What I Learned About Becoming Successful from Eminem’s 8 Mile

I have never been a big fan of hiphop, although most kids I grew up with in the 90s were 2nd generation immigrants (like myself) listening to MC Hammer and playing basketball to be like Michael Jordan. Being raised in a low-middle class environment in what you could call a 60k version of Detroit, one block away from an international car factory that dominated the whole city, I was surrounded by hiphop culture, but never could relate to it. Today, 30 years later, I barely have half a dozen hiphop songs in my playlist. And yet, after watching 8 Mile, I can’t but admit that I am seriously impressed with Eminem.

Strictly speaking, it’s not Eminem’s 8 Mile, since he neither wrote nor directed it. Yet, the screenplay is strongly following his biography. Just like the protagonist Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith, Eminem grew up poor, with a single mother who was addicted to playing Bingo. He was about the only white guy in the local hiphop scene and aspired to become successful in order to break free from the shackles of poverty. 8 Mile is, as Eminem himself once put it “symbolical”.

The movie begins with Jimmy participating in a rap battle. A rap battle means that on a stage 2 rappers will each in turn have 45 seconds to diss their respective opponent with their rap rhymes. The crowd will determine the winner by applause. Prior to the battle Jimmy locks himself up in the bathroom to encourage himself, in order to overcome his stage anxiety. His stage fright is so severe that he throws up. In the battle, when it’s his turn, he is paralyzed and starts overthinking, unable to utter a single word in his 45 seconds. The crowd boos and mocks him. He resigns and leaves the stage defeated and self-conscious.

Rock Bottom

Rabbit’s life is a mess. His pregnant girlfriend broke up with him and he now has to move in with his alcoholic mother (Kim Basinger), who lives in a trailer and whose life is in shambles. Having left his car to his ex, every day Rabbit needs to take the bus to get to his blue-collar job in a car factory.

On his bus rides to work he writes verses on old and overused paper scraps. In his heart he nourishes the dream and the hope of once becoming a successful rapper, regardless of his current stream of setbacks. He needs money and wants to work more shifts, but his request is rejected due to his tardiness.

Throughout the movie he deals with the difficulties in his life, like his problematic mother, money issues, his unsuccessful self-realization as a rapper, and his new girl Alex (Brittany Murphy) cheating on him with his friend Wink (Eugene Byrd). In the end he overcomes his obstacles: He gets more shifts at his job and finally wins the rap battle against his arch enemy Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie), thereby gaining regard and reputation in the rap scene.

In interviews, Eminem talks about the time in his life that 8 Mile refers to. He slept on the floor of a house that had the electricity cut off, and lost a battle that could have earned him the money he needed to pay his bills. He recalls feeling emasculated and so angry that he decided he had to get his act together and change his life.

Rabbit is driven by his desire to overcome his poverty by becoming a successful rapper. Eminem expressed his existential Angst and desperation in his song Rock Bottom:

My life is full of empty promises and broken dreams
I’m hopin’ things look up, but there ain’t no job openings
I feel discouraged, hungry and malnourished
Livin’ in this house with no furnace, unfurnished
And I’m sick of workin’ dead-end jobs with lame pay

Destroying the Illusion

The one scene when Rabbit first reflects about his situation is when his friends daydream euphorically about what they’d do with their money once they’ll (supposedly) become successful. But he yells at them to shut up, since neither of them ever does anything productive in their lives; instead, as he reminds them, they (himself included) are all broke and still living at their mothers’ houses.

At a closer glimpse, we recognize that this scene initiates a build-up that leads to Rabbit writing Lose Yourself, the award-winning title song of 8 Mile.

After Rabbit becomes aware that he and all of his friends are just talking big and not acting, he visits his friend Bob who previously had accidentally shot himself in the leg. Bob’s been hiding from his friends because he feels ashamed; he doesn’t want them to make fun of him. But in the next scene it is Rabbit who feels embarrassed. His mate Wink brought Alex (Rabbit’s new flirt) to Jimmy’s house – meaning his mother’s trailer. Rabbit is embarrassed that Alex sees how he lives, and denies that he lives there.

While Bob was being vulnerable with Rabbit and admitted to him that he felt embarrassed about his accident, Rabbit is not able to be equally vulnerable with Alex. Since he’s attracted to her, he doesn’t want her to see that he is so poor that he cannot afford an own apartment. He is afraid that she’d lose interest in him when she saw his weakness by knowing his true life situation.

After his conversation with Alex forces him to become aware of his unfulfilling life, he sits down and starts writing Lose Yourself.

While Rock Bottom portraits Eminem’s difficulties and desperation before he became successful, Lose Yourself, the title song of 8 Mile, voices his mindset through which he outgrew his misery. Since 8 Mile is the story of Rabbit overcoming his life as a bum, Lose Yourself, with its success-themed, motivational lyrics, is programmatic for the movie. For this reason we will pay particular attention to the song in order to get a deeper understanding of the movie.

In the intro, Eminem speaks:

If you had one shot
or one opportunity
to seize everything you ever wanted
in one moment:
Would you capture it?
Or just let it slip?

On first glimpse, Eminem speaks about a single event that presents itself as a unique an unrepeatible opportunity to change one’s life. He zooms in on this opportunity and conjures up the necessity to put all your effort into this one chance to change your life forever. But on a deeper glimpse, these words are kind of metonymic, meaning that the whole is expressed through a part (like saying “blade” when you mean “sword”). The metonomy in this case is that Eminem speaks explicitly about a singular moment in life, but implicitly about life as a whole: We only have one life; this one life is the one shot we have, the one opportunity we are ever being given. If we want something in our life, we should focus our attention and our efforts on reaching these goals as long as we are still alive.

In this light, the intro of Lose Yourself conjures up the mindset of what the author Robert Greene calls “putting yourself on death ground”. Reminding ourselves of our mortality creates necessity and invigorates us to act. Envisioning our own mortality is a strategy to create a sense of urgency in order to get ourselves out of our numbing comfort that keeps us lazy and passive. It’s a wake-up call, rooted in the awareness of our limited existence.

We meet this thought again in the refrain:

Lose yourself
in the music
the moment
you own it
you better never let it go.
You only get one shot –
do not miss your chance to blow,
this opportunity comes once in a lifetime.

Here, the thought of life as a unique opportunity is linked to the idea of “losing yourself”. What exactly does Eminem mean by saying “lose yourself”? The term seems to carry a notion of dissolution of one’s own identity. This may sound contradictory to the aforementioned thought of becoming aware of your own mortality. One might think that the thought of one’s own mortality should be linked to the thought of maintaining who you are.

Let’s take a little detour and connect the crucial dots of the movie, to see whether we can find a hint on how these two contradictory thoughts might be connected.

“Lose Yourself”

In portraying Rabbit’s development, the movie doesn’t really offer a lot of psychoanalysis, reflection or over-explaining. Instead, it keeps the characters, especially Rabbit, expressing their inner world mostly through their actions. If we want to understand Rabbit, the movie hands us a critical clue to recognize how he changed from before to after, and that is the difference between the two parallel rap battles with their diametrically opposite outcomes.

As we just stated, in the entry scene Rabbit first locks himself up in the bathroom to relieve his anxiety. He is so agitated that he throws up on himself and then is unable to utter a single word on stage. At this point in the story, not knowing our protagonist yet, it is virtually impossible for us to understand what exactly it is that blocked him. That’s why we’re going to the final scene first and then will draw our conclusions going back to the entry scene from there.

The difference of outcome in the second scene is that Rabbit wins the rap battle and is being celebrated. What does he do differently?

Let’s take a look at what exactly Rabbit says in his rap, that allows him to win the battle. The most critical part is certainly the following:

This guy ain’t no motherfuckin’ MC!
I know everything he’s got to say against me:
I am white, I am a fucking bum,
I do live in a trailer with my mom,
[…]
I did get jumped by all six of you chumps,
and Wink did fuck my girl […]

Knowing all the things his opponent was going to use against him, Rabbit chooses to admit his deficiencies publicly. Admitting that he is poor, comes from a broken home, gets beaten up and cheated on, reveals his deepest weaknesses. But in admitting them he achieves two things: Firstly he preemptly takes the wind out of his adversary’s attack. Papa Doc will have nothing new to say that the crowd wouldn’t already now. Thereby Rabbit disarms him beforehand. Secondly, by being vulnerable about his weaknesses, Rabbit becomes relatable to the crowd by being authentic. Being authentic allows the crowd to connect with him. He’s not “confessing” to the crowd in order to arouse pity or sympathy. He’s not victimizing himself. Instead he is actively addressing his weaknesses, verbally attacking them from a position of strength.

How does he gain this position of strength? Essentially through exercising his vital powers. Instead of overthinking, he acts. He exercises his strength, which is his talent as a rapper. We see it and hear about it throughout the whole movie. It is in the decisive moments that Rabbit failed because of his fear of failure, which makes him self-conscious.

In Sterquilinis Invenitur – In Filth it will be found

Denying our reality or hiding it from ourselves and others will not solve any of our problems. It will just create a false reality that will always keep clashing with the real world. So the only way to solve our problems is to first identify and acknowledge them, and then go at them.

If your life isn’t working out as you want to, you have two choices: You can either blame the world for your misery or you can start looking at yourself and at the mistakes you are committing, leading you to this point in life. The first option is the way of Cain, whose story we read in the Book of Genesis.

Cain offers a sacrifice to God. His younger brother Abel does the same. Cain is a farmer, Abel a shepherd. God watches upon Abel’s sacrifice, but not upon Cain’s. Cain becomes envious of his brother, who found God’s favour, while he could not – and slays him.

Now, instead of blaming his brother or God for not gaining favour, Cain could have asked himself whether maybe his sacrifice was lacking in some way. It requires humility to see one’s own role when things don’t work out. It requires us to see our own faults, shortcomings and inadequacies, which is never pleasant. But it’s the only way to learn and to improve.

But Cain chose to insist that what he did was perfectly adequate and sufficient, and that his missing success is due to God not loving him enough. So, instead of taking ownership, he chooses to victimize himself. Cain blames God for being unjust and not appreciating him, instead of looking at what he could potentially have done better.

This idea of holding on to what we are now and insisting that we already deserve what we want, without needing to develop ourselves and become the person capable of earning that thing we want: That is Ego. Ego is the static state of our Self. Ego is the unwillingness to progress, to change, to let go of what’s deficient in us in order to improve. It is essentially the unwillingness to recognize, the unwillingness to admit the faulty and deficient parts in us. Ego is a false self-idealization that refuses to be corrected by outside reality.

In truth, this self-idealization is a coping mechanism for being unable to accept ourselves with all our deficiencies. Because we feel ashamed of what we are, we create an ideal fantasy of ourselves and wear it as a mask in order to appear good in the world and hide that which we are ashamed of.

Now let’s return to Rabbit’s victorious rap battle. What grants Rabbit his victory is his ability to give up on his self-idealization and instead admit his own deficiencies. He accepts that he is an outsider in the black community, he admits that he is broke and lives in his mom’s trailer. Meanwhile he exposes Papa Doc as being a rich kid coming from privilege, who pretended to come from the hood. Unveiling Papa Doc’s true identity reveals that he’s a liar, while Rabbit is authentic by revealing his struggles and shortcomings. In the end, this is exactly what makes Rabbit Rabbit, what made Eminem Eminem.

Action is the Healer

But this concept of giving up his self-idealization has a second, deeper aspect. Even his paralysis is rooted in Ego. In the beginning Rabbit is paralyzed because in his mind he is still trying to hide what a mess his life is. Hence, his performance must either be perfect to negate all his shortcomings, or otherwise it will expose that he is not it. It is only after he has stripped himself of his own shame for his deficiencies, and has admitted all of it publicly, that he becomes able to realistically assess what and who he is. Giving up on his self-idealization and being vulnerable with his deficiencies is what paves the way for Rabbit to see himself realistically, which includes also his talent, which he undeniably has.

And so, Rabbit, fully aware of who he is, brings up the courage to bet on himself. Every action is a leap of faith. Faith requires courage. By daring to speak, thereby attacking his fear, he gains a position of strength. The exercise of his vital powers pulls him out of his overthinking-paralysis. To “lose yourself” means to let go of self-reflection and instead immerse yourself in action; it means being so fully present in the outer reality that you forget your self-awareness. It’s the state of flow.

His life, his one chance as this one person with this exact life-story and these exact traits, is the only chance that Rabbit has got. So he plays the hand that he’s dealt, without second-guessing himself, fully present in his task. He “loses himself” by immersing himself into his rap. He overcomes his fear of not being enough by daring to be himself. He lets go of his shame that kept him stuck in his past, thereby stepping into his new self.

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