8 Mile is Rocky with literacy
I’m a known whore for PlutoTV, and this week they put 8 Mile in rotation. On watching it again for the first time in at least 15 years, I couldn’t help apply my own life to the lessons of Rocky, Rabbit, and the American Dream.
In Rocky’s 1970s Philadelphia, physical prowess, training, and violence creates winners. Grit and determination, sure, but at the end of the day you gotta have a reach and width of someone like Sylvester Stallone taking weird ass experimental 70s steroids to get to a place like that.
Philadelphia is reeling from the loss of the steel industry across the state, the fracking boom is still generations away, and in an American city with almost no economic ladders left the only option left is to fight your way out.
Meanwhile, in 8-Mile Eminem plays himself as a small-statured, but creatively obsessed writer who also uses battle, the act of a 1v1 ring fight where two men enter and only one leaves, as his opportunity to ascend through the ranks of a 1990s America that’s to rewarded every major city in the country with Clintonian riches, except Detroit.
Detroit is crumbling, decimated by the influx of cheaper, more reliable, higher-quality cars from Germany, Japan, and South Korea over the previous 40 years. At the same time we watch Rabbit take his commute home, and a soundtrack plays over real shots from real streets in a city that had been all but forgotten by time and economic purpose.
Yada yada, the hero struggles and transforms and you bet your ass there’s a dope montage and he triumphs victorious etc etc.
I just thought it was interesting to connect the two because in some ways, it shows our evolution as a viewing public.
What does any authority figure tell you when you hit someone as a kid?
“Use your words.”
8-Mile was the movie for a newer generation with much higher rates of literacy than the 1970s, and the battle wasn’t about physical domination. Since WWII America had lost Korea, Vietnam, and barely made it out of Iraq the first time. The idea of American exceptionalism being a pure expression of physical force was degrading, and the new era called for cleverness above all else.
Education, literacy, the ability to understand English with its many entendres and turns of phrase was the new battlefield. Intelligence above all else. If we can’t punch our way out of it, we’ll have to think this thing through instead.
As a writer, the quote from Hamilton always hits hardest: “I wrote my way out.”
Whether it’s code, prose, raps, or beats, writing your way out used to mean something in this country. But since AI scraped and stole every piece of art ever published on the web with zero repercussions, I guess we’ll have to see what comes next.
9-Mile: The AI rap battle? Is that a thing.