8 Mile
Directed by Curtis Hanson
It will be calamitous for popular culture if more people see 8 Mile than see Paid in Full. Sure, the disaster is already a fait accompli; all the hype for 8 Mile already ensures that more people are aware it’s out there. The only hope is that anyone remotely interested in 8 Mile’s subject matter–hiphop culture, American youth, urban desolation–will find their way to Paid in Full and have that interest satisfied, their understanding of the world expanded.
Paid in Full is the finest hiphop movie anyone’s made since Run-DMC’s Tougher Than Leather–strange, since there’s actually very little hiphop music in it. What director Chuck Stone III and his screenwriters Matthew Cirulnick and Thulani Davis have done that 8 Mile doesn’t do is take hiphop’s issues seriously. Set in 1986 Harlem, Paid in Full is true to black youth’s dawning sense of social potential. An extraordinary scene shows an audience of black kids at De Palma’s Scarface reacting to Tony Montana’s epic of excess and over-the-top flame-out ("Say hello to my little friend," Pacino warns, bazooka in his hands). Stone-Cirulnick-Davis steer clear of hiphop music’s powerful distractions, yet still pinpoint how crucial and misleading pop culture is when youths look for role models and moral models.
Ace (Wood
Harris) works at a neighborhood drycleaners, a (perhaps obscure)
reference to the hero of Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding
(1983). Burnett observed a young black man’s difficulty choosing among
wayward examples–his infantilized father, his bourgie brother, his rascally
best friend. Similarly, Ace is torn between the fly ways and money-flashing
of his friend Mekhi Phifer and his running buddy Cam’ron (whose b-boy characterization
sizzles like nothing I’ve seen since De Niro’s Johnny Boy). Both homeboys
are drug-dealing thugs. Ace parrots and leads them, but always seems awkward
and self-conscious. Harlem’s streets are his road to Damascus.
Stone gives Paid in Full full tragic dimension when Harris’ business gets out of hand. Kids in the audience audibly recoiled from a scene of violent retaliation–not because it was gory (it wasn’t) but because the suffering got so close. Granted, some plot resolution is routine, but it’s nearly astonishing to see the depth of emotion Harris, Phifer and Cam’ron brought to their roles. Anyone who ever dreamed about hiphop culture being transferred to the big screen needs to see this movie, because at its best (like Phifer’s tearful confusion) hiphop’s dramatic potential is justified.
What 8 Mile offers is surprisingly banal given the media-fomented controversy surrounding its star, the white rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers). This is the least provocative hiphop movie I’ve seen–which figures, since Eminem is primarily a figment of the white media’s imagination: he had to be invented to rival the cultural impact of numberless black rap artists who cornered the market on righteous, rhythmic indignation. And with his goofy horrorcore-comedy and limited subject matter, his importance as a rapper is sheer fantasy. Eminem gives those whites who desire their own Tupac/Ice Cube a color-coordinated poster boy to fit their segregated emotional environment.
Pop culture always has pretenders, biters and frauds who latch onto popular trends, but Eminem might be the first who exploits an audience’s sense of entitlement more than their taste in music. (After all, Elvis could really sing.) The sense of alienation that white youth feels (that’s been marvelously voiced by groups from Cheap Trick to the Replacements, Social Distortion to Metallica, and many others) gets bollixed up in Eminem’s personal turmoil and is nowhere onscreen in 8 Mile. The script by Scott Silver uses Eminem’s working-class Detroit background as a setting; but the life shown there is as vague/ sketchy/insipid as Eminem’s lyrics. He’s a teenage father called Jimmy Rabbit, bored at his auto plant job, lives in a shoddy trailer camp with his slatternly mother (Kim Basinger) and–here’s the hook–he wants to be a rap star.
Not only dramatically vapid, it’s also morally insulting; a Hollywood movie finally deals with white working-class life, but only as a pretext for selling the notion of celebrity and fame. It’s the same deception as Brown Sugar’s romantic lies, but how many people will see through Eminem’s bio to the malarkey at its core? Once again, hiphop is marketed without principle. It’s shown to be a way to get paid, but not as the landmark articulation particular to the experience of late-20th-century youth. Director Curtis Hanson has no feeling for how kids find words and rhythm to deal with out-of-reach politics and at-hand deprivation. (Where’s Boaz Yakin when you need him?) Eminem’s stardom obscures rap’s unifying potential and replaces it with self-absorption. As an actor he gives no clues to his inner thoughts, just a wild-eyed stare that’s intended to pass for anger, withdrawal, alertness, shyness–it’s a performance as one-note as his raps.
8 Mile needs to succeed foremost as a musical (it’s patterned after Prince’s Purple Rain), but musicals provide release and uplift and Eminem’s music is nothing if not emotionally deadening. (You don’t have to think hard to imagine an ecstatic movie musical made from the De La Soul catalog.) "Lose Yourself," 8 Mile’s theme song, is the most offensive pop record since Destiny’s Child’s "Survivor." Using relentless, repetitive beats, both songs flaunt the vocalists’ business plans. Craven commercialism disguised as self-improvement. "You better never let it go!/You only get one shot!" Eminem hollers in his typically strained, pay-me-what-you-owe-me delivery. It’s the same record as "Survivor," an anthem to careerism. The only difference is Eminem’s macho privilege; the pretense that he’s fulfilling himself–that he is destiny’s child–is a male prerogative older than the Rocky movies.
But 8 Mile’s not primal like Rocky; its struggle-against-oppression story–essentially a white-vs.-black confrontation as Rabbit opposes and beats all Detroit’s black rappers (his black friend Mekhi Phifer constantly running behind him calling him "a genius")–is mitigated by the way Eminem twists hiphop culture into something inauthentic. Like Eminem’s records, 8 Mile is a collection of marketing tropes predicated on racially distorting hiphop music. Black desperation and dissent become white petulance. Watching a millionaire mythologize himself and rapping rags-to-riches cliches is insufferable. The real story would be a switch on the old Sam Phillips/Elvis Presley legend about selling a white man with a black sound, using Eminem’s mentor Dr. Dre as a protagonist with Machiavellian calculations. (However, anyone who thinks Dr. Dre has produced great tracks for Eminem needs to go back and listen to Dre’s "California Love" for Tupac–one of hiphop’s most magnificent moments. Get the pop remix, specially designed for mainstream airplay and open to the widest American interpretation and enjoyment.) Eminem’s records are narrow. His self-produced "Lose Yourself" is loud but monotonous–ripping off Busta Rhymes’ "Fire," it’s just noise that non-adepts mistake for dynamism. And as a rapper Eminem never grooves; he raps ahead of the rhythm as if trying to ignore it.
8 Mile is constructed to ignore the advantages that accrue to whiteness in America. It misstates the peculiar tension between Detroit’s working-class blacks and whites that Kid Rock, a truly radical white rapper, gets right. (Hanson’s unclear that 8 Mile Road is a racial demarcation line of Detroit’s white flight.) The way Rabbit’s MC competitions are rigged in his favor is no fun, it only confirms the film’s Great White Hope formula. I don’t trust 8 Mile encomiums by those critics who would never go to a hiphop movie like Paid in Full, but who go for this one because its hero is white. 8 Mile’s detestable drama sells the myth that it’s tough for Rabbit/Eminem to overcome the black world of rap–signified by Detroit at its grimmest. That’s self-aggrandizing sentimentality. Wanna bet black country & western singer Charley Pride had it harder?
