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Moore and Eminem together bowl an 8-mile strike
by Paxton Downard
The Republic
For most Canadians, watching CNN can be a perplexing experience.
The fevered pitch of the American story can seem overwhelming.
Two films released this fall shed some light on the situation.
Bowling for Columbine (made by Michael Moore) provides
a context for how the US arrived at its current high drama,
and 8 Mile (starring Eminem) paints a semi-autobiographical
picture of life in Detroit in 1995. Both films present controversial
icons of American culture, and, despite their differences
in purpose and genre, they share crucial themes.
As a response to the massacre at Columbine high school, Moore
uses the documentary format to delve into the reasons for
the scale of gun-related carnage in America. The traditional
explanation, that the massive presence of guns precipitates
the massive use of guns, is debunked. Instead, the argument
presented is that a culture of fear and violence are responsible
for the over 30,000 deaths and 85,000 injuries by guns per
year.
Canada is brimming with guns (7.5 million of them), and yet,
as Moore points, out Canadians do not kill each other nearly
in the same proportion as their American cousins. Fear, says
Moore, is the difference.
But where does that fear come from?
Columbine proposes this fear is rooted in the very
foundations of American society, right back to the first boatload
of Puritan refugees that landed at Plymouth. That fear has
developed over time and manifested itself in a number of ways,
most notably through media, consumerism, and a societal fear
of people of African descent (as well as others).
The issue of race and fear is illustrated in a short animation
within the film, done by a graduate of Columbine High and
creator of the Southpark series, Harold Moss. A Brief History
of the United States of America details crucial moments
in American history and how they relate to issues of race:
from Plymouth to slavery, the wild west, and the fact that
the National Rifle Association was founded in the same year
that the Ku Klux Klan was banned. It culminates in the current
state of polarized cities, blacks in the inner city, and the
embattled whites camped out in the suburbs, defending their
right to own guns and protect themselves from marauders to
their utopic neighborhoods.
Race is one of the many sensitive and controversial elements
of the film. The word was hardly out of NRA president Charlton
Heston's mouth before he thought better of it and walked out
of his interview with Moore, who is in fact a fellow member
(since childhood) of Heston's beloved NRA. This is one of
the film's quieter but more revealing moments.
The flight of middle-class Americans from cities in the '70s
has left a socioeconomic legacy that also lies at the heart
of 8 Mile, a dramatic and gritty movie set in Detroit.
Eminem, who has received accolades for his lead role as Rabbit,
portrays a modern incarnation of Norman Mailer's "White
Negro," a hipster gone hip-hop in the tradition of James
Dean meets Beatstreet. No longer an outcast of the
establishment, the existentialist loner is a fixture of history.
Now, as class and race become blurred in a society where representations
of people fall into economic as well as racial stereotypes,
Eminem champions the cause of White Trash.
8 mile validates the esthetic of marginalized inner-city
lore. Rabbit, however, despises his own contemporaries (who
are mostly black) more than the reasons for his situation.
In typical Eminem fashion, he finds no solace in the rhetoric
of his friends, or the black culture that he appropriates.
Instead, he rejects everything except his own determination
to transcend his situation. Rabbit is everything that America
stands for: self-reliance, determination, and a steely gaze
on the future.
Globe and Mail film reviewer Rick Groen got it right:
"The lesson this antihero learns has everything to do
with social Darwinism and nothing to do with social contract."
8 mile glorifies verbal battle, the war of words that
is the hallmark of hip-hop, and, surprisingly, very few guns
(another hip-hop icon) are portrayed. Three guns are drawn
over the course of the film, each time with the insistence
that they be put away. The only person who does get shot,
does so as he puts his gun away in the waist of his trousers.
Despite this unusual (for Hollywood) treatment of guns, 8
Mile is a very violent film. The question that 8 Mile
poses, in light of Moore's Columbine; is this: is it
a film about fear, and is it designed to console or provoke?
It consoles by providing a model for survival and redemption
that mirrors contemporary themes in American culture. But
it provokes in many ways as well.
The lyrics to the theme song by Eminem sound more like the
US Army's recent ad campaign "An army of one":
"Look--If you had one shot / one opportunity / to seize
everything you ever wanted / one moment / would you capture
it / or just let it slip. . . this world is for the taking
/ make me king / as we move toward a / new world orda' / a
normal life is boring."
One thing that both these films prove is that violence against
society transcends race and becomes a circumstance of class.
Or, to be more precise, violence becomes the manifestation
of alienation within certain classes--like it did for Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold one morning at Columbine High.
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