Dear friends,
If there’s one thing, just one thing, guaranteed to feature in a Spike Lee joint, it’s the phrase “By Any Means Necessary”. The words, followed up by the printed call-and-response “Ya dig | Sho nuff”, adorn the closing credits of each of Lee’s films, forming the two-pronged slogan for his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks—and, in turn, a kind of mission statement. No matter the film, its themes, its message, we will be asked at the end to carry away that simple, vital phrasing: “by any means necessary.”
Though decontextualised, the basic meaning of these four words should be clear to most viewers. Used and popularised by Malcolm X during the last year or so of his life, it refers, quite simply, to the potential, adaptable “means” that may be necessary to achieve social, racial justice and change. It’s been often interpreted, somewhat facetiously, as an incitement to violence; really, it conveys the fluidity of such “means”, the goalposts ever moving in a system set up to prevent any such justice from being easily, if ever, achieved. Per Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which specifically quotes both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the “means necessary” may be as low-key as, say, arguing for wider representation on the walls of a neighbourhood pizzeria; they may be as active as throwing a trashcan through that pizzeria’s window in reaction to an instance of murderous police brutality. Lee himself, of course, plays the character who throws the trashcan, and who then expresses regret over the greater ensuing destruction; in turn, his film (including those closing quotations) works through and weighs up various “means necessary” from incendiary protest to community cooperation, with a galaxy of ideas dotted betwixt.
When taken, however, sans context and appended to the final moments of each of these motion pictures, the phrase “By any means necessary” becomes less a broad social rallying call and more an exercise in personal branding. This need not be a criticism: the mantra serves as a floating reminder of the struggle for equality and justice; a framework of engagement to which Lee, whether in Bamboozled (2001), BlacKkKlansman (2018) or even his OldBoy remake (2013), intends always to strive.
Lee’s 1992 biopic of Malcolm X himself is, for better and worse, probably the key to the filmmaker’s career. It famously transformed the assassinated activist into a branding exercise long before release, in an attempt to drum up anticipation for this unprecedented epic of Black American history. Upon its release, critic Armond White wrote two (very good!) withering pieces on the film that took umbrage with Lee’s design of a towering “X” on posters, hats and T-shirts; as well, indeed, with Lee’s bombastic methods of self-promotion in TV and print interviews, which had drawn their own share of ire from other Black commentators and public figures. (Some of whom, admittedly, were members of the Nation of Islam, an organisation that obviously had an interest in discrediting Malcolm X.) In any case, before the first scene begins, this film remains defined by the paratextual status that its director worked so hard to cultivate. On the one hand, Lee presented this as a work of great import in terms of Hollywood subject matter, American film semiotics more generally and as a space of sociocultural resistance that the white-dominated studio system worked as much to sabotage as to help in producing. On the other, it was an opportunity for Black-made art to compete as a mainstream, capitalist object—no longer in the independent-cinema mode that Lee had come up through, but a full-fat “quality blockbuster”.
In the end, Malcolm X works on both levels. It is, certainly, a towering work of biography crafted by a young and idiosyncratic writer-director who knows his craft inside and out; who possesses such a potent voice as to expertly draw out a slew of startling sequences, moments and details that can inform, evoke and rouse in equal measure. Lee’s approach distils facts, conjectures and “ecstatic truths” into (a) a clear and direct celebration of his subject’s life, words and iconographic status as an activist-thinker and (b) a few-holds-barred attack on the specific machinations that tore Malcolm back down and murdered him. (And in 1992, the film’s direct implication of the Nation of Islam in the assassination was still a controversial statement to make.) Yet, for all its multifaceted brilliance, Malcolm X is also successful as a product, a marketing exercise tethered so clearly to the unique perspective of Spike Lee as to render it strangely compromised. This is evidently inherent to all biographical writing; but from those baseball caps on down, Malcolm X bears its own type of strangeness in the way it rather repackages its radical title figure into an historical context that he never lived to see: the early 1990s.
Lee makes his stamp clear from the film’s first moments. Malcolm X opens by cross-cutting between a full-screen, Patton-style Stars-and-Stripes, on which are overlaid the credits, and footage of the LAPD assault on Rodney King, which had occurred a short 20 months before the movie’s release. Towards the end of the credits, the flag begins to burn from its edges, leaving that gigantic “X” standing in the centre, as high as the cinema screen. The meaning of this montage is clear enough: Malcolm and his words may now be considered “history” but the problems he addressed linger. All at once, the viewer must deal with an urgent call-to-arms (the King beating, juxtaposed with the flag) and that reclaimed baseball-cap logo (the X branding); we are then swooped down into 1940s Boston where, moments after his name hovers on screen, we see Spike Lee sauntering confidently into the space. After a few minutes, we are introduced to Denzel Washington’s young and cheery Malcolm, who is “conked” by Lee’s Shorty.
The dressing of a teenaged Malcolm’s hair is something of a mythic scene in his autobiography: his entryway to manhood, modernity, the city. It represents the birth of one of the many Malcolms who evolve throughout his story. Lee’s decision to cast himself as the mookish sidekick Shorty is really just of a piece with his prior supporting roles, not least as the mookish sidekick to Washington’s trumpeter in Mo’ Better Blues (1990). But it is nevertheless significant that in Malcolm X the Lee character is essentially the protagonist’s guide into the whole tale. Shorty confers on Malcolm an entire way of being, one that defines the first act but is also, in its rejection, key to the rest of Malcolm’s profound evolution throughout.
This is a fun metatextual element that underscores the clear directorial identity that Lee uses to steer the whole film. His canvas makes generally judicious use of both classical and more modernist styles, animated throughout by the radicalism of its deceptively simple semiotics. As the film’s producer, Monty Ross, wrote in the 40 Acres and a Mule book on the production of Malcolm X, “All media, including film […] has been one of the slowest outlets in allowing Blacks to control the reflected image of their culture, to control the expressions of themselves.” Certainly, the grammar of this film is such an expression; while much of Lee’s focus in the second half is on Malcolm’s speeches, which he treats with respect and awe, his own editorial approach is designed as its own discursive contribution, an evocation of the same fiery rhetoric.
What’s interesting is the way the form of the rhetoric is clearly of interest to Lee as much as its content. As he makes clear in that accompanying book, Lee respects Malcolm’s well-documented ability to “market” his ideas—initially, as the Nation of Islam’s number-one door-knocker (Malcolm even merited some mention in EU Essien-Udom’s early-60s book Black Nationalism, not because he was yet a public figure in his own right but because he accounted for so much of the Nation’s growth in membership) and later as an internationally-known champion of Afro-American advancement. And of himself, in his own capacity as both filmmaker and a promoter of his films, Lee wrote, “the only person who does marketing better than me, as far as artists go, is Madonna.” This does little to contradict Armond White’s note that “Lee treats Malcolm X as a pop star whose achievement was fame rather than enlightenment.” Agree with this or not, the director clearly appreciated not just the message but the manner in which Malcolm could convey his ideas, and that fascination underscores much of the film.
This is essentially what makes Malcolm X a knottier biopic than it is often given credit for. Lee’s brilliance is in pushing his medium to match his subject in its communicative directness, clarity, intelligence and ambition. But, per the curse of any biography, Lee also swaddles the film in himself: his propensity to hawk his personal “brand” as much as his work and its messages. During the making of this film, Lee—discussing his marketing, his hustling production process and his attitude to cinema viewership—cheerfully described himself as a capitalist. It doesn’t take a scholar of Black history to tell you what Malcolm X thought of that word: “You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”
Lee ends his film with a bravura and very moving extended montage of sound and image, plundering archive material and setting it to Terence Blanchard’s rather stately score and the voices of Martin Luther King Jr, Ossie Davis, Nelson Mandela and, finally, Malcolm X himself—with those four words, “by any means necessary.” In addition to the social and historical meaning this ending works through, it also has textual purchase as a kind of transcendence of the biopic form. Is it, even, an admission of defeat? Why continue this costume-and-makeup pageantry when the reality is already so powerful? (To this point: compare it to the similarly heady ending of our last podcast subject, Oppenheimer.) This “outro”, however, keeps the filmmaker simultaneously back- and foregrounded; all at once, it shows the biopic artifice stripped away and the materials of the cutting-room made manifest. In that sense, it is the perfect ending to what may be the ultimate Spike Lee film: socially conscious and self-conscious, all in one remarkable package. And that’s the truth, Ruth.
As ever, many thanks for listening and much love.
—Calum & Eddie
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