Tuesday, August 08, 2017

The Immoral Artistry of Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit”
By Richard Brody
The New Yorker

I consider Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, “Detroit,” to be a moral failure. It’s clear that Bigelow intended to present a set of historical facts that would offend viewers’ sensibilities, spark righteous outrage at the brutality and the injustice inflicted upon the movie’s main characters, and induce viewers to reflect on the persistence of racist injustice in the United States today. Her intentions come through clearly: to depict an incident—and a climate—of racism, to show that the cruelty of these deeds was multiplied by their ultimate impunity, and to suggest that, in the intervening half-century since the events depicted in the film took place, little has changed. Movies aren’t made with intentions, though; they’re made with people and with equipment, and what Bigelow has her actors do for the benefit of the camera is repellent to imagine.

The subject of the movie is police violence—the violence of white police officers against black residents of Detroit (and against several white people who associate with them) in the summer of 1967, sparking riots and also violence that was unleashed in response to those riots. For the first segment, the drama meanders a bit: at an after-hours club where the customers are black, a police raid run by a pack of officers who are mostly white (though the episode also involves a black officer and a black informant) ignites the fury of local residents, who begin to throw bricks through the windows of stores, loot, and set fires. The district’s representative in Congress, John Conyers (played by Laz Alonso), addresses a crowd of residents, who reject his call to be patient for change and, in response to his calming words about preserving their own neighborhood, shout, “Burn it down!”

From the start of the film, Bigelow and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, treat the black residents of Detroit, whose lives they dramatize, as an indiscriminate mass of people. The viewer has no idea what they say to each other while they’re drinking at an after-hours spot; she watches them dance and drink from a distance. It is only the official, white-dominated and white-led assault that will give the black group and its members their distinctive identities—they exist only in relation to their oppression, to their victimhood. When a trio of white men rides through the neighborhood in a nondescript sedan, one of them looks out the window and, while gazing at rioters and protesters, remarks ruefully that “we” are failing “them.” The men are soon revealed to be police officers. They get out of the car and pursue a young black man who they’re sure is a looter; as he flees, the officer who spoke in the car shoots him, twice. Back in the station house, this officer, named Phil (played by Will Poulter), is questioned by his commander (Darren Goldstein), who informs him that he’ll be charged with murder for the shooting.

Soon thereafter, in a performance seen from backstage at Detroit’s Fox Theatre, Martha and the Vandellas (or, rather, actors portraying them) are singing “Nowhere to Run.” Meanwhile, four young black men, the Dramatics, are rehearsing just offstage—they know that there are Motown Records executives in the audience, and they’re counting on this performance to be their big break. They’re awaiting the arrival of their fifth member, Freddy (Jacob Latimore), who joins them backstage just as they’re about to go on; but, at that moment, the show is shut down by the police because of the rioting, and the group doesn’t get to perform. Instead, its lead singer, Larry (Algee Smith), takes a microphone in hand and croons to the empty hall.

The film’s suggestion that the Dramatics missed their big chance because of the riots—or, rather, the choice to focus on the effect the riots had on these singers’ fortunes—only emphasizes Bigelow’s superficial approach to these characters, who hardly have anything to say to each other about anything else (or, for that matter, about the events taking place in the streets). Compare the shallowness of these characters with the complex experiences of the musicians in Kasper Collin’s documentary “I Called Him Morgan,” in which interviews fill out a varied range of activities, from social to intimate and familial and cultural, and in which musicians and their times come to life in brisk but precise strokes. That’s a documentary, and “Detroit” isn’t—but perhaps it should have been.

In the scenes of rioting, Bigelow blends what appears to be archival documentary footage of the events with her own dramatizations of them; her style of filming action, mainly with a handheld, shaking, and darting camera, is an imitation of the style of the newsreels, as if lending her own stagings and dramatizations a seamless claim of comparable veracity and authenticity. The attempt at realistic dramatization is most comprehensive—and most appalling—in a sequence that, I’d estimate, plays for at least an hour, perhaps fully half of the movie’s two-hour-and-twenty-minute running time. It is set in the Algiers Motel, where several members of the Dramatics take refuge after the bus that they’ve been riding (after leaving the theatre) is stoned by rioters. In a room there, despite the turmoil in the streets, there’s something like a party going on. Freddy and Larry meet other guests, including several other young black men and two white women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever).

One of the men, Carl (Jason Mitchell), furious at the police occupation of the streets, decides to taunt them and fires a starter pistol (i.e., one that makes noise but doesn’t shoot bullets) out the window.

The police, who are already jumpy because there are snipers elsewhere in the city, assume that shots were fired at them and they raid the motel, with shocking violence, to find the shooter and the weapon.

The camera shakes, the camera darts, the camera highlights the victims’ anguish and pain, highlights the perpetrators’ anger and cruelty, by way of angles and editing of a cranked-up dramatic intensity. Bigelow offers closeups of bleeding and grimacing faces, of characters gasping and shuddering, wincing and groaning under the shock of blows that are played as high-energy action sequences. The monstrosity of the policemen’s actions is emphasized with sharply exaggerating angles; blows land and shots jolt with a cinematically ramped-up expressivity and pictorial intensity. The killing and torturing of black people by the police during the Detroit riots are so shocking, so horrifying, that they require virtually no technique to render them so onscreen. Bigelow could direct these scenes with the technique of Ed Wood and they’d be sufficiently unbearable to observe.

As I watched this protracted scene of captivity, terror, torture, and murder in the Algiers Motel, I wondered: How could they film this? How could a director tell an actor to administer these brutal blows, not just once but repeatedly? How could a director instruct another actor to grimace and groan, to collapse under the force of the blows? How could a director even feel the need to make audiences feel the physical pain of the horrific, appalling police actions? I wondered the same thing while watching “Detroit” that I did when watching “Schindler’s List,” another film about atrocities that is itself an atrocity. How could Steven Spielberg ask actresses to undress and get into gas chambers? How could he stage an S.S. raid? Just as the actual subject of “Schindler’s List” is the oblivious vanity, the temerity—the chutzpah—that it takes to make such a film, the subject of “Detroit” is the fact of Bigelow at work staging horrific events in reductive specificity. Were the filmmakers—Bigelow and her crew—able to stay coolly professional while they imagined, blocked out, framed beatings and murder? Were they able to stay above the fray as they saw to placing just the right color and amount of blood in just the right place on the temple, made the contusions the right shape and size and shade, made the nightsticks and gun butts come crashing down on faces and bodies at just the right speed and angle? The meticulous dramatization of events intended to shock strikes me as the moral equivalent of pornography.

Just as the real raid and the torture were carried out by the police, the recreated scenes were carried out by Bigelow. In that sense, she inevitably puts herself in the position of the police by bringing the raid, willfully and at her own behest—under her own moment-by-moment decision-making—into being again. The actual story of “Detroit” isn’t the one that’s onscreen; it’s the making-of story, which would involve the participants acknowledging what they’re doing, talking about how they feel about what they’re doing, trying to figure out what they’re doing, being questioned about what they’re doing. (Examples of such a film include Rithy Panh’s “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” and Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing.”)

The Algiers Motel scenes in “Detroit” reminded me, above all, of the worst moments in Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” (a movie that, by contrast, also has some very fine moments) and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Like Parker and Gibson, Bigelow transforms the agony of the story’s victims into her own drama, her own declaration of woe. With what were likely the best of intentions, she has made it all about her—without considering any questions about herself relative to the story. Bigelow was a teen-ager at the time of the Detroit riots; now she’s a film director, and the one thing that “Detroit” completely masks and avoids is her own point of view, her own standpoint, whether from personal memory of the time or from personal engagement now.

There’s no subject that can’t be dramatized, and that can’t be dramatized morally. But the more monstrous, the more horrific the subject, the greater the aesthetic demands that it places on a filmmaker. Bigelow doesn’t have as original, as distinctive, as reflective a sense of cinematic drama as the extraordinary subject matter of “Detroit” requires. (The fact that police violence against black Americans was, and remains, all too frequent does nothing to make it ordinary.) The crisis of cinematic representation is one that cuts both ways: it’s a matter of what’s onscreen, but it’s also a matter of the filmmaker’s decision to represent the subjects, the people, in the film. Bigelow’s self-appointed representation of the real-life people who endured the horrors of “Detroit” is all the more conspicuous, and all the more vain, inasmuch as there’s already a virtual documentary lurking beneath the surface of the film: a closing credit explains that, since there’s no legally conclusive version of what transpired at the Algiers Motel, the film’s version is based on the recollections and the accounts of the participants. That’s the movie I’m impatient to see.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”

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