Reading a "Closet Screenplay": Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance

Abstract

am attempting to this odd thing can only call a closet screenplay--James Baldwin's written version of a film about Malcolm X never realized in the visual medium. The reading skills that literary studies offer this anomalous and necessarily politically charged bastard genre are limited given that there is no film, and therefore no film stills, to read for Baldwin's representation of the image of Malcolm X on the American consciousness. (1) There are Baldwin's parenthetical narratives of shots and scenes, dialogues and narrator monologues, directorial notes for conjunctions of voice-overs and images, and succinct utilitarian descriptions of the actions of characters. In short, there are components of a narrative without the visual form to join them into a seamless about the life of Malcolm X. But the closet seems an appropriate vehicle for a version of Malcolm X written by a writer caught between a virulently homophobic Black Nationalist movement in one corner and a reactionary Nixon-era America in another. (2) The media are in tension, the shapes in the work don't fit, the pieces of a written film pull in multiple directions: outward, inward, between themselves. This literature is not safe or healthy, as Baldwin condemns the status quo. The closet offers a formal lesson in the politics of mainstream markets, crossover campaigns, and race relations at the salt point in American history where calls for integration recede and self-determination surfaces on a national scene increasingly dominated by visual culture. Further, the circulating print script might offer an example of a queer reading practice that does not shut down questions of history, experience, and self-examination with the trump card of settled identity. For Baldwin, history is something to revisit continually in the light of new experiences and political stances. Therein the story of Malcolm X becomes not an autobiographical analog to discrete historical eras; rather, it becomes a necessarily unfinished project that accrues new meanings and significance when its parts enter new fields, eras, injustices, and groupings. For Baldwin, his un-filmed screenplay is an index to America's failure to invest in Black history and artistic production. Nevertheless, the awkwardness of a closet becomes a great asset in a text whose very title bespeaks an inability to fit Malcolm X into one narrative location: One Day, When Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The clunkiness of the project and the multitude of subjects (Haley, Malcolm X, Baldwin, and I) point to what see as the positive potential of Baldwin's historical meditation. Baldwin referred to his project as a scenario: one version of Malcolm X aware that it exists among other extant versions--and even more possible versions. The significance of Malcolm X for Baldwin was as yet undetermined and, ultimately, undeterminable. Baldwin creates a space that accounts for, without containing, what is often mutually exclusive in the of Malcolm X: black and white, man and woman, self-determination and integration, wealth and politics. The I that is the announced subject of the is not necessarily Malcolm nor Baldwin. Rather, the I of the scenario is a subject space that negotiates between poles: between the reader/viewer and Malcolm X/American history. Contrary to the ordered, developmental versions of Malcolm X in popular circulation in The Autobiography and in Spike Lee's 1992 Hollywood film, Baldwin's closet does not provide a roadmap to an inevitable present. Instead, Baldwin's induces a lost-ness, an awareness both of the orienting function of historical markers and of the simultaneous possibility of alternate markings and orientations. Thus Baldwin constructs a of Malcolm X as a project that remains relevant to an American political landscape even after the subject of the has been removed--by assassination--from the national script. …