The Dark Story of Eminem (34 page)

There were few rough moments during its shoot. The biggest strain was in its inexperienced star’s head. Not just trying to act, but charged with writing the rap battles, and spending spare moments in his trailer writing soundtrack songs in the character of Jimmy, or in a mobile studio completing the soundtrack and
The Eminem Show
, he had stretched himself to the limit. Hanson’s warnings had not been enough. Being a movie star was draining him.

“It was unnatural to him,” Hanson said. “There’s great courage necessary to lay oneself open as one has to [in order] to give the kind of performance I wanted. There was also courage involved because he wanted to be good. He wasn’t entering into this lightly. He felt he had a lot at stake. He has sufficient ego and pride that he wanted his performance as well as the movie to appear truthful. And it took over his life. It was also challenging for him because it’s very different than his normal process. He is somebody who does what he does in a very solitary way. Much the way we show in the movie, when we show Jimmy writing – those papers are Marshall’s work-sheets – that little tiny writing, densely packed all over the page. It’s a very private and interior process, and in making a movie not only did he have me to deal with constantly, but also the other actors, and the mechanics of movie-making. It was very invasive in his life. He found it wearing.”

“I work a lot of hours in the studio, but it’s on my own time and it’s something I’m in control of,” Eminem agreed to MTV Asia. “It hurts being on somebody else’s schedule and somebody else’s time. It was gruesome. It was like acting boot camp. It was tough, five in the morning till seven, eight at night. Then literally have enough time to go to sleep, and come right back.” To Zadie Smith he confided, “acting was hard, not second nature, like rapping. I might do another, but not one where I’m in every scene and the whole thing’s riding on me.” As Hanson remembered, “After we were into it a few weeks, he said to me, ‘You weren’t kidding …’ And the last day of shooting, I asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ And he said, ‘Never again.’ And he meant it. It was hard. But rewarding, for both of us.”

Once the film had wrapped, word swiftly started to build that it had all been worthwhile. The first, rough cut was seen by critics at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8.

It starts in a toilet. Eminem as Jimmy is shadow-boxing, holding his hand like there’s a mic in it, preparing for rap battle. His eyes look dead, and he’s so nervous he starts to throw up. Urged on stage by fellow members of the Three One Third crew – 313 is the Detroit city phone code, 810 signals the suburbs, skin colour read in digits, like the number of Miles high you live – he looks out through dim, smoky air at a hostile black crowd. A taller black rapper, his opponent (played by Proof), gets in his face, and uses his 45 seconds of their battle to say people laugh at him “‘cos you’re white”. At Jimmy’s turn, he just clutches the mic to his throat like it’s choking him, eyes scared, brain blank, saying nothing. Boos rise around him, and he leaves the stage. It was all the humiliations Eminem had suffered at the real Shelter and other clubs in one scene, the years of failure his fans had never seen revived in his first major film.

Elsewhere,
8 Mile
ranged round its star’s private Ground Zero with investigating eyes. The cathedral-like car park of the Michigan Theater, the burnt buildings left to rot in the middle of streets, the indoor gun range outside his mother’s trailer park and domestic nightmare behind her door, the bus rides up 8 Mile to his auto plant job; it was the subliminal background of his records given flesh, Hanson’s fight to film there justified. In one powerful scene, where Three One Third roam through an abandoned, once prosperous family house, in the unsafe hollows of which a little girl has been raped, then burn it to the ground, as their militant member DJ Iz spits, “Does the city tear it down? No, too busy building casinos,” the dramatic addressing of a Detroit issue for a global audience showed what a thorn Eminem now was to his home town, and how important. As Jimmy and his crew capered in the flames, the scene, Hanson’s idea, recalled the thousands of such dangerous eyesores burned down by angry citizens during “Devil’s Night” (Detroit’s Halloween, as in the D12 song) in 1995, the riot inferno of 1967, the prosperity building and its city had once enjoyed, and the happy family home Jimmy and Eminem were denied.

Everyone watched, too, for more clues to Eminem’s own past, the new details he had confided to Silvers. Basinger’s glamorous but unstable, unreliable Mom showed more tired if incompetent love for her son than Debbie had in Eminem’s memory, though her drunken rages and leeching from slob boyfriends seemed familiar. Her grand offer to hand Jimmy her car for his birthday so he can get to a job he can’t afford to lose the next morning, only for the rustbucket to die when he turns the key, seems a symptomatic exasperation, stored from life, as does Jimmy’s fight with the boyfriend she sides with, because she needs his money while his little sister cowers in a corner. But the melding of fiction and biography made it all guesswork, the forthrightness of his voice on record impossible here.

The most revealing scenes were of creativity: scribbling on his pad on the bus, or trading rhymes with Future in a sunny street, pleasure brightening his face. Eminem’s whole performance, which carried the film, was built on such simple truthfulness; his high, light speaking voice, unfamiliar smile, and blue eyes capable of soft dreaminess as well as deadness, and his slight, white frame compared to almost everyone around him, made him vulnerable and sympathetic, where the public voice he had built since the times the film recalled could be strident and divisive. In a discreet sex scene with Murphy, the relieved need of his sighed out breath and drooping head as he came was unusually tender and erotic. And in the battle scenes, a lightness of touch quite different from his own raps remained, even in the pitch of desperate intensity of his final, winning confrontation. “Come on, Elvis,” taunts his gigantic black opponent, fanning a pack of race cards. Jimmy’s Eminem-scripted reply simply lacerates his own white trash flaws better than his enemy ever can, a return to the crushed esteem of
The Slim Shady LP
that success had seemed to bury. The choked silence of Jimmy’s start has been spat out, to clog his speechless enemy’s throat. But, true to the limited triumph of working-class rappers who don’t become Eminem, he follows his victory by going back to his factory shift. The last shot shows a harried, private smile as he wanders away.

The Toronto screening exceeded everyone’s hopes. The crowd, including Festival attendees Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone and Dustin Hoffman (though not Eminem, gigging in Detroit) roared Jimmy on in the battle scenes, and Hanson left the cinema feeling exhilarated. He told reporters: “The reception took my breath away.” Early reviews were good, too. Eminem then stoked local flames with a surprise, MTV-sponsored live show after an
8 Mile
preview at Michigan State University, on October 11. Students queued for eight hours, just in case their state’s most famous school drop-out showed.

Eminem then added one element of substance to the building hype, by releasing
8 Mile
‘s soundtrack on October 29. The talents he’d assembled for it showed his unquestioned hip-hop status now, the distance he’d dragged himself from the desperate unknown the movie recalled: Jay-Z, Nas and Gangstarr were among the stars who contributed mostly strong, battle-style raps. Eminem also produced tracks by rough, Shady Records-signed Detroit rapper Obie Trice, and early copies included a second CD spotlighting Shady talent. Eminem’s silent, sudden transition from Dre’s protégé to Detroit’s new Berry Gordy, picking up the city’s raw music talent, left in the gutter since Motown fled for LA in 1972, was confirmed when he described his A&R policy to
Launch
. “Every artist I’ve signed so far is from Detroit – and that’s kinda how I’m gonna keep it in the family. So, no matter what Detroit says about me, how much dirt they wanna spread and gossip, I’m doing something for the city. So suck my dick.” Ironically, the one exception to his rule, New York rapper 50 Cent, also on the soundtrack, would soon prove to be Eminem’s most successful discovery.

The soundtrack’s real thrill, though, was its three new Eminem songs, plus his appearance on two more, a further track on the second CD, and seven producer’s credits (including taking charge of his only commercial rap rival, Jay-Z). It was more than half a fresh Eminem album, four months after the last, and just before a major film. It also marked, incredibly, an instant musical and lyrical break from
The Eminem Show
. Eminem, having possibly reached the limit of his own life as raw material, had levered open a new part of his brain, to inhabit Jimmy Smith.

It had been Hanson’s idea to show Jimmy constructing a rap during
8 Mile
, littering the movie with fragments of its words and beats, and climaxing with the finished work over the credits. Eminem wrote the track, ‘Lose Yourself ‘, during filming.
8 Mile
‘s fictional rapper, in effect, had created its musical centrepiece as the movie was made, a reality-bending first Eminem was built for. “We talked a lot about what rap’s opportunities meant to the character, and what the song needed to express,” Hanson recalled. “And it was a struggle for him. Because his music, up to that point, all came from within, in whatever form he felt right, and it was all extremely personal and self-referential. Here, he was doing something that was also an assignment, and it needed to apply to his emotional life as reflected in his character Jimmy.”

Released as a single on December 2, ‘Lose Yourself’ was Eminem’s first US number one, and one of his most powerful records. Effortlessly commercial, it was based around a stabbing bass riff suggesting the unreleased, repetitive tension of Jimmy’s life (rock by now integral to his sound) and triumphal Eighties synths, echoing the themes of the
Rocky
films
8 Mile
resembled. Within this hit frame, ‘Lose Yourself’s crafted nature seemed to sharpen and discipline its writer’s wits, forcing him into Jimmy’s head. It was in this song and its
8 Mile
companions, more than his performance in the film itself, that Eminem truly reached back into his depressed, almost hopeless past as Marshall Mathers with an actor’s skill. His lyrics re-created his sweaty palms and stalling brain and choking mouth as he failed in the real Shelter, the cold shock of reality reasserting itself as defeat destroyed his dreams again. ‘Lose Yourself’ slipped into Jimmy’s home life too, the subtle separation from Marshall more evident in this apologetic line:
“Mom, I love you, but this trailer’s got to go.”
How fictional that apology was, and how much a soft corrective to ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’, could only be guessed, in the grey zone of this new writing style. But more innovative still was the verse when Eminem suddenly broke character, jumping into a cautionary vision of his own success’s underside, and possible future collapse:
“he’s cold product, they’ve moved onto the next shmoe who blows/ the soap opera’s told.”
Reminiscence and premonition, fiction, autobiography and obituary, ‘Lose Yourself’ showed that, even with
“the soap opera told”
, inspiration still flooded Eminem’s veins.

Of the other new songs, ‘8 Mile’ was almost as striking. Including another startling series of metaphors for the cramped depression Jimmy/ Marshall suffered before success saved them – asking
“am I just another crab in the bucket?”
, wanting to jump right out of his skin – what lingered from ‘8 Mile’ was its sound: the wail of a train horn, followed by the click-clack rhythm of old railway tracks, which Eminem imagined trudging down, till his home was left behind. He had begun wanting to be Ice-T. By 2002, Elvis, Aerosmith, and the symbols and sounds of Depression bluesmen and hobos were welcome in his world, too.

The
8 Mile
soundtrack went straight to number one in the US, selling 703,000 and sucking
The Eminem Show
back into the Top 10. The next week, the final part of Eminem’s extraordinary year of achievement fell into place. On November 7, he attended
8 Mile
‘s US première, held, of course, at the Phoenix Theater, the only first-run cinema left in Detroit. Family members he was speaking to and friends were all with him. Ever the responsible father, he put his hands over Hailie’s eyes during his sex scene. By the end of that weekend, the film had made $54.5 million at the US box office. Stepping into a mainstream medium, to be judged by Americans to whom he had until now been just a filthy rumour, reviews too were effusive.
Entertainment Weekly
‘s critic was not the only one to dub him “a hip-hop James Dean”, while many also grasped the new lessons on US class and race Hanson and his star were trying to teach. Some also noted the disappointing conservatism of the plot compared to Eminem’s own unbound records, as in
LA Times
critic Kenneth Turan’s insightful review: “
8 Mile
is very much an old-fashioned somebody-up-there-likes-me kind of story, replete with traditional plot devices that … are decades old. This … facilitates the mainstreaming of rap, enabling civilian audiences to feel the safety and security of familiarity that’s simply not on the cards when listening to Eminem’s earlier, more nasty and threatening work … [But] his hostility, savagery and disgust as well as his undeniable musical gifts come from too deep a place to be completely blanded out the way Elvis’ talents notoriously were … Eminem is an actor with a rare gift for rage, and movie careers, even big ones, have been built on less.”

It was true that the film came most alive in Eminem’s self-scripted battles, and in that sense was a standard pop showcase. But in also crafting Hollywood’s first portrait of working-class Detroit, and the dreams that can thrive there, director and actor could be well satisfied. Eminem was sure of the positive message he wanted to give: “No matter where you come from, you can break out of that cycle. You can make something of yourself.” America’s most politically radical pop star still believed in its Dream, and wanted others to. Even false hope was better than the despair he’d known in his darkest Detroit days.