Wednesday, April 01, 2009

8 mile




There aren't very good scenes from this movie on YouTube but I thought this was a very good example for our discussion the portrayal of different races through the media. The movie is the story of the rapper Eminem and how he made it out of a poverty stricken life to become arguably one of the greatest rappers of all time.

When thinking about this movie after seeing it a few times I realized there are some very different portrayals amongst the black roles and the white roles.

Eminem is trying to make his career in rap and participates in a few different forms of free style during the course of the movie. He is shown as more well spoken than most of the people he battles against who all happen to be black.

There is also a very big contrast between Eminem's group of friends who are black compared to the others shown in this movie. Eminem has a very intelligent and well spoken friend named Iz who is shown as being very intelligent. He also has a friend nicknamed "Future" who talks about how he wants to be a better person, and a person of god, and who has his own job where he is trying to make a name for himself.

Other than these two roles most of the other portrayals are of black men or women working at very low level jobs or participate in some sort of criminal activities to get their income.

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