Last night I went to see the film, Detroit, about the 1967 uprising in that city. I went with my parents, which was interesting as my dad is from Detroit and my parents were living there at the time. It was interesting to ask them about the ways in which the film matched or differed from their memories.
The film is effective at portraying terrorism, one feels frightened throughout. There are also several tear-jerking moments amid the action. It is effectively emotionally manipulative and intense. I could not sleep until 5 am after watching it.
Nevertheless, the film is disappointing because it is not really about its black characters, despite being described as a film that provides a compelling and vivid look at the experience of racism. I expected a film about how police terrorism affects Black people who are terrorized by it. Instead, it is a film about a white terrorist police officer. I cannot really imagine a film about another terrorist group that would focus so much on the terrorist and so little on those terrorized. This is allegedly a film about Black experiences, but it lacks any black characters.
The film begins with the riots, and everything is fast-paced and a little hard to follow. We are introduced to the characters, but mostly don’t get their names or a sense of who they are. Everyone is swept along with the chaos of the riots. It is not until Larry Reid (Algee Smith) and his best friend Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) check into the Algiers and meet two white women, Juli Hysell (Hannah Murray) and Karen Malloy (Kaitlyn Dever), that things begin to calm down enough to get a sense of the characters at all.
What we are “shown” here is a little odd. It amounts to a lecture on “the Black experience of being policed.” Here Carl Cooper (Jason Mitchell) is enlisted to give a lecture on how policing of Black neighbourhoods is experienced by the community and the two white women are enlisted to provide the reason for this lecture. The lecture clearly indicates that the film is for a white audience, and one that has little knowledge of past or present realities in non-white communities. I used to be interested in creative writing and in the classes I took they always stressed that one should “show not tell.” In this film, one is told of this experience but is never really quite shown the experience. I think showing is harder than telling, which is why I eventually switched to non-fiction. So when I watch a film I always pay attention to where the effort was made. What are we shown? What are we merely told?
The lecture also provides the pretense for the ensuing events as the ‘starter pistol’ is shot to demonstrate how having a gun pointed at you creates fear. But that is it, that is the character development that we get. Well, that and we get to see Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega) bringing coffee to the National Guard across from his security job just before the shots. Not long after, the police arrive to investigate the hotel.
At this point, all of the character development focuses on the police. The Black characters (with the exception of Melvin Dismukes) are reduced to literal props in the police “death game” which seems to be a widely-known “interrogation tactic.” Most of the dialogue is given to the police, and the Black characters mainly whimper in fear. Now don’t get me wrong, the acting is amazing. You feel how terrorized the characters are and the portrayal is extremely realistic. You feel terrorized along with them.
But you don’t learn about them. You see and feel their terror, but little else, and little strength or heroism. There is one meager failed attempt to escape, and one successful attempt to escape which is assisted by the white national guardsman who decides he should get out of there or he will have to deal with his involvement in civil rights abuses. There is little resistance from the terrified characters, other than one moment from Robert Green (Anthony Mackie) says to the cops at the beginning that he is an army vet, he knows what is happening, and “he won’t lay down.” (Which is somewhat ironic, because if memory serves me correctly, he is one of the ones chosen to die in the “death game” and so spends much of the film literally lying down). There is a second moment of resistance (I think) from Larry Reid (though it might have been Fred Temple) where he offers the cops a way out by saying, “I think you have the wrong house.”
The main character of the film is Officer Krauss (Will Poulter).* He is in control, he drives the events, he is most fully the agent. Now don’t get me wrong, he is a villain and this is a film about his villainy. It is not a sympathetic portrayal. Krauss is racist and he stereotypes all blacks as ‘animals’ and those in his capture as “criminals.” Krauss treats his captives as things, as objects to be manipulated in an interrogation game, which he enjoys. The problem is that the film also treats these actors as props in its portrayal rather than as fully fleshed out characters. Even their killing is sometimes used more as a way to advance the story than as a way to explore their experience. Aubrey Pollard (Nathan Davis Jr.) is actually shot by the rookie who doesn’t understand the “game.” Pollard is literally reduced to a thing in this killing, a plot device to allow the film to move on from the terrorist hostage situation at the Algiers.
This leads to what my mom told me was the least believable aspect of the film for her. The hostages are released one by one if they promise never to talk about it. Most do, but Fred Temple will not deny the bodies he sees in front of him and he, too, is shot. We see Larry Reid, bleeding from the head and terrified, running/stumbling through an open area, toward a cop car muttering, “please, please.” The cop in the car says, “oh my god, who would do this to a person?” and helps Larry Reid to the hospital for treatment, rescuing Larry Reid from the ordeal. My mom said that she did not believe for a second that a member of law enforcement involved in controlling the Detroit uprising would see a bleeding, disoriented Black man, charging toward them without shooting.
Now people will probably object that this is unfair, as the film also follows the trial and the effects of the Algiers hostage situation on Larry Reid, and it is true that in the denouement I began to think ok, maybe this film will redeem itself. We see the horrifying and life-destroying effect of the hostage experience on Larry Reid. At the start of the film we see Reid beginning his singing career, and he is portrayed as the most dedicated of the group. By the end of the film, he cannot continue as a Motown musician because he does not want to make music for whites to dance to. Instead, while his band-mates go on to success in the 1970s, Reid has to take a poorly-paying job as the director of a Black church choir. So the hostage situation is portrayed as having detrimental material, financial, and psychological effects on Larry Reid. And this is true, and we can see that these events don’t remain isolated to the one night but can continue to linger throughout a lifetime.
But here again the focus on Larry Reid’s psychological damage individualizes the issue. His band-mates (who also lost a friend when Fred Temple was killed) are not affected and go on to become successful musicians. The other people in the Algiers hostage situation seem to adjust just fine. So one might be led to think that Reid is psychologically weak. This ignores that terrorism aims not just at the immediate victims, but intends also to victimize and terrorize the community. There is no sense that these events had any effect on the community outside of those directly affected. So this is a movie about a bad cop, not about how policing can have systemic effects.
In fact, the film stresses this point. They repeatedly talk about how Krass is a “bad apple.” Thankfully, they don’t forget the rest of the the adage “one bad apple can spoil the bunch” (which is often left out of discussions of police brutality where the fact that there are a “few bad apples” is used more often to excuse the rest of the force rather than to suggest that they might be tainted) because they also show how Krass’ dominant personality attracts the other racist cop, Flynn (Brian O’Toole), and cows the more reticent Demens (Jack Reynor) into going along with his plot. So we see that Krass is a bad apple that can spoil Demens who is portrayed as fairly innocent and never having shot a person before that night. The film portrays the way in which the other cops, including the Michigan State Police, and the National Guard, recognize something bad is happening and then walk away because they don’t want to get involved in “civil rights stuff.”
But this places the blame on Krass’ shoulders and leaves out questions about the system of policing itself. Who taught this “death game” to the metro police, the state troopers, and the national guard? Why could Krass rely on every officer who arrived, no matter the force they came from, to have knowledge of this technique? Why do none of the officers come from, live in, and understand the community? Why is law enforcement escalation seen as the way to dominate the uprising? What led to the rebellion anyway (there was some cartoon that told us about vague racial tensions, but all we were shown were police shutting down an illegal after hours club)? Are “these people” out of out of control animals destroying the city (as Krass says)? We see the trial, but the focus of the trial is on the police themselves not on the technique they were using. So again the events are individualized rather than examined as part of a system of policing.
So this film is not about Black experiences with racist policing (a systemic problem); instead, it is a film about white experiences with a racist police officer (a bad individual, an isolated individual incident). Indeed, we are reassured that although “a bad apple” might taint a few other apples around it, the barrel itself is fine. White audiences can be assured that the system is fine, after all Larry Reid is rescued by a cop in the end.
*Note: while the real names of the Black hostages were used throughout the film, the names of the officers involved were changed to avoid lawsuits.
P.S. If you think I am wrong that the film lacks Black characters, list what you know about each of them. I tried, and it was far longer for Krass than anyone else. Most of the Black characters had just one or two dimensions (e.g. Larry Reid: wanted to sing Motown, was unable to because of psychological damage). The screenwriter, Mark Boal, says this was a deliberate decision to show that people don’t control their own lives. But that would be better demonstrated, I think, with characters developed enough to seem like more than props in someone else’s story (and doesn’t the cop control his own life?).
What to watch instead: The Documentary 12th and Clairmount created using donated footage from people who live in Detroit.
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