November 27, 2002

IS IT ME or does 8 Mile seem like the first mainstream movie about rap that's been at the multiplexes in years. But then again, music doesn't seem to drive this cinematic success story. I took one central message with me when I walked out of the theater: white anger will outdo, outtalk, outshine black anger, or for that matter anyone else's rage, anytime, any day, anywhere, even in a bleak Detroit dominated, naturally, by African Americans.

Not that 8 Mile's Motor City necessarily resembles reality's: Census 2000 reported Detroit's 4.4 million population is about 69 percent white and 22 percent black. But perception and portrayal are different animals altogether. The movie's black club crowds – in deliberately sharp contrast to Eminem's almost glowingly pale Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith – are shot to resemble the Somalian hordes of Black Hawk Down rather than, say, the blue-collar hopefuls of Flashdance. The cultural wars are raging as 8 Mile highlights Rabbit's travails amid a posse of hostile black rap rivals – who tellingly call themselves Leaders of the Free World – and his eventual triumph, with little help from his African American pals. In spite of their presence, the subtitle of 8 Mile could easily be Fear of a Black Planet. Or Anger at a Chocolate City.

Rabbit is, apparently, one of only three white men in Detroit, the others being his hapless friend Cheddar, who shoots himself in the groin while playing at being a big bad gangsta, and the abusive, brain-damaged boyfriend of Rabbit's mother. All that impotence and shame – symbols of the protagonists's own inhibitions and cultural baggage – are the real hurdles for this Rabbit to leap over. So it follows that when Rabbit gets beaten and bruised by his black rap opponents, he manages to pick himself up and overcome – sporting a new "black" eye, the only color in his otherwise perfectly blank, completely composed face.

And composition is key. The weirdest and most fascinating visual motif in 8 Mile is the way Em is photographed: at times he simultaneously resembles Christ and the Virgin Mary, his blank visage framed by a hooded sweatshirt, shining like a beacon. From the movie posters that aestheticize the rapper's whiteness against a jet background to the scenes that paint Eminem/Rabbit as intense, hard-working, and straight edge as Minor Threat/Fugazi's Ian MacKaye – particularly in comparison to his dysfunction-ridden biological family – 8 Mile works notions of (racial) purity in visually explicit, if not verbally forthright, terms, in a way that seems firmly tied to Rabbit's, uh, beauty. No wonder so many female moviegoers are getting obsessed with the strident and at times repellent motormouth with a deep misogynist streak.

It's even more amazing, and outrageous, that the man who once gloated over his status as white America's most hated hip-hop star is depicted in 8 Mile as someone who can bring moral fiber, ethics, and even civilized behavior to battle – applying his wit in defense of a gay coworker against a lunchtime tormenter played by Motown rapper Xzibit.

Would 8 Mile work with Xzibit in the Rabbit role? Probably not. According to Hollywood's unwritten rules, black hip-hop artists – Ja Rule, Treach, and LL Cool J among them – are best suited to lend street cred to action flicks and comedies (1985's Krush Groove, a music movie about rap that starred black actors, may never come again). Which explains why my 8 Mile date – my mother – found the film so unusual. In the celluloid arena Dr. Dre and DMX are best decontextualized, it seems. These days the movies are where white rap performers and mainstream audiences can find each other on celluloid and together make their way safely through African American culture, like white-bread American soldiers inching their way through some African warlord's dusty Detroit, rewriting music history and cleaning up the untidy realities as they go, heroically outnumbered.

It's not surprising that it should happen in the so-called worst city in America, the nexus of a country's conflicted views on race, where the area's African and Arab Americans make the news and melanin-deprived hip-hoppers like Rabbit may very well consider themselves the new invisible men. So Eminem/Rabbit acts out a fantasy of cultural imperialism in the new world order, shooting 'em up, with words, in an urban frontier where the minority has become the majority and the majority fights back by heavy-artillery appropriation. Eminem/Rabbit gets mad, gets even, and in the falsest note of the film, completely silences his Free World opponent. He gets the last word, the only word, and not only does it seem unrealistic, it also just seems unfair because we all know this 8 Mile world is far from free; it's "The Eminem Show" all the way in the first place. And he looks like he's been lit by God.