Too Late the Antihero

The only appropriate response to Peter Rainer’s “Antihero Worship” (Film Comment, Dec. 6) is that if ever a commentary was gratuitously unnecessary, Rainer’s was. After a full page of quasi-analysis and negative criticism, one is taken completely by surprise to find a single line in which Rainer acknowledges that Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” has any merit, as in: “This is a lot to get from a movie and yet it’s not enough.”

Had Rainer really watched the movie or been familiar with the context of the period, he could hardly have failed to recognize the numerous scenes of interwoven footage of the period showing the water hosings and beatings of demonstrators as well as appearances of Martin Luther King Jr., all of which occurred during the ‘50s and ‘60s. No informed viewer could have said, as he does, “We don’t get much sense of how his (Malcolm X’s) struggles were a part of the total home-front scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s.” Perhaps Rainer assumes that these scenes were independent creations of Spike Lee’s imagination.

Finally, I must remind Rainer that Lee’s film is based essentially on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as told to Alex Haley. The only significant departure is the substitution of a character named Baines, a fellow convict, for Malcolm X’s real-life brother, as the catalyst for Malcolm X’s conversion to Islam. So much for Rainer’s comment that Lee had made Malcolm X into “a kind of smoothed-out storybook hero.”

SHEILA E. HENRY

Laguna Niguel