Spike Lee is an equal-rights activist. ... Because of this, it is no surprise that Lee had another intent when recounting the life of Malcolm X in his 7th film, Malcolm X. ... In Malcolm X, Spike Lee piggyback’s his own beliefs through fictitious elements of Malcolm X and his life in order to relate the struggle for racial equality to the present.
Spike Lee contemporizes the beliefs of Malcolm X throughout the film. ... Behind the footage of this opening scene is a voice over of Malcolm X (Denzel Washington). In this speech, Malcolm X negatively portrays whites as the number one murderer. Although the footage complements the convictions of Malcolm X, the Rodney King incident occurred in 1990. ... A comparison of contemporary America with the example of the Rodney King beating and the treatment of African American’s pre-civil rights does not belong in the portrayal of Malcolm X.
Another means of contemporizing and inserting his own commentary was through Lee’s distortions of Malcolm X and his life. Each of these additions serves to mold Malcolm X into a more mythic and contemporizable figure.
In Malcolm X’s biography, Malcolm devotes a chapter to his half-sister. ... However, according to Lee’s Malcolm X, Ella did not exist. Lee could not include her in that she did not assist in Malcolm X’s progression to a political activist. In order to justify Malcolm’s hatred of whites so that Lee could transpose Malcolm’s battle to the present, Ella had to cut from the biopic.
Another digression taken by Spike Lee in order to make the movie more central to black/white issues is parental influence in the Malcolm X’s childhood. In the film, Earl Little becomes a martyr for Malcolm and an important influence on his life. In the Autobiography, it is Malcolm’s mother who shapes and helps to form Malcolm’s adulthood. Spike Lee, however, needed to create a more dramatized and “sacred” influence in order to establish Malcolm X as a mythic figure. ...
After Malcolm split from the Nation of Islam (NOI), he began to address the question of alliances.
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