Everybody from the 313
Essay
Everybody from the 313
By Nick Pinkerton
Revisiting 8 Mile, Eminem’s little hellion-raising cinéma à clef, at 20.
8 Mile screens as part of the Pop Plays Itself series at Metrograph through April 6.
During the summer of 2000, when The Marshall Mathers LP was resting comfortably atop the Billboard charts, I was 19 years old, working through my vacation loading up trucks at a UPS depot in Sharonville, Ohio, just outside of the Cincinnati city limits. This was, as you might well imagine, miserable. That same summer I would attend a meeting held in a classroom on the University of Cincinnati campus by the local chapter of the Communist Party USA. There were about a dozen other dour young men there, and at some point, talking amongst ourselves, we discovered that almost everyone in the room either presently worked for UPS, or had, which seemed significant of something.
What the job entailed was standing in the back of a truck trailer while sorters, tucked away somewhere up in the dark of the warehouse rafters, pulled packages that were designated to go wherever the trailer for the moment was going, which they fed down to you in a steady cascade. The packages would slide in by way of a strip of steel rollers, coming to rest at whatever point the trailer was loaded out to—tight tiers, remember to keep those tiers tight—and if you weren’t alert your calves would take a beating, which mine did, constantly, to the point of looking like rotten banana flesh for most of that summer. The trailers were hellishly hot, and you’d sweat like a hog in them; to combat dehydration, it was advised that you fill an empty gallon milk container with water the night before a shift, then stick it in the freezer—the idea being that, when the frozen contents melted in the trailer, you’d have cool refreshment on hand. I downed two full gallons every shift, and never once had to take a piss on the job, because every drop of moisture drained out through my pores.
My immediate supervisor was a guy a couple of years my senior known only as “Bowman,” who memorably came into work one day announcing: “My ass hurts from poundin’ pussy all night long.” Bowman was a great fan of 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite,” then ubiquitous on the FM radio. I myself favored what has been described as “indie” or “college” rock, and driving to-and-from work with Justin Stewart, a friend from high school who was likewise stuck slinging parcels between semesters, we’d usually listen to Cat Power or The Smiths or something similarly appropriate to sensitive bookish types—he was studying English literature at Florida State; I, film production at Wright State University outside of Dayton, 40-odd miles up I-75. But then something funny started happening during those interminable hours in the trailer: quite out of nowhere, the lyrical stylings of Eminem started to cycle, like a tape loop, through my brain.
This was unsettling, because at that juncture of my life I had never to my knowledge intentionally listened to Eminem—though I didn’t exactly recoil when I’d hear “Forgot About Dre” wafting through the air in the Oregon District, a popular strip of bars in downtown Dayton, as indeed who would? At any rate, after spending several days on the job with that yipping, yammering delivery constantly clacking away in my skull, I concluded that there was no use any longer in fighting whatever it was that was happening to me, and shamefacedly asked Justin to make me a tape of his little sister Nancy’s copy of The Marshall Mathers LP, so that at the very least I would have some new bars to ricochet around in my dome. (I should mention that we weren’t permitted to listen to music at work at UPS, on headphones or otherwise, presumably because that would have made the gig marginally less unpleasant.)
after spending several days on the job with that yipping, yammering delivery constantly clacking away in my skull, I concluded that there was no use any longer in fighting whatever it was that was happening to me, and shamefacedly asked Justin to make me a tape of his little sister Nancy’s copy of 'The Marshall Mathers LP'
The “Eminem” phenomenon was a triumph of marketing, certainly, but this triumph was made possible because his lyrics tapped into real and rankling resentments, all of which may seem rather obscure a couple of decades down the line, after a Super Bowl halftime show and a Joe Biden endorsement. The man born as Marshall Bruce Mathers III had a few bit parts in movies prior to acting out the story of his pre-fame life in 2002’s 8 Mile, including playing himself in Dale Resteghini’s 2000 Da Hip Hop Witch, a cash-in on the previous year’s The Blair Witch Project also featuring the talents of Pras, Royce da 5'9", and Vanilla Ice, but his most potent cameo came in another movie made before Curtis Hanson and crew unloaded their gear in Detroit, 2001’s Bully. Em never set foot on the set of Larry Clark’s movie about suburban Florida teen dirtbags who turn to premeditated murder, based on a true-crime tome by Jim Schutze, but all the same he’s an essential part of the movie’s pungent ambiance of basketball shorts, tramp stamps, and testicle sweat, and the film freezes in amber the climate of the moment of his cultural ascendency. At one point in Bully, Brad Renfro’s character Marty Puccio, an unambitious blockhead who’s a massive disappointment to his upper middle-class parents, can be seen bouncing on his sofa joyously belting out the hook to “Forgot About Dre” while watching the accompanying music video, and his bedroom door is graced by an Eminem poster. It’s an iconic image, courtesy of photographer Jonathan “Xtra Gangsta” Mannion, that’s seen on the inside sleeve of the Mathers LP: a low-angle shot of Em, dressed in a grease monkey apron, carrying a loaded garbage bag and an empty cardboard box labeled “First Prize Idaho Potatoes”, implicitly punching the clock at some shit chump change job, like the “sandwich artist” gig that Marty shows up to when he’s not supplementing his income by dancing in his underwear at gay bars.
Aside from the earworm quality of his sing-song, schoolyard taunt-like cadence, no small part of Eminem’s appeal (and that of Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady) was in his violent venting of spleen: towards his former bullies, towards his mother, towards his wife, towards “men who wear makeup”—and towards crap jobs—which is almost certainly part of why he installed himself in my noggin in the summer of 2000, and had done the same to Renfro’s character, though both of our prospects were, on paper at least, significantly better than those of Mathers when he was a short-order cook making $5.50 an hour at Gilbert’s Lodge in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. As it transpired, Mathers would go on to become very, very rich, which I, to date, have not, and the man who warned of Slim Shadys across America “working at Burger King spitting on your onion rings” today even owns his own restaurant. I refer, of course, to Mom’s Spaghetti, opened in Detroit last fall to tepid reviews from the bourgeoise foodie class, an eatery which takes its name from a line in his breakout hit from the 8 Mile soundtrack, the leave-it-all-on-the-court anthem “Lose Yourself.” Hope he treats his employees well; I’d be deeply disappointed to learn otherwise.
I saw 8 Mile on opening night at a multiplex nearby to the Wright State campus, and I can confirm that the packed house of Midwesterners did, indeed, lose themselves, because people tend to go in for a well-tooled underdog story—I soaked up a similar response from the crowd in Astoria, Queens, at a screening of Ryan Coogler’s Creed (2015), a continuation of the Sylvester Stallone franchise that began with John G. Avildsen’s 1976 Rocky, a film to which 8 Mile owes more than a little. There’s a widely shared satisfaction in watching characters positioned as longshots triumph against hardships to exceed expectation: the Philly club fighter recruited as a pushover tomato can, the rich kid who has to spit out his silver spoon to face pugs from off the mean streets, the white trash rapper competing in a Black idiom. From this, one might draw the conclusion that a great many people regard themselves as underdogs, formerly or presently, which presents a bit of a problem, because we can’t all very well be underdogs, can we?
Jean Eustache, the working-class kid from the southwest of France who became the toast of Cannes in 1973, rode for Rocky—there’s a photograph of him wearing a Rocky T-shirt, in fact, which must have been taken some time after his career had collapsed and he was feeling like an outsider with the odds stacked against him again. For my part, I favor 8 Mile. Sly is a font of enjoyable actorly affects to be sure, as when Rocky swigs a beer with his pinkie extended, but Avildsen is a plodding, pedestrian, autopilot director. Hanson, comparatively, was a paragon of classical construction and attention to detail, though there’s often something in his films that keeps them from the first rate, and that something usually relates to his reliance on prestige performers. Meryl Streep is fine once The River Wild (1994) transforms into a full on woman vs. nature whitewater white-knuckler, but you have to paddle upstream against a lot of Streeply mannerisms in order to get to the goodies. Hanson’s attention to the specifics of inclement weather in wintertime Pittsburgh in his Wonder Boys (2000) is extraordinary, but then there’s Frances McDormand and Robert Downey Jr., both, true to form, honey-baked hams. L.A. Confidential (1997) contains many fine things, but it also contains a performance by moist dinner roll Kevin Spacey, and so before revisiting its peerless period art direction I’ll probably opt to watch Isabelle Huppert slumming it up in Baltimore in Hanson’s erotic thriller The Bedroom Window (1987) eight or nine more times.
Hanson had a weakness for preening showboats, but he was on solid ground with close-to-the-vest underplayers like Huppert or the James Spader of 1990’s Bad Influence. What a stroke of luck, then, his meeting with Mathers, whose performance as striving rapper Jimmy Smith Jr. aka B-Rabbit in 8 Mile is at times downright Bressonian in its opacity. The non-actor lead, white as a jug of Vitamin D, is surrounded by visiting Hollywoodians—Kim Basinger dowdied down as Jimmy’s booze ’n’ pills, Bingo-lovin’ mom; Brittany Murphy, a spontaneous performer with a charming knack for playing women tripping headlong through life, as his on-and-off love interest; a lowkey Mekhi Phifer as best friend and bemused well-wisher—but none brought along an appetite for nibbling on the scenery, which is admittedly unappetizing. With cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, Hanson exercises his genius for establishing and sustaining atmosphere, here that of a dead-end, blue-gray-green Detroit of factory lunch trucks and endless rides on city buses where the unwashed windows make an already grimy view grimier, long rides which give our protagonist plenty of time to contemplate which is worse, his job or his home life. The camera stays on the move in a restless, speed-of-life fashion, seeming to stumble across scenes rather than having them staged for its benefit, and this, along with the movie’s compact timeframe—one rocky week in the life of B-Rabbit and friends—lends the film a miraculously sustained immediacy. And though 8 Mile is very much an Eminem vehicle, it doesn’t contain a single “minor” character, the rare Great Man biopic where the subject is often less interesting than everyone around him.
Do I need to tell you what happens in 8 Mile? Everyone knows what happens in 8 Mile. After suffering a crisis of confidence at a public rap battle, B-Rabbit goes back to putting in his hours on the factory floor. He gets a girl, he loses the girl—a scene that’s played less as a back-stabbing betrayal than a bitter confirmation of her suspected capriciousness. Cheddar Bob (Evan Jones) shoots himself in the leg. B-Rabbit gets back on stage, proves his mettle against three MCs from a rival crew, then walks off into the night in a shot reminiscent of the end of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)—he’s heading back to the factory to cover a co-worker’s shift, though any Stan will know that he’s really headed for his heroic destiny. I could go on: “You ever wonder at what point you just got to say fuck it, man? Like when you gotta stop living up here, and start living down here?”, “Clarence’s parents have a real good marriage,” all of that stuff, but come on, you’ve seen it, right?
That climactic battle, in which B-Rabbit bests his final opponent by unleashing a flurry of self-deprecatory bars that rob his foe of all ammunition, capping it all off by revealing that glowering would-be thug “Papa Doc” aka Clarence (Anthony Mackie) in fact attended the tony Cranbrook (“That’s a private school!”), is a blast; some time ago a friend and I started using “Cranbrook” as a shorthand to refer to our armies of illusory enemies who operate from a position of relative advantage and entitlement. This came up shortly after the police had knocked on my door in the wee morning hours while I was bouncing off the walls while watching the rap battles from 8 Mile ad nauseum, acting on a noise complaint called in by someone in my building. Whoever it was, you’d better believe they went to Cranbrook.
Eminem, who once ridiculed Moby for having reached the venerable age of 36, is pushing 50 now. Every couple of years he’ll put out a new album, which I’ll dutifully listen to, say “Oh, that’s fun… he’s rapping over the music from Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” or something to that effect, and then never think about what I just heard ever again, because while the lyrical dexterity remains intact, it’s hard to recapture the particular élan of underclass degenerates bum-rushing the airwaves that you got in the dear, dirty D12 days. Em still moves plenty of units kvetching about contemporary “mumble rap,” presumably bought by his same, aging core audience—it’s hard to imagine that it’s kids who are eating up these albums like Valiums, if only because it’s unlikely that kids know who Christopher Reeve is, to cite but one of the handful of pop culture references that Em’s been recycling for ages.
In the multiplex of the present, one sees quite a few more of Superman’s offspring than one does those of Rocky or 8 Mile or even Creed—Coogler is tied up with the Marvel Comics Universe, and Em himself has taken to cashing checks as the official bard of the Venom franchise (to his credit the most egregiously stoopid, and therefore best, of the MCU properties). This is, perhaps, not an insupportable loss, given the dubious track record of Hollywood’s ventures into neorealism (now is as good a time as any to mention that 8 Mile screenwriter Scott Silver later co-wrote David O. Russell’s 2010 The Fighter), but something has nevertheless been lost with the disappearance of recognizable, grotty American scenes from the screen, which are rarely seen now outside of a fantasy context. (Silver also co-wrote Todd Phillips’s 2019 Joker.) 8 Mile traffics in a kind of proletariat mythmaking of its own—see for example its images of Em lugging his belongings around in a Hefty Cinch Sak, a possible hat-tip to that photo of him as a minimum wage shit-shoveler taking out the trash—but Hanson keeps it grounded in a glumly tangible reality of surreptitious fucks snuck on clock at your sheet metal stamping job, as does Mr. Mathers, who has the existential presence of someone whose muscle memory still recalls the repetitions of the workaday world. I feel there was value in showing paycheck-to-paycheck Americans things that reflected something of their lived experience in mainstream movies, but obviously the people who sign off on those movies now disagree.
8 Mile is not precisely a paean to the day job, which is only fair given that it’s a movie about someone desperate to escape an intolerable status quo. Graduating to the art racket or the rap game is just another grind, as it turns out, but the Eminem who would gripe endlessly about the vicissitudes of fame was never quite so compelling a figure as the one who just wanted to get away from the fry cooker. Here an anecdote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder, always profound on the subject of labor, is applicable, recounted by actor Karlheinz Böhm of the shooting of Fox and His Friends (1975):
“It must have been three or four in the morning, and I am not a night person. I hate night scenes. I was leaning against a post and yawning so hard that I almost tore myself apart. Suddenly Rainer comes up, grins at me, and says, ‘Tired, aren’t ya?’ So I say, ‘Yes, I’m very tired.’ I was grumpy and irritable. He looked at me in a certain way and said, ‘Working on an assembly line is harder.’”
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Decadent Editions), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk).
