Cracks in a dingy bathroom mirror warp Jimmy Smith’s face. He runs in place with Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones (Pt. II)” blasting in his headphones as he mimes his practice moves in the mirror to prepare for a battle. A battle not fought with a sword, but with a microphone. It’s not fought over a difference in politics, but over territory. The loud banging on the graffiti-ridden door pulls him from his haze. Jimmy is nowhere near the confident person that his raps project.
He can only live in the mirror of the way he dreams in those brief moments. In the mirror, the record executive spots him through the smoke and heavy jackets in a Detroit club. In this instance, he has no home or money problems staring back at him. Just pure ambition. 8 Mile proves that surroundings don’t define someone’s character, but without persistence, a seemingly hopeless city like Detroit can still engulf one’s psyche.
Knock, knock, knock.
After cursing out the people who aggressively want him out of the bathroom, Jimmy takes his headphones off. No more dreaming of rapping about how troubling his surroundings are à la Prodigy and Havoc. Muffled performers surround the room as he looks back above the sink as a reminder of who he really is. The realization that a co-sign or a big check won’t change him takes an amount of internal perspicacity full enough to break through.
8 Mile is not quite an adaptation of the hero story Eminem’s life would eventually become. Instead of making a full blown biopic following Eminem all the way from the Hip-Hop Shop in Detroit to the Rap Olympics in LA, late director Curtis Hanson of LA Confidential fame, producer Brian Glazer and relatively unknown screenwriter Scott Silver crafted a separate story to focus more specifically on how challenging it was for someone like Eminem from the inner-cities of Michigan to get a break and rise out of indigence.
Detroit is portrayed as a city that disenfranchises all of those who inhabit it. Pushed to the edges of blue-collar workers birthed into incurable poverty. A good day for Jimmy is not having his beat-up car die on the way to his job at the steel stamping company. His love interest, played by the late Brittany Murphy, had a similar soul-crushing job of bussing tables with bigger dreams to move to New York to model.
The Motor City is ripped straight out of the midwest in the dead center of the 90s, lacking any sort of glamour or high class. Destitution reeks on Jimmy as it does on all those he comes across; most of whom want to pull him back down into the bucket anytime they see him tasting any degree of success.
“You know how many abandoned buildings we have in Detroit? How are you suppose to take pride in your neighborhood with shit like that next door? Do the city tear them down? No. They too busy building casinos and taking money from the people.” — DJ Iz (played by late De’Angelo Wilson)
Besides “Gotta Get Mine” by MC Breed, Jimmy and his friends ride around listening to and battling over East Coast and West Coast music. Midwest music didn’t get national radio play in the mid-90s and barely got any even after Eminem blew up (Royce Da 5’9”, Elzhi, Black Milk and Obie Trice are the strong runner-ups).
Hip-hop was created in 1973 in South Bronx from a community that had debilitating neighborhoods, no more humanities classes and an undying need for self-expression. It’s a music genre produced from sampling black soul and funk artists to have black voices rap over could inspire other musicians, and in the case of 8 Mile, a white kid from Detriot. There were few white rappers from that era in the mainstream. Vanilla Ice, essentially a white MC Hammer, was the exception and not the norm.
It wasn’t as easy for Jimmy, a white rapper from Detroit, to get the attention he needed to be successful and emerge from his poverty. No one was checking for Detroit rappers on either of the coasts and the locals expressed animosity due to the cultural baggage. His friend Future (Mekhi Phifer) pushes him like Rocky’s Paulie and Wink (Eugene Byrd) only has the golden goose to promise him. But a simple taste of his potential is enough to keep him satisfied.
The obstacles Jimmy encounters should never have occured. When Poppa Doc (Anthony Mackie) points a gun at Jimmy’s face and says, “I could end your shit right here and nobody would miss you,” it’s true to the system. He would have been just another dead impoverished kid on the north side of Detroit who was known for showing up at a hip-hop event or two. Its ambiguous ending, when taken away from the life story of Eminem, is hopeful yet mundane. He won the big battle, but rap isn’t paying his bills or raising his little sister. It’s an open ended conclusion and it even leaves room for a hopeful future, but as the film concludes, Jimmy’s rap career seems to be a simple escape from his own monotonous reality.
8 Mile showcases the importance of having the capacity to pursue an artistic outlet and finding the venues to dispel that artistry. Everything Jimmy goes through does nothing but empower his words to hit like ricochet bullets with a room full of strangers hanging on his every word. An impoverished area like the Detroit presented in the movie can trap a person’s body, revenue, and liveliness, but no matter the disadvantages, it can’t trap the mind of a true artist.
