PETER RAINER Antihero Worship 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 suprahuman is currently out of the loop of fashion. But Malcolm X has survived the gauntlet 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 transcendence that appeals to the finest 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 homegrown 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 was 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 both thrive on a national sense of identity, a comprehensible 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-Capricorn like Hero, and the dumb-dumb revisionism of the Columbus movies. We've retreated safely to a quasi-mythic past, as in Robin Hood or 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's full-out embodiment of Hawkeye in Mohicans, the results can be exhilarating. The film is strictly ersatz but Day-Lewis is a marvelous romantic image: He whips through the forest as if he were a rampaging revenant. 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 kinds of 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 melancholicized 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 movies 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 created a vacuum for the kind of traditional heroism that is one of the prime enjoyments of movie going. It's no accident that this was the period in film history--the Toy Store Epoch--when George Lucas and 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. (In a mercenary culture, fame makes you a commodity.) It has left us with a yearning for the possibility of heroism cross-wired with a cynicism and a self-consciousness that will not fully allow for such a possibility. No doubt the problem is compounded by the ways in which celebrity, as first recognized by Daniel Boorstin in the early sixties in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, has replaced heroism as the modern archetype of greatness. But celebrity is fleeting. Our idea of the movie star--in Boorstin's terms 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. It's a system designed to sabotage specialness: We require a bit more mystery in our heroes. This media climate, as Boorstin sees it, has made it difficult to recognize the "true" hero. (Fundamental to that recognition is a sense of history--something in scant supply in the short-attention-span generation.) 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 storybook hero: He's sanctified by his martyrdom. Malcolm X is a significant sociological event: It's the coronation of a "new" black folk hero. 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 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. Lee doesn't draw on any psychological dimension for Malcolm. Perhaps he feels that a psychoanalytic view would demean black experience by separating it from its historical context. (Or more likely he's just better at creating characters who are mouthpieces.) He draws on the Autobiography of Malcolm X the inspirational, "authorized" version of Malcolm's life, almost exclusively, barring from his film any controversial material from texts like the unsettling and not conventionally flattering 1991 Bruce Perry biography. 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 in any larger framework: We don't get much sense of how his struggles were a part of the total home-front scene of the fifties and sixties. We are shown Malcolm's progression from two bit 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 gam. This approach might have gotten by in the Golden Age of the Biopic--the thirties and forties. (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 which does justice both to our yearnings and our cynicism. Would a movie that dealt with Malcolm's 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 black civil rights movement and the bourgeois middle class--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 an 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 film makers like Lee rightly accustomed us to a more challenging standard?