Malcolm X Reflection

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The movie Malcolm X is based on Malcolm X’s autobiography and tells his story from childhood through his assassination. The filmmakers focused on the events that happened just prior to his imprisonment and the years following that led to his death. There are times when the writers seem to be focusing on his evolution through the years. They want you to see the struggles he went through and see the changes he made as he gradually became a better man and they also want the viewer to understand the extreme racial tensions during that time. I also believe they wanted the viewer to watch the movie and come away with the feeling that Malcolm X was a great man. They begin the movie with people chanting we love Malcolm and end it in a similar manner.
I believe this was done intentionally due to time constraints. The few brief scenes that they do show do gave me the impression that there were a lot of negative messages being sent to Malcolm. A teacher tells Malcolm that he cannot be a lawyer because he is African-American, something a young Malcolm accepts as being true and seems to give up on school. He witnesses two violent events against his family by the Ku Klux Klan, which had to have influenced the way he felt about white people in general. In addition to those two events his parents had a very strong dislike for white people and his father believed that whites and blacks can never live together peacefully. He also has to deal with his father’s death at a young age and the fact that he may have been murdered by white men. Malcolm had to have internalized all of these negative messages and probably had a very loud very destructive VOC telling him that he would never be good enough because of his skin color. It was probably also telling him that all whites hated all African-Americans. This is important because it may have made him more susceptible to the beliefs of the Nation of Islam. There are many other parts of Malcolm X’s life that are missing from the film and again I feel that this was mostly due to time constraints. The filmmakers could have done a two-week miniseries and

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