Tupac: Resurrected (2003, USA, Lauren Lazin) 

Dan Jardine:

Tupac: Resurrected is a fascinating, if flawed, documentary that finds an unusual hook to lure in its audience: The film tells Tupac’s story in his own words, culling the ubiquitous voice-over narration from a plethora of interviews and layering them over videos and found footage of Shakur. This is at once the film’s greatest strength, as the immediacy of hearing Tupac tell his own story in his own words, years after his own death, is both eerie and affecting, as well as its Achilles heel, as the story of Tupac’s life would benefit from the sort of critical external analysis and interpretation that Shakur is unable to bring to his own life. Still, there’s something unshakably powerful and affecting in this tragic tale of one gifted young man’s rise from misery of poverty to the sort of fame and great wealth that most of us can only dream of. That this did not bring him the peace and happiness we would have hoped, and in fact almost certainly contributed to his very early death, is the film’s final sorrowful lesson. 

A gifted actor and poet, a teenaged Shakur was invited to attend the Baltimore School of Performing Arts. Although he loved all his classes, his mother withdrew him from the school to head to California where she hoped to escape the violence of Maryland’s mean streets. Unfortunately, once in SoCal, the Shakur’s found only more of the same. Tupac claimed that this helped him to relate to everyone’s struggle, and that he was able to dedicate his music to depicting this reality in graphic detail in hopes of stopping the disintegration of the African American inner-city reality. To critics of his song’s brutality he retorted, "I didn’t create the violence, I diagnosed it." There is no doubt that Tupac’s music has a rawness that speaks directly about things that affect his community, but Tupac’s life, riddled with violence, arrests and imprisonment, leads one to wonder if he wasn’t just identifying the problem, but also identifying with it. He seems to have been well on the way to becoming the self-destructive figures depicted in his music when he was shot to death in 1996. 

The enigmatic Shakur was perhaps the most influential rapper to emerge out of hip hop’s remarkably fruitful era of the early 90s. His paradoxical life was both extraordinary and typical, as he was a sensitive and artistically-inclined mama’s boy who filled the paternal gap in his single-parent home by gravitating to the macho world of gangsters. Yet, unlike so many young men who fall into a life on the streets, Tupac was encouraged by his street patrons, those same shady pimps and drug dealers who would swallow up the lives of so many other young men, to get out of this life, to use his talents to rise above the gangsta life. That he would take their advice to such wild success, yet fall victim to the influences of these same figures and forces, is perhaps the film’s ultimate irony. That this keenly intelligent and socially active young man would be foolish enough to believe that Suge Knight, a gangsta record exec of the ominously-named Death Row Records, was not only a good man to trust his career with, but even a trusted friend, shows something of Tupac’s naivete and desperate need for strong masculine models in his life, and his willingness to turn just about anywhere to satisfy it. 

"You need a man to teach you how to be a man," notes Tupac, which is something Bill Cosby might wanna think about before he starts condemning the behaviour of young male African Americans, and the lyrical content of many hip hop artists, whose work he proclaims is letting the side down, to borrow a sports metaphor. And if Tupac were still here, I’m sure he’d ask the Cos where all the successful elder male role models have gone? They sure aren’t in the ‘hood anymore, imparting their pearly wisdom for the younguns. They’ve fled the communities from which they were born, and by and large successfully melted away into the giant, insular pot of secure, patrolled and fenced neighbourhoods. Tupac would surely remind Bill of the perils of being raised by a single mother, where the only strong men available to turn to for guidance were drug dealers and pimps. While drug dealers were urging Tupac to get out and live his dream, where are the Bill Cosby’s of this world when the Tupac’s of the ‘hood are casting around for positive male influences? 

As a young man trying to find his footing and establish his place in hip hop culture, Tupac promoted the theory of Thug Life, which he suggested as a means of championing the underdog, rather than the criminal. Thug life, he contended, is about overcoming obstacles, about being strong. "America" he famously suggests, "IS thug life." Tupac also noted, in a moment of introspection, that he was "most like my mom cuz I’m arrogant, totally arrogant." His self-diagnosis proves astute when he states that "My ego was out of control; I had to get humble." Unfortunately, this lesson came at a cost, as Tupac’s early supporters seem to have had a profound effect upon his behaviour. He began to evolve into the stereotype, beginning to look more and more like the criminal gangsta rather than a follower of the thug life. Whether it was residual resentment against his mother, one-time Black Panther and radical activist Afeni Shakur, a rising antipathy borne out of her drug addiction or arrogance, or if it was merely the predictable effect of having as his principle male influence people with pronounced destructive and misogynist viewpoints, Tupac’s attitude towards and treatment of women in his music and subsequently in his life was to prove troubling, and even vile, as his later arrests for sexual misconduct and assault would attest. As a statement on the significance of Tupac’s life, the film would have been strengthened if it had been a little more willing to challenge Tupac’s behaviour toward and treatment of women. The central contradiction in Tupac’s life, that he was capable of astute self-analysis, yet often too cocky to wonder if he wasn’t being as adversely affected by this life as the people he wrote about, is one of the keys to understanding Shakur’s complex life. 

In the end, the pressure of being a 20-something black role model for men may simply have been too much to bear. Tupac expressed his fear of the responsibility that such a position put him in. And while he hints at some personal growth and maturity, particularly after his eventual incarceration proved a humbling experience that "Kills the spirit. I couldn’t write in prison," it remains something of a gap in the film that, while he assures us it is so, we cannot be sure that his time in prison caused Tupac to abandon his youthful hubris and destructive treatment of women. However, his evolution as an artist showed us a young man who was an activist, involved in the community, who showed signs of becoming a more self-aware and self-critical artist, as his music moved from the political to the personal. Was he learning the skills of self-examination necessary to be not just a great artist and good citizen but also a good person? Unfortunately, his murder renders the question moot.