Victimology, Version XXIV

“Detroit,” film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal, 2017

This is another hard film to watch.  There are a plethora of films about the Holocaust, slavery and Jim Crow, which are easy (and deserved) political targets.  Most of the films portray black people or Jews as extreme victims, and that particular view is beloved of mostly white liberals.  This film breaks the mold a bit by moving the scene from the U.S. South or Germany to Detroit, Michigan.  But the central event, the ‘Algiers Motel incident’ as it is known, becomes the exclusive focus of the film.  And this again features terrorized black men, along with two terrorized white women.

Festival of Looting

Given the director and writer also collaborated on “Zero Dark 30” and “The Hurt Locker” – both pro-war or pro-torture films – it seems odd that they chose this topic.  But there is a connection.

The crimes at the Algiers were carried out by 3 racist and hysterical Detroit police and one Michigan Guardsman, passively watched by a black security guard.  3 innocent black men were executed, with a knife planted next to one man’s body by a cop.  The remaining victims were beaten, terrorized and threatened with death in order to get them to ‘talk.’  All this because of a missing starter pistol.  As is to be expected, no policeman is convicted of these crimes after a trial handled by an incompetent prosecutor.  A $5,000 civil penalty was ultimately paid by one cop.

A familiar story, and one repeated every day in the U.S. to this day, as hundreds of mostly minority people are killed by police every year with no accountability.

The recent rebellions in Ferguson MO, and later Baltimore, MD against police violence echo back to Detroit and many other rebellions in the 1960s, and even the Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles in 1992.

So what is wrong with this picture?  If you are tired of politically easy victim films, then looking at the 1967 Detroit rebellion itself might give you a real topic for a film.  Because the issues are far broader than the Algiers crimes. In this film we see Detroit police roughly raid an after-hours club full of black people, including returning servicemen from Vietnam, because they do not have a liquor license.  They arrest everyone.  This example of over-zealous policing against black people infuriates the folks on 12^th Street, and the police begin to be attacked.  Later Democratic Party politician John Conyers attempts to quiet the crowd from atop a car, and they will have none of it.  Eventually Michigan Governor George Romney calls in National Guard  and the Michigan State police, both full of white country boys.  Lyndon Johnson then sent in the 82^nd and 101st Airborne as part of the 1807 ‘insurrection act.’  Tanks and machine guns were deployed, but the experienced and integrated soldiers were far less violent than the cops and Guard.  From there the film stops looking at the larger story.

Map of Detroit Uprising

The 1967 Detroit Rebellion (which the bourgeois press calls a ‘riot’) was essentially a 5-day confrontation between parts of the Detroit black community and the police. It spread out in various parts of the city.  It was one of 159 rebellions in black communities that year.   White people also took part in the looting of the predatory businesses located in these neighborhoods.  43 people were killed, over a 1,000 injured and thousands arrested, all overwhelmingly black.  Fires burned 2,000 structures.  Basically snipers started shooting at police and later, fireman.   Detroit police broke into many homes and brutalized arrestees and conducted uncontrolled shooting.  Women were molested. Two dozen other cities had simultaneous rebellions that grew out of the Detroit uprising.

Members of various left groups like the Black Panthers, SNCC, Uhuru and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers played a role in the Detroit rebellion, and were strengthened by it.  Even the White Panthers were influenced, as they had their own problems with the police.  This was not some ‘chaotic’ unpredictable event but in fact the logical result of years of oppression of the black working class in Detroit.  Given it spread beyond Detroit, it was clear it was a national problem.  In essence, “Detroit” should have been about far more than the Algiers motel savagery.  The film fails to address that, but instead gives us a tiny picture of black people as victims – again.  And individual racists (bad apples) - again.

Odd that even film critics at the NYT get it:

A. O. Scott in The New York Times wrote, "It is curious that a movie set against a backdrop of black resistance and rebellion—however inchoate and self-destructive its expression may have been—should become a tale of black helplessness and passivity. The white men, the decent ones as much as the brutes, have the answers, the power, the agency."  Another NYT critic called it a ‘moral failure.'

It is time that both black directors and white directors finally made actual ‘emancipatory’ films, especially located in the present, instead of deceptive progressive fare placed long ago and far away.  The real target is not individual evil men, but a whole system.  It is not nostalgia that will help us, but the 'now.'  Review of "Zero Dark 30," below

Red Frog / January 26, 2018