‘Detroit’a dream for voyeurs of black pain
The film is a harrowing orgy of violence that ignores important historical detail and cultural sensitivities
Detroit. July 25 1967. The Motor City is roiling in a tempest of riots. What ignited the inferno is a police raid on an illegal after-hours drinking club in a black neighbourhood, better known as a “blind pig”. The black clientele is rounded up and arrested. A stone is thrown through a shop window. In this racially tense milieu, a community fights back. The National Guard is called in, leaving 43 people dead, more than 1 000 injured and 7 000 people under arrest.
Kathryn Bigelow’s film adaptation of Detroit revolves around what is known as the Algiers Motel incident, an appalling case of police brutality and murder in the midst of wider chaos in the summer of 1967.
The film’s title gave me reason to pause. How does one dramatise an entire city? It does make marketing sense, because 2017 is the 60th anniversary of the rebellion, and I can’t help but think this is exploitative and demeaning to the memory of what happened that summer.
The film opens with an animated depiction of the great migration, based on Jacob Lawrence’s artwork The Migration of the Negro (Series), and then goes into the police raid. The opening sequence provides a compelling brief on urban migration and touches on the themes that would later mutate into the riots of 1967.
For some reason, after the police raid, the audience is subjected to 40 gruelling minutes of a mind-numbing of violence, in what can only be described as graphic, almost pornographic detail at the Algiers Motel and Manor House. The “bad cops” interrogate a group of people who sought refuge in the building about the possible presence of a sniper in their midst. After hours of torture, three young black men are killed.
There are narratives in Detroit where I feel that Bigelow is trying to pass off racist, murderous cops as a few bad apples instead of showing a system of inequality and racism in a rotten police department. Ahistorical depictions of the three people murdered by the cops as older than they actually were (teenagers), the existence of a starter gun (never found) and an implied notion that the three youngsters were somehow to blame for their own deaths (at the autopsies, no alcohol or narcotics were found in their blood).
Should you watch Detroit? No. Save your coins and read John Hersey’s book, The Algiers Motel Incident, instead.
Bigelow, of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty fame, presents in just over two hours what can only be described as porn for those who enjoy watching black pain.
The events that occurred at the Algiers Motel are important and would have made for compelling viewing but, based on Bigelow’s earlier movies, she isn’t too interested in the legal and cultural aspects of historically important events but rather in torture and bloodshed.