eminem

New Realism

By Crispin Sartwell

Eminem is the pre-eminent figure in American popular culture, and in some ways the most admirable. Eminem is an activist for just one thing: the truth. He's the poster boy for the new realism.

We have, it turns out, managed to survive the postmodern era (1960-2000), an era in which, as such eminent French theoreticians as Jean Baudrillard argued, images replaced reality, and the media replaced the world, in which the whole earth became Disney World, and even we ourselves became fabrications.

The great pop stars of the postmodern era were born in 1958: Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince. They were shape-shifters, people who actually tried to have no self outside a series of video images. They made perfect pop music: music largely without guts or roots, but at its best providing a perfectly crafted, utterly mediated pleasure.

But in 2002, Madonna is struggling into motherhood and trying to find God. Prince seems to have dissipated, like a fog. Michael Jackson, in his effort to be reduced literally to an image or fantasy, had become a monster, someone at whom it is difficult even to look, a reductio ad absurdum of the postmodern, a demonstration of the limits of power to remake our world into something clean and pretty.

Folks like Bill Clinton and Al Gore were postmodern politicians, concerned almost exclusively with polling and image-making, and living in a realm well beyond quaint notions like authenticity or belief.

The Matrix was an interesting moment in the genesis of the new reality. The attraction of the movie was largely in the glamour of its virtual reality, in which many of the limitations of our physical bodies could be suspended. One could dodge bullets, or spin through the air like a supernatural Baryshnikov.

Nevertheless, the movie was a New Realist manifesto, in which rebels waged a guerilla war on behalf of reality. The reality they were fighting for was gritty and dangerous compared to the state's artificial world. But it was precious simply because it was real. And The Matrix was, like almost all science fiction, a parable of the present.

The flawed world underneath the virtual reality is the setting Eminem's great "semi-autobiographical" film 8 Mile. It takes place in a trailer park and the ghettoes of Detroit in the mid-nineties, one of the many zones of America and the world that the Disneyfication seems to have passed over.

I saw 8 Mile the day after I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In many ways they are exquisite opposites: one a computer-generated fantasy world in which people are mere emblems, the other a shattered Detroit in which people are complex and fundamentally flawed.

Indeed, Eminem's character, B Rabbit, himself is portrayed as a morose lout, whose relationships, while important, are largely superficial. His mother (Kim Basinger) and girlfriend (Brittany Murphy) are both, to say the least, problematic people, but they have redemptive moments.

Rabbit makes his way through a series of crushing humiliations. He chokes onstage at a rap battle. He moves back in with his mother in the trailer park, as she receives an eviction notice. He's cuckolded by an old friend. He gets severely beaten up by a rival crew of rappers.

But, in the final scenes, worthy of Hoosiers, he wins a rap battle by a strategy of total pre-emptive honesty. Through a face that registers tremendous pain and defiance, as well as a touch of humor, he tells the story of every humiliation he's experienced, leaving his opponent no ammunition.

That's what Eminem's whole career has been: an absolute commitment to parade his demons and his flaws publicly: an absolute determination to say what no one else will say, to tell his own truth.

This entails that what he says is, at times, horrible. And we see his bigotries as well as his creativity, his stupidities and blindnesses as well as his intense intelligence and courage. Eminem is wrong about homosexuality and wrong about women (though so right about race). But that very wrongness is part of what makes him true, because he says it.

I predict that we have seen almost the last of Britney Spears and Al Gore, and are in for some real moments.

Eminem is to pop culture what John McCain or Jesse Ventura are to politics: new realists who embody our exhaustion with the virtual, our disillusionment with illusion, our yearning toward reality, and the perverse, stupid, beautiful persistence of our humanity.

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