthier to the role than the director seems to have had in mind. Someone Aiello’s size can’t help but carry an air of authority, but what’s most in evidence here is Aiello’s oversized affability. Lee’s portrait of Sal also suffers from faulty logic. In the production diary, Lee writes that Pino has learned his racism at home. But that doesn’t explain why Vito hasn’t picked it up or why Sal is constantly at Pino to cool his anger toward blacks. When Pino urges Sal to move the pizzeria out of Bed-Stuy, Sal replies that he’s had no trouble with the people there. When his son confides that his friends make fun of him because he serves blacks, Sal is quick to counter that people like that aren’t real friends. And since John Turturro is just about incapable of acting in a normal human range—he begins seething—it’s Pino, not Vito, who doesn’t match up with his father. Sal is hardly a liberal, but he’s certainly not in the business of hating or persecuting his customers.

It’s important to keep Sal’s character in mind, because to accept Lee’s ending you have to accept something about Sal that’s inconsistent with what we’ve seen of him (and specifically with Aiello’s performance). Technically, the climax of the picture is a coup, a swift-moving set piece that showcases Lee’s gift for violence and for directing large-scale scenes without sacrificing either clarity or tautness. The movie’s reviews talked about the ambiguous nature of this scene, but the meaning is actually very clear. What works to Lee’s advantage is the pace, which allows him to rush through the events and make his statement before audiences have a chance to sort out what it is he’s really saying.

It’s the end of a long, brutally hot day. Sal is exhausted but pleased with the take, and he’s in an expansive mood. When some kids bang on the door asking for slices, Sal tells Mookie to let them in; it’s his small way of expressing his gratitude to the neighborhood. But suddenly in walks Radio Raheem, playing Public Enemy at a bruising volume, and Buggin’ Out, who demands that black faces be put on the wall now.

An argument ensues during which Buggin’ Out calls Sal “a guinea bastard” and Sal, who’s had it, flips out. He screams at Raheem that he’ll kick his “nigger ass” out of there, and taking a baseball bat from beneath the counter, he smashes Raheem’s beatbox to pieces—something the audience has wanted to do since his first scene. There’s a stunned silence before Raheem drags Sal over the counter and a full-scale fight breaks out. The cops arrive on the scene, immediately go for Raheem—who at this point is choking the life out of Sal—and get him in a stranglehold. The cop holding the nightstick against Raheem’s throat ignores his partner’s pleas to stop; by the time he finally removes his nightstick, Raheem is dead. Mookie, who’s been watching the scene unfold, can’t believe it. He picks up a garbage can and hurls it through the pizzeria window, touching off a riot that ends with Sal’s place being set afire. And Lee still doesn’t let up. While the place is burning, the mob, which has somehow expanded to include people who previously bore Sal no animosity, approaches the Korean couple standing in front of their store and tells them they’re next. What’s even more confusing is that they’re led by Sweet Dick Willie who earlier stood up for the Koreans’ right to do business in the neighborhood.

Firemen arrive; the crowd attempts to attack them but quickly find the hoses turned on them. Lee includes a photo of this scene in the published script with the caption, “Take your pick: Montgomery, Alabama, 1963—or Brooklyn, New York, 1989?” Of course that’s the connection Lee wants us to make, and it’s impossible to see blacks being hosed without making that connection. But there’s a major difference between water cannons being turned on peaceful schoolchildren and spraying a mob that is assaulting firemen who are trying to put out a blaze.

These are the same tactics Lee tries to get by with when he has Sal call Buggin’ Out a “nigger,” which directly contradicts his earlier refusal to succumb to Pino’s virulent racism. When that word pops out of Sal’s mouth in a regrettable moment of anger, we can see he’s been provoked at the end of a grueling day, and partly by the racial epithet Buggin’ Out used on him. I’m not saying that what Sal says or does is justifiable, but in order for it to be consistent with what Lee has already shown us of Sal we need to understand that it comes out of anger, not racism. But Lee wants this moment to be a revelation of Sal’s deepest, most accurate feelings. And it has to be Sal, the movie’s most likable character, who’s revealed as a racist because Lee is saying that all white men—even the best of them—are racist in their souls. Sal has to serve an ideological purpose, and he has to be linked to the incendiary state of race relations in eighties New York. Hasn’t Lee ever snapped out something in a pique and instantly regretted it?

After Raheem’s death, it doesn’t take long for the crowd gathered outside the pizzeria to begin chanting the names of Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpers. And the connection isn’t false: this is a black wrongfully killed by the New York police. But the implication that Sal is responsible for Raheem’s death is absurd, though there’s no doubt that Lee holds him responsible. After the fire the camera pans the burned-out shell of the pizzeria while “Fight the Power” plays on the soundtrack. But which power is being fought by burning down a small business? The film’s defenders swallowed the notion of Sal’s guilt. One told me that Sal is part of a system and that the fire doesn’t matter because (as Lee is careful to tell us) Sal is covered by insurance—as if money alone could make up for the loss of a twenty-five year family business. Another told me Sal deserves his fate because “the white man is the oppressor." But I can’t accept a code of ethics that can so casually reduce a person to a faceless cog in a system of oppression, or a social view that decries racism by branding someone an oppressor solely because of his color. That’s racism. The idea that Sal is responsible for Raheem’s death is the “tired old shit’’ that Sweet Dick Willie is sick of hearing (though, significantly, after Raheem’s death, Willie becomes the most vocal of Sal’s accusers). But Lee doesn’t present Willie as he does Sal, as a man re- vealed to be a racist. In the movie’s terms Willie has come to his senses and recognized the face of the enemy—a point of view that’s in tune with Lee’s repeatedly stated belief that blacks can’t be racist. (In a San Francisco Examiner interview with the movie critic Michael Sragow following Do the Right Thing’s release, Lee tried to define what he feels is the difference between racism and prejudice. “I think racism comes when you control the mechanisms that really stop a people from advancing,” he said. “If I call you a Jewish so-and-so, I don’t know if that would necessarily be racist. I would say it’s definitely prejudice.” That’s a pretty cockeyed distinction, but plenty of highly intelligent people are echoing it. In his much praised book Two Nations, the (white) sociologist Andrew Hacker says, “If we care about racism, it is because it scars people’s lives. Individuals who do not have power may hold racist views, but they seldom cause much harm.” At least Hacker admits blacks can be racist. But what’s wrong with his view, apart from his inability to realize that racists do harm themselves, is that it has more than a touch of the old racist reaction to black violence and prejudice: “Whaddya expect of these people.” Both attitudes assume that you can’t expect tolerance and logic from historically brutalized people.)

The two quotations that appear on the screen at the end of the movie—one from Martin Luther King condemning violence as a way of redressing injustice, and one from Malcolm X saying that violence used in self-defense is intelligence—have been cited as proof of the film’s open-endedness. But it’s clear that Lee feels closer to the Malcolm X quote. And how can he justify the destruction of Sal’s place as self-defense? The answer, I think, lies in the unacknowledged subtext of the film—Buggin’ Out’s complaints about the Wall of Fame and his confrontation with a white man who’s just purchased a brownstone in the neighborhood, the Tawana Brawley graffiti, the threat to the Korean couple. What these incidents add up to is a belief that a white man (or an Asian man) has no business in a black neighborhood. If Lee can find the presence of pictures of Italians an affront, how must he feel about the presence of Italians themselves? (Lee writes in his production diary that he wanted to cast De Niro as Sal because “it would really fuck with Italians to see De Niro in a film sympathetic to black people.”) When, towards the end of the film, Smiley shambles through the rubble and hangs one of his pictures of King and Malcolm on the Wall of Fame, it’s presented as a triumph—turf regained—and the camera pulls back to show, for the only time in the film, Smiley living up to his name. He has to be the one to reclaim the pizzeria because he’s the one who lit the match that started the fire. Smiley, who can barely get through a sentence, who looks as if he can scarcely walk, hawks pictures tied to the summit of black political consciousness—an era, Lee wants to say, that came to a sputtering halt with the renewed racism (and Reagan’s attack on civil rights) in the eighties. Smiley, and by extension black revolution, finds his voice when he drops that match, and victory when he regains lost ground.

The irony of all this is that Lee winds up validating the view of the worst racist in the movie, Pino, who insists blacks and whites belong with their own kind. If Sal had listened to him, he would have saved his business. There’s a larger irony, too. The whites who denied that the Howard Beach incident was racially motivated claimed it was simply a matter of defending turf, and that’s the same rationale that Lee offers for the racially motivated violence here.

When Mookie tosses that garbage can, he melds with his counterpart, Lee the director: he ceases to be merely an observer and becomes a force to rally his people to action. Lee’s heart is with that crowd accusing Sal and by extension every white in the audience. That many white moviegoers and critics have stood for Lee’s haranguing and pronounced themselves better for the experience only shows how effective guilt can be in putting a half-baked argument across. The whites I’ve spoken to who admire Lee’s work invariably talk about their disgust over the obstacles still facing black Americans, and the guilt they feel at the knowledge that their white skin gives them an automatic advantage. They go to his movies convinced that being aware of what black people face is the only way to begin to change things. But by praising a filmmaker who insists that the races have no business with each other, they’re confirming that the concern that drew them to these movies in the first place is irrelevant. Worse, out of concern about racism, they’re letting themselves be vilified merely for the color of their skin. It’s only a matter of time, Do the Right Thing says, when, under the right circumstances, “nigger” will spring from their lips.

After Do the Right Thing, Lee made Mo’ Better Blues (1990), the story of a jazz trumpeter (which contained some viciously anti-Semitic caricatures), and Jungle Fever (1991), about the affair between a black architect and his white secretary. That film suffered from some of the same preconceptions as Do the Right Thing, and the central relationship was pushed to background by a subplot about the architect’s crackhead brother (Samuel L. Jackson, in a sensational performance). Then came Malcolm X, the film Lee said he wanted to be his epic, his David Lean film. Who’d have thought it would turn out to be his Richard Attenborough picture—his Gandhi? Stylistically, Malcolm X is all over the place, from his collage polemics of the title sequence, which intercuts Rodney King’s beating with a burning American flag, to the faux forties studio patina Lee brings to Malcolm’s early years in Boston and New York, to the stolid Lives of the Greats style the movie settles into once Malcolm converts to Islam. But above all else, the movie is reverent. This Malcolm X is tailor-made for high- school field trips, two hundred and twenty-one virtuous, improving minutes that show even the most tumultuous lives can be made boring.

Various people have been trying to bring this movie to the screen for over twenty years. Lee is using material that’s been reworked by so many hands it’s acquired the anonymity of a national monument. He draws on not just The Autobiography, which was rewritten by Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, after Alex Haley finished it, but also on a script written twenty years ago by the late Arnold Perl, and James Baldwin’s unproduced screenplay, a maddeningly elliptical and clumsy, but often lyrical and evocative, piece of work published under the title One Day When I Was Lost. (Baldwin’s estate requested that the late writer not receive a screen credit for Lee’s movie.)

Lee is doggedly faithful to the accepted version of Malcolm’s life, the one set down in The Autobiography. It’s not surprising, then, that the film smooths over or eliminates Malcolm’s paradoxes and inconsistencies. Bruce Perry’s superbly documented biography Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America doesn’t shrink from those paradoxes. In the process, Perry makes a pretty convincing case that The Autobiography isn’t so much the truth about Malcolm’s life as it is the first major black Bildungsroman. It’s proof of how potent the myth of Malcolm X still is that Perry’s book, a major feat of research and a dense, compelling psychological portrait, has largely been condemned or ignored or dismissed as a hatchet job.

Lee, who’s now quoted on paperback editions of The Autobiography saying it’s the book that’s influenced him most, makes the movie as if he’d never encountered Malcolm anywhere but on those pages. He holds up Malcolm’s speeches as if they were great pieces of truthtelling, though the rhetoric is stiff and—at best—intellectually shaky. And he has Denzel Washington deliver huge untrimmed chunks of them as though this were a promotional video for a recording of dramatic readings. Obviously, any film on Malcolm’s life would have had to reckon with The Autobiography, but I think Lee’s troubles begin with his treating the book as the definitive Malcolm. It’s open to question how much of Malcolm the book really captures—and because he ceases to change or grow before the book is half over, its treatment of Malcolm becomes increasingly less dramatic as it goes on.

When a book becomes as influential as The Autobiography has, it’s easy to forget that sometimes even bad books can have an impact (The Grapes of Wrath comes to mind). The vividness of The Autobiography's early chapters, about Malcolm’s life as a young hustler, intensify the nostalgic pull he obviously still felt for those times, so it’s a real drag when we’re stuck with the saved Malcolm. Pages are devoted to transcriptions of speeches, to praising Elijah Muhammad’s cracked version of the black man’s history, to descriptions of a Nation of Islam member’s weekly itinerary, and to descriptions of Malcolm’s travels, press conferences, and public appearances. Even after Malcolm leaves the Nation, Alex Haley’s prose still turns him into the black nationalist equivalent of the feistiest student in civics class. Here’s a description of his flight to Mecca:

Both of the pilots were smiling at me, treating me with the same honor and respect I had received ever since I left America. I stood there looking through the glass at the sky ahead of us. In America, I had ridden in more planes than perhaps any other Negro, and I had never been invited up into the cockpit. And there I was, with two Muslim seatmates, one from Egypt, the other from Arabia, all of us bound for Mecca, with me up in the pilots’ cabin. Brother, I knew Allah was with me.

Gerald Early, in an excellentessay in the December issue of Harper’s, tries to suggest why Malcolm’s appeal has grown when so many other black nationalist leaders have been forgotten. Early writes, “If Malcolm...had not written his story, he would have died a negligible figure on the American political landscape...” But the reasons Early suggests for Malcolm’s continuing appeal—his youth in a decade infatuated with youth, his hipness, his charisma, his sly way of bringing the gripes of a barber-shop bull session into the often stodgy debate on black rights are nowhere to be found in The Autobiography. Early himself says what first turned him on to Malcolm was a recording of one of Malcolm’s speeches.

Reading The Autobiography, people are able to project onto it the Malcolm they’ve seen in newsreel footage, or heard on record, the Malcolm whose legend has been passed down to them by older friends and relatives. It’s much like the way that people, after seeing a movie based on a book, often read that book as a way of extending the experience of the movie.

The section on Malcolm that opens the second half of the documentary Eyes on the Prize shows you what’s missing from The Autobiography. The potbellied men chomping on cigars listening to Malcolm at a Harlem rally aren’t about to adhere to the Nation of Islam’s puritanical codes of behavior, and the women with their make-up and processed hair sure as hell aren’t going to listen to someone tell them that they must scrub their faces and submit to their men. But they laugh and applaud with pleasure at hearing what they’ve probably thought but never heard a black say publicly, just as later audiences laughed at Richard Pryor. And Malcolm, knowing that his black audiences had largely ignored the clean-cut, bow-tied NOI members who’d been canvassing black neighborhoods for years, dug into his hustler’s past and delivered his digs with the smooth, sly, impeccable timing that actors would kill for. “Why, your skin is like gold compared to his,” he tells them about the white man. “You find [him] lying out in the sun, trying to get to look like you. That old, pale thing.”

There’s no doubt that Malcolm fancied himself a performer. Interrupted by applause at a press conference announcing that he intended to bring the United States before the United Nations on charges of human-rights violations for their treatment of American blacks, Malcolm admonishes the audience to keep quiet, then breaks into a broad grin. But you have to separate the Malcolm who could come up with a brilliant tactical stroke like that one from the one who, at a 1964 Oxford University debate, said that American society is based on “castration of the black man.” Where, you imagine Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer asking, do black women fit into that analysis? To get a complete picture of Malcolm you have to keep in mind the limitations and evasions of all his fierce and threatening rhetoric. This was a man who operated by threat rather than by action, by making white America fear what he could do. (And in the process he managed to make Martin Luther King seem much more appealing to deal with.) This was a man who, as Stanley Crouch and others have pointed out, said freedom should be seized by any means necessary but who left the fight for freedom to the southern blacks he belittled, people who stood up to unimaginable terrors. This was a man who complained of the NOI’s refusal to get political but, on his own, sneered at any political progress as a proof of the white man’s bad faith. (At Oxford he cited the murders of Goodman, Cheyney, and Schwerner after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as proof that the bill was meaningless, as if laws against rape and murder can ensure that those crimes will never be committed.) This is a man whose story, despite his railings against American society is, as Gerald Early suggests, the quintessential Horatio Alger story. And this was a man who spouted sexist and anti-Semitic rhetoric as horrendously prejudiced as anything he spoke out against.

These contradictions can’t be easily contained within the mythology of Malcolm X, and Spike Lee prefers not to let them trouble him. Lee is quoted in the film’s press material as saying, “He was three or four or five or six different people, and that’s what we want to show in this film,” but he hasn’t bothered to come up with an arc that would carry his Malcolm through those transformations. The movie shows us that Malcolm, who first heard of the Nation of Islam while serving a stretch in a Massachusetts prison for robbery, was attracted to it because it promised a way out. But Lee never questions how someone as obviously intelligent as Malcolm could fall for Elijah Muhammad’s whacked-out jive about whites being the products of an evil experiment done thousands of years ago by a mad black scientist, Dr. Yacub. Bruce Perry’s biography suggest that even after Malcolm stopped believing Muhammad’s “theories,” he stayed with the Nation because it gave him the platform he needed for his politics. But Lee presents Malcolm’s hearing about “white devils” as an authentic enlightenment, instead of as the “truth” that a junkie on the skids might grasp to save himself. Lee knows that there’s more than a little of the con man in Elijah Muhammad (he allows Al Freeman, Jr., who uses a clipped, high voice, to play Elijah as a wily old snake you’d be crazy to trust), but he can’t bring himself to equate Muhammad with Malcolm’s earlier mentor, the gangster West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo, who portrays a big man’s authority as well as his vulnerability), whose promise to Malcolm of the good life that awaits is just as much an illusion.

In Lee’s film, the converted Malcolm is a straight arrow, as conservative as his narrow-collared suits. By mistakenly locating Malcolm’s appeal in his by-the-book black nationalist rhetoric, which was nothing new in the black community, rather than his fiery charisma or the pleasure he clearly took in saying the previously unsayable, Lee reduces him to the level of all those other forgotten black nationalists. There’s no reason why this rather stiff young man would inspire the rapturous, clamoring reactions he does here. It’s much more likely that people would respond the way Malcolm’s hustling buddy Shorty (played appealingly by Lee) does. Shorty goes to see his old friend preach, and when Malcolm recognizes him in the crowd and comes down to embrace him, praising him as a brother who’s found the way, Shorty returns the embrace awkwardly, unsure how to react. Talking afterwards over coffee, Shorty tells him he enjoys the sensual pleasures too much to join the Nation. (One of the reasons these two brief scenes are enjoyable is that they remind you how likable Lee can be onscreen. His mixture of affection and embarrassment—over the pleasures he still enjoys, the ones he used to share with Malcolm—is very touching.)

Lee’s conception of Malcolm allows for Denzel Washington’s flair for heroic acting, but it exposes the stiffness that afflicts him. Washington is an odd case, a sometimes-great actor with no spontaneity in him. So he delivers Malcolm’s speeches as straight as Lee intends them to be taken. There’s none of Malcolm’s seductiveness in Washington’s presentations, none of Malcolm’s ability to tease, kid, and embrace a crowd. Washington has a couple of good moments: the eager hayseed look on his face when we first see him as he gets ready to have his hair conked; sitting stone-faced in a nightclub while West Indian Archie whispers to him that he’s going to kill him, betraying Malcolm’s fear only by letting the cigarette in his mouth tremble slightly; the romantic nervousness under the exterior of the righteous black man as he proposes to Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett). But on the whole it’s an immobile performance. Washington acts Malcolm for the history books, not to plumb what was going on inside the man.

Lee doesn’t connect Malcolm’s various transformations. He directs the same way that Margaret Dumont used to play scenes with Groucho: by the amnesia principle. Hit with a Marxian zinger, Dumont’s dowager puss would register shock before relaxing into a mask of social comportment as if nothing had happened. And Lee’s Malcolm returns from his trip to Mecca who follow those Uncle Tom leaders.

The movie features equal opportunity finger pointing. There are the standard white villains like the social worker who breaks up Malcolm’s family (Lee makes sure we see her wearing fur). And though the Justice Department did keep tabs on Malcolm during his pilgrimage to Africa, as the movie shows, Lee tries to link the shadowy, unidentified white agents following Malcolm with the group seen plotting to kill him. It plays as if Lee is squeamish about admitting that Malcolm was killed by black men though in the Malcolm X production diary and in a recent Sight and Sound interview he admits that the orders for the killing probably came from someone in the NOI. (The FBI and the New York City Police Department may have had prior knowledge of the assassination and chose not to intervene.) But the blacks who don’t get with Malcolm’s program come off just as badly as people not ready for shining truths. (Just think how puritanical a white filmmaker would seem if he made a film about the white fools who refuse to submit to the strictures of born-again Christianity.) There’s an appalling sequence near the beginning of the film where Malcolm and Shorty go dancing at Boston’s Roseland ballroom. Lee wants the scene to be his Busby Berkeley number, but what’s wrong with it goes beyond the frenetic cutting and strange camera angles and Lee’s not bothering to place the camera so we can see what’s going on. The scene is so grotesquely exaggerated that if a white director had done it, there’d be charges of racism.

Malcolm’s and Shorty’s zoot suits wouldn’t be out of place in one of Carol Burnett’s movie parodies, and the sweaty-faced dancers, trapped in the camera angles, all sport big, foolish grins, popped eyes, and spout ludicrously inauthentic jive slang. The scene ends with Lee sliding belly down through his partner’s legs and grinning, ironically, into the camera as if to say, “don’t these people look ridiculous?’’ It’s an outrageous scene. Lee turns one of the great periods in black music and dance into a coon show to condemn what he evidently feels is frivolity. It’s Lee who makes these people into racist caricatures. You’d see something a whole lot different if you looked at film clips of performers like the Nicholas Brothers or Cab Calloway.

On the whole, Lee’s dull reverence leads him away from his trademark provocations. He’s so conscious of presenting an acceptable portrait of Malcolm that he’s actually selective about the rhetoric he employs. Asked at a press conference if any white man has ever done anything good for the black man, Malcolm says he doesn’t understand the question. But Malcolm had a ready answer in The Autobiography. “I can think of two. Hitler and Stalin. The black man in America couldn’t get a decent factory job until Hitler put so much pressure on the white man. And then Stalin kept up the pressure.” Jews are mentioned in the movie only as models for building communities that take care of their own. There’s none of the Malcolm who told an audience, “Goldberg always catches ya’. If Goldberg can’t catch ya’, Goldstein’ll catch ya’.” (Maybe Lee is still smarting over the criticism of his portrayal of the Jewish club owners as money-grubbing cheats in Mo’ Better Blues.) And Lee is very coy about the Nation of Islam’s sexism. When Malcolm takes Betty out for coffee and tells her Elijah Muhammad’s rules for women’s behavior, it’s laughingly passed off as nervous date chatter. Later there’s a shot of a banner at a NOI rally that says “WE MUST PROTECT OUR WOMEN—OUR MOST VALUABLE PROPERTY.” A woman I talked to cited the shot as Lee’s acknowledgment of the NOI’s sexism, but I think it serves the same purpose as that Tawana Brawley graffiti in Do the Right Thing—we’re meant to take it at face value, uncritically. Otherwise, if Lee is trying to deflect the issue, why include a shot of the banner at all?

But what are we to make of the way Lee shoots the early scene where Malcolm makes out with Sophia (Kate Vernon), the blond, white woman he meets at Roseland and with whom he has an affair? The couple are in the backseat of Sophia’s convertible, which is parked overlooking a lake. The camera begins on the back end of the car, swoops over the top to take in the necking couple, and ends on a close-up of the hood ornament—a silver, naked woman. It’s not just Malcolm who’s turning this woman into an object, a trophy for a young black man. By equating her with the statuette, Lee is, too. And significantly, her face is included, along with the social worker, and the teacher who tells Malcolm that “niggers” can’t be lawyers, in the montage of people Malcolm sees in his mind when the inmate who converts him to Islam convinces him that all white people are devils.

Like numerous other scenes, the sequence in Sophia’s car, with the Ink Spots’ “My Prayer” on the soundtrack, seems like something out of a forties movie. Maybe by re-doing those scenes with black faces, Lee is trying to reclaim the part of American movie history blacks were left out of. But does anyone in the nineties really want to see a black replay of those terrible forties scenes where a couple on their first date go for an ice-cream soda, or where a bright-eyed young recruit, out of hero worship, signs up for the cause? The prison scene where Malcolm heeds the call would fit right into an inspirational man-of-the-cloth biography like 1955's A Man Called Peter. There were plenty of movies nobody wanted to see white people in, either.

Lee muffs so much here that it’s a surprise when he gets something right. The assassination sequence with its sustained tension and terrific staging is a demonstration of Lee’s real strength as a director: the ability to handle large groups of people and sudden violent confusion while keeping everything perfectly clear. That’s the sort of talent you associate with an epic filmmaker, and it only shows us how shrivelled the rest of the movie is by comparison. The film never loses the dull unimaginative cast of Official Monument, and that’s exactly what it’s being praised for. It ends with a short documentary that incorporates footage of the real Malcolm (a major miscalculation on Lee’s part and a disservice to his leading man since next to the real man, Washington’s performance dries up and blows away) and clips from his funeral and burial. There’s also footage, shot by Lee, of schoolchildren responding to a lesson that tells them every black person is Malcolm by having them jump out of their chairs proclaiming “I’m Malcolm X!” and there’s a spot in which they’re addressed by Nelson Mandela, who quotes Malcolm to them. But if the audience still needs to be told who Malcolm X was after three and a half hours it’s because the director hasn’t done his job.

It will be interesting to see how Lee deals with the movie’s middling box office—which means, of course, that the black audiences he was counting on to support the film just didn’t turn out. It could be that the movie is just too long-winded and preachy to be very popular. Or it could be that Lee has misjudged in a more crucial way—that today’s blacks have embraced Malcolm for something other than the rhetoric that’s ladled out here without benefit of the Malcolm wit, charisma, or irony. In a brilliant piece for the New Republic last December, Shelby Steele argued that Malcolm’s great gift to blacks was to wipe out the self-doubt and self-hatred that’s inevitably planted in the minds of people who’ve been despised and persecuted. Malcolm’s torrent of anger, Steele writes, told blacks that it was all right to love themselves, and all right to hate the people who made them feel worthless. If that’s true, then it means that the surge of feeling Malcolm instilled in his audience meant more to them than his rigged history lessons, his shilling for the Nation of Islam, his visions of black revolt and nationalism which he must have known didn’t have a prayer of coming true.

A surge of feeling is what you expect from a movie epic scaled to tell us about a heroic life, and it’s exactly the uplift that’s missing from Malcolm X. Lee has taken Malcolm at his word and transformed him back into the identity he left behind (the name Steele chose as the title of his essay): Malcolm Little. The complex, sometimes appalling, and altogether astonishing, truth of the real Malcolm and his reinvention hovers outside of the movie like a taunt, daring Lee to measure up.

The critical response to Malcolm X proves that critics can be just as easily blinded, or bullied, by “prestigious moviemaking” as by the sort of pamphleteering Lee concocted in Do the Right Thing. But Malcolm X might never have been made if Lee, despite his complaints about critics, hadn’t bought into all the claims they’ve been making for his greatnesss since Do the Right Thing. The reviews of Malcolm X went beyond the usual solemn drone that greets “worthy” films; the nuttiest were a sort of “Woe betide him who ignores the truths herein.” It wasn’t the movie that was reviewed, but what was perceived as the movie’s mission: the healing of America’s racial divisions. With precious few exceptions (Terrence Rafferty in The New Yorker, Ray Sawhill in The Modern Review), American critics didn’t review Malcolm X, they made nominating speeches for Spike Lee.

Lee is a little like the character played by Eddie Bracken in Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero, a 4F Marine who poses as a war hero and is transformed, by the wish-fulfillment of his town’s leaders, into a beacon of light and truth. But unlike Bracken, Lee has no clue that he doesn’t fit the bill. His career has come to resemble a whistle-stop campaign. But not only are the critics powering the train—at every stop they disembark to form a cheering throng.