Depravity speaks of white supremacy
Detroit leaves a thick lump in your throat, an uncomfortable lingering sense of injustice and disgust at what you have just witnessed. And that may just be the film’s primary goal.
Kathryn Bigelow’s latest visceral offering has faced no shortage of criticism. A large chunk of the ire focuses on the film’s limited telling of the event that the title alludes to — the 1967 political unrest in the United States’s Motor City. Instead, the plot revolves around the Algiers Motel incident, in which three black men were killed by police during a raid.
The pain and suffering at the Algiers is a telling of the dire consequences that arise when an already trigger-happy police force have their sensibilities insulted. They lose their shit when two white women are discovered sitting in one of the rooms with a black man. When he reveals he was an airforce pilot in Vietnam — shattering their perceptions of him as a lowlife pimp — the beatings only intensify.
The violence is orchestrated mainly by one cop — a scary performance by Will Poulter — who prods and encourages the others into more acts of depravity. What the film does well, though, is illustrate the crimes of inaction, pleading ignorance and looking the other way.
In the first act, Poulter shoots and kills a suspected looter in the back. An annoyed police chief recommends he be charged with murder but nonetheless sends him back on the beat with an indifferent “don’t do it again” warning, presumably unenthused by the admin of replacing an officer during trying times.
At the Algiers itself, the soldier mixed up in the mess appears conorgy flicted, disturbed even, by the blatant torture unfolding in front of him. Ultimately, he does nothing to stop it, bar ensuring the white women are escorted to safety. When it’s clear the situation has escalated beyond repair, he solemnly excuses himself from the scene and declares “this was police business”.
Even the justice system is unsuccessful in policing its own kind and offer recourse for a night of tragedy.
Detroit no doubt has its flaws. But if its goal is to act as a microcosm for white complicity then it succeeds. Given that we live in an era in which we too easily change the channel when our realities become too gruesome to witness, this may be a timely admonition.
Of course, it has also rightly been pointed out that a story about black pain is not necessarily Bigelow’s to tell in the first place. Her film is not an attempt to understand black pain or comprehend the socioeconomic realities that sparked riots, violence and death. For better or worse, this is a film by white people, for white people. It’s a harrowing tale of how the ruthless machinations of whiteness operate to subjugate those deemed inferior.