When one of them pulls out a real piece in the middle of a ferocious argument with a rival gang, everyone on both sides is deeply pained by this error of taste. There are no guns to speak of: Jimmy's buddies cruise around firing a paintball at various shopfronts and a police car, but almost wet themselves with fear when they hear a siren behind them. So Hanson seems slyly to be proposing a melting pot of some sort bubbling away in counterpoint to what they're watching. One night in the trailer where Jimmy lives with his mom and baby sister, they watch Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life on TV: a scene in which the teacher of a little girl, Sarah-Jane, can't conceal her polite astonishment that Sarah-Jane's mother is black. So has the music and culture of the streets abolished racial difference? Difficult to tell. It's the ultimate suburban boy's fantasy: a crowd of cool black people cheering him on, and he even gets to look like the underdog. "Elvis" is what the crowds at the rap contests jeeringly call him, and in the final showdown Eminem defiantly says that he's poor white trash and proud of it.
But something in Eminem's pale, even somehow delicate features makes him whiter than white: Persil white trash - though his friends unhesitatingly extend to him the honorific of "nigga" or "negro" in conversation.
A dopey guy in his crew called Cheddar Bob is white the other three are black - a DJ who hosts regular rap battles and who's always got Jimmy's back, a big fat guy made to look even bigger with a puffa jacket and another who's the radical political conscience. As for race, Eminem's character Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith is not the only white man around, though he's the only white rapper the movie's not about to flush his USP down the toilet.
Even his Aryan blondness has been allowed to grow out and get replaced with his natural brown hair, though usually covered by hoods and woolly hats. He scribbles lyrics on bits of paper on the bus, brooding over his rap career, his unhappy domestic situations, and the way his attractive blonde mom (Kim Basinger) keeps flaunting her sex life.Įminem really has cleaned up his act the provocative gay-baiting has gone, and in one of the improvised rap contests springing up spontaneously at the lunch-truck where he works shifts at a metal plant, Eminem actually reproves someone for his homophobic rhyming. He hangs with his multi-racial rainbow coalition of homeboys in Detroit. But he could not be in safer hands than those of director Curtis Hanson, who positions him in an old-fashioned, quasi-autobiographical drama of the streets like West Side Story or Saturday Night Fever, presenting Eminem with challenges he can meet with that unvarying not-backing-down stare, which does not require of him any testing thespian displays of emotion. Gays bad, guns good? Now it's the other way around.Īctually, this isn't his debut that was in The Wash, Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg's dire remake of Car Wash, where Eminem had a cameo as a phone-stalker psycho.
#Eminem 8 mile bonus battles movie
Maybe in response to this, or probably out of a cynical need to plane down his rough edges for a movie career, Eminem has adjusted his attitude. H ere he is on the big screen, the notorious white rapper whose celebrity is treated with such deference here by modish liberal opinion - deference which has, I always think, a touch of Neville Chamberlain about it.
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