American Stories: Barbershop and 8 Mile

...the legitimacy of hip-hop is not an issue for him or for anyone else in 8 Mile...

...Only the timely intervention of the others in the shop—someone slips a disc into the CD player, and everybody begins to dance—keeps the two men from coming to blows...

...It's Jimmy— "Booker T."—who's the real sell-out, who "can't compete" with a white man who's "blacker" than he is...

...His closing riposte: "Now tell these people something they don't know about me...

...as in, "Get out...

...These are narrative forms suited to our disillusioned age, in which the injunction to tell the truth is accompanied by the expectation that the truth will be awful...

...while the thousands of black men and women who, like himself, also sat in and went to jail have gotten a lot less...

...There's a painful irony in his claim that Isaac belongs in the white barbershop uptown: uptown is where Jimmy hopes he himself is headed...

...Witness the heightened academic requirements, the everincreasing amount of standardized testing, and the toughened exit exams that many states have imposed on high school students...

...Even as an account of Eminem's own early success, 8 Mile makes significant departures from reality...

...I I N THE CURRENT real world, however, con tempt for work that doesn't require aca demic excellence, let alone a college degree, is widespread...

...You don't belong here," he says...

...Little does Papa Doc realize that his opponent is vulnerable to the accusation that Isaac flings at Jimmy James: You wish you were me...

...Jackson and Sharpton got one thing right, though: Barbershop is a sassy film...

...The filmmakers expect us to believe that Jimmy's anxieties would be outweighed by his respect for expertise...

...and in his milieu, as in Rich's, it's proficiency in wordsmithing, not auto mechanics, that commands respect...

...Betraying them, he'd be betraying himself...

...This lesson comes hard to Calvin, who is fed up with the aggravations of running the small business that he inherited from his father and beguiled by fantasies of wealth, if not renown...

...Isaac is an equable guy, but no patsy...

...Eddie attributes Parks's celebrity to her association with the "N Double A C C P" [sic], dismisses Jackson with a four-letter obscenity, and calls King "a whore...

...Rabbit's knockout victory, moreover, results from a shrewd double exposure...

...A A T LEAST Barbershop grapples with the issues: legitimate vocation, racial entitlement, class mobility...

...For a man who imagines a career in public relations, a bad haircut (or something worse) would be hard to bear...

...he says, after learning that Future, his biggest fan and the Shelter's M.C., has signed him up for a second battle without asking him first...

...With Jimmy looking on in apparent disgust, Isaac emerges from a huge, rap-booming SUV and pauses on the sidewalk to exchange a full-body embrace with his black girlfriend before going in to work...

...Then he apologizes for having "disrespected you like that in front of everybody"—an apology accepted with good grace...

...I just have to do my own thing...

...but he speaks for everyone present when he describes the collective exchange as "nothin' but healthy conversation...

...But these concessions are too readily tendered...

...In the climactic face-off, Rabbit raps the Shelter's defending champion, Papa Doc, into stunned silence by revealing that Papa Doc went to a private school and comes from parents who "have a real good marriage...

...At the end of the day, hip-hop is about brainpower...

...Which brings us to 8 Mile...

...On the contrary, convention can foster radical protest, and good humor can sharpen insight...

...Written, directed, and produced by blacks, this tale of a day in the life of a barbershop on Chicago's Southside raked in $75 million in box office receipts (on a $12 million investment) last fall...

...Nodding to the outspoken Eddie, they cite a slew of hackneyed types whose too-familiar trials and tribulations intersect in a format borDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 73 AMERICAN STORIES rowed, like the film's sight gags and raunchy jokes, from that generic lowlife, the television sitcom...

...In the film, Rabbit flounders until he decides to reject all offers of assistance, both well- and ill-intended, and to proceed on his own initiative...

...He even uses his fists to defend that mother's questionable honor...

...In most films, these matters are sentimentalized or skirted altogether...

...And Jimmy shows additional substance by his ready acknowledgment of skill and his equally ready apology for his rudeness...

...I'm "a fucking piece of trailer trash," he tells the crowd, "a loser" who still lives at home with a mother who's sleeping with one of her son's former schoolmates...

...Barbering stands for the "something" that a man ought to be able to make out of himself: the competent practitioner of a respectable, socially beneficial trade—a trade, moreover, that allows a man to exercise prideful skill in his work...

...Asshole," murmurs the woman next in line...

...The character who embodies Barbershop's vocational ideal never appears...

...And to be sure, Jimmy resents what he sees as a white man's easy appropriation of black identity, an appropriation that extends beyond a yen for barbering—in a black neighborhood, no less—to a sexual relationship with an attractive black woman...

...As he's stowing his gear, Isaac suddenly turns to Jimmy and issues a declaration of independence...

...In public, Rabbit suppresses his familial longings, thereby reassuring his longtime fans that he hasn't sold out...

...As long as Jimmy can believe that only people without options cut hair for a living in a downtown barbershop, he can quell any doubts he might have about his own career path...

...There's no visible sign of either Rabbit's old home or of Jimmy Smith, Sr., but there is ample evidence that Jimmy Jr...

...Their decisive confrontation occurs at the end of the workday when they are alone, packing up to leave...

...Certainly the challenges he faces and overcomes are much more formidable, from the jeers of a crowd to the inner doubts that make him freeze onstage...

...In private Rabbit exhibits longings for family and home that make him palatable to the mainstream audience that the filmmakers hope to capture, many of whom enter the theater uncomfortably aware of Eminem's reputation as an obscene thug...

...As he heads down a dark alley, Rabbit flashes a peace sign over his shoulder...

...When Jimmy mocks him for not having had a single customer in three days, Calvin observes that Isaac has "the first chair," that is, the chair nearest the door, the one assigned to the barber with the least seniority— the same one, he notes, where Jimmy started out—the point being that customers are unwill ing to take their chances with a novice...

...You're not my fucking father...

...Though Barbershop explores the grounds of such affection in a black context, it would be a big mistake to conclude that it's just highflying black politicos who don't get the connection between communal morale and what Eddie calls "talk[ing] straight...

...The reverends' appeals went unheeded by black moviegoers and MGM alike (the producers offered their apologies...

...The film cloaks its improbabilities with an illusion of total candor that trades heavily on rap's ethos of brutal honesty and its predilection for expos...

...But he's said it all— or so Papa Doc and the Shelter's fans are left to believe...

...Jimmy James's denigration of barbering reflects the prejudices of the professional elites he hopes to join, prejudices that blind him to the value of real but modest competence and compromise his own faith in "virtuosity" Professional hubris can't wholly explain Jimmy's hostility toward one colleague in particular— Isaac, the white barber in the shop (and the only white character in the film...

...A white man who is purposefully moving in the other direction, geographically and socially, pricks Jimmy's doubts about his own course...

...But after Jimmy calls him a sell-out" blackface for the new millennium"—and mocks DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 75 AMERICAN STORIES his "pimped-out" car and his black girlfriend, Isaac meets insult with insult...

...Being educated," he avers, ". . . means you have opportunities...

...Ice Cube plays Calvin Palmer, Jr., the barbershop's owner, and Eve plays Terri, the shop's sole female practitioner...

...This time, it's the myth of the self-made man...

...Hook me up...

...I was running out of insults," says Isaac, and they shake hands...

...When last seen, he's headed back to his crummy day job at a metalstamping plant...

...To someone of Eddie's vintage (and my own), that gesture immediately evokes the antiwar movement of the sixties...

...His eventual vindication derives much of its emotional charge from the audience's responsiveness to a familiar device, the "star is born" narrative, wherein after an arduous struggle for recognition, a highly talented but utterly obscure individual wins sudden fame and fortune...

...But his passion is for working on words, not engines...

...With a cast that includes two rap stars, Ice Cube and Eve, the film owes a portion of its box-office success to the pull of celebrity...

...But what gave the homespun comedy the cachet that propelled it onto prime-time talk shows and high-circulation editorial pages across the country were Jackson's and Sharpton's attacks on it for disparaging African American civil rights heroes and their demands that MGM, which produced it, cut the offending sequences or face a black boycott...

...AMERICAN STORIES Jimmy's taunts elicit a chorus of rebuttals: "Barber's a respectable occupation...

...For him, too, skill is a necessary but insufficient condition of success...

...And simplest of all: "I like cutting hair...

...A week later, he returns to deliver an unflinching bravura performance that earns him his due...

...Unlike the movie's viewers, Papa Doc hasn't seen his rival transfixed by the battered photograph of an affectionate nuclear family that he finds in an abandoned house...

...Jackson and Sharpton picked up on one such challenge: the movie's sharp rebuke of self-aggrandizing, censorious political leadership...

...Historically, the intellectual discrimination against technical education has been accompanied by a racial discrimination that steers young blacks into the so-called lower track, regardless of their aptitudes or interests...

...The essence of that spirit is summed up by Eddie in the admonitory lecture he gives a contrite Calvin, who has just confessed that 74 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 he's "messed up bad" by selling the shop...

...The satisfaction comes from seeing Isaac live up to his claims for himself and seeing Jimmy show some unexpected depth...

...This is not the end of the line for Jimmy James...

...8 Mile lets his movie persona have it both ways...

...When Eddie criticizes Parks et al., he's a minority of one...

...Don't push...

...Also released last fall to popular acclaim, 8 Mile has for its hero Jimmy Smith, Jr., aka Rabbit, another young, white, working-class male living in an inner city—here it's Detroit—who's determined to make it in an overwhelmingly black line of work, in this case, rap...

...Rabbit lacks a father, but he has a mother and a sister, and his relations with them are critical in establishing his character...

...By the end of the film, he has embraced his paternal legacy and made it truly his own— but only after having sold the barbershop to a loan shark, painfully come to see the value of what he's relinquished, and taken the bold action required to get it back...

...Then he takes down Jimmy's educational conceit: "Just 'cause you go to some fancy college don't make you better than me, don't make you better than anybody...

...He coulda been a contender, maybe...

...Some commentators have suggested that far from validating Eddie's views, Barbershop holds them up to scorn: everyone else in the shop loudly protests them...

...Jimmy is first seen on his way to work, ordering a take-out "triple nonfat, French roast, soymilk cappuccino—just a splash of hazelnut—just a splash—orange extract, with the foam in a separate cup" because, he tells the counterperson, "y'all never get it right—understand...

...Hanging in means assuming the risks of commitment...

...In the scenes that they wanted to cut, the barbershop's employees and patrons, all but one of whom are black, get into a noisy argument about African American political icons...

...As far as he's concerned, cutting hair is an occupation of last resort...

...But Jimmy's insults are driven less by wounded racial pride than by envy, and what he mainly envies is not only Isaac's "fly" girlfriend, but something more elusive—Isaac's self-confidence...

...Jimmy's challenge, after all, carries risks for himself...

...Here's one advantage, then, that Rabbit enjoys over Barbershop's Isaac: Isaac has to defend both a white man's right to cut hair in a black barbershop and the legitimacy of a hands-on trade...

...Please let me do it in peace...

...In fact, as Elvis Mitchell observed in his review of 8 Mile for the DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 77 AMERICAN STORIES New York Times, some of the most accomplished black rap artists have middle-class upbringings...

...Jimmy belittles his co-workers' command of English, knowledge of geography, taste in food, and, most offensively, line of work...

...By masking his background, Papa Doc not only lays himself open to Rabbit's revelations, he vio 78 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 lates hip-hop's rock-bottom commitment to "keeping it real...

...What if Isaac really can't cut hair, or if he uses his razor as a tool of revenge...

...Indeed, among the people who now set educational policy in the United States, it's the dominant attitude...

...New York State recently eliminated the non-college preparatory track to a high school diploma...

...Those rejoinders are backed up by the film's respectful, not to say reverential, portrait of black barbering...

...I think I kind of need to just do my own thing," he says, before turning his back on Future and the rest of his crew and loping off into the night...

...Barbershop's treatment of ambition is a case in point...

...Calvin starts to make the same move as Rabbit but changes his mind, partly because the other people who anchor his life won't let him go in peace, and partly because he realizes that his identity is nurtured by the life he shares with those others...

...There's more, but you get the picture...

...These subtler attacks can be hard to discern, thanks to the film's down-home style...

...The opening credits play over old photos of black barbers, their tools, their places of work, and the artful effects they achieved...

...In 8 Mile, despair is the lot of everyone except the hero, who vanquishes all comers and then gets out...

...But Calvin Sr.'s kindly, bespectacled face is painted onto the shop's back wall, alongside those of his colleagues and customers, and his spirit suffuses the place...

...The film concludes with the triumphant Rabbit rejecting Future's proposal that they co-host the club's battles...

...In our culture, getting ahead has typically meant getting away, an imperative that has now gone global...

...I'm probably not even going to go to school, but I'm going to open a business—whether you like it or not...

...In real life, Eminem's career was stalled until it was taken in hand by successful rap promoter Dr...

...But to call it conservative or, in the words of one critic, "at best sweet and sentimental," is to perpetuate the common misconception that convention is inherently stifling and sweetness inevitably saccharine...

...Once again, 8 Mile calls on a familiar convention for emotional reinforcement...

...In Barbershop such cues tempt viewers to see a spirited affirmation of democratic values as an exercise in nostalgia...

...And Rabbit has additional liabilities— the emotional abuse of a slatternly alcoholic mother who neglects the kid sister he adores, the false promises of a local promoter, and his own and other men's proclivity for physical violence...

...Rapping well, however, requires an aptitude that is essential to success in many prestigious contemporary vocations: the capacity to manipulate language...

...Isaac unnerves him because he's a white man—that is, a man presumed to have options—who has freely assumed what conventional wisdom deems a black—that is, downscale—vocation and lifestyle...

...IF NOT FOR THE Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Barbershop might have been merely one of the most popular black films in American history...

...But Rabbit's triumph over his circumstances, harrowing as they are, would seem like much less of a victory for the common man if it were not bound up with some beguiling cultural cues...

...Far from venerating celebrity, however, the overriding moral of his story is the old-fashioned precept that the mark of honorable work is service to others, particularly other members of one's own community...

...True to the type, Rabbit is proudly fatherless...

...Rabbit recycles a once-potent emblem of solidarity in resistance into an expression of gracious withdrawal...

...But Sharpton's pique, at least, was probably a response, not fully conscious and certainly never fully articulated, to something in the movie that threatens his style of politics and leadership far more than the disrespectful remarks of a single character: a vivid depiction of ordinary people's relish for frank talk about their common life...

...But despite their similarities, these characters represent very different attitudes toward integrity and success...

...Jimmy is trying to overcome these twinned biases by getting a college degree and a white-collar job, but he also shares in them...

...In an early scene that alludes to Ice Cube's real-life success as a rapper and a music and film producer, one fantasy—producing a platinum recording—literally goes up in smoke when Calvin switches on his new home studio...

...There are other kinds of smarts besides linguistic dexterity...

...So taken is Rabbit with this image that he almost gets caught in the fire that is consuming the place and has to jump out of a second-story window to escape...

...A barber is a craftsman...

...Barbershop makes it clear that such skill is attained in the company of others...

...Calvin Sr.'s "investments" gave men like Eddie, in his own words, "the opportunity to make something" out of themselves...

...He shrugs off Jimmy's refusal to trade high-fives as, fresh from his sidewalk embrace, he goes in to work...

...Rabbit has both these capacities tested at the Shelter, a bunker-like club where rap hopefuls go up against each other in bruising contests, with the winner chosen by the audience...

...Rabbit's point is that a rapper with a respectable middle-class background can only be a poseur...

...That assessment would be readily seconded by Jimmy's fellow barbers, who spend a good deal of their time fending off his put-downs...

...Granted, at the end of 8 Mile, all Rabbit has won is the applause of the Shelter's patrons...

...the other indispensable factor is self-confidence...

...In another deft move, 8 Mile manipulates family values so as to garner sympathy for its hero from a diverse audience...

...Their counterparts in 8 Mile have the opposite effect: they make a story that basically affirms the exclusionary status quo seem like a tale of uncompromising populist iconoclasm...

...Nothing personal, guys...

...I'm not pretending to be somebody you saw on TV...

...yearns for family ties...

...Rabbit has only to assert a white man's right to rap...

...The final showdown, wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times Magazine, "has more in common with a no-holds barred debating competition than an urban brawl...

...some of its characters are trite...

...In a surprising response, Jimmy issues a challenge of his own: "Prove it," he says...

...It's a resolution at once satisfying and inadequate...

...Indeed, Rabbit himself displays motor skills as well as verbal ones...

...It would also be a mistake to conclude that making that connection is Barbershop's only provocative gesture, simply because it's the one thing that has stirred up controversy...

...What it affronts, however, is not the dignity of African Americans at large but the presumptions of various elites, black and otherwise...

...Appearances to the contrary, Barbershop issues the broader and braver statement about integrity in a democratic society...

...The film further parries complaints about sentimentality by investing its hero with a wish for family ties that cannot be realized nowaday...

...ERHAPS THE most artful of these cues ex p p ploits rap's ambiguous relationship to the dominant culture...

...The wish seems credible, its realization too fantastic for belief...

...We know better but have a hard time remembering so, thanks to our own credulity in the face of the two modes of address that frame Rabbit's attack: the outrageous confession and the outraged accusation...

...Hip-hop is famously hostile to established authority...

...He's also nearly homeless...

...Like Barbershop's Isaac, Rabbit encounters intense black resentment toward a white man set on such a course, resentment he ultimately overcomes by an undeniable display of skill...

...Take away that assumption, judge the movie strictly on its own terms, and his figure becomes nearly pathetic...

...Eminem's real mother sued him for defaming her in his songs...

...B B UT THE character who raises the most complex issues of vocation and identity is neither Eddie nor Calvin Jr...

...Rabbit plays father to his little sister, singing her to sleep and taking her to a neighbor's trailer after putting their drunken mother to bed...

...Your father died broke," Eddie says, "but he was rich 'cause he invested in people...

...But Rabbit's own legitimacy is an issue for everyone but his kid sister, Lily, and his addled pal Cheddar Bob...

...Therein lies opportunity...

...Indeed, some reviewers have panned Barbershop for cultural and aesthetic conservatism...

...Taking the dare, Isaac seats Jimmy in the shop's first chair and painstakingly runs his electric razor over his harasser-cum-client's head, as the camera tracks his every move...

...Rating loyalty over mobility, Barbershop questions a time-honored American ideal...

...Barbershop could indeed serve as the pilot for a television series (and, it's been reported, may actually do so...

...What better role model could any parent ask for...

...Anyone familiar with Eminem's family history might find Rabbit's solicitude for his mother hard to take...

...This sounds like a charge of racial slumming...

...On first viewing, Rabbit may seem to make much the bolder claims for everyman's prerogatives...

...Isaac also sports two accouterments that Rabbit lacks: a reliable car and a reliable woman...

...The squabble is provoked by allegations made by Eddie, the senior barber in Calvin's Barbershop, and a graying veteran of the civil rights activism of the sixties and the seventies, that Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, not incidentally, Jesse Jackson have gotten a lot more credit than they deserve...

...Furthermore, Rabbit indulges in some posing of his own...

...But to a moviegoing audience largely drawn into the theater by a fascination with celebrity, Rabbit seems bound for glory...

...The filmmakers give the last word to a passing mailman who gets caught up in the verbal fray: "I love this place," he says as he heads for the door at the end of the scene...

...The story that follows pays tribute to the communal stature of the black barbershop—in Eddie's words, the "cornerstone of the neighborhood, our own country club"— and bears out the observation, also made by Eddie, that "something as simple as a little haircut could change the way a man felt on the inside...

...Pace Rich, the answer to that question depends on the kind of brainpower a child has...

...You wish you were me...

...Zelda Bronstein chairs the Berkeley Planning Commission...

...but Jimmy James, an ambitious young African American who's working his way through college as a barber in Calvin's shop...

...Rabbit's story may be of a piece with Isaac's...

...This is who I am, and whether you like it or not, I'm going to be like this tomorrow...

...charges Isaac...

...With far less to-do but equal irreverence, Barbershop also skewers pretenses of class and race that have weakened Americans' democratic commitments...

...Jimmy has a different explanation: "Thought you had a black membership card...

...He is the only character in 8 Mile who can coax an apparently dead car engine back into life, an ability he puts to timely use more than once...

...When he calls Isaac a sell-out, it is his own dreams whose betrayal he protests...

...In Isaac's case, however, that contempt is compounded by racial resentment...

...Wouldn't those anxieties be 76 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 ratcheted up by a white man's proven ability to cut African American hair...

...By contrast, Isaac exudes an easy self-confidence from the first and has to contend with only one obnoxious skeptic...

...Since every viewer knows that 8 Mile is based on the life of the man who plays its hero, megastar rapper Eminem, we duly assume that Rabbit is also headed for megastardom...

...he jeers, as yet another customer declines Isaac's invitation to sit in his chair...

...and its denouement is far neater than most real life resolutions...

...Rather, Barbershop's handling of vocation suggests that one of the surest ways to pursue the latter is to affirm the former...

...When 8 Mile opens, Rabbit, hauling all his AMERICAN STORIES worldly possessions in a plastic garbage bag, has just moved out from his ex-girlfriend's place and is about to crash in his mother's trailer...

...Nearly obscured by the fervor of Rabbit's quest, the film's cynicism is implicit in its hero's parting gesture...

...At the beginning of 8 Mile, Rabbit enters a "battle," chokes up after his black opponent tells him, "You don't belong here," and flees to the black crowd's chants of "Go, go, go...

...After giving the results a long look in the mirror, Jimmy pronounces them "pretty good...

...He accompanies his startling allegations about his opponent with riveting admissions about his own identity...

...And believability is 8 Mile's trump card...

...When Eddie notices one of his junior colleagues about to apply a questionable technique to a customer's stubble, he gets out his prized pearl-handled straight razor, gathers everyone round, and demonstrates the finer points of a really smooth shave...

...When I was little," he tells the woman he fancies, as they watch the house burn, "I used to live in a house like that," and, it might be surmised from the intensity with which he studies the photo, used to live there with such a family...

...The white barbershop is uptown...

...His pride in barbering and his lack of education make him, like the other barbers, an object of Jimmy's contempt...

...It's Calvin's struggle with vocation and identity that supplies Barbershop's main story line...

...Isaac is also young and ambitious, but his ambitions differ from Jimmy's: he dreams of owning a barbershop...

...The message here, however, is not that the collective good ought to take precedence over personal integrity...

...That is, give me a haircut...