8 Mile (2002)
8 Mile Road is a depressing stretch of rundown buildings, gas stations, fast-food outlets, and strip malls that separates the rich and poor areas of Detroit, the most racially segregated city in the United States. South of 8 Mile Road, Detroit is overwhelmingly African American. The suburbs north of 8 Mile Road are overwhelmingly European American.
Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith (Eminem) is a member of the white minority in the poor area. He and his family live in a trailer park near 8 Mile Road. Rabbit slouches and keeps a beanie pulled low over his head, as if hiding from the world or keeping it at bay. His close friends think he is a gifted rap artist but his more numerous enemies think a white boy rapping is a travesty. They ridicule Rabbit and call him Elvis. He meets Alex (Brittany Murphy), a beautiful young woman who discerns his talent, but she betrays him. No wonder Rabbit is sullen and angry, reserving his rare smiles for his little sister.
Two rap competitions bracket the movie. In the first session, Rabbit has 45 seconds to out-insult his opponent. Instead, he freezes and is laughed and booed off the stage. In the second session, near the end of the movie, he has 90 seconds to prove his mettle. This time, he succeeds brilliantly.
The lyrics in the second rap session are worth heeding for their sociological implications. Eminem first anticipates the attack of his African American opponent, Papa Doc, by listing his own deficiencies: I’m a white rapper, I’m a bum, I live in a trailer with my mom, my friend is so dumb he shot himself, my girlfriend betrayed me, and so forth. “Tell these people something they don’t know about me,” Rabbit taunts. After taking the wind out of his opponent’s sails, he dissects Papa Doc with the following words:
But I know something about you:
You went to Cranbrook, that’s a private school.
What’s the matter dawg, you embarrassed?
This guy’s a gangster?
His real name’s Clarence.
And Clarence lives at home with both parents.
And Clarence’s parents have a real good marriage.
Cranbrook is a prep school in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb north of 8 Mile Road. Clarence, it turns out, is not quite the streetwise gang member from a single-parent family he makes himself out to be.
Clarence, however, is big news. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods (where the poverty rate is 40% or higher) doubled. During the economic boom of the 1990s, the process of poverty concentration went into reverse. Two and a half million Americans moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods and mostly into less impoverished, older, inner-ring suburbs around major metropolitan areas. Nowhere was the reversal more dramatic than in Detroit.
The phenomenon represented by Clarence is encouraging yet fraught with danger. On the one hand, poor people are better off if they are widely dispersed rather than spatially concentrated. Spatially concentrated poor people have to deal not only with their own poverty but with a violent environment, low-performing schools, and a lack of positive role models. Thus, the exodus from the inner city is a positive development because it puts poor people in neighborhoods where poverty is less concentrated. On the other hand, the exodus increases the percentage of poor people in many of the older, inner-ring suburbs around major metropolitan areas. Particularly now that the economic boom of the 1990s has ended, this may result in the migration of many of the social ills of the inner city into the inner suburbs. If Clarence’s children grow up where he did, they may be less susceptible to the ridicule of an Eminem.