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Saturday, July 29, 2017
MOVIE REVIEW/Detroit
In Detroit: Zero Dark 2017, White Blindness Run Amok
Will Poulter
(left) and Anthony Mackie in Kathryn Bigelow's drama "Detroit".
Annapurna Pictures
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Saturday,
July 29,
2017
Bottles fly, tempers flare and fires burn as Black rebellions against white
supremacy, racism and racial injustice are what Kathryn Bigelow
chronicles well in "Detroit", about the real-life Detroit police assault and
invasion of the Algiers Motel in which white police officers killed three Black
boys in 1967. Action musculature and extended powerful sequences forming
separate movies is never Ms. Bigelow's stumbling block in this epic but blindness and narrowness
of scope are.
In clinically re-enacting documentary style the racist climate of a segregated
city with an overwhelmingly white oppressive police force "Detroit" wears blinders
in
the context of rebellions exploding across the entire U.S. There is a
perplexing children's coloring book prologue that feels dropped in
from outer space before a hard shift to the grit, smells, sweat and blood of a
racial tinderbox exploded by centuries of racial discrimination. Ms. Bigelow, such a
crisp director, has difficulty finding an entry point in "Detroit",
so archival footage fills a void where something more clinical and illustrative
(a visual chronicle of the cause of racial uprisings in America) should
have.
What Ms. Bigelow nails is the differing forms, shape-shifts and
layers of white supremacy. We see the effect this systemic power and oppression has
on Black male youth and their differing reactions (mostly passive or impotent)
to the onslaught against them. There's a strange disconnect between the
12th Street rebellion in Detroit, where property was the biggest target, and the contrasting
microcosm (or more accurately macrocosm) of state-sanctioned police violence
meted out against Black people by Detroit's non-finest and Lyndon Johnson's
National Guard.
Mark Boal's screenplay gets white male racist psyche, paranoia,
irrationality, assumption, stereotyping, zenophobia and schizophrenia down to a T. There's sustained tension in a major
30-minute sequence that is especially harrowing and tortuous. White male
violence, inadequacy, insecurity and fear command a confined space in unflinchingly brutal ways.
We are as much hostages as those victimized. Ms. Bigelow seems to make the
house this ordeal transpires in three times as small as it is, via tight shots
and quick edits. We also glimpse the damage white supremacy and
institutionalized power does to one white cop.
Several Black male characters' lives are altered forever (a singer on the cusp
of the big time, his bodyguard, and a security guard.)
The big casualty of "Detroit" though, is
the Sandra Bland of 2015 erasure of Black women in effect 50
years earlier. It's a back-to-the-future type of white blindness - a crude
Ralph Ellison invisibility of Black women in a section of a predominantly-Black city -- whether or
not connected to actual events of the Algiers - that's as troubling as the
events themselves. There's a myth-making created in Black women's general absence
from "Detroit" that is as injurious and dangerous as the myth-making of the
presence of white
goody-goody FBI agents as friends to Black people in "Mississippi Burning".
It is difficult to fathom a real-life events film in a white American
neighborhood or city without either having at least one principal white male or
white female character in it, regardless of the actual events and their
accuracy.
And this is what baffled and irked me most about "Detroit", which possesses a
claustrophobic atmopshere, one that truncates and disempowers Black young men, their
dignity, masculinity and highlights a strange alienation from Black women.
(By contrast Black young males lust after young white females in numerous early scenes.)
The waters are further muddied by a soft-spoken do-gooder security guard Dismukes (John Boyega) who knows
right from wrong but acquieces to white male violence to try and assimilate into
white hieracrhy. Implicitly he wants to be deputized to police officer.
It's a role Dismukes elects to play but like Frankenstein the role mutates and overtakes him.
He becomes a spook, a gatekeeper and enabler of white
supremacy and its violence. He receives lukewarm thanks from one guilty
white cohort for playing the role. Dismukes's motto is "survive the
night," something he quietly urges a Black male teenager to do yet is desperately
trying to do himself.
It is this wear and tear of oppression on Dismukes and his uneasy coexistence
with it that is the film's cross to bear. Dismukes is
reminded that his badge and uniform don't insulate him though he assiduously does the bidding of deadly
white superiors. Dismukes is treated as the rest, asked by white
colleagues about fellow Blacks and their end point of rebellion. "How
would I know?," he replies. Dismukes is the film's most troubling
character, and I suspect Ms. Bigelow placed him front and center as its most
important one. Mr. Boyega's security guard has swallowed a lot of guilt in
his role-play, such that he has to expel that guilt before it chokes him.
Even so, there is a lack of socio-political contextualisation to the events in
"Detroit", particularly in the rebellion sequences in contrast to the Black
rebellion in Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing".
What gives "Detroit" a fair amount of cover though -- present-day oppression of
Black people isn't alluded to as a connective tissue to 1967 and should have
been, rather than the film's curious prologue created by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
-- is it takes on a specific though unclear event where characters' "Rashomon"
perspectives make dramatic license palatable. No matter how murky, dead
Black bodies are what are left on America's bloody canvas. The mistake
however, is that "Detroit" sometimes tries to fill in gaps about the
who-shot-firsts of onscreen violence and oppression, the same gaps we were left
to fill in recent killings (not caught on video) of Black
teenagers Michael Brown, 18 (2014),
Renisha McBride, 18 (killed by a white man in a Detroit
suburb in 2013) and Trayvon Martin, 17 (2012). There isn't
space for us the viewer in "Detroit" to process a racial Rohrshach test of verification or lies.
We are explicitly fed almost all the ingredients and any complexities. As
a result "Detroit" as a film challenges us less intellectually than viscerally.
The visceral reaction to police executions we see all-too often on video today
(of unarmed Black men like Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Garner
and Samuel
Dubose, among the most recently publicized) are fully invited in "Detroit".
Powerless to stop these events as they unfold (Mr. Castile's death was
live-streamed on Facebook), "Detroit" forces us, somewhat Michael Haneke-style,
to sit, endure and reckon with our own feelings, inaction and complicity with
the very state-sanctioned violence our tax dollars pay for. We are as
guilty as the film's criminal white cops in this futile, fraught war zone of militarized
mayhem and death via occupying army.
Most of all, Mr. Boyega's Dismukes is us -- watching and enabling the
relentless abuse in "Compliance" or the endless loop of real video
assassinations. We are desensitized and inert. We don't walk away.
We watch helplessly or with dark, basest desires. Today these endless
loops form a bizarre fascination, an indictment of intransigence or a rallying
call for justice in an unjust country and system. The two white females
caught in the crosshairs of the white male state violence of 1967 may have been
the Justine Damond of today had things escalated further for them. ("What,
you think that because you're white you won't I won't kill you too?," one white
cop threatens.)
"Detroit" makes its white police officers' actions appear more nuanced while some
of its Black
characters (including those seen looting early on) are drawn from monolithic or
one-dimensional straits. Lesser context is afforded them. (A singer
in "The Dramatics" is a core character but the sight of a Black man singing
for his big Motown moment seems too convenient and connective touchstone of
comfort for white audiences, even if summoned from real events.) An effort
however, is made to balance out white cops -- some as do-gooders or dogged
interrogators, with clear rule changes based on the race of the interrogated.
In a film that takes painstaking care in capturing its institutionalized and
entrenched oppressions of Black men (and to a lesser extent white women) it is bizarre that the film's white
male police detectives would be somehow resistant to the same racist and systemic
empowerment and entrenchment that their subordinates carried out.
As I watched spellbound at times I often asked myself who "Detroit" is for.
Is it for America collectively? Is it a lesson? Is it for Black
America? Is it for white America? (On the surface "Detroit" is a
touchstone for America in its present day, still with 241-year-lessons
unlearned.) Yet with each passing scene I often found myself answering,
"the latter." Even with the film's searing and unblinking violence by
white cops comes comforting reassurances of the goodness of some members of an
oppressive occupying force for the film's white audience (two white male cops
aid a Black youth, and the film's music gets gooey and sobering.) It is a
reauthorizing of the cultural myth of the veracity of (white) police officers,
one that America has been spoonfed with via television and movies ad infinitum.
The Ferguson of 2014 and the police killing onslaught of 2017 is well and truly alive in "Detroit".
Obviously nothing has changed in 50-plus years in the U.S. where police killings
of Black men and women are concerned but the line-blurring and Ms. Bigelow's
recurring themes of testifying, Black expression, validation and recollection
constantly clash with presumptions of accuracy in whiteness. "Detroit"
never plays things easy yet doesn't go as deep or as all-encompassing as it should. For all of Ms.
Bigelow's passion, prowess and potency as a director, there's a sense that "Detroit"
has a few vital missing heartbeats its near-three-hour length would have justified.
Also with: Jacob Latimore, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Laz
Alonso, John Krasinski, Jason Mitchell, Jennifer Ehle.
"Detroit" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong
language and pervasive violence. The film's running time is two hours and 23 minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2017. POPCORNREEL.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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