'Missed The Boat' - Episode #2: '8 Mile'

The admission of guilt is right there in the title; as an Eminem fan, I only recently saw 8 Mile. Don’t worry; I’ll carry that shame with me forever, so consider me punished.

Not a lot happens in 8 Mile, and that’s the point. B-Rabbit has his mundane job stamping metal, and he rides the bus because his car never works. His home life is a depressing display of a desperate mother and a lost, scared little girl, Lily. So it’s really a good job that B-Rabbit happens to be a genius.

We first meet him when he’s preparing for a rap battle, practicing his style in front of a grimy bathroom mirror. He gets onto the stage and opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out. He’s choking now, the clocks run out, times up, over. Now, there are a few points of note. Rabbit’s home life becomes more chaotic. His mate Cheddar shoots himself in the leg by accident, and Rabbit spits a brilliant verse at the factory food truck. He meets a woman called Alex, played by the late Brittany Murphy, and they form a connection. It’s hardly love’s young dream, but she seems loyal even though she isn’t faithful.

Throughout the movie, I was struck by Rabbit’s stoic level of politeness. He apologises all the time and doesn’t utter a sound when six people are jumping him. We must root for the character, of course, but I can’t help but feel like I probably would have rooted for him even more if his personality had a little more complexity, either positive or negative. There’s one scene where he loses his cool but other than that, he’s like a boy at Sunday school. I assume production wanted to make sure Eminem was toned down and censored for audiences to not affect his image, but he just came across as dull. It’s not to say Eminem can’t act, but he didn’t have a great deal to work with to prove otherwise.

Rabbit’s journey is focused on him figuring out what he has to do to get out of the rat race he’s in and start living his life doing what he was born to do. That’s not the case for everyone, is it? For every Eminem or Rabbit saying, “there’s got to be more to life than this”, a Brian is going into his job of 30 years, making the same jokes and smoking the same cigarettes, looking forward to cottage pie for tea. He doesn’t mind, though. Brian looks forward to the caravan park in June with Linda and the kids and Christmas, where he goes out for his annual drinks down The Black Swan with the lads from the factory.

We can’t all be Eminem’s and Rabbits, creative visionaries who must fight their way through the weighted, heavy monotony of life so they can finally let their gifts flourish. I wonder when it is that we realise that we’re a Rabbit or a Brian. How do we accept it if we do accept it at all?

8 Mile’s crescendo culminates in a battle between Rabbit and three other rappers, but it’s the final battle, the one with Papa Doc, that makes the movie. Rabbit goes first, something he doesn’t usually do, and does something different. Of course, he slates his opponent but primarily, he spends his whole minute and a half verse dissing himself. How he’s trailer trash, how the rival crew beat him up, how he’s white in a black world, and how one of the Free World crew slept with the woman he was seeing. Rabbit dismantles everything that Papa Doc can say against him and owns his past to get the crowd onside. It works, and it’s something that Papa Doc, or ‘Clarence’ as we find out, couldn’t bring himself to do. Although I bet Doc kicked himself when he thought of the perfect comeback in the shower later.

We don’t see Rabbit morph into Eminem explicitly at the end of the film, but as he turns down his mate's invite to go out and party, the message is there. The message that the strife will be worthwhile because the figure walking into the distance will soon become one of the greatest rappers of all time.

This got me thinking, how many talented Brian’s have been left behind? How many non-geniuses have 'made it’ through sheer perseverance and arrogance alone? Talent isn’t enough. You’ve got to have the drive, the determination, and focus, and that’s what the end of 8 Mile is all about. Notable points:

• Harrison Ford Check: No. I really wanted this be a yes, but alas, Fordy doesn’t seem to get too involved with celebrity part biopics about Detroit’s rap scene

• “Tell these people something they don’t know about me”. I watched it 10 times, and I love it

• Poor Brittany Murphy is all I can think of when she’s in a movie I’m watching

• 8 Mile didn’t blow me away, but Eminem does every time