I’m scrolling through terrible images on the internet the way James Baldwin describes browsing on a television some mornings before getting out of bed, switching from channel to channel restlessly, then deliberately, so that the slurring between pictures unfolds as its own story in defiance of the programs from which each now-stray image derives, when I realize why I’ve been hesitating to write just another elegy for the effigy of James Baldwin at one hundred or one hundred and one. It’s been redundant and incessant, our fetishizing of this man and his thinking, the fashioning of an idol out of someone who was inherently suspicious of worship, and it’s caused his ideas to ossify and lose their visceral impact, deracinated now, the way commercial jingles made of soul songs betray that music. You can never dance to it or with it again, and we can never again enjoy James Baldwin outside projections of his gravitas. He has been hijacked that way and gutted for parts, and all of us have contributed to turning him into one of the monsters of innocence we yearn to become, an unassailable symbol. We’ve diluted James Baldwin’s person and used him up the way we do the black people we discover in our folkloric GIFs and memes, black people whose gestures we turn abstract and viral overnight, and replay for weeks or even years, then discard once the inside joke has expired.

This is not to say James Baldwin’s true value has diminished under the siege of this constant dissection and reanimation, but to suggest that with each round of vivisection by philistines, the ruins of misused lore that the real man is submerged beneath become a little more dense and impenetrable; they camouflage him. I attempted a naïve rescue mission; I went digging in his biography searching for anything real and wrote about his lifelong depression and his several attempts at suicide, a play and an essay that became a short film for a museum show. No one really cared about the fact that he wanted to die for being treated like an idea in public life and a dark secret privately. He was too visually and verbally stunning to be taken seriously when in distress; maybe it was mistaken for performance or bluffing when he threatened to disappear, because he was so radiant and so present. How could a man with, in their eyes, so much going for him not want to live forever in the catacombs of literary celebrity, advising us on how to restore our own images? My efforts became part of the ongoing and brutal cannibalization, and all I can offer as a disclaimer is that I was coming from a place of blunt revision, closer listening, and tenderness. Even then I arrived at the same expenditure of images of him being beautiful and deathless, the same ready-made PR stunt for liberal aesthetics. I’m trying again, through the apologia that all men and women who are treated like high concepts deserve, and by placing Jimmy in different company. We have at last reached the stage at which the representation that turns the dead into the conscience of the living is so dysfunctional and limp it must turn on itself and repent. I’m trying that out. It feels like trying to disarm the abyss in order to wrest him from it limb by limb, the same way we lured him in.

Obsession with James Baldwin the writer, the black writer who taught white liberals and those non-whites who aspired to be them how to feign guilt or strategic decency in the face of their privilege and status while heralding the black abjection their position relied on, has been misguided, dishonest. Remapping his dissembled pain and showmanship, it occurs to me that James Baldwin the writer was guarded and protected until ultimately taken under by Hollywood’s James Baldwin. This is the man who could stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel and attempt the first adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X for Columbia Pictures; the man who had cameras in his face after his friends were assassinated one by one, and played the perfect bereaved and bereft heir; the man who resisted the appropriation of his grief for spectacle or entertainment; the man who wrote The Devil Finds Work (1976), finally divulging his fixation on the silver screen through a meticulous reading of a series of films (from The Exorcist to The Defiant Ones to Lady Sings the Blues) that only he could connect; the man who privately penned a letter to Ingmar Bergman entreating him to direct a film of his, and heard back from a fatigued Bergman some years later: a Hollywood no. James Baldwin, the actor and would-be filmmaker whose generous yearning to perform and embody characters projected onto him was incongruent with his life and function as writer, so that his glaring intensity has been swiped and remixed into commercials for itself, and the films or books made about his life are inadequate long-form commercials for those commercials, and nobody really reads those novels, plays, and essays, or the letters in his archive that confess like memoir. How did it get so oversimplified, and so convoluted?

James Baldwin, born in Harlem, New York, in 1924, was among America’s first Negro child stars, alongside Josephine Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., and Billie Holiday, long before he became a writer. Before we had collectively inscribed into our cultural heritage that illicit and scandalous archetype of a boy minstrel whose work was conflated with play (so that child-labor laws needn’t apply), fourteen-year-old Jimmy stood at the pulpit, boosted by a stack of phone books, and attempted to mend some of Harlem’s broken souls with the rhythms and jive psalms of Pentecostalism. This need to deliver what Amiri Baraka called, while giving Jimmy’s eulogy in 1987 at a church not far from the one where Baldwin started preaching, urgent messages for those who would be real, was like a defective pathological spectacle of empathy that Jimmy had inherited and channeled into absolute and incorruptible power, a shield from his diminutive stature, his swagger, his omniscience. Either through sanctification or by distracting them from how far from their bodies their spirits had drifted as he mirrored divinity back to them, James Baldwin rescued lost souls before even graduating from high school or naming the turmoils that broke his own soul in for conditioning as a literary giant and involuntary token appeasing white-liberal delusions of the happy-go-lucky Negro who made it out the ghetto to remind them how to live. How do you live? He would be trapped in the destiny of his reverend surrogate father (he never knew his biological one) and in his own eloquence, condemned to speaking roles in times of crisis from that point forward as if sold in a silent auction to a literati plantation. His offense: saving the damned with the melancholic gallantry of a real angel of history.

Rather than hustling or selling street drugs as his rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood, Jimmy entered the gift economy and distributed the legal opiate that is proximity to the spirit of Jesus, pleading the blood, appeasing disillusioned Holy Rollers, dying on the cross of the ego to be glorified in spirit. He would remain at the mercy of this gift economy and undercommons for the rest of his life, having entered its confines so young and unassuming and under the tyranny of his upbringing that he was never given permission by the divine or by man to stop preaching to sinners to ward off angry gods. His writing would wander from parable to sharp calculated insight and back like a great sermon, improvised but never too playful or meandering to find its lesson and warning and telegram it to believers with unflinching moral authority. The child preacher would grow up to be an international sensation and public intellectual, but the duties remained the same: Make a captive audience of desperately attentive lost ones presume themselves capable and worthy of redemption. Put them in a trance until they forget they’re being finessed by doctrine translated by their so-called oppressors. Give them the courage to behave as if they knew they were worthy of themselves. Imagine! A child redeemer interpreting the letter of the Lord’s law, both oracle and fool, then a man-child writing his own scriptures as novels and essays, always by taking to the podium first, rousing muscle memory from those dismissed yet formative teenage years, or because his mandate required that his writing arrive like live improvised performance and life itself provided scripts that only he could decipher, and only by showing up to play the lead crisis actor over and over, indefinitely.

There are no known recordings of Jimmy’s sermons; his status as a young minister is mythic compared with the long record we have of him in print, on film, and on radio, as a secular demiurge. But his role as a boy preacher was the earliest evidence that he was one of the greatest American actors and dramatists who would ever appear onscreen or stage. We call him a writer, a poet, an activist, a cultural hero, a member of the intelligentsia, but the thread uniting every role Jimmy Baldwin played, especially in the lives of white liberals as eager for his approval as he was for his own father’s, the missing title and overarching function is actor, cinephile, dramatist, movie star, child star, martyr. When he knows he’s being filmed but is not speaking or looking straight into our heart through the lens, Jimmy blinks frantically to hold back tears before his anger starts to cry; he smokes neurotically to fill the void. Like many writers, he is in his element when soloing; that desolation, mingled with imagined witnesses whom he will never see but knows will see and hear and know him, is where he shines. Unlike most writers, he also shines on camera, knows how to flirt with an offscreen audience and appear entirely authentic and unadorned while in his best mask.

We must consider the possibility that he was voguing for us throughout his entire career, deflecting, pandering, in costume or a drag of decorum, giving liberals what they wanted, afraid of outgrowing the oracular, ruthlessly visionary register, aware that he had been cast as an informant or liaison for the two Americas, and keen to the fact that he was neutralized by that position. What we know or accept of James Baldwin and repeat like slogans and use to encode our own ideas with decency are the euphemisms he invented to make his pain and ambivalence seem resolved or remote. His essence is captured on, or in his writing about, or his efforts to make, films. Films that have been made about him in recent years are blasphemous in their appeasement of the same liberal expectations that have turned his work into soft literary S and M. Scold us, please, they entreat, tell us why we’re wrong about identity and race, and then go back to the South of France and tend to your garden and welcome table until the next notable cataclysm. Pose with some Hollywood A-listers at the televised protest; your mic is off. Smile. Honor the devil that you know.

When the career of a writer is reduced to diagnosing his society with pathologies, he can become addicted to catastrophizing, to the drama and friction of social dysfunction; it’s good for business; he thrives under it. This turns his creative mind reactionary and a little dull, until he’s transcribing instead of recounting stories, because we know what’s coming next in the plot. We put a coin in the juke and it sings the song we choose. So Jimmy was groomed to play the same literary jazz and gospel standards that he wrote ad infinitum, to sing for his supper, to take requests for his greatest hits. On camera we see him break with that regime in some scenes; we see him playing the most compelling hero in his own story. Jimmy wanted to be an actor, a star, and wrote these roles for himself. His filmography is an autobiography in images and just as harrowing as his writing. The camera loved him more than the streets did, more than the tabloids, more, even, than readers and editors, more than hopeful sinners, more than he knew how to love himself. Rather than asking him to tell your fortune or reprimand you, you could just observe and listen to how he walks, exhales impressive plumes of smoke, sighs, and ask yourself whether he might be a little fatigued or depleted by having been cast as a savior and spokesman among the wretched of the earth; ask yourself, might he have burned his sermons and saved the celluloid and Giovanni and no one else? The child star never retires; we retire him when that boyish charm expires and force him to remain whatever age or cross-section of ages that is forever. On film Jimmy occupies that purgatory until it bends to his whims and possesses us.

Why is this established black writer in a hamlet in Switzerland in the dead of winter, listening to Bessie Smith and being teased and adored by locals? Jimmy visited Valais at the invitation of his lover Lucien to clear his mind and spirit, and to write in the pseudosolitude that being surrounded by utter strangers who were somewhere between indifferent to and entranced by his presence might have afforded. That isolation, the isolation of the Other or the menace who was of little interest to the locals beyond his skin color as event or minor spectacle, was armor against distractions. He sojourned there three times in the early Fifties; the village became crucial to his self-mythologizing impulse. Valais was where he could finally access the acoustic temperament of black America that he had repressed so as to contribute to it while growing up in its cultural epicenter. He presumes that he may have been the first black man to set foot in the place. In 1962, a short documentary film, Un étranger dans le village, was produced during one of Jimmy’s trips to this postcard town. (Its title translates that of his earliest entry in this magazine, “Stranger in the Village,” an essay of 1953.) It’s his first official film appearance and one of the most striking. The camera follows his pensive visage as he navigates the town by train and on foot, or visits the local church. He’s chaperoned by lights and a crew through snowy mountains, into taverns where the locals’ merriment proceeds as if he were not there, and finally through the train station, as he trails a porter who pushes his luggage.

When Jimmy isn’t speaking, he engages in silent speech, leaning dramatically against walls like a model posing for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, tilting his neck back in neurotic exasperation or gazing off into space broodingly, never absentmindedly. He makes the ideal romantic lead, emphasizing the absurdity of his situation in this place, the way the children there both seek him out as an indication of an unknown world they might encounter one day and tease him like friendly and familiar bullies. For a spell, he grows vicious and admits that in his mind he hallucinates echoes of the first slurs cast at him when he was a child: Your mother was a nigger. During close-ups, with his eyes gazing steadily into the soul of the machine filming him and piercing through its attempt at phantasmagoria, he preaches, channels his origins, all but tells us we’re doomed and should repent for making outcasts of mavericks. For this debut film role he wanders between whimsy and suspense. There’s an unspoken, off-camera love story that makes his tenure in the town tolerable, frantic, a little glorious, and a little ridiculous—a star is reborn.

A couple of years later, the set shifts from the Swiss Alps to black San Francisco. In the 1964 featurette Take This Hammer, Baldwin appears glamorously displaced amid the ruins of San Francisco. In some scenes, he is being driven through black neighborhoods in the city, the Fillmore District, primarily; in others he holds court with fed-up black teenagers, or looks on proudly as they dance and joke. The interlude is punctuated by his famed invocation against the specter of whiteness and the hearts of white America: You’re the nigga, baby. It isn’t me. This footage is an ethnography of a town mistaken for integrated, demonstrating unequivocally the de facto segregation that persists there. To the disillusioned black male teens he attempts to console he makes the promise, You can become president. There’s nothing anybody can do that you can’t do.

Footage from this film has been sampled and sometimes mangled by the spate of documentaries and by a rekindled fixation on Jimmy as a voice of dogma and reason that accompanied that unmistakable Obama-era sanctimony, as if that had been the Establishment’s plan for the boy preacher turned writer and subtle movie star all this time, to have him move hope like a narcotic, never quite warning users that they, too, in the event that they reach his stature, will have to sell America back to itself for the rest of their lives and look flattered by the duty, as he had. No one, living or dead, was exempt from the rediscovery of the rhetoric of racial tensions that was exploited by the state as a diversion from class struggle in those years. The bleary aesthetics of the cult of representation held all of us captive, as did the advent of internet archives, and an axis between James Baldwin and Fred Hampton, between the moderate and the militant, was collapsed into one commercialized aesthetic of resistance and repurposed as Black Lives Matter. A quasi-movement of controlled opposition to police killings made Jimmy one of its background muses or it-girls. This was an erratic and reactionary period that persuaded many of us that we could be officially radical with aesthetics and intentions alone, or that there was no distinction to be upheld between radical art and radical politics. The clear distinction was that the so-called radical artist was preemptively held captive by art and academic institutions or corporations by this time, and that the very marginalized radical politicians were often mythic charlatans counting the approval of fellow grifters.

Meeting the Man: It is 1970. An enterprising and seemingly obnoxious and entitled white-liberal director wants to chronicle Jimmy’s life in France, starting with shots along the Seine. Jimmy throws a tantrum and insinuates he’s being exploited and asked to play some maudlin theory of who he is rather than document the true preoccupations of his daily life in Paris. Next thing we know he’s seated at a café in what seems to be the Algerian quarter of Paris discussing love and negritude. Heard offscreen, the director says, Everybody’s been in love, and Jimmy protests, telling him to look at the world and be honest. If everyone had been in love at one point or another, modern life would not play out as it does; people would treat one another as sacred, whereas now they behave like even they themselves are disposable. It seems the director had wanted Jimmy to walk aimlessly around France like he had in the Alps years back, but Jimmy wanted to be surrounded by friends and kin this time round, to argue with someone other than himself and the fictional characters of his novels.

The subject of renewed attention a few years ago, this work went from shocking on first viewing to grotesquely assimilated in excerpts, so that the bridge between Baldwin’s irreverence and his warmth is never crossed by most who encounter parts of the film stripped of context. Nonetheless, in many ways this is the best and most coherent record we have of Jimmy on film, because it depicts him wanting both to be seen and to self-direct how he is seen, until ultimately he’s obscured yet again by the force of his own charisma and becomes an idol on the screen, or a misfit, or someone who worries he’ll be a relic soon if he doesn’t keep the correct company. He’s already being accused of moderation or relative docility compared with such figures as Malcolm X. He defers to a younger generation perhaps because he’s trying to learn how to be more like them and more like himself simultaneously. That he won’t tell the congregation what to do next as he had in both previous documentaries is the director’s complaint—and Baldwin’s triumph.

Another leading role, in From Another Place, has him in Istanbul in 1970. Sedat Pakay directs and jazz musicians Linda and Sonny Sharrock compose an original score. Jimmy is forty-five here. The opening scene finds him rousing himself from bed, nearly naked, to light a cigarette and begin a day of flâneurlike wandering through the city, followed by a camera. He admits to his prevailing anxiety that he’s seen as some kind of sellout for leaving the United States so frequently, but he refuses to stop, because he cannot work at home, where he’s turned into a full-time socialite and preacher; he cannot get words on the page consistently or meaningfully enough under such scrutiny. Again, we encounter a version of Jimmy who seems completely alone among strangers; the solacing fellowship of Meeting the Man is somehow no more. We know that off camera he has a local community, but his daily routine looks more like swimming through crowds undetected in search of coffee and food before he begins writing. He seems at peace, and though wrinkles that weren’t there in Valais have settled into his brow by now, he smiles more, and more sincerely. He’s accepted the man he’s become, the witness he has chosen to be. The witness is quieter, preaches less, has conversations instead of delivering sermons, is better off and more effective long-term, not passive, though he will be mistaken for being so. The director pries delicately into Jimmy’s love life and is met with a very elegant version of That’s none of your business, though everyone seems to want it to be. There’s a hint of defensiveness that indicates that love is a central preoccupation and source of tension and sabotage for Jimmy, and at the same time the only reason he keeps traveling and writing and speaking to and for us. Another postcard as short film, but this time more seductive, less frigid both literally and figuratively, about a man who has reconciled the consequences of his fame with his gifts and might even be a little daunted by their magnitude. But now he knows how to remedy his ennui: by abandoning himself to it. He luxuriates in waking up alone with a camera more than he laments what images it might capture and force him to relive. This time, he revels to reveal so little with words, and has settled into the articulation of his gestures—having his shoes shined and buffed, riding quietly in a rowboat, laughing as a street performer wrangles with a bear. He communicates his daze like a mime plotting his gradual retreat from performing, not because his star is fading but because his fate, his exquisite alienation, is sealed.

Like a homecoming, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, the final proper film made about James Baldwin in his lifetime, follows him back to the American South of the early Eighties, to assess the region twenty years on from the civil-rights era. He finds morale among organizers in shambles and has the impression that the Sixties were lived out in another world, now expired. He meets with the poet Sterling A. Brown, who affectionately challenges Jimmy, If you weren’t so conservative, I’d say you’re a revolutionary. Eventually, Jimmy leaves the South to meet with Baraka, who drives him through the roughest parts of Newark, New Jersey. He ends up holding court with a group of children there, in a neighborhood that might as well be a war zone, and walks offstage with them as virtual curtains close. Turns out no quantity of books or sermons or legislation could change the material conditions in black ghettos. Jimmy knows this, but as a child star trapped in a lifetime of acting like a savior while needing to be saved himself, he plays his role so well he doesn’t let on. The film we never see, that I long to see, is his version of Portrait of Jason. It’s much less stodgy and not at all didactic. He sits in a room and gossips about the cultures he’s been forced to protect, that of liberalism, that of black essentialism on the other end, that of the faux-radical glitterati in the middle. He walks off belligerently, not because he’s quarreling with the director but because he’s announced the last offense before his silence and retirement from his lifelong childhood. It’s aching and self-effacing hypervigilance—it’s his turn to disappoint us on purpose.

If James Baldwin had lived into his seventies or eighties, or even a few years longer than he did, he would have made his own film, on his own compromised terms, making that leap from page to screen official and sovereign. Instead, he’s beholden to and impaired by roles we’ve imposed on him—martyr, savior, king, hero; Othello, Desdemona, Antigone, Oedipus, Achilles—as if possessed and propelled by our admiration into acts of potential self-abnegation. He’s coerced into playing his own understudy and co-star, father and son, sometimes mother, lover, friend, apprentice, threat. At literary parties, he’s often a punch line. A rumor that he was ugly in person surfaces like a cloud over tea after a gala, making the messenger look hideous and cruel. A rumor that his Hollywood friends avoided him because he always needed money makes me wonder whether those were his friends or his opps. We cannot forget that the cameras took to him as much for surveillance as for entertainment. The salary for the effortless poet working in several modes and places at once and reassuring the whole world everything will be okay can be meager and often squandered on the upkeep of a certain lifestyle (that of the elegant fugitive deflecting his popularity by working all the time), unless he formally sells out to Hollywood and quits his efforts at being a witness who honors the substance and not just the spotlight. I wonder whether the directors who made films about him or his books have to borrow money to survive some winters. I wonder what it means to eat the dead in course after decadent course of images, and whether they ever metabolize as redeemers who can forgive us what we have done. And whether we can reform now and rely on our own energy for kindling, so that we break the habit of desecrating theirs. We’ve reached the end of the film era. As one of the black writers whose lashing the spectator loves so much, it’s as if the decoy they made out of James Baldwin were dying, too. He can no longer stand in for your virtues or lack thereof; blackness can’t; black writers cannot keep writing everybody’s protest poem or lamenting our constructed identities for the empty offerings of prestige. This is culture-making in critical condition, because even the fact that these are static industries is a version of sacrilege. The brave thing to do is to face that explicitly in our hearts and deeds while we actively work to resituate the sustainable forms of creative life and escort ourselves outside of and away from the cacophony of these easy streets to validation and praise. What is it we really need to say and witness, now, having looked at the most superficial aspects of ourselves for decades and derived reactive narcissism from accusations of oppression and victimhood? Maybe we can just write about our families and friends and encounters with other humans as if they were more real than our ideas of them, as though their subjectivity and interiority mattered more than what they represent. Maybe we have to get stranger and more vulnerable syntactically, emotionally. Reactionary outrage is not vulnerability; it encourages us to dissimulate and mine guilt for accolades, developing a dependency on the aestheticization of our limitations. Jimmy Baldwin never asked to get caught up in that. During a monologue for the camera in one of his films he quips brazenly, I am not the victim here, I know one thing from another. . . . A person is more important than anything else, anything else. We pretend not to hear him, because we need him to be the victim so we can join in. He was brave enough to watch television, write books, appear on camera, fall in love, exist as a troubadour, endure vitriol for his sexuality and his race, and still act unfazed, all before such vicious nonchalance became trendy. No matter how well we emulate his uncanny ability to be all of these things and still himself, we cannot be or have him just because we valorize his mistaken and stolen identity. We must put him back where we found him, in the Word, having picked him up like a designer accessory we cannot yet afford and worn him around for decades, pretending. I give you your problem back, he went on, speaking to you, fury finally stern in his eyes. It’s our turn to see how it feels when millions of aspiring deep thinkers or shallow ones want to wear your mind and be held in its light and saved by it, whether or not it means parts of you have to die or disappear for them. What splendid collusion with losing our edge. We must shape our minds in such a way that they no longer fit inside the skins of imposters like ourselves, that we may recover from this long stupor of the derivative to be reborn in our own image.