Home is where the heart is.
Home is so remote.
(Lene Lovich 1978)

I can see it in your face,
You’re in the wrong place
(Mobb Deep 1995)

Culture is not limited to a night at the opera, an afternoon at the art gallery, or ‘high tea’ on the lawns of Government House. Certainly these are aspects or elements of a particular person’s culture, just as television game shows, Mills & Boon, or a chat down at the local hair-dresser’s are aspects of another person’s culture. But culture is much more than which books one reads or films one chooses to watch. Culture is about how people live, how they interact – not just with each other, but also with their environment. It is about finding our place in the world, developing a sense of belonging. The places where we live, where we work, shop and play, are not merely physical, inert sites. They contribute to how we identify ourselves, how we position ourselves in society – and in that sense, they are organic. If home is indeed where the heart is, then the roads we walk are the arteries through which flows the blood that fuels our cultural identity. But sometimes a clot, a blockage, can occur – one can lose oneself, lose one’s ’sense of belonging’ or identity. Sometimes home can seem so remote.

Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile (2002) may be considered by some critics as just another tale of one person’s quest for success against adversity, a tale previously presented in films such as Rocky (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), or Glitter (2001). But more than this, it is the tale of a young man’s search for his own identity - a young, white man in a black man’s world. It is not just the story of losing oneself “in the music, the moment”, but of being lost in an urban desert; caught on the wrong side of the tracks, the wrong side of Eight Mile Road (Eminem 2002). It is not a tale of success with a happy ending, but rather a tale of uncertainty in an uncertain world, and that world is Detroit, 1995 - a modern metropolis that encapsulates all the myths and contradictions modernity has to offer. If, as Berman (1982/1988, p. 29) claims, machines are an element of modernity, then Detroit, the heart of the American automobile industry is certainly a modern city. But Hanson’s Detroit is not a city of sparkling skyscrapers, parkland promenades or sidewalk bistros. It is an almost post-apocalyptic wasteland of disused shops, abandoned houses and an “art deco building turned parking lot” (Grundmann 2003). Even this carpark is a contradiction as it provides a venue, not so much for stationary vehicles, but for people participating in ‘rap duels’, a ‘modern’ form of fencing, where repartee, rather than riposte, serves to cut the flesh that spills the blood, not of corpuscles, but of pride and identity. These contests are how the protagonists in 8 Mile determine, define and shape their identities. They are a part of this modern environment that Berman (1982/1988, p. 15) contends, offers the promise of “adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation”, and they simultaneously threaten destruction. These are not the verbal jibes or name-calling of the primary school playground. These are carefully calculated vocal assaults that hold no quarter; and levels of income, education, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation make powerfully piercing projectiles.

Mirzoff (2002, p. 10) suggests that “questions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity” are important factors in the shaping and contestation of identity. Hanson poses such questions in a stark landscape. The decayed urban streets of Detroit are the arteries of this text, with the thumping beat of Rap music as the blood that allows those streets to breathe. But rather than a revitalising breath of life, it is more like the final rasp of death, or at least, despair. Detroit is very much a segregated city with the metropolitan area being predominantly black (Chinni 2002). Eight Mile Road serves as a boundary between this zone and the mostly white affluent suburbs to the north (Chinni 2002). It is a flat, seemingly endless “eight lanes of asphalt and concrete” separating white from black, rich from poor, new from old (Chinni 2002). It is into this chasm, this great divide of race and class that Hanson has dropped his hero, Jimmy ‘B-Rabbit’ Smith (Eminem).

The first word heard in this text is “word”. The first word uttered in a duel is “word” or “yo, word up” as if a call to arms, “En garde!”, and it is the word that does replace the épée as the weapon of choice for the duels that provide the main thrust of this text. The first scene of the film shows Rabbit preparing himself for just such a battle, by rehearsing in front of a mirror in the toilets of the battle venue, ‘The Shelter’. A shot of his face reflected in a cracked mirror signifies, perhaps, how his own persona is shattered, dysfunctional. The crack itself indicates that this mirror has borne witness to violence in a site of resistance, a resistance further evidenced by the discoloured, graffiti-covered walls. This is not the bathroom of a Hilton Hotel. This is a place of gloom and despair. There will be no cocktails, olives and swizzle-sticks served at The Shelter, the venue’s name surely a contradiction, for if this is the shelter, beware the storm.

The soundtrack is rap, a strong, defiant, male vocal with words of violence:

To all the killers and a hundred dollar billers…
you heard of us, official Queensbridge murderers,
the Mobb comes equipped with warfare, beware
of my crime family who got nuff shots to share.
(Mobb Deep 1995)

The atmosphere is tense and aggressive. A serious-looking Rabbit appears to be building up his confidence in a style reminiscent of Rocky Balboa, though the soundtrack in this case certainly opposes the uplifting inspirational intention of Rocky’s “Gonna Fly Now” (Conti 1976). His body, reflected in the mirror, shows the strength and intestinal fortitude of a practised performer, but the real man then loses his nerve in a toilet-bowl. As can be expected from a text that could be posited in the ‘underdog-beats-all-odds-to-come-up-top’ genre, Rabbit ‘chokes’ on his first duel. His loss is compounded by his recent split with girlfriend, Janeane (Taryn Manning), with whom he has left his car. He must now go, tail between his legs and garbage bag of clothes slung over his shoulder, back to his mother’s place in a ‘white trash’ trailer park. Here he finds his mother, Stephanie (Kim Basinger) in bed with Greg Buehl (Michael Shannon) from his former classroom. Hoping to place a band-aid over her son’s pain, Stephanie gives Rabbit her car. But the car does not start, so it is on the bus – late for work. This litany of despair kindles the fire of an angst that continues to be stoked throughout the film. But this angst might seem commonplace along the Eight Mile Road.

It is during the bus trip to work, when Hanson gives the audience a tour of the Eight Mile. Rabbit takes on the role of a ‘motorised’ flâneur, as he watches with an almost emotionless disdain while the bus takes him passed a loan shop, a liquor store with barred windows, a gun range, destroyed building, a sole pedestrian and lone dog on a footpath of cracked concrete and dead-looking trees.

This is not a vibrant metropolis. There is no hustle and bustle. It is an environment of despair and dissatisfaction that is covered by an air of confinement, an atmosphere of oppression. Rabbit’s workplace is a metal-stamping factory. It is heavy machinery, loud noise, and a monotonous repetition, that presses in on him just as the metal-stamping machines press out one car body part after another. This mechanical reproduction is, according to Berman (1982/1988, p. 29), “a familiar twentieth-century refrain … (whereby) modernity is constituted by its machines”. Interestingly, Rap music, Rabbit’s dream as a way out of this dystopic space, might also be considered as mechanical and repetitive with its trademark, thick and constant backbeat - a beat that is often acquired by appropriation, such as the use of ’sampled’ drumbeats and ’scratched’ records. As an urban sound, it is not surprising that Rap should exhibit such characteristics, and, as De Certeau (1985, p. 127) claims, appropriation is certainly a function of the modern city.

Back home, while working on his car, Rabbit uses appropriation to express the depression and desperation exacerbated by having to live in the trailer park. ‘Future’ (Mekhi Phifer) is sitting in the driver’s seat, symbolic of his position as Rabbit’s mentor – his ‘Uncle Tom’. In the background, coming from his mother’s trailer, can be heard the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974). This song is a tribute to Alabama, a song of praise, a song of pride:

Sweet home Alabama, where the skies are so blue,
Sweet home Alabama, Lord I’m coming home to you.
(Lynyrd Skynyrd 1974)

Future spurs Rabbit on in an appropriation that produces an irreverent rap, a contradiction where opposite values are brought together to seemingly create a whole. Yet the foundation can only ever remain disunited:

Future:	Well Jimmy moved in with his mother, Cuz he ain’t got no place to go.
Rabbit:	And now I’m right back in the gutter… Cuz I live at home in a trailer, Mom I’m comin’ home to you.

Though Rabbit has claimed he has come home, he is not settled, and this need to claim somewhere as home is a thread embroidered throughout this text. The question of home, or where one resides – where one posits oneself in society – is an important factor in the formation of one’s identity. To be able to say “I am at home” is being able to say “I am content”; “I am sated”; “I am proud of who I am and where I am”. Future is the only member of the ‘3-1-3′ gang, which includes Rabbit, Cheddar Bob (Evan Jones), Sol George (Omar Benson Miller) and DJ Iz (De’Angelo Wilson), who seems to be contented with who he is and where he is. Rapping in the carpark, Future refers to himself as “the metaphysical”, that is, concerned with abstract concepts such as “existence, causality, truth” (The Macquarie Dictionary 1997, p. 1353). Future exists now. Future is the epitome of modernity where the future is ‘in’ the present. Rabbit is unhappy with the ‘now’ and yearns for a better future.

While Rabbit’s dissatisfaction is, perhaps, more to do with his own internal politics - his relationships at home, DJ Iz has concerns for the urban environment and the politics involved in city planning. Having fixed the car, the gang goes for a cruise. During this outing, they come across an abandoned house that had been the scene of a child-rape incident.

DJ Iz:	You know how many abandoned buildings we have in Detroit? I mean, how ya s’posed to take pride in your neighbourhood with shit like that next door? And does the city tear ‘em down? No, they too busy building casinos and takin’ money from the people.
Sol George:	Shut your preachin’ ass up. Nobody care ’bout that shit.
DJ Iz:	Did you care when that crack-head raped that little girl? Ya think that would’ve happened if he didn’t have an abandoned house to take her to?

Later, at a party:

DJ Iz:

You better believe that place wouldn’t still be standin’ if it were on the other side of 8 Mile.

DJ Iz convinces the other members of the gang that it is time to take matters into their own hands. They burn the house down. During this scene, Rabbit finds a photograph of a family – mother, father, two children. He yearns for the comfort that the nuclear family represents. As they watch the house burn, Rabbit tells new girlfriend, Alex (Brittany Murphy), that he had wished, as a child, to live in a house like this one. It is not so much the type of building, or even its location, but what it represents to him – the security signified by the suburban lifestyle: the family home, white-picket fence, with a swing out the back. He refuses to admit to Alex that he lives at home with his mother; that they live in a trailer park. The following evening, Rabbit comes home to find Wink (Eugene Byrd), a friend who has promised to help Rabbit get a recording contract, and Alex have both come to the trailer and are sitting inside talking with his mother. He runs out of the trailer, embarrassed. Alex follows him:

Alex:	Why’d you take off?
Rabbit:	I don’t really live here.
Alex:	So? Why’d you take off?
Rabbit:	I just…
Alex:	You don’t have to be embarrassed about where you live, Jimmy.
Rabbit:	I don’t live here!

Rabbit’s embarrassment is compounded by his belief that Alex, who plans to get out, to go to New York to become a model, will break through that imagined boundary that the Eight Mile represents – a goal of which he is envious, and of which he is unsure of being able to achieve himself. Previously that day, arriving at work, he says to Sol, “Ya ever wonder at what point ya get it and say fuck it man, when ya gotta stop livin’ up here and start livin’ down here?” He has already begun questioning his ability to improve his lot. However, it is not so much a surrender, but more, perhaps, a realisation of the importance to him of his family, in particular, his relationship with younger sister, Lily (Chloe Greenfield). While he writes rap-lyrics, she draws pictures of her own dreams for the comfort and security of family, representing in crayon her own yearning for the father figure that Rabbit has become for her. Rabbit realises that his mother cannot cope without him, or, at least, he feels that his mother needs his help to care for Lily.

A turning-point in this saga of Rabbit’s quest for his identity occurs when members of the ‘Free World’ gang, Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie), Lyckety-Splyt (Strike) and Lotto (Nashawn ‘Ox’ Breedlove), confront Rabbit at the trailer park. The Free World, led by Papa Doc, are the reigning champions of the rap duels at the Shelter. In an effort to deter Rabbit from challenging their position, they assault him, in front of Lily. Rather than frighten him off, this assault serves to ‘put him in his place’, in that Rabbit accepts that ‘his place’ is as a white, Detroit factory worker, who lives at home with his mother and sister in a trailer park. In retaliation for the beating he received, Rabbit verbally beheads each member of the Free World in a rap ’shoot-out’ at the Shelter corral, where the glare of vengeance, akin to a Clint Eastwood ’spaghetti’ Western, slices through the superficiality that holds that gang together.

The winning blow in these duels is usually dealt when the assailant appropriates the victim’s attributes, transforming them into vicious verbal bullets of derision and ridicule. Rabbit, however, appropriates himself; abuses himself before his opponents, leaving them with no gunpowder. Not only does he claim the rap duel championship, he also claims his own identity:

I know everything he’s got to say against me,
I am white, I am a fuckin’ bum, I do live in a trailer
with my mom…
I’m a piece of fuckin’ white trash, I say it proudly…
Here, tell these people something they don’t know
about me.

By a process of excorporation, Rabbit has used the music of the dominant culture of his environment to shape his own identity. He has accepted where he lives and the lifestyle that accompanies that position, that location. For Rabbit, the next thing to do is not to revel in the victory, not to consider this as a way out, a step up some imagined ladder of success. The next thing on Rabbit’s agenda is to go back to work in the metal-stamping factory; and from there, back to his home. Home, for Rabbit, is no longer remote. Home is where his heart is, and his heart is at home with his mother and sister in a trailer park on the Eight Mile Road.

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