I hope to write these newsletters more frequently as I have the time.
Movies:
8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2001): One of my fondest movie-watching memories is sitting with my friends Anthony and Anushee in the library after school, sharing headphones and watching 8 Mile on a tiny old laptop. We hushed each other during every rap battle to keep from screaming. The film is a masterpiece about genius and class solidarity, about a factory worker Amadeus in a world of Salieris. What struck me this time around, however, was not the rivalry between Eminem’s B-Rabbit and his battle rap foe, Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie, really good here), but that of B-Rabbit and his friend Future (Mekhi Phifer), the host of the battles who signs B-Rabbit up to battle without his permission, who urges B-Rabbit to stick around the Shelter (the venue that hosts these battles) with the argument that taking on these gruelling tasks is what it takes to eventually make it big. (And when would that be? Future can’t say for sure.) B-Rabbit, however muted and angry, is fully conscious that talents are precious and is willingly hostile to overextending his generosity, of letting just about anyone profit off of his gift in hopes of recording one demo.
Underlying the film is the tension between the artist and the manager who values public exposure over artistic development, the artist and the curator who thinks they know better. The film continually problematizes the fact that B-Rabbit is surrounded by both friends and enemies who are less skilled than him, and therefore are not in the position to make the decisions that will define his future as an artist. Mocked by many for being “white trash,” in private quarters we see B-Rabbit writing lyrics as he watches his baby sister (neglected by the siblings’ alcoholic mother and her violent boyfriend) sleep—these are the nights that keep B-Rabbit going everyday from the car factory to the stage and to the trailer park again. Those hours when he is alone to himself, without needing to dumb himself down to others or negotiate contracts and deals and schedules he didn’t plan for, free to let the words flow.
In rewatching this film I was reminded of another film about a factory worker, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, in that both films have a rotational rhythm like a wheel rolling through days and evenings at a monotonous pace, with a major rupture waiting in the distance. Methodically, I feel that the climax of 8 Mile comes at the very end of what seems like maybe two weeks or so, during the rap battle between B-Rabbit and Papa Doc. The turning point, of course, is B-Rabbit’s actual rap in the final round against Papa Doc.
There are casual battles throughout, maybe a few bars spit here and there, but Hanson reserves the full display for the very end like a final cry from B-Rabbit to the world in a very strategically calculated, hilarious but moving argument: (1) he and his friends are losers, he knows this, (2) what divides him and Papa Doc is less their racial difference but their class difference (Papa Doc, or Clarence, as we learn, is not who he says he is, and he’s even more ashamed of this than B-Rabbit is of his poverty), which is in fact what unites B-Rabbit with the Detroit audience, and (3) “Fuck everybody! Fuck y'all if you doubt me!” After the battle, Future asks B-Rabbit if he’d like to join him as a host for the rap battles. This is much like the common and sadly often correct stereotype of the failed artist-turned-curator or critic, who places their faith in holding out or waiting long enough in the proximity of art for a window of opportunity to one day create something themselves. It’s a risky gamble with the promise of at least some stability, but B-Rabbit shocks all of his friends by politely declining the offer and walking, alone, to the factory instead.
Books:
I am currently reading Babel-17 by Samuel Delany and I like it very much. Last month, I completed Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a two-part essay on the closures of porn theatres in New York City’s Time Square. I love the structure of the essay, since the first part is mostly anecdotal and it then transitions into the theoretical arguments of the second part. However, I do prefer the former over the latter because I believe Delany’s argument against the closures (that the theatres encourage “interclass contact” between different social classes in the city) to be a bit too lenient as it overlooks another type of interclass contact other than sexual or interpersonal intimacy, which is class violence. (He acknowledges this, but more discussion would’ve been useful to developing the theory further.) The essay still contains many interesting ideas that I’d never previously considered on sexuality and pornography, city planning and the definitions of a social space, as well as invaluable stories about Delany’s own excursions in these theatres for almost three decades.
I also finally finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as I read about half of it three years ago. I want to retain my full opinion until I finish its sequel, Parable of the Talents, but what I did conclude was that the book is yet another showcase of a prototypical Butler protagonist, a young woman who is usually cold and calm but also sporadically volatile, however, she is never afraid to be the first to extend care to a stranger, though not always in the most expressive of ways. Butler is exceptional at portraying women whose nurturing for others branches from a separate tradition of care rather than that of the maternal (for any proof of this, just read Wild Seed or Bloodchild). Parable of the Sower is about whether this type of branching off—via the formation of a new family, a new religion—is sustainable for forming an alternate society within the United States. I already have my conclusions about how that would turn out in such a vicious and bloodthirsty America as she has so hauntingly described, but I believe that Butler likely shares my views, based on what I do know about the next book. I’ll save those thoughts for next time.
Recently:
Isiah Medina, Inventing the Future (2020).
Isiah Medina’s second feature, Inventing the Future, is now available to watch and download for free at Quantity Cinema’s website. The film is based on Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. It is obviously relevant, we can say that with confidence. Within the last few weeks, the phrase “universal basic income” has lurched into the mainstream political lexicon like never before; meanwhile, we face mass lay-offs, limited sick leave, reduced pay or forced work attendance to perform tedious labour in the face of deadly danger, and increasingly fascistic police mandates to stay away from each other or else pay the price. These procedures, along with an overwhelming lack of state welfare, UBI, rent and loan forgiveness, et cetera, circumscribe one’s freedom to even enjoy what might otherwise be considered “free” time because every second without these forms of help is a devastating financial loss and increasing push into jeopardy.
The film addresses these circumstances as obstacles facing a limited political imagination from which we derive only immediate and not long-term responses. We must hope for and pursue another future. On a more personal level, this movie is significant to me as one of very few pictures to feature diverse communities both on-screen and off-screen—members of the working class, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people—that advocates for objectivity, logic, and rationality, as well as the end of capitalism, without the scars of suffering or blood spilled in the streets, or the individual emotional purging that everyone (from curators and programmers to critics and audiences) craves for the feeding. The film’s cast is not weighed down by the notion that anything outside of their subjective or ethnographic experience does not belong to them and therefore cannot be discussed. They occupy and take back spaces of luxury, often placed in front of a green screen that elevates them out of a present-day precarity.
Writing as a critic, I argue that one of the most distinctive, and controversial, qualities about Medina as an auteur is that in an era of art-making that obsessively measures and fixates on artist bios, and defines avant-garde cinema as nothing more than cheap diaries, he very proudly maintains an impenetrability against those who demand personal credentials—his race, ethnicity, gender, and class background, his family and friends, his relationship to arts institutions and the state. His first feature, 88:88, films Winnipeg not only with cellphones but also with the RED camera, and because it withholds any narrative exposition or “story” (the term many use for these types of films when they really mean an all-exposing confession, or “explain your life to me so that I may feel sorry for you”) of poverty, some still believe the film to be a scripted work of fiction starring actors, or an invasive documentary made by an interloper (the film is neither). Surely, these criticisms suggest, poor people would never make a non-narrative film about politics and philosophy, let alone care about such topics. Instead of bowing to the demands for a more affective divulgence, Medina focuses on ideas and plans that extend further than the realm of identity, and this is all that really matters when you choose to look ahead and think of what is best for the world and all that we love on its evolving foundation.
I hope you enjoy the film.