Bodied

And Adversarial Engagement

For those of you who are relatively new to this substack, this site represents many things, but one is sort of an academic time capsule. In discussing the movies that came out while I was in prison, I am hoping to explore what, to me, was a period of history I didn’t directly experience. But we’re reaching a point where some of these movies, in the topics they address, seem like remnants of a completely different, unfamiliar time, a period that is alien to our modern perspective. “Bodied”, an aggressively-silly product of an era that seems as if it was eons ago, feels today like an echo of what we all were during better, funkier, more optimistic times, even as it seeks to brutally eviscerate those times in question.

“Bodied” follows Adam (Calum Worthy), a white graduate student preparing a thesis on hip hop music, particularly its use of the “n” word. He’s specifically focused on the use of the word during battle rapping, depicted in the film almost as a contact sport, to better differentiate it from basic freestyling. In “Bodied”, battle rappers gather in parking lots and collect their bullets of rhetoric before firing them at each other. The art is based in insults, so Adam, essentially, is wondering where the boundary is drawn in battle rap, knowing that it is an artform that pushes the envelope further than commercial rap music.

Obviously these early scenes are building up to Adam dropping rhymes himself. So when he busts them out of nowhere, it makes sense, but it’s also a surprise as to how slick it is. Of course, unlike other battle rappers, Adam is coming out of academia. So his rhymes are wordy, convoluted, educated. You might even say woke! Which is a dangerous element to put in a movie, of course – a white man showing up in primarily-Black spaces and adding a “progressive” angle to their art. But whenever you have these admittedly predictable thoughts, the movie is one step ahead of you – his wordy style works in the parking lot, but it doesn’t work in a rap battle, when you have to hustle to get the audience on your side.

Adam starts to ignore his studies, and his squeamish liberal girlfriend, and begins to work on becoming an actual battle rapper. It’s an amusing visual, since Adam looks like a grown up version of a paperboy from a 50’s sitcom, and here he’s trying to understand hip hop culture in order to find creative new ways to belittle Black, Hispanic and Asian battle rappers. There is a point where he commits to the Faustian bargain, knowing that battle rap is a realm that rewards open bigotry and ignorance, as long as it’s wrapped in a rhythmic joke. Is this who Adam is, or is he just performing? Performative racism is still racism, right?

“Bodied”, which is produced by Eminem, seems like a fanciful broad-comedy version of battle rapping. Obviously it exists in the shadow of Eminem’s own “8 Mile” – this is the wackier comedic version of that, where Simon Rex shows up as a bumbling m.c. and everyone has a preposterous amount of jokes. Adam finds himself getting In Too Deep, but instead of the danger you’d see in a more generic film, it’s about him giving himself up and turning himself into a weapon against everything he knows. When everything is battle rap, everything is a confrontation, everything is an attempt by one person to dominate another. And those skills simply do not translate everywhere.

The tone, which is that of a live-action cartoon – comes courtesy of Joseph Kahn, maybe the most rebellious director to emerge from the age of music videos. There’s an apocryphal story about how Kahn, annoyed while directing his first movie “Torque”, simply took every bad or disingenuous studio note he received and put it in the movie, which is why “Torque” is a movie so transparently dumb that it ascends to the level of camp in a way you don’t ever see in mainstream studio movies. That little prank of a film lost him several years of a working career, but he’s never lost his snark and excessive force-fed pop culture enthusiasm, which he usually allows to bubble over and curdle. One of his earlier movies, “Detention”, crumbles entire ridiculous eras of movies and music into a time traveling high school musical cocktail weaponized with irony. And last year’s poorly-distributed ”The Ick”, a lesser Kahn offering, was still a perverse pop-rock infused high school horror movie that aggressively toyed with dopey genre cliches (and featured a delightful leading man performance from Brandon Routh – save him from purgatory).

Here, Kahn keeps the action moving, but it’s interesting how flexible his frame is – he’ll comfortably shove another character into the camera if only because he needs just one more gag. Like a battle rapper, he’s trying to get as much as possible into your eyeline in only the allotted time. He’s a positive manifestation of the worst tendencies of all your least favorite filmmakers, spiked with a necessary wicked sense of humor. In his hands, “Bodied” is a gas, but from anyone else, it would just be garden-variety offensive.

The battle rap mentality hit a nerve for me. Obviously, there are times in life when you have to hustle, to keep the business moving. But earlier in my life, I went into conversations open, with clear eyes and full hearts, and shucks, those can’t lose. Most people are the same. They operate, initially, with a patina of trust around their words. The assumption is that if you meet a stranger, you may want different things, but you’re always going to be on the same page. Kumbaya, we’re all only one people and one planet, right? In prison, you find out really quickly that this is a mistake.

The reason, of course, is that you’re surrounded by people who have learned not to trust the system. The men that surround you, there’s a greater than 50% chance that they have been down before, demeaned and degraded by this system. And you might think you’re a hustler, but are you prepared to deal with a compound full of hustlers? Every conversion becomes a hustle. Even the closest person in a prison cannot be trusted, and every conversation needs to have at least a hint of the adversarial. You’re battling every day, just to express yourself and be heard, just to get what you want. It became tiring, every exchange feeling transactional, every conversation a tussle. And when I came out into the real world, I had to speak to lawyers, probation officers, bosses, parents. But I was, and maybe still am, confrontational in that way. You give so much of yourself when you do this, and personally, I don’t know when or how not to stop. I worked so hard to avoid becoming the sucker that now, my day to day depends on making other people a sucker. And I hate living like that.