Malcolm X.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.

Spike Lee's long-anticipated Malcolm X is now shaping the remainder of the climate of Malcolmania that his advance marketing and merchandising campaign helped create in the first place. Before the movie's fifteen minutes run out, it's worth considering what all this means, because Lee's vision of Malcolm X and the larger Malcolm iconology surrounding it reveal significant issues in contemporary black politics.

The film highlights in a particularly striking way five key problems that have gotten progressively worse since the civil-rights era: 1) an ahistorical and ultimately quietistic way of thinking about politics; 2) a cloudiness about purpose and a related tendency to rely simplistically on race as the central category of political and historical analysis; 3) a reluctance to confront and analyze intraracial conflict; 4) a romantic notion of leadership, and 5) powerful tendencies to reduce politics to catharsis or theater.

The problems with history begin even before X starts. The trailer used in the television promotion for the film lingers on a dance-hall scene in which Denzel Washington as Malcolm and others are dancing animatedly. Their exuberance seems the natural response to the music accompanying the scene - the hot, saxophone-driven R&B of Junior Walker and the All Stars. The trouble with this Pepsi-ad-style reverie, though, is that the dance occurs in the 1940s, and the music is from 1965.

Trailers, of course, are meant to be evocative rather than literal, and Lee probably can't be held responsible for this one anyway. Nevertheless, the trailer is a metaphor for the way the past figures into Lee's vision. Throughout the film, time periods are marked by images of fashion and music. The 1940s were when people wore zoot suits and did the jitterbug; the 1960s were as much about the Motown sound as about attacks on civil-rights workers.

Moreover, the film's narrative is foreshortened in a curiously inverted way. The more it approaches Malcolm's rise to prominence as a public figure, the more compressed it becomes. What a colleague of mine referred to as the Guys and Dolls segment - Malcolm's "Detroit Red" phase - takes up more than the first third of the film. This is followed by roughly half an hour on his time in prison and conversion to the Nation of Islam, leaving not much more than ninety minutes for his rise within the Nation, courtship and marriage, disillusionment with Elijah Muhammad, his censure and departure from the organization, international travel, return and effort to establish an independent base...