My main motivation for seeing “Notorious,” George Tillman Jr.’s biopic about the late rapper, The Notorious B.I.G., was nostalgia. I was 9 years old when unknown assailants gunned down Biggie, and I was glued to MTV the days following the shooting. My musical taste at the time consisted mostly of runoff of what my teenage sister listened to, from Alanis Morisette and The Smashing Pumpkins to Oasis and Mariah Carey. The Notorious B.I.G.’s music was out of my reach at the time of his death, but as I got older, the more his music entered my life. Middle school and high school dances were littered with “Big Poppa” and “Hypnotized” and his music was, for me, a staple of good hip-hop that I really enjoyed, along with The Beastie Boys, The Wu-Tang Clan and Snoop Dogg.
So, when my music-centric boyfriend tentatively asked if I’d like to see “Notorious” on opening night, I agreed without much hesitation. I tend to stay away from reviews; so going into the film I knew nearly nothing about it, such as whether or not it had been well received. But it really wouldn’t have mattered if I had.
The guy working the box office was flirting with a group of shivering girls, probably no older than 14, by telling them of the turmoil that came with his job. We were buying tickets for one of the last showings of “Notorious” of the night at 10:15 p.m., and he expressed concern about selling tickets “in the red.” Apparently, when a film showing is sold out, tickets can still be sold, it’s just not common practice. “Notorious” had such a high turnout, however, that he sold tickets to the girls in front of us, the group behind us, and, of course, us.
The theater was, as we expected, packed. We found seats only after politely suggesting two guys who were most certainly not together to sit next to each other, something they did but were clearly uncomfortable with. This was despite the fact that we probably took the last two actual seats and people were sitting along the walls of the theater and on the steps. Fire hazards aside, I always like movie experiences like that; everyone so badly wants to see the same movie and you’re all in it together. It’s a sense of unity not often felt everyday and just as I began to enjoy it, it started to crumble apart.
The film opened with the familiar sounds of “Hypnotized,” causing the audience to erupt in cheers, applause, and song. Even once the dialog began, it was completely inaudible due to the noise, as if the audience had not had the opportunity to hear “Hypnotized” since the 1997 release of “Life After Death.” The film continued on, though, and eventually the singing stopped (once the scene changed and the song stopped, that is).
About an hour into the movie it occurred to me that it wasn’t any good. I had been trying hard to like it, especially when the audience continually heckled at actor Jamal Woolard’s heavy, snort-filled breaths, but it just wasn’t happening. Mostly due to the ever-present narration, the film seemed more of a live-action version of The Notorious B.I.G.’s Wikipedia entry than a meaningful portrayal of the rapper’s life. The audience, perhaps sensing this feeling of oncoming disappointment, began stealing the show from the film, most notably done by one particular guy who happened to be sitting in front of us. Anytime a New York skyline appeared, he yelled, “That’s Manhattan, y’all! I don’t know if y’all know, but that’s Manhattan,” while waving a bottle of some sort and making sounds graphically approving any sexual act shown on screen. He wasn’t the only culprit though: In a scene of confrontation between Biggie and then-wife Faith Evans about Biggie cheating on her, several women in the audience reflected on the situation, most of them obviously feeling a kinship with the wronged-by-her-man Faith. Throughout this, there were occasional appearances made by the theater manager, a short and starkly white man somewhat reminiscent of Kip from “Napoleon Dynamite,” and a police officer, an older black man with a flashlight he pointed in the general direction of noise.
Sometime after the halfway mark of the film, the guy in front of us started up his usual banter when another voice from the direction of a group sitting against the wall interrupted him. Though we strained to hear, neither my boyfriend nor myself could make out what he had said, but it was immediately clear that it was not polite. First the guy in front of us, bottle still in hand, stood, followed by the voice in the distance, and seemingly instantly followed by every single person in the audience, in unison, besides my boyfriend and myself, who just sat dumbstruck. We stayed in our seats while countless people seemed to move towards each other and yelled in a way I hadn’t seen since middle school. Between remaining seated and the darkness, it was hard to tell what was going on besides the fact that it was not good. It eventually calmed down, with the police officer escorting the offenders out, after politely waiting for them to gather their belongings in the aisles.
We left during the reenactment of Biggie’s funeral before the movie had a chance to end. The violence in the theater had nearly corresponded with the violence on the screen, which had long since been ignored. The movie spent much of its story devoted to the talent and potential of Biggie and the uselessness of the violence that not only brought him down, but also Tupac Shakur, another influential and talented voice in the hip-hop scene. It’s been theorized that one, if not both deaths were at least in some way connected to the East Coast-West Coast feud that developed in hip-hop and preceded the shootings. The movie depicts this feud as a compilation of gross misunderstandings and huge egos, but nothing with any real substance, certainly nothing to warrant the deaths of two talented young men. All of this was the background noise to the fight that broke out in the theater. A petty disagreement, not even substantial enough to warrant calling it a “feud” erupted and disrupted not only an experience for the audience but a message from the movie. What was made clear that night during the screening of “Notorious” wasn’t so much the fact that in 1997 the music world lost a great voice, but that it doesn’t really matter.
