Well, I finally saw 8 Mile. I have to admit that it’s pretty good. Eminem’s low-key charismatic screen presence, and the gritty camerawork showing Detroit, make up for the hokeyness and predictability of the plot. Still, it’s a film that raises more questions than it answers…
The question of race is dealt with about as well as it could be (which is, however, not very well) given that this is a film about a white guy appropriating, and claiming mastery of ,what remains a largely black endeavor. As many critics have observed, class trumps race in the film’s resolution: Eminem wins the culminating rap battle by affirming his “white trash” status (i.e. he is not claiming to be black), and dissing his black opponent for having gone to Cranwood (a private school, as he says, and indeed a snooty art school at that, as Detroiters would know). In this way, Eminem’s “wigger” status is confirmed and disavowed at the same time. Can we demand more from Eminem than his conscious acknowledgment that race is still a big problem in America, something that has not (as pious white commentators always try to claim) gone away, and that he remains complicit as a beneficiary of white privilege, no matter what? I’m really not sure.
In any case, Eminem’s use of his class background in order to gain acceptance in a world (hip hop) defined predominantly by race raises a lot of questions, especially in terms of his relationship to his audience. Do young black people (who supposedly went to this movie in great numbers) accept class as a kind of surrogate for race, in the sense that ‘Eminem’s OK because he admits he’s white and doesn’t falsely claim he is black, while at the same time his up-from-slavery background in effect makes him acceptably black’? This scenario is disturbing, because it rests on the assumption that black = stereotypes of poverty & deprivation, and the codes of conduct associated therewith.
The popularity of Eminem among white youth, including affluent white youth, raises even more questions, though. What am I to make of my teenaged cousins, the children of two PhDs, telling me that Eminem is “cool”? What am I to make of the many white students of mine, who loved 8 Mile, they told me, because the film proves that Eminem is “authentic.” There’s almost too much for me to unpack here: first, the assumption that a movie (which, like any work of art, is an artificial construction by definition) could somehow provide proof of any sort of “authenticity,” second, the white kids’ overwhelming sense that coolness = blackness, combined with their eagerness to get this equation embodied in somebody who has the additional quality of not actually being black; third, that well-to-do white kids identify “authenticity” with poverty and deprivation–they enjoy, without even thinking about it, all the privileges of their middle class upbringings, and at the same time identify with the “realness” of someone who has been deprived of those privileges.
Of course, these are problems that exist in relation to Eminem’s music, as well as his movie; and indeed, that exist in relation to hip hop culture in general, in a world where white suburban kids idolize images of black urban despair. But these problems are exacerbated in 8 Mile, precisely because the film calculatedly sacrifices much of Eminem’s irony and hard edge, in order to give him more mainstream acceptance. Thus, we get scenes like the one where he stands up for a gay co-worker (though, of course, he does this linguistically by telling the gay-baiter, “he’s gay, but you’re a faggot”). In this way, the film constructs a myth of “authenticity” for Eminem at the price of toning down the sarcasm, aggression, and multiply ironic stance that made him such a compelling figure in the first place. Of course, the channeling of male adolescent aggression into verbal battles is a big part of what makes Eminem into the artist he is in the first place. But it’s strange to see this recapitulated in a movie sufficiently heartwarming that Mrs. Cheney would find nothing in it to be offended by; and even stranger that this dilution apparently only adds to the force of the film’s myth of authenticity, at least for a good part of its target audience.
In short: given that Eminem’s aesthetic power comes from his ironic self-construction, and given that his core teenaged and post-teenaged audience takes it for granted (without even having to think about it) that everything in the world is a media construction, why does 8 Mile‘s mythical denial of such constructedness have such great credibility with that audience?