Spike Lee's Malcolm X as Transformational Object

In this essay, I would like to explore one way in which recent psychoanalytic theory might contribute to a postcolonial aesthetics, using Spike Lee's film, Malcolm X, as something of a test case. I hope to show that what appear to be flaws, even mistakes, in Lee's film—what I will call “cinematic parapraxes”—are in fact symptoms of the film's resistance to a certain aesthetic ideal of seamless, internal consistency and closure. Reflecting on these parapraxes, I will go on to sketch an alternative aesthetic model—note that I hesitate to describe this as an “ideal”—in terms of which Lee's work can be seen as a strong example of the “national culture” for which Frantz Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth.

In his book, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Christopher Bollas offers an intriguing account of aesthetic experience grounded in the infant's earliest—and certainly pre-Oedipal—relations to other objects in the environment. Working from D. W. Winnicott's notion of the mother as providing a “holding environment” for the infant's gradual negotiation of the world surrounding him, Bollas stresses that she exists for the infant essentially as what he calls a “transformational object,” and he notes that “the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations” (1987, 14). Everything that happens to the infant happens through the mediating attention of the mother; even the effects of the child's first tentative manipulations of the environment are decisively shaped by the mother's intervention, with the result that the infant's earliest ego achievements are identified with the presence of the mother as transformational object (15). As the infant gradually becomes more self-reliant, the mother “disillusions” him from this notion of her as an omnipotent transformative power, and she