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Open Letter to the Industry Feeding Off Eminem's Integrity
I'm sick of critics who can't give eminem credit for leaving them with nothing to add to a personal history of pure pith with their literary instruments. No, that they've seen 10,000 movies studiously replete with plot tricks, character twists and symbolic mega-hints doesn't legitimate them one bit to ingest this soul-singeing story, because we don't understand soulfulness by analyzing it into coherent sentences, we absorb it by feeling it. To understand eminem's face-forward honesty in 8 Mile, it's applicable to insist upon the old presumptive quip: If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Feelings of the kind eminem spills forth you just accept. Or not. Nothing you can say, explicate or elaborate upon will pre-empt them. I'm sorry, film critics, you'll have to take a seat behind the screen like the rest of us to digest this flick. Your sophisticated guidance is not required to dissect it. Eminem's raw art is the real deal. At least, probably as real as he could reveal without getting sued or screwed by an industry that lives by sucking artists into empty-handedness -- you parasitic critics!
Somehow we think because we leverage the sovereignty of print, we can't escape from it. That's ridiculous! Who confines us to a medium but ourselves? Things about eminem's story are great that words may not articulate. It's not just another pile of tired lines about a poor kid riding his talent out of the ghetto -- because this time it's real. It's not Elvis or John Travolta's smash-hit persona because it's eminem -- and no one is quite like him, just like no one is quite like you or me. He's a unique person with his own experience that looks stereotypical when scanned within the categorical confines of your mind with its canned critical perspicuity, but which hits hard like reality, like a punch to the gut that sucks out your wind, when you watch it and let it seep in... to the depths where you dwell... and feel.
I don't know what defines the purity of his rhythm or rhymes, or the soul-searching veracity of his hard-fought story, but I'm sure some intellectual wit can spit out an explication, if you're into erudition. All I know is he's pouring out pure truth -- and you grasp that not with your stripped-bare cognition, but with your full-bodied intuition.
His honest intensity shows in his eyes, not in his great aping face -- like in other actors who fake it and don't warrant a name's place beside his. (I don't care how famous a person is, fame doesn't make us big inside, many times it makes us small as we hide from the harsh, intruding, fiery spotlights, whose glare will blind us like the sun, but without providing satisfying nutrition.)
Eminem speaks from the heart and that is true art and you can leave it at the level of timing sequences and camera angles if you can't take it full-on. He's a lyrical genius because he lets it rip straight from the pit of his stomach, from the core of his being, from the depth of his soul, from the tortures we've all known, but which only the few of us, those brave enough to face cowardice, would ever admit.
If you don't get this analysis, I'm sorry, maybe if I threw in some rhetorical devices and literary hair-splits you'd have something to sink your teeth into besides the grit of your own pain-laden existence -- the grit eminem slips through the restrictions upon his mainstream marketable commodity, and invites us to accept.
His cinematic phenomenon: there's nothing to write about it, and believe me I can write about any old sh*t. Eminem has already delivered it. Take a seat you uncomprehending, rejecting critics; know when you've lost the face-off. Eminem is an example of freedom for all of us. He points the way by showing we CAN relate what we have to say.
When you give people the raw deal of your experience, when you take your pain and portray it honestly, it has weight and meaning to which we all want to connect, because we all want to express ourselves honestly too, because that is the pinnacle of sanity in a stultifying and repressive society that would rather numb our myriad nerve ending so we would simply shut up and get back to our cardboard-cut-out work.
You, movie industry, can't understand what young people want to watch because you're trying to hard to cut off or drown out the youthful beauty inside yourself. Out of your financial addiction to expediency, you rely on cost-benefit analyses and succinct marketable patterns. But to get eminem's movie, you have to suck away your neat financial starter kits, fling away your sureties to the next prevailing wind that sweeps your soul off its feet -- and feel his artistry run through your spine. You have to trust your intuition -- not the crafty spin of some cross-conflicted, dry-cleaned, consulting politician who picked up the tab last night. You have to cut out your legion of middle men -- sweep them off your slate like plastic pieces off your weighty chess board -- and see eminem's spirit shimmer for yourself.
How can you know which movies will sink deep into the public consciousness and resonate with real feeling? Listen to your instincts. Trust your gut, rather than sucking it in for others to see you slice off another swing at the overly green golf course. It's like this: how do you know the difference between an overly-sexed good man and a smiling, lying thief of the public's trust? You look inside yourself and see. Your feelings are smarter than you acknowledge. In a world simmering with smiling liars, your feelings will tell you the truth. If your doubtful feelings teem upon a sea of suspicions that lead you to distrust your very own sanity, well, maybe your feelings are functioning reasonably... amidst a nest of money-drunken vipers you call your society.
What is integrity? It is not abstaining from consensual sex. It is not sticking consistently to a frozen formula of big-name stars to market a movie. It is not any pattern of decorum. It is honesty. It is honoring your prevailing wind, holding true to your nature within. It is truly expressing your well-grounded pain; sometimes nature brings forth rain. It is staying true to what will liberate humanity, which may mean liberating yourself first.
How do you make a dollar off this fluff? You snort and chuckle. Watch out you do not choke yourself. Did you not pay attention to what eminem just showed you - when he bared his soul? Or is that too painful for you to know.
Integrity is freedom of expression. It doesn't always fit nicely into a tidy answer that the majority will accept easily. Eminem's movie does not try to be something new and dazzling to cinematography -- like some theatrical soliloquy rendered quirkily by some dramatic voice afflicted with self-consciousness that persists in force-feeding us a different variety of Shakespeare to get noticed. Difference for the sake of originality is pure vanity. Who does it draw attention to? Only one person. Eminem sticks to the script of his experience -- as much as the legal-shackled industry will permit -- and in the purity of it we recognize our own humanity.
That is integrity -- having the serenity to be what you are, to accept the many, minor, painful, learning details of human life that are actually minutiae chock-full of magnificence: beauty, wisdom, and lessons for yourself and everyone. Honest and open expression is the bridge that connects us and reveals us to ourselves. That is why it is an honor to the human condition that eminem lets his common presence exist. When he experiences stage fright, he lets it sing, expresses it honestly -- that is integrity. Its reality is sensible in a way that is apprehended by more than just one sense -- by more than just our intellect -- its reality "unites [our] senses in their magic ring" (Ranier Rilke) as they convene in feeling something... real.
That is why I like eminem. It is more than rhythm and words. It is flesh and blood poetry -- that can see the hypocrisy surrounding it, encircling it, raging at it like a mob of hungry critics seeking for a chink in the armor that protects their delicate human prey - that also protects themselves.
Eminem can withstand your cruel, crushing industry because he has withstood the life-threatening jeers of ravenous crowds in his neighborhood as a traumatized little boy -- can you believe it? He has borne scenes even more frightening and savage that your pristine boardrooms seething falsely with straight-edged sterility, with facades draped across your debauchery like ornate tapestries. Your industry represents everything fake, lying and lacking in integrity that eminem's honesty cries out against like a pure babe to a decadent and atrophying king.
Eminem is great because he is humble enough to be himself, to express his tiny crying feelings, nothing more nor less, without plastering on hypo-manic smiles to hide stage fright like some of your idolatrous sycophants. He can face your leering intensity with wide eyes, content to absorb it, content to say nothing until the time feels right.
I knew he wouldn't try to spoon-feed his hopeful audience with an incredulous slop story of saccharine success. I knew he would sock the disappointments to us and let us see him fail until he got fed up enough with silent resistance against the unjust winning of those high-powered wimps. And he did. He gave us the truth. In my opinion, that is the highest honor anyone can bestow on anyone.
And now to eminem: your honesty, your lack of reverence to what the industry proselytizes, your resistance to sycophancy: I love it. Just like I love the pure spirit that pervades Avril Lavigne's poetic musicianship.
I know fame threatens to devour people into the money-grinding machine, but with my ten-spot, I support you in being yourself. I only wish I could hand the returns directly to you instead of through all the money-hungry leeches that wouldn't know integri
12:39 am (7 years ago)
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