Bodied Is The Scorching Satire That Asks, 'Should White People Rap?'

In this corner: Bodied. The flashy, frenetic movie about a freckly ginger who becomes a battle-rap star. The scorching satire that pummels crowds with questions and provides little in the way of answers. The two-hour cringe-fest that makes you laugh hysterically and then immediately makes you feel bad about it. And in this corner: all of us. The mainstream public. The police of political correctness. The judges and juries who determine what's offensive generally, almost everything) and what's not. Are we really ready for a movie like Bodied? Doesn't matter — it's coming, and yes it wants to prepare you squirm.


The third feature from prolific music video director Joseph Kahn, Bodied arrives 16 years soon after 8 Mile gave us another big-screen story about what it means for a white guy to be the hero of a battle-rap movie. Nevertheless that's pretty much where the comparisons end (though Eminem does serve as a producer on Kahn's film). Bodied star Jackie Long summed it up to MTV News by musing, "With 8 Mile, you wanted to know, 'Could a white person rap?' In our movie, you hope to know, 'Should white people rap?'"


A lot rides on the white person in question. In 8 Mile, Eminem's Jimmy was a native Detroit punk; he wasn't so much a tourist in the grimy battle rap world. The opposite is true of Bodied's protagonist, Adam, a pasty grad student studying English language and poetry at Berkeley. Adam is fed up with the competitive wokeness of his academic bubble and finds release in the deliberately insolent world of battle rap, where filters don't exist and anything goes. As soon as he discovers how improbably skilled of a wordslinger he turns out to be, his callowness and cockiness threaten everything: his relationship with his feminist girlfriend, his friendships, his academic future. However he doesn't really seem to care, so long as he keeps winning battles.


And, more improbably — or not, considering he's basically been weaponized as an academic wordsmith — he does win plenty of battles, as soon as he realizes that the more shocking and tasteless his words are, the more he satisfies the crowd and comes out on top.


"He's the anti-hero, in the truest way possible," explained Calum Worthy, the 27-year-old former Disney Channel star who plays Adam. "He's a good battle rapper, nevertheless at the end of the day, is he a good person?" Kahn poses the question a different way: "Any battle rapper has the capability to [go also far]. Yet would they?"


That debate intensifies as we watch Adam get increasingly comfortable spewing misogynistic, racist, and homophobic bile at his opponents — and yes it comes to a head in the film's climactic battle, as soon as Adam and Long's Behn face one another in a master-protégé duel that turns ugly as they use each other's secrets as ammunition. Although while Bodied never lets Adam off easy for being a white dude propounding his right to prepare race jakes, it also doesn't make him a scapegoat by suggesting he shouldn't try. Soon after one battle any time if he conjures the nastiest jabs he can muster about his Asian-American opponent — think everything from slanted eyes to consuming food dogs — his apology is waved away: "At least you knew I was Korean. That's culturally sensitive by battle-rap standards."


Kahn maintains that if Bodied does its job, "you should be shaken by the end of it," and that's partially as the movie doesn't spoon-feed politics by telling the audience what they should think or how they should feel. Alternatively, it offers the mechanism to debate and to ask, "Was that joke hilarious or offensive?" And "What does my response to that mention about me?" As Worthy contends, "It promotes conversation, rather than staying in an echo chamber."


Bodied was partially inspired by the dust-up over cultural appropriation in Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" video, which Kahn directed. His beginning idea was to prepare a film that revolved around social-media landmines, nevertheless soon after realizing such a screen-centric story "would be the most boring thing ever," he determined to frame it by means of the more dynamic lens of battle rap.


"Battle rap is just a visual metaphor for Twitter," Kahn explained. "The funny thing is, people think I've made a race movie. I really haven't. I've made a communications movie. Battle rap, in a nutshell, is the ultimate confrontation on a verbal level. It's two people that have agreed to face each other and mention the meanest things possible without killing each other."


He added, "It's a blood sport; the target goal is to win and kill in a clever way. And on a certain level, that reflects society itself. Our limitations of what is acceptable to mention in public to each other fluctuates depending on the political temperature. Now, we're at a heightened level where we can't mention anything. We are quick to call each other racist and sexist on anything and, let's face it, if anybody went and mentioned any two lines of battle raps at work from this movie, they could be fired instantly."


Adam, also, learns by the end of Bodied that saying what you want has repercussions (not to mention: who says them, and to whom, is also of consequence). As Worthy says, it's a timely-as-hell commentary about "freedom of speech versus 'where is the allowance The reason the film resonates so strongly isn't just because it streams the hostility that suffocates the way we interact with one another online, however because it's hard to watch without seeing yourself in a flawed character like Adam and forcing you to analyse your own stereotypes. Thankfully, there's also plenty for you to laugh at.


whenever you watch Bodied and you're all laughing with each other, yet you're all laughing at the most racist, homophobic, anti-Asian jokes up there on screen, and you're laughing next to a gay person, and you're laughing next to girl if you are a guy, there's a collective realization that you're all in this with each other, and the uptightness of what you feel in regular society goes away," Kahn explained. "It's using really, really offensive jokes to connect with each other."


And that, ultimately, is what may make Bodied worth the uncomfortable watch. Immediately considering that, why shouldn't we have the ability to have a dialogue about ethics, labels, and cultural appropriation that's fun?


Bodied is in select theaters right now and releases on YouTube Premium on November 28.