1) His splendidly written autobiography is a case in point. Its exaggerated portrayal of his youthful criminality enhanced his tough image and dramatized the transformation of the pseudo masculine, criminal Malcolm into the manly, political Malcolm. It inspired his followers to feel that, no matter how far they had fallen, they could still raise themselves up and surmount the handicaps that were largely due to the dreadful legacy of slavery. (Bruce Perry ix)

2) Malcolm's assassination on February 21, 1965, ended his efforts to establish an alliance between his nationalistic followers and the militant offspring of the civil rights movement. Deprived of Malcolm's leadership, African-American politics remained divided into hostile, warring camps. After Malcolm's death, the divisions were evident even among militant blacks who saw themselves as his ideological descendants. On one side were nationalists who resolutely refused to participate in efforts to achieve black advancement through the struggle within the American political system. On the other were radical activists who sought to mobilize African-Americans for confrontational politics while placing little emphasis on the cultural and psychological transformation that would foster effective black political action. (Clayborne Carson 43-44)

3) Malcolm X was basically disputing the American Dream. And there’s one thing Hollywood is about, it is selling the American Dream. So Malcolm X is at odds with the images that Hollywood has always been about. (Spike Lee 176)

4) While the content of the Autobiography continues to constitute the pallet from which Lee draws the dramatic hues and textures that he uses to depict Malcolm’s life and to authorize his representation of Malcolm’s importance, the remainder of the film relies on Lee’s racialization of gender and sexuality to define cultural and political authenticity. This racialization works powerfully to protect against threats to the vindicating function of cultural nationalism that Lee creates with his representations of Malcolm X’s life. (Maurice Stevens 281)

5) The film denigrates transracial unions, obscures Betty Shabazz’s self-determination, and hides the political battle Malcolm waged against certain ministers in the Nation of Islam. (Mark Reid 21)

6) Today, market forces in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy have found a way to use Malcolm X. Where black images are concerned, the field of representation has always been plantation culture. Malcolm X can be turned into a hot commodity, his militant black nationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics can be diffused and undermined by a process of objectification. (bell hooks 155)

7) And by turning traditional filmmaking inside out, by using familiar forms to make as incendiary a thinker as Malcolm palatable, Lee may in fact be more subversive than he ever has been before. (Kenneth Turan 1)

8) This is probably as big a single worry as the American prison system has today -- the way Muslim teachings, circulated among all Negroes in the country, are converting new Muslims among black men in prison, and black men are in prison in far greater numbers than their proportion in the population. (Malcolm X with Haley 186)

9) Malcolm X was the prophet of Black rage primarily because of his great love for Black people. His love was neither abstract nor ephemeral. Rather, it represented a concrete connection with a degraded and devalued people in need of psychic conversion. This connection is why Malcolm X's articulation of Black rage was not directed first and foremost at white America. Malcolm spoke love to Black people; he believed the love that motivated Black rage had to be felt by Black people in order for the rage to take on institutional forms. (Cornel West, qtd. in Wood 48)

10) The film concludes by simple-mindedly linking Malcolm X to Nelson Mandela. This intellectual montage fails to connect the two contrasting liberation philosophies of these men. Blackness is not so simple and liberation struggles are not all the same, regardless of their similar black hue and racist enemies. Lee ignores the vast difference between black separatism and democratic socialism that Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela espouse, respectively. (Mark Reid 23)

11) Lee’s portraits of black women in Malcolm X mirror the usual stereotypes found in films by white directors. (bell hooks 558)

12) In any organization, someone must be the boss. If it's even just one person, you've got to be the boss of yourself. (Malcolm X with Haley, 145)

13) There is an overwhelming sense that Malcolm X, the movie, will be looked back on as a turning point, not just for the nation, but for the film’s director. If Oliver Stone’s JFK could lead to the opening of sealed congressional reports, what might X bring about? (Lisa Kennedy 6)

14) Our intention is not to tear down Malcolm; for us this is an act of love. And those cases where we had to change names, change events, or make three or four characters into one, well, I don’t think that’s distorting the Malcolm X story. You have to realize we’re not making a documentary, we’re making a drama. (Spike Lee 178)

15) In Lee’s version, relationships between black men and white women never transcend the sexual. Indeed, in Lee’s cinematic world, every relationship between a black man and a woman, whether white or black, is mediated by his constant sexualization of the female. (bell hooks 557)

16) Thus, rather than producing a kind of cinematic discontinuity that moves away from classic Hollywood realism, Lee’s is a spectacularization meant to codify the "real" in his populist approach to "keepin’ it real" and thereby making his own bid for raciopolitical authenticity. (Maurice Stevens 294)

17) Imagine yourself in a hotel room late at night listening to a man whose life story you wish to write and perhaps you'll invent other means serving the end of representing the man's voice, his presence, ultimately his meaning on the page. Perhaps you'll begin to appreciate how intimately truth and technique are entangled. (Wideman, qtd. in Wood 104)

18) Lee’s Malcolm X celebrates a nostalgic, socio-psychical terrain, inhabited by racially fixed black and white male anatomies. The C-brand marks the in-between and slippery currency of popular American racial sentiment. Each visually excised portrait of Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Malcolm X, and El-Haj Malik El-Shabazz, is separated by a postmodern frontier of "by-any-means-necessary" consumerism. (Mark Reid 24)

19) Lee’s film conforms to racist/sexist iconography that depicts white women as innocent and therefore desirable and black woman as controlling-domineering therefore undesirable. (bell hooks 557)

20) Lee’s Malcolm X reinscribes the figure of a "shining" black masculinity in response to the institutionalized and systematic targeting of black men constituted as the embodiment of criminality and threat. Unfortunately, in this instance, disavowal plays a central role in constituting the structure of countermemory and limits the transformative potential of Lee’s Malcolm X. (Maurice Stevens 299)

21) One can safely say the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never been a friend to African-Americans. As far back as Marcus Garvey and A. Phillip Randolph the Bureau has more than kept its watchful eye on black leaders trying to uplift their people. (Spike Lee, qtd. in Carson 13)

22) Yes, the movie gives us various Malcolms -- the criminal, the black nationalist, the revolutionary, the intellectual, the humanist, the liberal and so on. And in this respect, it must be praised and celebrated. But what it does not give us is the fluidity of Malcolm, the way his various personalities mingle and intermix, a fluidity embodied in the autobiography, a document made exceptional by the fact that Malcolm does not narrate his past from a secure, stable identity at some point in the future. (Malcolm Turvey 54)

23) Everybody can get an education out of this film [Malcolm X]. This film’s about America, and all Americans can learn from it. Like Malcolm, we’re taking a global view of this film; it’s not just about the United States, we’re thinking about the world. And there will be people who’ll want to see this around the world. (Spike Lee 185)

24) Because Lee valorizes a very particular form of black masculinity in the film, moments of implicit homosocioality, feminine agency, and interracial ambiguity threaten both Malcolm’s black manhood and the film’s narrative structure as well. (Maurice Stevens 284)

25) By March 25th, 1964, John Ali could see the debilitating effects of Malcolm X's forced departure on the NOI's financial health and on its morale. Both were at an all-time low. In some mosques, the weekly income had dropped by more than $550, a direct reflection of the exodus of members towards Malcolm's new organizations and the sharp decline in new membership applications. (Karl Evanzz 223)

26) That the everyday moments that constituted one’s upbringing never made it to screen was a repressed given for the African-American filmgoer. Spike Lee has said to millions of Africans Americans: this is something from your life. (Lisa Kennedy 9)

27) Later that same day, Malcolm reached Mount Arafat, along with thousands of other Hajjis, where he spent the rest of the day praying under a tent on the mount. Malcolm sat there, absorbed by the tremendous diversity of peoples sharing the same shelter on the desert ascent. Of that experience, he later reflected that "present in that group was every shade - every shade, every complexion, there was every type of culture..." Malcolm was intensely moved by the realization of the great unity of the Hajj, especially exemplified by the Hajjis' sharing of nourishment, utensils, and even the space needed for prayer and sleep. (Louis DeCaro 207)

28) Lee also dangerously fuses notions of blackness with his picture of manhood by constructing an idealized femininity that functions most significantly as a prop for masculinity. (Maurice Stevens 294)

29) I've often reflected upon such black veteran numbers men as West Indian Archie. If they had lived in another kind of society, their exceptional mathematical talents might have been better used. But they were black. (Malcolm X with Haley 120)

30) The history of the production of Malcolm X under the auspices of Warner Brothers in Hollywood provides ample testimony to the institutional and commercial power of this fantasy of the authentic black film-maker. For its production and post-production problems provide us with a long list of contrasting and clashing points of view, radically different perceptions, and false expectations centering upon the difficulty, from beginning, of slotting the Malcolm X project into existing Hollywood paradigm of "black film." (Malcolm Turvey 54)

31) As impressed as I was with Malcolm X’s life, I was less than impressed with Lee’s portrayal (or lack thereof) of women. There was not one single empowered woman throughout the whole film. Betty Shabazz is the closest thing we see to this,but her confinement to domestication-related activities (teaching nutrition, taking care of their children) throws her autonomy and power into question, instead portraying her as restricted to the traditional role of the American housewife. Though Malcolm X’s life goal is black oppression, I was just as equally struck by the relentless imagery of female oppression. The women we see in this film are either hookers, criminals, or domesticated, devoted followers of Islam, willing to do the bidding of men and to act as a “suitable” wife for a “brother of Islam.” (Katherine Prosswimmer, Lehigh University)

32) First presented on television, next presented in print, and finally projected on the motion picture screen, the popular image of Malcolm X has developed in three stages of multiple exposure: the televisual face transmitted on the small screen, the literary self conjured by the autobiography, and the motion picture incarnation fashioned by Spike Lee for the theatrical screen and videotape afterlife. (Thomas Doherty 33)

33) The mystique of the gun weaves thematically through the film. The occasional punctuation of gunshots on the soundtrack--as when Malcolm and Shorty play cops and robbers--ring out Malcolm's destiny, elevating his death by gunshot from circumstance to inevitability. The theme counterpoints the tired association of Malcolm X with violence. We discover throughout the film that, despite Malcolm's reputation and defiant rhetoric, he was far more scholarly than violent. But while dispelling one myth, the film falls back on Hollywood stereotypes that cast the gun as a symbol of power and manhood. (John Locke)

34) The charge of Hollywood has never been to produce functional political documents. And were the point of Lee's sixth feature film to capture faithfully the meaning and the resilient spirit of Malcolm in a manner that would satisfy the needs of every person of African descent in the United States, it would have remained as unmade as it has been for the past two decades. (Jacquie Jones)

35) We [Spike Lee and Denzel Washington] both knew a lot was riding on this film. We did not want to live in another country the rest of our lives. We could not go anywhere without being reminded by black folks, "Don't fuck up Malcolm, don't mess this one up." (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

36) Another serious weakness in Lee's film is the perspective which asserts that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were inherently at odds over philosophies, strategies, and tactics in achieving freedom for African-Americans. (Manning Marable)

37) Fictively recreating the relationship between Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz provided an opportunity for Spike Lee to bring to Hollywood cinema a different representation of black womanhood and black heterosexuality. Lee did not rise to the challenge. All his films show darker skinned men choosing lighter skinned black female partners. Malcolm X should have been different. (bell hooks)

38) Lee dampened every controversial aspect of Malcolm's life, not least the pan-Africanism and proto-socialism of his final year. Nor does he even hint at the controversies regarding the assassination. Most disturbing, however, is that he has in a sense "decultured" Malcolm in the most fundamental way. (Jesse Rhines)

39) Malcolm's ability to "pull himself up by his own bootstraps" fits neatly into the ideology of upward mobility, and, paradoxically, Malcolm emerges as more "American" than the elite Kennedys or the middle class, well-educated Martin Luther King, Jr. Given the ubiquitous "X" on film posters, baseball caps, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia, it would be difficult to define the film's collaboration with this process of commodification as anything other than truly "American." (Herb Boyd)

40) We're told of his suffering but we don't have to see it. Conked hair and a white girlfriend stand in as philosophical surrogates for true pain. Lee grants Malcolm "star quality" when the drama requires he forgo his dignity, making him special when perhaps he should be pathetically ordinary. (John Locke)

41) We made the decision for a PG-13 rating. We did not want to give teachers, schools, or parents an excuse why they could not take their children to see this film. . . . A whole generation of young people are being introduced to Malcolm X and people who've heard of him or had limited views of him are having their views expanded. Above all, we hope that black folks will come out of the theater inspired and moved to do something positive. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

42) Many black activists feared that Lee focused too heavily on Malcolm X's pre-Nation of Islam career as "Detroit Red," street hustler and cocaine user, at the expense of a solid political analysis of Malcolm's ideological and personal evolution as a leader. (Manning Marable)

43) While the barrage of television advertisements for the film reminded viewers of Malcolm's aphorism--"We didn't land on Plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us!"--it is now evident that Malcolm X has landed somewhere between Madison Avenue and Hollywood. (Herb Boyd)

44) Malcolm X has always signified something singular, though often unspoken, for black people, something that cannot be expressed by any other figure in our history: the confirmation that we are a people--beautiful, tenacious, and proud though we may be--that has been dogged and victimized in the most insidious form of slavery known. (Jacquie Jones)

45) By separating the "white" from the "devil," Lee removes the racial philosophy underpinning the NOI's concept of evil, further distancing Malcolm from the "religion" of the NOI. It implies his weak conviction for the NOI's counter-prejudice, thus preparing him for the idealistic high ground in his later break with the organization. Taken with the downplay of Malcolm's (and the NOI's) disparagement of women and Jews by class, the overall softening of his rhetoric increases the chance that a contemporary, film audience, drawn from diverse quarters, will find Malcolm appealing. (John Locke)

46) For a large part of the white audience, however, I think we're helping to redefine Malcolm X because for the most part their view of Malcolm came from the white media which portrayed him as anti-white, anti-Semitic, and pro-violence. It's funny, when we had the national press junket for this film, many of the white journalists said they felt they'd been robbed, that they'd been cheated, because they'd never been taught about Malcolm X in school or they had only been told that he was anti-white and violent. A great miseducation has gone on about this man. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

47) Muhammad's brand of black nationalism sought solutions to the black community's problems from within, focusing largely on questions of business development, personal hygiene, and socially conservative behavior. Malcolm's vision was always fixed on the larger world. It was not sufficient to save souls if one could not challenge social injustice. (Manning Marable)

48) This is my first PG film . . . because we wanted to get a young audience. We feel this is an important piece of American history and people, especially young kids, need to see this. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

49) The young Malcolm X was sexist and misogynist, and, in fact, made a point of treating women badly. Yet Lee ignores the sexism that shaped and determined Malcolm's attitude towards women and makes it appear that his lust for Sophia is solely a response to racism, that having the white man's woman is a way to rebel and assert power. Like the younger Malcolm, the real-life Sophia was a hustler, not the portrait of an innocent little girl trapped in a woman's body which Lee gives viewers. It was disturbing to see Lee's version of Malcolm's life begin with and focus centrally on his lust for white female bodies, but it was even more disturbing that this relationship was portrayed as yet another example of "jungle fever." Spike Lee refuses to allow for the possibility that there could be meaningful affectional ties between a black man and a white woman which transcend the sexual. (bell hooks)

50) We have been taught to hate ourselves. The shackles that we languish in today are prisons of the mind. And only by accepting this truth to be self-evident can we be empowered. All the desegregation in the world, as we have painfully seen, cannot save us. That this man is the subject of the first big budget Hollywood movie on the life of a black historical figure is, in and of itself, nothing short of a coup. (Jacquie Jones)

51) What we hope, what we're praying for, is that with the success of Malcolm X, you'll be able to eventually see films about Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth . . . you can go right on down the line. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

52) With the vast social destruction of our central cities today, with twenty-three percent of all African-American males between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine currently in prison, on probation, parole, or awaiting a trial, Malcolm X personifies the ability of an individual to overcome the worst circumstances to achieve personal integrity and leadership. (Manning Marable)

53) Toward the end of the film, just before he is to deliver his final speech, Malcolm appears extremely stressed and upset. In a rare lapse of composure he berates his aides for not having completed the "document." Most film viewers are unaware that Malcolm is referring to a revision of the OAAU's constitution with special emendations on the role of women in the organization, Clearly; explication of this scene would have been doubly meaningful in providing a glimpse of the evolution of the organization and Malcolm's own changing attitudes about male chauvinism. (Herb Boyd)

54) We've never said that anyone who sees this film doesn't need to know anything else about Malcolm X. I mean, the man had four or five different lives, so the film is really only a primer, a starting point. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

55) Malcolm X culminates loyally the tide of new Black Nationalism that is as American as the Afrocentrism to which it lays claim. A few years ago, Nelson George, writing in The Village Voice, described the atmosphere from which hip-hop flows as "a post-civil rights, ultra-urban, unromantic, hyper-realistic, neo-nationalistic, anti-assimilationist, aggressive Afro-centric impulse." It is, in fact, these forces that have resurrected and enshrined Malcolm X in his current incarnation, which is better characterized by stylized separatism than any sort of political depth. (Jacquie Jones)

56) Lee's Malcolm X is a powerful film. Had he chosen to round off the great man's life, however, making it resonate with the conviction and integrity of his international phase, the film would be even more remarkable, educational, and inspirational. Rarely are African-American artists given an opportunity to connect in such a massive way with our African sisters and brothers. This is what the last days of Malcolm's life were all about--you might say he had devolved back to the beginning, recognizing the importance of Africa, like his Garveyite father. Lee and his associates should have paid a little more attention to Malcolm's admonition: "You say you have left nothing in Africa, why, you left your mind in Africa." (Herb Boyd)

57) The film manages to show the enormous accomplishments of the black nationalist Nation of Islam--pulling thousands of drug dealers, prostitutes, and criminals off the streets, providing moral guidance and self-respect, and giving people denied opportunity a belief in themselves as capable and productive members of society. The core ideology of the Nation--the "whites are devils" thesis--was always secondary to its constructive and positive contributions toward black working class and low income people. (Manning Marable)

58) I also wanted to tie the film into today. I did not want this film just to be a historical document. That's why we open the film with the Rodney King footage and the American flag burning, and end the film with the classrooms, from Harlem to Soweto. (Spike Lee, in Crowdus and Georgakas)

59) What Spike Lee has finally been able to do in Malcolm X is to interject into our cultural history a hypnotic character, flawed and gracious, who is capable of world-altering change. (Jacquie Jones)

60) [Lee's] approach to Malcolm was the construction of a mythic hero figure, not an actual political leader who made mistakes, assessed his errors, and went in new directions. The battle between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm is shown as grounded in personalities, rather than in differences stemming from ideology and politics. Elijah Muhammad's sexual misadventures and Malcolm's "silencing" for his "Chickens Coming Home to Roost" remarks following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are the principal reasons given for the rupture within the Nation of Islam. (Manning Marable)

61) Spike Lee’s Malcolm X functions as a countermemory-cum-collective social memory that mediates African-American historical trauma, thereby working to define, and in critical ways restrict, the boundaries of "authentic" blackness, which appears to be increasingly a prerequisite for nationalist identification. (Maurice Stevens 279)

62) I unsurprisingly came away from this film humbled by the life of Malcolm X and his contribution to American society and social change. What I appreciated most was his personal struggle and the strength it took to make the decisions he chose to make. Most obviously was his decision to leave a life of crime in exchange for a lifestyle that was less physically but more spiritually satisfying. However, it was Malcolm X’s decision to separate himself and his views from that of Elijah Muhammad that struck me the most. Involvement in religious sects can be confining and blinding, and it takes great strength to be able to separate yourself from something you relied on to tell you what is right and what is wrong. (Katherine Prosswimmer, Lehigh University)

63) One of the things that Malcolm stressed was education. Well, we're just not doing it. It's such a sad situation now, where male black kids will fail so they can be "down" with everyone else, and if you get A's and speak correct English, you're regarded as being "white." Peer pressure has turned around our whole value system. (Spike Lee, in Gates)

64) The strengths of Haley's work are its powerful narrative, the moving descriptions of Malcolm profound epiphanies, the faithful reconstruction of Malcolm's voice, his ambiguities, and intensely attractive human personality. (Manning Marable)

65) Blackness is not so simple, and liberation struggles are not all the same, regardless of their similar black hue and racist enemies. Lee ignores the vast difference between black separatism and democratic socialism that Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela espouse, respectively. (Mark Reid)

66) There is an intriguing, unnameable element about Malcolm, a "something more," that one cannot quite put one's finger on, the "X," the mystery, that compels fascination and desire. (MalcolmTurvey)

67) But I would suggest that the ideological limitations of both Haley and Lee keep their interpretations of Malcolm located on safe, religious grounds rather than on the more dangerous terrain of race and class struggle. Haley was a longtime Republican, and a twenty year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard. Lee is primarily a product of the post-civil rights era black middle class, who never directly participated in the massive black protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Both Lee and Haley ignore the long history of African-American nationalism in the U.S., preferring to see Malcolm as a "reaction" to white racism and prejudice, rather than as the product of a long and rich protest tradition. (Manning Marable)

68) Little wonder that despite critical esteem and a big opening week, the film’s box office gross declined sharply in the second week, and ultimately fell far short of the anticipated commercial pay off (in the six weeks following its opening, it grossed $45 million). According to a marketing postmortem by Warner Bros. executives, the daunting combination of the film’s three-hour-plus running time and Lee’s severe message-mongering doomed Malcolm X with audiences who resisted “a tedious history lesson as opposed to dramatic entertainment.” (Thomas Doherty)

69) Lee’s film relies on disavowal to make ideological claims about the state of African-American political affairs and to convey “what black people in America have come through.” While the Autobiography presented Malcolm’s life in the frame of American exceptionalism and epic heroism because of the cultural barriers that barred black admittance to those categories, Lee’s Malcolm X reinscribes the figure of a “shining” black masculinity in response to the institutionalized and systematic targeting of black men constituted as the embodiment of criminality and threat. Unfortunately, in this instance, disavowal plays a central role in constituting the structure of countermemory and limits the transformative potential of Lee’s Malcolm X. (Maurice Stevens)

70) Don't blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustices. The government is responsible for the injustices. (Malcolm X)

71) In Martin & Malcolm & America, noted African-American theologian James Cone observed that these two gifted, charismatic figures were complementary: "The were like two soldiers fighting their enemies from different angels of vision, each pointing out the others blind spots and correcting the other's errors. Each needed each other, for they represented -- and continue to represent -- the "yin and yang" deep in the soul of black America. (Manning Marable)

72) Most famous of all, perhaps, was the controversy initiated by Amiri Bakara, who argued even before the shooting of the film began that Lee was not a suitable director for the Malcolm X project because of his middle class origins. (MalcolmTurvey)

73) In X too, the female characters, even Malcolm’s wife Betty Shabazz, are vague shadows in a story about men. (Lisa Kennedy)

74) Lee's Malcolm X is an excellent introduction to this magnificent and articulate black spokesperson for liberation, but it is also seriously limited in terms of critical interpretation. The filmmaker's goal was to create a cultural icon, but the black community does not need myths. (Manning Marable)

75) The Rodney King beating is only one face of black/white relations in America. Another equally important face is the fact that a number of whites were outraged by the beating and subsequent acquittal of the policemen involved. That white America could get outraged by the beating of a black man is a significant change from the indifference of the early Sixties. (Julius Lester)

76) Despite its undeniable power to move individual spectators, and for all its laudable motives, Malcolm X came to be the kind of prestige project more respected than enjoyed: a 201-minute hagiography that possessed all too little of the energy, passion, or wit of the man who inspired it. Against the fast pace, sharp asides, and direct trajectory of the Autobiography, the motion picture meandered, straightfaced and dour. Where Malcolm and Haley conjured the seductions of the unregenerate life with unrepentant glee, Lee’s depiction of Malcolm’s “Detroit Red” years as a young hustler in Boston and Harlem plays out as flat and joyless. (Thomas Doherty)

77) It comes as no surprise that Lee’s Malcolm X works relentlessly to defend against threats to heteronormative black masculinity. What is more troubling, and what we must ask of the film, is why its defense of black masculinity rests on creating a very circumscribed vision of black male and female gender performance and sexuality. (Maurice Stevens)

78) Despite the film's respect for this position, the adoption of black supremacist politics doesn't purge anything. It merely puts a veneer of racial militancy over the agony of one's sense of inferiority. (Julius Lester)

79) It's amazing, I've seen this film with ten, eleven, and twelve-year-olds and they're just riveted in their seats. You know the attention span of young people at that age--they're usually throwing popcorn at the screen--but there's not a sound, they're riveted for three hours and twenty-one minutes. A whole generation of young people are being introduced to Malcolm X and people who've heard of him or had limited views of him are having their views expanded. Above all, we hope that black folks will come out of the theater inspired and moved to do something positive. (Spike Lee, qtd. in Crowdus)

80) If a Martian landed here and had to imagine what black culture is, based upon recent black cinema, it would conclude that all black people lived in ghettos, did crack, and chanted rap. (Spike Lee, in Gates)

81) While it is understandable that Malcolm would create myths which granted him impeccable credentials as a victim of white racism right from from the womb, it is irresponsible for a filmmaker to perpetuate those myths. (Julius Lester)

82) Before I see the film, I would like to say that I have never heard much about Malcolm X. It was always just a name to me rather than a person, and I admit that if I saw a picture of him before this film I don't know If I would be able to tell you who he was. The only things I have heard about Malcolm X are that he was a darker (no pun or racial remark intended) version of MLK Jr. Where MLK was a peaceful, equality-searching man, Malcolm was a violent, take-no-prisoners type of man. Again, this is all I know before seeing this movie. (Harrison Lawrence, Lehigh University)

83) Although Spike Lee's Malcolm X hopes to give Malcolm's legacy a prominent place within America's historical memory, the film suffers from a common tendency to recycle history into pure spectacle empty of meaningful political or intellectual content. Lee refuses Malcolm's transformation from an archetypal "race man" to an internationalist and pan-Africanist. The film merely honors Malcolm as a humanist, and this incomplete portrait of a complex man sets the stage for his enshrinement as a true "American." While the barrage of television advertisements for the film reminded viewers of Malcolm's aphorism -- "We didn't land on Plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us!" -- it is now evident that Malcolm X has landed somewhere between Madison Avenue and Hollywood. (Herb Boyd)

84) There is no denying that there were profound anti-Semitic strains in Malcolm's speeches. But Lee excluded other troubling aspects of Malcolm's public and private life from the film. (Julius Lester)

85) For too long a period, [Malcolm] seems to have broken the continuum of adversity and put the past behind him. What remains is a kind of romantic victimization that protects Malcolm's image from the ravages of true degradation. We're told of his suffering but we don't have to see it. Conked hair and a white girlfriend stand in as philosophical surrogates for true pain. Lee grants Malcolm "star quality" when the drama requires he forgo his dignity, making him special when perhaps he should be pathetically ordinary. (John Locke)

86) Through his uses of continuity editing to create a seamless narrative, Lee also presents a picture of black power and pride (denuded of its militancy) that congeals into very precise and apparently unsutured images of what it means to be a black man or black woman in the United States. According to Lee’s visual narrative, in order to “be” black in the United States, one has to be gendered and, as Lee’s Malcolm X would suggest, gendered in very particular ways. Looking closely at Lee’s depiction of Malcolm’s masculinity, his wife Betty Shabazz’s femininity, and the picture of “black family” that they create highlights the threats that homosociality, feminine agency, and interracial ambiguity pose to a racialized and gendered black nationalism. (Maurice Stevens)

87) "By any means necessary" was a placebo when Malcolm proclaimed it in the Sixties. It is a narcotic now, designed to give one a "black high" and nothing more. "By any means necessary" is not a point of view; it is a cry of despair, a mewl of impotence, a fitting coda to a politics based on empty posturing. (Julius Lester)

88) Malcolm X was basically disputing the American Dream. And if there's one thing Hollywood is about, it is selling the American Dream. So Malcolm X is at odds with the images that Hollywood has always been about. (Henry Louis Gates)

89) Yet, as a "biopic," it differs significantly from the current canon of black Hollywood cinema that I have traced, playing with and referencing the conventions of a long line of "life of great men" films, such as Lawrence of Arabia and more recently JFK and Chaplin. (MalcolmTurvey)

90) But if Lee’s Malcolm X challenged the Hollywood tradition, it also threatened the status of the autobiography. In the age of the moving image, after all, what is seen on the screen tends to erase what is read on the page. Tellingly, however, the media face-off between the two images of Malcolm X -- the literary creation and the motion picture version -- indicates that even in an incessantly visual culture, a portrait in literature can outlive a depiction in film. (Thomas Doherty)

91) We declare our right on this earth . . . to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. (Malcolm X)

92) I think the most important question you have to ask is, what is the intent? Our intention is not to tear down Malcolm; for us this is an act of love. And in those cases where we had to change names, change events, or make three or four characters into one, well, I don't think that's distorting the Malcolm X story. (Spike Lee, in Gates)

93) Lee's film attempts to pay Malcolm the same kind of respect that was once reserved for King and the Kennedys. In essence, Malcolm X endeavors to refurbish Malcolm's memory and legitimize him as a true American. (Herb Boyd)

94) The Baldwin-Perl script was adapted from the autobiography by Alex Haley. But the problems with it were in the last third of the script, where the split with the Nation occurs. They were really, I felt, walking on eggshells, tiptoeing over a lot of stuff. . . . (Spike Lee, in Gates)

95) "We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us," shouts Denzel Washington's Malcolm X, and it is this enduring image of inexorable weight that truly links Malcolm X and Spike Lee in terms of the very different demands made upon them as popular personas desired by many different constituencies. (MalcolmTurvey)

96) In the particular case of Lee’s Malcolm X, ideas of racialized difference are mapped onto categories of gender and sexuality, resulting in even more powerful ideas of incommensurability. Not only are masculinity and femininity “different”in an absolute sense, but also black masculinity and black femininity are fundamentally distinct precisely because of their being situated within a naturalized conception of black culture. In addition to the particular moments of its application within the film’s diegetic space,the overall structure of disavowal as a rubric of analysis and as a psychic mechanism naturalizes the gendered and sexualized figure of racialized agency and political possibility that Malcolm X conjures. (Maurice Stevens)

97) Rather than challenging us to oppose suffering, the glamorization of Malcolm tempts us to covet his suffering as a means toward a fabled existence. (John Locke)

98) I had to walk a tightrope, but you can still tell that I directed this film. I still feel it's a personal film like my other films. It was paramount to us that Malcolm would be a human being -- we didn't want him to be a Jesus Christ figure, you might say. We wanted him to be complex, wanted him to have shades of gray, not be all black or white. (Spike Lee, in Gates)

99) In their criticism of Spike Lee and Malcolm X, what these reviewer are lamenting is the failure of Lee as film-maker to live up to a certain image of the authentic black film-maker and his craft, to fulfill the fantasy of the radical director who can adequately represent and attend to oppression of all types. What these reviews and articles are saying is that, as a black film-maker, Lee should be able to be radical in all respects, address every constituency, and satisfy all the varied and competing investments in Malcolm X's image. (MalcolmTurvey)

100) I did not want this film just to be a historical document. That's why we open the film with the Rodney King footage and the American flag burning, and end the film with the classrooms, from Harlem to Soweto. (Spike Lee, qtd. in Crowdus)

101) The final product of Lee's labors and shameless self-promotion, Malcolm X, is simultaneously a triumph of filmmaking, and a justification of Barak's fears and frustrations. (Manning Marable)

102) The charge of Hollywood has never been produce functional political documents. And were the point of Lee's sixth feature film to capture faithfully the meaning and the resilient spirit of Malcolm in a manner that would satisfy the needs of every person of African decent in the United states, it would have remained as unmade as it has been for the past two decades. (Jacquie Jones)

103) Lee's creative genius lies in his ability to construct Malcolm for three very different groups. First, there is his college-educated and racially mixed film audience who flocks to see Lee's most recent film. There there is the black audience in search of films by black filmmakers. Lastly, and most importantly, Lee must satisfy the demands of his film distributor, the multi-national media conglomerate Time-Warner Inc. These three constituencies determine how Lee frames Malcolm for the Multi-cultural Nineties and its discontents. (Mark Reid)

104) Putting it another way, the film distinguishes injuries inflicted by others and those which are self-imposed. One speaks to circumstance, the other to character. Lee depicts with clarity the horrors of racism that were beyond Malcolm's control, but he minimizes what Malcolm portrays in the autobiography as self-degradation, the acts of an animal. (John Locke)

105) I want to be remembered for honest, true portrayal of Afro-Americans. And bring our great richness to the screen. (Spike Lee, in Gates)

106) Yeah, Denzel was very involved. He has a good story sense. We both knew a lot was riding on this film. We did not want to live in another country the rest of our lives. We could not go anywhere without being reminded by black folks, "Don't fuck up Malcolm, don't mess this one up." We were under tremendous pressure on this film. We can laugh about it now, but it was no joke while we were doing the film. (Spike Lee, qtd. in Crowdus)

107) Lee negates this image of Malcolm and presents his version of a Malcolm who speaks with a Spike Lee tongue. (Mark Reid)

108) With Malcolm X, Spike Lee has made not his best, but his greatest film -- a movie that propels a complex, furious, little-comprehended black man into the pantheon of American icons. (Lisa Kennedy)

109) Countermemory is a form of popular cultural production that provides a space on which the desire for full African-American humanity, full discursive recognition, can be advanced, represented, and ultimately shaped into a viable object of identification. This, combined with the increasingly influential role that the visual plays as an arbiter of American identities, is why the Hollywood production Malcolm X is so important. Along with certain other popular cultural productions of countermemory, it obtains a social force and, subsequently, a political relevance to cultural producers interested in increasing identificatory options for African-Americans. (Maurice Stevens)

110) As with the antebellum slave narrative, the formal strengths and incisive insights of the Autobiography give the lie to racist ideology. Mirabile dictu -- the black man can think, write, and analyze. Yet the work defied another image, a new African American stereotype that Malcolm himself helped forge. The stance of the literary Malcolm refuted the hot television image of the angry demagogue showcased in documentaries such as WNTA’s The Hate That Hate Produced (1959) and ABC’s Walk in My Shoes (1961). (Thomas Doherty)

111) Lee's film, however, is more fiction than real, and unfortunately, more accessible than the other regimes of truth. Lee's film will determine how most moviegoers come to "know" Malcolm Little, Malcolm X, and El- Hadjj Malik El-Shabazz. This is especially true when many audience members have not, and will not, refer to such extra-filmic documents and his speeches, taped television interviews and the socio-political world that surrounded him. (Mark Reid)

112) But what it does not give us is the fluidity of Malcolm, the way his various personalities mingle and intermix, a fluidity embodied in the autobiography, a document made exceptional by the fact that Malcolm does not narrate his past from a secure, stable identity at some point in the future. (MalcolmTurvey)

113) I live like a man who is dead already. (Malcolm X)

114) The fact is that Lee still does not know how to end a picture. But gratefully, he has learned to draw a picture and tell a story. What Spike Lee has finally been able to do in Malcolm X is to interject into our culture history a hypnotic figure, flawed and gracious, who is capable of world-altering change. (Jacquie Jones)

115) But if the major studios are going to finance Black films, for the most part it's two genres: You have the homeboy shot-'em-up drug movie or you have a hip-hop musical comedy. I think Black film should be broader than that. (Spike Lee, qtd. in Turvey)

116) Lee's Malcolm X does no better as history than the autobiography, but refines the book's agenda for a modern audience needing contemporary relevance and streamlined heroes. The Malcolm X of the film is less self-conscious, less square, more romantic, less dogmatic, and less divisive than the autobiographical Malcolm X. Near the end of the film, American and South African schoolchildren jump up from their desks to cry, "I am Malcolm X!," and we know they speak of the latter ecumenical man and not the Muslim separatist who came before. The film has forgiven and forgotten the hostile rhetoric of Malcolm's past as his America would not. (John Locke)

117) Lee claims to have conducted extensive research in the construction of his screenplay, the film indicates otherwise. The storyline is essentially an adaptation of Alex Haley's classic text. (Manning Marable)

118) First presented on television, next represented in print, and finally projected on the motion picture screen, the popular image of Malcolm X has developed in three stages of multiple exposure: the televisual face transmitted on the small screen, the literary self conjured by the autobiography, and the motion picture incarnation fashioned by Spike Lee for the theatrical screen and videotape afterlife. (Thomas Doherty)

119) Exactly what does Lee’s film suggest “black people” have to go through in order to be black and people in the United States? Rather than linking phenotype to authenticity, as often occurs in films that reconstruct African-American history in the service of vindication, such as Daughters of the Dust (1991), Sankofa (1993), Panther (1995), and Rosewood (1997), Lee connects authentic black being in the United States with the vindication of idealized visions of black manhood and black femininity. (Maurice Stevens)

120) This scramble to possess Malcolm, to circumscribe and own him, along with the cinematic canonization performed by Malcolm X the "biopic," is ample testimony to Malcolm X's exalted position within the ranks of that pantheon of popular figures from the 1950's and 1960's that includes JFK and Marilyn Monroe. (Malcom Turvey)