Month: August 2017

I finally saw Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow’s film on the Algiers Motel killings, and I have to say I came out of the theater quite shaken by it–it’s visually exhausting, thanks to the frenetic, riotous movement of Bigelow’s camera throughout. And a viewer familiar with the Algiers Motel killings can only watch the unfolding drama with an awful sense of dread, knowing as one does in advance the fate of the dead, and the rough order in which they will die. This puts an extra dramatic burden, at least for me, on the necessity of bringing those victims to life, of making them more than just the soon-to-be-dead-of-the-Algiers, which is a burden that the film doesn’t meet. So even though it’s emotionally grueling, given the brutality it depicts, there’s also something unfeeling about it.

I would also just say, for starters, that whenever you put “Detroit” in the title of a thing (see also: Detroiters) it’s a good sign that the thing in question is not going to be about Detroit in any serious way, but just some generic urban placeholder for something else: “race relations,” “urban crisis,” “gentrification hijinks,” etc. This is not new or unique to Bigelow’s film–elsewhere, I’ve written more about the way in which Detroit serves as a metonym for various other national fantasies or fears. This can, of course, be true of any city but the effect is intensified in Detroit, the film, which uses an introductory Jacob Lawrence montage to introduce the rebellion as an explosion of dashed black hopes and reactionary white backlash in the wake of the Great Migration. Detroit, in this film, is every northern city, which isn’t untrue. But because the film lacks much political perspective, and because of the narrative restrictions of depicting an hours-long ordeal in a single room, and for some other reasons (see below), Detroit as a distinct place, landscape, economy, culture, and so on, never really appears. There’s not even a midwestern accent in the whole film.

The film’s feeling of placelessness, along with its almost non-existent characterization, really made me appreciate John Hersey’s narrative decisions and granular focus on the participants’ backstories in The Algiers Motel Incident. (I wrote more about these here, in Guernica) The film’s focus on a singularly talented victim, the Dramatics singer Larry Reed, really makes the movie into the sort of “tragedy” Hersey said he wanted to avoid: a routinized spectacle of black suffering, which predictably elicits what Richard Wright called the “consolation of tears” in its audience. Everyone in the movie feels like a myth or a caricature–the innocent victims, the monstrous cops. The only exception–and this is a telling misstep by the writers–is one of the white characters, the brave white maybe-prostitute, Juli, who talks back to the police.

This, to me, misses a big part of what makes the Algiers Motel story so compelling and scary to me: the normality of the participants, which is what Hersey emphasizes. The victims for him were just regular kids, or at least they were trying to be, in a city and country determined not to allow them. And the cops weren’t uniquely awful people, like the villain in the film. What’s worse is that they were rather typical white Detroiters who, in a moment of crisis, just “did what came naturally to them,” as one reviewer of the book put it.

And some specific points:

1. What was the point, really, of the Mel Dismukes character, played by John Boyega? If the film sets out to exonerate him, I don’t think it succeeds. His character makes very little sense: he’s treated as an innocent peacemaker who is also improbably a fly on the wall, witnessing all of the police torture and even trying to forestall it. But why would the police–especially police as paranoid as these are made out to be–allow a black security guard to just hang out while they beat and murder people, unless he’s complicit with them?
2. A perhaps historically pedantic point of information: one of the film’s obligarory sympathetic policemen is a homicide detective who, early in the film, says that he is going to recommend murder charges for the character played by Will Poulter, who seems to be based on the real-life Detroit cop David Senak. Senak was a vice squad officer implicated in the Algiers killings who also shot a looter in the back in the early days of the uprising. Narratively, this episode establishes the Senak character’s unhinged violent streak, but it also suggests that the forthcoming charges motivate his wild behavior later–he’s got nothing to lose anymore. Yet it wasn’t actually illegal at the time for cops to fire on fleeing suspects who refused an order to stop, even those suspected only of looting.  Murder charges would never have been forthcoming–and Senak’s motivations must have been deeper, or more complicated, than the film allows.

3. 

   I was suspicious of some of the Twitter critiques I read of the film’s lack of black female characters, for the reason Bigelow herself offered: there were no black women present in the Motel itself. But after seeing the film, I would say that the character of Pollard’s mother should have been more prominent–and not just to check off a box. Rather, her advocacy for her son was such a prominent part of the real-life Algiers Motel case (which Hersey, again, emphasizes) and featuring her would have given the movie some of the political and emotional heft it just doesn’t have.

The organized anti-academic right has claimed its first major legislative victory, with North Carolina’s bill, HB 527, naturally called the ACT TO RESTORE AND PRESERVE FREE SPEECH ON THE CAMPUSES OF THE CONSTITUENT INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA. The bill is based on the Goldwater Institute’s model bill, versions of which have been proposed in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other places. I wrote about the Michigan bill here. The fallout of the Charles Murray affair and Ann Coulter dustup has continued much longer than I expected.

One other common thread: Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, champion of the North Carolina bill, and Michigan Sen. Patrick Colbeck, sponsor of Michigan’s harsher measure, are thought to be running for governor in their respective states, and are grandstanding on this non-issue to burnish their right-wing bona-fides. These laws are thus fruit of the same unvarnished courage that powers Ann Coulter.

The North Carolina bill is a watered down version of the Goldwater bill, which calls for expulsions or suspensions of students who “infringe” upon the free speech rights of others.  The Carolina bill includes that artfully vague wording, barring conduct that “substantially disrupts the functioning of the constituent institution” or “substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others.” What “substantially,” “disrupts,” or “interferes” means will be left up to campus administrators and the kangaroo free speech courts these laws set up to regulate students’ speech rights.

The good news, sort of, is that the Carolina bill only calls for unstated “disciplinary measures,” rather than specific punishments. The bad news is that it will be left up to the whims of individual campus administrators to set these policies. Dependence upon the political courage of university administrators is never a happy place to be.