FILM COMMENT : Antihero Worship : ‘Malcolm X’ has come at a time when the country is starved for heroes, but Spike Lee didn’t make it as provocative as its subject

Is it a coincidence that Superman died the same week the movie “Malcolm X” opened? In popular culture, styles of heroism have their cycles, and the square-jawed righter-of-wrongs, the lily-white goody-two-shoes supra-human is currently out of the loop of fashion.

But Malcolm X has survived the gantlet of historical reassessment. A new generation responds to his principled rage precisely because he isn’t lily white and goody-two-shoes. He’s an antihero--a subverter of the white racist status quo--who, in the Spike Lee movie and in popular culture in general right now, has been sanctified with the legend-toned look of the traditional hero. American culture is essentially transformational: Yesterday’s firebrand is today’s voice of reason.

“Malcolm X” comes out at a time when the movies are starved for heroes--which is another way of saying that the country is starved for them. One of the explicit themes of the recent Presidential campaign was the question of “character.” Who could you trust to act properly “heroic” when the chips were down? George Bush’s old-guard war-hero WASP Republicanism clashed with Bill Clinton’s baby-boomer New Covenant. Leaving aside the matter of political truth or untruth in these poses, both were nevertheless presented as styles of heroism, and Clinton’s proved the more marketable.

Heroism--a display of courage and nobility that appeals to the best in us--has been a sometime thing in our movies in part because the country has had no unifying vision. We tend to import our heroes nowadays: Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, even Gorbachev. These men are linked with emergent and righteous national movements. (And they’re far enough away from us to avoid our home-grown media scrutiny.) They testify to the force of national consciousness in creating popular heroes.

Our most iconic movie heroes, whatever one thinks of their personas, have always been linked to a four-square concept of what America is all about. John Wayne was two-fisted and rode hard and was never without a gun; Jimmy Stewart had his drawling, homespun rootedness; so did Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper. Humphrey Bogart was never so American as when he was an expatriate, in “Casablanca.” The rebels without a cause, like James Dean or the young Brando, defined themselves by their opposition to a society they felt excluded from.

American movies have often been better--livelier and more fun--when they featured antiheroes. The rebels undercut the homiletics of standard-issue heroism; they spoke to our discontent and our cynicism, our sense of how things really were, to a far greater extent than the role-model types. But their discontent was, in itself, an act of heroism--they challenged the suffocating fitness of things.

Heroism and antiheroism thrive on a national sense of identity, a comprehensive core, a vision. Lacking these qualities in our national life, our movies have been bereft of the sorts of heroes who might connect up with us, even in opposition. We’ve been treated instead to a spate of antihero heroes, ranging from RoboCop to the Terminator to Batman, who operate out of a techno-pop-comic never-never-land.

There have been other movie hero sandwiches lately. In “Under Siege,” Steven Seagal’s aikido moves have gone big-time patriotic. “JFK,” the most hero-worshiping American movie in years, offered up a deliriously idealized version of President Kennedy and a counter-myth about his assassination. We’ve been treated this year to musty neo-Capracorn, like “Hero,” and the dumb revisionism of the Columbus movies. We’ve retreated safely to a quasi-mythic past, as in “The Last of the Mohicans.” Heroism in our movies--as opposed to our TV shows, which often deal with the less action-oriented, “mundane” heroics of ordinary people, and which therefore provide virtually the only screen opportunities for female heroism--is almost exclusively the province of an idealized past or a cartoon present.

When the idealization works, as in Daniel Day-Lewis’ full-out embodiment of Hawkeye in “Mohicans,” the results can be exhilarating. There are other modern actors who have a heroic dimension: Nick Nolte, Mel Gibson, Morgan Freeman, for example. Unlike, say, Tom Cruise, who is often a hero in his films by virtue of casting rather than presence, these actors express the tensions and contradictions that give heroism in the movies a human face.

We can, if we choose, scan the faces of an older generation of movie-star heroes, like Robert Redford and Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood. But the effect they provide is not satisfying in the same old ways. They evoke a more complicated response now: Age has melancholized their features. The power with which Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” moved audiences had its source in our response to Eastwood’s deep-creased Westerner’s face: a road map of time’s passage--his and ours.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the standard do-gooder action hero could no longer be taken straight in our movies; his heroics, fairly or not, took on a sinister, villainous cast. The cynical, tragic, hopeless tone that crept into our films in the wake of Vietnam was responsible for some of the greatest movies of the era: “The Godfather” films, “Taxi Driver,” and many others. But it also created a vacuum for the kind of traditional heroism that is one of the prime enjoyments of moviegoing.

It’s no accident that this was the period in film history--the Toy Store Epoch--when George Lucas & Co., toting their well-thumbed copies of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” began bombarding us with superhero jamborees; they provided us with heroes who were literally (and conveniently) out of this world. If heroism is what appeals to the best in us, then the subsequent Reagan-Bush reign, with its appeals to the mercenary in us, did not exalt the cause of heroism either. It has left us with a yearning for the possibilities of heroism cross-wired with a cynicism and a self-consciousness that will not allow for the possibilities of human greatness.

No doubt the problem is compounded by the ways in which celebrity has replaced heroism as the modern archetype of that greatness. In a mercenary culture, fame is its own reward. But fame, by these rules, is also fleeting. Our idea of the movie star--the new celebrity hero--is an agglomeration not only of that star’s screen appearances but also of everything else we are made to know through the media about his off-screen life.

This media climate, which Daniel Boorstin first recognized in the mid-’60s in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” and which has reached its apotheosis today, has also made it difficult to recognize the “true” hero. Even when the heroes are acknowledged, the acknowledgment is in the same old celebrity-mongering terms. Gorbymania, anyone?

This is conspicuously the case with Malcolm X. The full force of media marketeering has been brought to bear on his life until its meaning is befogged in a welter of insignias and paraphernalia. The Spike Lee movie plays into this commercialization by making Malcolm a kind of smoothed-out storybook hero: He’s sanctified by his martyrdom. “Malcolm X” is undoubtedly a significant sociological event. There has hardly ever been a big biographical film about a black hero who was not a sports or entertainment star. But the most startling thing about the movie--once one gets past the opening credits with the burning American flag forming the letter “X” and the Rodney King footage--is how purposefully unstartling it is. It is being widely compared to “Gandhi,” as if that were high praise indeed. Has everyone forgotten what a high-minded, Oscarized long sit that film was?

“Malcolm X” has rhetorical power. Denzel Washington captures Malcolm’s cool ferocity as an orator, his fierce, scary sense of entitlement. But the film, except for its opening, doesn’t really have an in-your-face immediacy. It’s part of an older, softer, more conventional tradition of biographical enshrinement.

Except for childhood flashbacks, Malcolm’s siblings, who were major influences throughout his life, have been eliminated. Lee doesn’t really situate Malcolm’s struggle is any larger framework: We don’t get much sense of how his struggles were a part of the total home-front scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s. We are shown Malcolm’s progression from hustler and convict to the man he became, but the episodes are like a series of illuminated pages in a holy text. They are demonstrations, not explications, of his spiritual journey.

This approach might have gotten by in the Golden Age of the Biopic--the ‘30s and ‘40s. (Except, of course, Hollywood would never have dreamed of making a movie about someone like Malcolm X back then.) But we require a fuller approach now, one that does justice both to our yearnings for a champion and our media-wise cynicism.

Would a movie that dealt with Malcolm’s early racial and sexual fears, that got more deeply into his white-devil preachings within the Nation of Islam, that pointed up his anti-Semitism and his detestation of the civil rights movement and bourgeois blacks--would such a movie have upended his heroism? Or, more likely, would it have dramatized his final dilemma, when he felt caught in a trap between the moderate and militant? Would it have humanized him and defined his struggle so that we could feel the full resounding force of his evolution? The challenge in this tell-all age of celebrity heroism is to create a hero not only in spite of but because of the hero’s failings--what he had to overcome.

If Malcolm X, almost alone among “contemporary” American heroes now, seems aligned with the likes of Walesa and Mandela, it is because he, too, is linked with a new generation’s emergent and righteous national movement--a movement of black pride. That’s why his presence, as contourless and spiritualized as it is in the film, still fills the screen. This is a lot to get from a movie and yet it’s not enough. “Malcolm X” is much closer to political hagiography than political art.

Is the civics-lesson worshipfulness of “Malcolm X” justifiable because so few films about black heroes are made? Is this what we can look forward to if movies are produced about the lives of, say, Martin Luther King or Paul Robeson? In light of the way his film has turned out, Spike Lee’s contention that only a black director, namely himself, could do justice to Malcolm’s life takes on an unexpected meaning. “Malcolm X” suggests that movies about black heroes are entitled to partake of the same big-picture piety and impersonality as the standard biopics about white heroes. Hasn’t the previously provocative work of filmmakers like Lee rightly accustomed us to a more challenging standard?