After 1 1/2 hours you realize you haven't seen them sing at all. Then they draw their metaphoric guns, it becomes like High Noon. The experience of how the film draws you into its world allows it to explore the catharsis of art and pain. The things he's singing about, you have now seen with your own eyes, so it is as shocking for us as it is the audience, because suddenly he rises above even we, the viewer. The doorman going from hating him, to respecting him, becomes participatory with the audience. And the stakes couldn't be any lower. This isn't a TV show in front of millions of people, or a boxing match covered by national media. It's just a basement rap-off. Notice how the song is about authenticity and respect, and he destroys the other guy for having no authenticity, for not earning his art. He has earned it through poverty and pain. Interesting this is not the measure of how the world works--a Clarence will go farther in life in every institution, highlighting how rare an Eminem is in the world. Also illustrated, with the factory manager. So he got extra shifts, who cares? He gets to work a terrible job even more, and it's treated as some kind of victory. Well. The universe is rewarding him with more responsibility. It is treated, cinematically, as a gigantic victory for him.
This film, 8 Mile, is teaching us the most brutal of lessons, that enlightenment comes through participation, presenting the most rigged, unfair, horrible conditions through both spiritual constructions (stoicism, buddhism, christianity), and genre film constructions (samurai, western, sports). However art is the most potent of cinematic symbols because it is the direct proxy for mastery and nirvana. It is also why it also doesn't show him getting famous. His small victory here, scales in our imagination, however, he could easily be pushing the rock up the hill for his whole life. Enlightenment becomes a process, just in the case of it being productive for the viewer, it must come with capitalist rewards to make sense for us. This is just the easiest shorthand for a film. He takes the new shifts, accepts the suffering, and churns it all into Art, by mastering this craft he is portraying integration, he becomes Enlightened. Because there is no material equivalent to godliness, so you are just handed the entire kingdom. He becomes 'Eminem', a billionaire, rich, famous, all his dreams happening; but it is just one way there, no other way, and it doesn't show it happening. It fades out at the crescendo, showing wisdom. The good films sort of hint this direction because it puts it in our hands.
This film, 8 Mile, is teaching us the most brutal of lessons, that enlightenment comes through participation, presenting the most rigged, unfair, horrible conditions through both spiritual constructions (stoicism, buddhism, christianity), and genre film constructions (samurai, western, sports). However art is the most potent of cinematic symbols because it is the direct proxy for mastery and nirvana. It is also why it also doesn't show him getting famous. His small victory here, scales in our imagination, however, he could easily be pushing the rock up the hill for his whole life. Enlightenment becomes a process, just in the case of it being productive for the viewer, it must come with capitalist rewards to make sense for us. This is just the easiest shorthand for a film. He takes the new shifts, accepts the suffering, and churns it all into Art, by mastering this craft he is portraying integration, he becomes Enlightened. Because there is no material equivalent to godliness, so you are just handed the entire kingdom. He becomes 'Eminem', a billionaire, rich, famous, all his dreams happening; but it is just one way there, no other way, and it doesn't show it happening. It fades out at the crescendo, showing wisdom. The good films sort of hint this direction because it puts it in our hands.