Two Men, Many Visions--On Spike Lee and Malcolm X

Look into Spike Lee’s eyes on the cover of Esquire.

Look into Malcolm X’s eyes as depicted in the cover collage of the Oct. 12 New Yorker (or, as Denzel Washington captures that stare on the cover of L.A. Style).

What do Malcolm and Lee have in common? What divides them?

“When you talk about Malcolm X,” Lee tells L.A. Style, “you must specify which Malcolm you’re talking about. There were many different Malcolms.”

The same might be said of Lee.

In an uncomfortable profile of Lee by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in the October Esquire, the director of the upcoming “Malcolm X” comes across as a waffling racist, hard-driven by bile but sufficiently egocentric or greedy to bend with the winds of commerce.

In Michael Wilmington’s look at Lee in L.A. Style, the artist’s anger is controlled, his world view reasoned, his creative impulse pure.

The differing visions of Lee are, of course, the product of different journalistic perspectives.

Harrison’s Italian family lived near Lee’s black family in Brooklyn for a time, and Harrison is intent on connecting with her former neighbor. Like so many intellectual white interviewers these days, she clearly--admittedly, even--longs for her angry black subject to stop mid-sentence and declare with misty eyes: “At last, I’ve met a good white person.”

But Lee, arrogant toward women, isn’t impressed with all the famous black people Harrison has known. Or perhaps he’s just annoyed that Harrison wants to turn the conversation back on her feelings, her Angst, as a woman into the pain of the oppressed.

As a result, she pulls her punches during the interview but quietly gets in her digs in print.

The title of the Esquire piece is “Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass.” The subtitle is “If the battle to make ‘Malcolm X’ has taught Spike Lee anything, it is to disdain those who just want to hold hands and sing ‘We Are the World.’ ”

Those glib phrases --some editor’s interpretation of what Lee said--reflect the crass commercial instincts of this era.

Wilmington, the product of a small, all-white, Midwestern town, is more willing in the L.A. Style piece to poke at Lee’s sometimes naive assumptions about the so-called “dominant culture.” Lee parries without the defensive posturing to which he treats Harrison.

Marshall Frady mentions Spike Lee only in passing in his excellent study of Malcolm X in the New Yorker. But the piece seems infused with Frady’s concern about how Lee will treat the man who has supplanted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the icon of African-American hope.

Frady’s intricate portrait draws from Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and other works, as well as interviews with people who knew him. But Frady lets his own views hang out: The Nation of Islam’s theological history, for example, is “an intellectual ‘Fantasia’ that rivaled, in its fabulous loopiness, the racial anthropology of ‘Mein Kampf.’ ”

Most impressive, though, is Frady’s study of Malcolm’s move away from blind hatred to a more narrowly and clearly focused resolve.

Malcolm never let whites off the hook. But he did change, no longer targeting all whites as “blue-eyed devils.”

Esquire’s portrait of Lee suggests that the director discounts Malcolm’s move toward tolerance.

In L.A. Style, however, Lee says, “We wanted to show that he was a person always in search of humor, very caring and warm . . . and constantly evolving. Now, the white media, they’re gonna portray the image they want, and that’s the Malcolm of the Nation of Islam days.”

After Malcolm parted ways with the Nation of Islam, leader Elijah Muhammad’s followers assassinated him at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom.

Inexplicably, Frady says, the image of Malcolm X emerging today harks to his Muslim days: “It has been his earlier incarnation to which his posterity has somehow clung: to Malcolm’s own slayer, in effect.”

Lee tells L.A. Style that most African-Americans were glad to see L. A. explode. “I think as long as people feel they’re being treated like fourth-class citizens, this sense of rage will continue.”

Lee’s film will start, we know, with footage of the Rodney King beating.

But Frady says Malcolm was beginning to ask questions that foreshadowed Rodney King’s “Can we all get along?”

“The true tragedy of Malcolm’s life would be if, along with his inner emancipation of blacks, his gift to his people should also become, from that grimmer evangelism which finally claimed him in the Audubon Ballroom, the lurid liberation of their anger in the moral nihilism most recently beheld in the firestorm of Los Angeles.”

REQUIRED READING

As Los Angeles Times editorial writer Jack Miles left work during the April riots, a colleague said: “When the barbarians sacked Rome in 410, the Romans thought it was the end of civilization. You smile--but what followed was the Dark Ages.”

The result of Miles’ brooding on that line is the troubling cover story in the October Atlantic Monthly, “Blacks vs. Browns, Immigration and the New American Dilemma.”

Miles’ meandering argument is not pleasant to follow as it confronts taboo topics (why some whites fear blacks more than they fear Latinos, for instance) and scrutinizes difficult facts (how many readers knew that California’s underfunded education system is subsidizing non-citizens--150,000 immigrant undergraduates in community colleges alone?).

Miles weaves his analysis together with a narrative of how his family intertwined with a young Latino laborer and his family. This unfairly makes Miles’ young friend emblematic of Latinos.

That fault aside, Miles’ gutsy and idiosyncratic discussion draws attention to just how daintily most analysts have tippy-toed around problems underlying the riots.

Liberals will whine that Miles lacks compassion for the world’s huddled masses. Conservatives will whimper that he ignores the virtues of free trade. Marxists will howl that he pits the city’s have-nots against each other rather than against the rich.

But Miles looks at the situation with a neutral pragmatism: New Latino immigrants, with little stake in this city, are taking jobs and opportunity away from African-Americans who’ve been paying their psychic and political dues since slavery.

And until that injustice has been overcome, he believes, Los Angeles is unlikely to find peace.

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

When a bizarre true story comes in over the wire, it makes the rounds in newsrooms as quickly as a White House scandal or stock market crash. Such stories, however, seldom get into respectable newspapers.

True News, a new tabloid-esque monthly (biweekly as of next year) will fill that journalistic vacuum by compiling these true tales--of a fisherman who loses his thumb and finds it in the belly of a trout, for instance.

Many of the stories in the premiere issue are dumb (people who have the same names as celebrities), some are old and a few are merely revolting (does anyone really want to see a picture of the world’s largest hickey?).

In other words, the magazine has found a formula for success.

(True News, 13 issues for $18, P.O. Box 55247, Boulder, Colo., 80323-5247).