The Detroit riot of 1967 was one of the deadliest and most destructive in US history. It lasted almost a week after police raided an unlicensed bar and resulted in 43 deaths, thousands of injuries, and thousands of buildings destroyed. A lengthy history of injustice, police brutality and corruption, racial and social violence, and economic collapse led to the riots, which have only been surpassed in size and scope by the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the NYC draft riots during the civil war (100 years before the events of this movie). In Detroit, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal (the team behind The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) do what they do best by dramatizing a war zone. We might wash over the events in history as a "disturbance" or a crime spree, but Detroit knows its subject better than that.
Bigelow begins with onscreen-text narration of Detroit's racial and economic history using the paintings of the Great Migration by Jacob Lawrence. Once the stage is set, she dives right into the initial raid on the speakeasy as its black patrons celebrate one of their own (the always awesome Anthony Mackie) returning from Vietnam. Once rounded up by the white police and lined up on the street, observers start crowding around, and shouting and panic between the parties involved quickly leads to minor violence. Fueled by anger, the heat, lack of information, knowledge of Detroit police culture, and probably alcohol-heightened mob mentality, the crowd goes from throwing cans and bottles at the cop cars to store fronts. It doesn't take long before the city is aflame.
That's the beginning of the movie. A riveting twenty or so minutes of almost no discernible dialogue as cops and black civilians shout and cuss at each other, each party afraid but only one group with the authority to control the situation in a calm and responsible way. They do not. Bigelow and Boal have already shown us their incredible ability to subvert expectations and delve deep into the psychology of their characters: The leads of Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker are addicted to violence, hellbent on fulfilling their jobs while lives hang in the balance. The former film courts the morality of torture (something which, I suspect, led to the Oscar being stolen from both it and Bigelow that year, no thanks to Senator John McCain's review; beware of politicians using media for their own purposes! Remember Califano and Selma!) while the latter examines the nature of violence in white men's hearts. Here in Detroit, however, the character lens is much wider, as we understand the multiple points of view and the utter lack of a moral center by many parties. The black mayor pleads early in the film for peace, asking the rioters to please "not mess up your own neighborhoods." It's a reasonable cry, and one we hear repeated often from Ferguson to Baltimore.
But this movie's focus lies ever-so-slightly more on the alternative to that. What is it that provokes vandalism and arson in these riots? Of course, single shots of the film may answer that as simply as a lone rioter doing what he knows is wrong simply because he'll get away with it amidst the chaos. But the film, I think, suggests something more at work. By the end of the picture, we wonder what we would have done differently, had the police and lawyers and politicians treated us the same way as the black citizens of the time. That's the magic of this movie. It forces us into the headspace of everyone involved, how it's all a moral gray area and the relativity of consequences are as complex as the urgency of the situation.
Who are we to say that the way the rioters handled themselves badly? Their lives were at stake. Early in the film, as the trucks of national guardsmen roll into the city, the soldiers are looking for potential snipers on the roof. A little girl peers out her window to see what's happening and is immediately shot dead. Later, as dozens of arrested black men crowd a police station, the cops are as overwhelmed and confused as the prisoners. Trying to overpower the noise of outraged suspects and arrestees, officers hold men's cuffed hands up while shouting, "Whose prisoner is this?", highlighting the chaos and irresponsibility of the department in a scene that is horrifyingly reminiscent of a slave auction. Think that's taking the idea too far? Try again: One especially violent cop, while chasing a looter, shoots him twice with a shotgun. When the looter climbs a fence and escapes, the cop turns to his partner and says, "What a fucking specimen, huh?" He views the man as an animal, one who apparently deserved to be shot and killed even though he was only looting, was running away, and had no weapon.
But just as I was getting bewildered by the many perspective points and characters, Bigelow finds her real focal point. After introducing so many disparate characters and locations, she settles us in for a ride as her camera almost literally zooms in on the Algiers Motel. This sequence is the body of the movie, a masterpiece of horror cinema that details the still mysterious events that happened the night of July 25. I'm inclined to believe, generally, what the movie portrays due to public records of the event and the presence of one of its direct witnesses on the set every day, though there is obviously lots of room for dramatization. I won't spoil it for you, though if you know your history, you'll be as fascinated as I was.
Even if you don't, you'll be blown away by the horror shown onscreen. I'll leave the plot for other sources to describe, but in an ensemble movie of excellent performances, the standout for me was Will Poulter. Here he plays the murderous psychopath in a police uniform I previously mentioned. It's not a nuanced performance, but it's a dazzling, balls-out portrayal of absolute evil that stands out because the rest of the movie is so firmly entrenched in moral contradictions and relativity. Poulter either didn't get the memo or didn't care, and it pays off, as his baby face belies sinister designs and his Mephistophelean eyebrows indicate his devilish tendencies. He's the stuff of nightmares here, terrorizing the black men and two white women in the motel to find out which one might have a gun. Though he had previously been chastised by his superior for murdering the looter, he had been ordered to "get back to work" while he awaited formal murder charges (a not-so-sly early bit of criticism of white police departments that allow suspected criminal cops to continue working, when ordinary citizens would be hauled in for questioning or worse).
Despite that setback, Poulter's cop manages to get into the thick of the rioting. As his team charges into the Algiers Motel (it's a cartoonish portrayal lambasting Bad Cop culture: shooting the facade of the building like in a bad Western, the officers don't even announce their presence or offer a chance for innocent parties to evacuate), he quickly takes the reins. Even Guardsmen defer to him, and when the state police arrive they too let local cops take charge. Once, when a disturbed soldier leaves the motel to escape the crazed killer inside, he tells an incoming superior officer that Poulter is terrorizing black people, the state trooper declares, "That can't be right. They have their civil rights," and turns and leaves, not wanting to get mixed up in civil rights violations. What's that old saying about good men who do nothing? Maybe they're not such good men after all. What is missing from this movie, I'd argue, is a logical explanation if not examination of how and why this culture was (and is) so pervasive: Where is the police review board? Why were the police armed so heavily? What factors led to a nearly all-white police outfit, and why were bigoted acts of violence not disciplined? Of course the answer is racism, but it would be so much more interesting to see the realities of racist legislation and administration than to see a man who is basically the Iago to Detroit's Othello.
As a movie that directly concerns black experiences and racial injustice, it is disheartening and a little disturbing to see so much white perspective and agency in Detroit. That's historically accurate, sure, but I would have liked to see some more of the black heroes of the riots. When, after Mr Evil Cop lets one of the young black men leave the motel, he runs into another white cop; it's telling that the cop's immediate sympathy and care for the beaten youth is one of the most heartwrenching scenes of the movie. And then there's John Boyega, who performs easily the most thankless (and severely underwritten) role in the movie. He's a private security guard whose proximity to the Algiers sends him into the fray. Boal and Boyega portray him as a good man stuck in an impossible situation, who tries to do a little bit of good here and there but who ultimately ends up enabling the bloodthirsty police and becoming their scapegoat. Historically, that seems one of the less-likely possibility of his mysterious presence. It's almost as if Bigelow and Boal don't want us to know that some of the witnesses actually testified that he had participated in the beatings and humiliation that night, and that afterward he was found as guilty as the cops by an all-black city tribunal that included Rosa Parks.
Just as we saw in Dunkirk, Detroit is designed to be an immersive experience. It's a cinematic test of endurance, daring us to look away or to get sick like Boyega's character does at the end. While it stops short of making brazen judgments on most of the action and characters, the movie offers a harrowing experience and requires lots of thinking and discussion afterward. Perhaps most interestingly, and a conclusion I took some time to come to, Bigelow and Boal make this movie not a universal statement to encompass the whole history of Detroit during the 1967 riots. I expected that, and was initially disappointed when it was not the case. Why didn't they name the movie Algiers or something, since that's what it directly concerns? But upon reflection, the filmmakers do something much more savvy. They turn the Algiers into a centerpiece of the city and the conflict. The movie takes the riots and the horrors and the chaos and turns its narrative into a microcosm. It's an in-depth examination on a small scale of what was happening on a big scale.
What is still happening on a big scale.
IMDb: Detroit
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