Saturday, October 22, 2005
8 Mile
At last a good movie rears its unfamiliar head in the Netflix queue. 8 Mile, the 2002 Eminem vehicle, had that trip to another land quality that good movies offer. There was not a break in the intense rhythms of the movie. A conventional story told in a way that humanized a world usually closed to the general culture — ignored might be a better word — presenting with dignity and warmth the people who live on the margins of American consciousness. The tumultuous surface of the movie revealed what was underneath: despair, bristling life, a yearning for undefined release.
The rap form itself melds so many threads into a raw form that publicly expresses the most personal material: a person's life story — one of the few things you really have if you live poor and on the outskirts — mixing so understandably with the powerful drive for something better; an impulse to have your voice heard. At times the movie felt like gospel in its intensity of feeling; other times it reminded you of a bizarro Apollo Theater — at the edges of the mind's urban boundary; the audience was as much a part of the show as the performers; “battles”, verbal duels, that civilized the face to face confrontations into a play of word and improvisational quickness on a stage, in front of a fully engaged, physically pulsing audience, that felt on the perpetual verge of riot — something was at stake for everyone. This is culture at its incantatory baseline.
It has to be said that like much of edgy contemporary pop culture there is a proto-fascist quality to rap. The worship of body stripped of spirit, the crude formulations and impatience with all but violent solutions, the assertion of ego without reference to quality, the beat pounding out any allowance for nuance or ambiguity, all add up to unrefined energy for its own sake, drained of the full humanity to which rap aspires in its search of “authenticity”. This description leaves out much and is unfair to the wide variety of rap — I'm sure no specialist in this realm — but that's, in general, how rap feels to me.
The story-line is not syllable for syllable that of Eminem's life. But it touches all the bases, ending up an advocacy trailer for Em's form of expression. If you read the comments on Netflix, many people, at first intimidated or irritated by the violent tribal posturing of Eminem's act, find when they watch this semblance of his story, great sympathy and understanding.
Curtis Hanson did a great job directing this movie, telling an unrelenting story. There wasn't a bad performance. Eminem's movie “crew” were all individuals, all with their own survival tactics; all-star actors in an all-star movie.