In recent weeks, two films have endeavored to spark similar conversations about racial injustice, police brutality, and rioting, despite recounting events separated by 50 years.
Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by her collaborator Mark Boal, is set during the titular city’s infamous 12th Street Riots, which claimed 43 lives, almost 1,200 injuries, and more than 7,000 arrests in the final week of July 1967. Using a journalistic approach, it reconstructs and dramatizes the events that led to the killing of three black teenage boys — 17-year-old Carl Cooper, 18-year-old Aubrey Pollard, and 19-year-old Fred Temple — depicting in grim detail a group of young black men and women being terrorized at the Algiers Motel over a nightlong torture and brutality session at the hands of Detroit police.
A week after Detroit’s national expansion to 3,000 theaters, the street-level documentary Whose Streets?, directed by filmmaker and activist Sabaah Folayan, debuted at a much smaller scale. Premiering in January at Sundance, and now playing in 15 select cities, the five-act documentary has images and scenes that eerily mirror Detroit’s portrayal of racial tensions between black citizens and authority systems bent against them, here in service of a narrative following the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown Jr. at the hands of officer Darren Wilson.
On their own, these films are pieces of a larger conversation that might have once felt compartmentalized to the past, whether far (Detroit) or recent (Whose Streets?). Yet now, as the country reels from the sight of white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, it places greater weight on a question that goes far beyond whether these movies are good: the question of whether these films can inspire productive conversations on race. As one film stumbles and another succeeds, the answer lies in some key differences between them.
Detroit: an exercise in black trauma and narrative injustice
Detroit’s core story about that brutal, murderous night at the Algiers Motel that ended the lives of three young black men (also detailed in John Hersey’s 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident) is certainly a story worth telling, and the outcome will feel chillingly familiar for many people, especially for black moviegoers. The conflicting, dubious accounts by authorities; the insistent, dismissed accounts by eyewitnesses; collusion by a wider legal system; and a trail of broken black bodies will feel wearingly familiar to many viewers today.
They also feel all the more egregious in light of Detroit’s faults. While it comes from a well-intentioned place, the movie suffers from being both too inhuman and too abstract. Detroit’s approach to storytelling suffers from rounded representations and political context, which not only undercuts the humanity of Detroit’s black citizens, it threatens to stifle a worthwhile conversation about how far American race relations haven’t come since 1967.
In a Variety profile about Detroit, Bigelow says that her hope is “that a dialogue comes out of this film that can begin to humanize a situation that often feels very abstract.” But unfortunately, that humanity never makes its way out of Detroit’s muck of dreary, traumatizing imagery, nonexistent characterization, and lack of broader political and historical context. In Bigelow’s film, conversation is driven by suffering, supplanting nuance with abhorrent images that feel cobbled together from newspaper headlines: There’s “African-American Child Accidentally Shot By Authorities” for when a child peering through her living room window is shot because she’s mistaken for a sniper; there’s “Local Robber Stopped By Officer Bullets While Looting” as another scene.
These scenes are treated chillingly, but Detroit seems disinterested in lingering on the people inhabiting the bodies involved, saying nothing of significance about what impact those deaths have on the community. The movie’s undisciplined desire to “rip from the headlines” cheapens the inherent drama of its central conflict in deference to sensationalism.
Intentionally or not, under the pen of screenwriter Mark Boal, Detroit reproduces situations that have sparked outcries from the black community in recent years. The girl in the window isn’t just an incident; it’s Tamir Rice. The running looter shot in the back by officers and the subsequent cover-up isn’t just plot — it’s the 2015 South Carolina killing of Walter Scott, or, as the looter scales the fence, injured and bleeding, it’s the 2016 Chicago killing of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal.
Underlying all of this is what HuffPost Black Voices points out: Detroit overlooks the fact that years before the events it depicts, in 1963, nearly 200,000 black Detroiters marched to protest the structural inequalities they were already fighting against in housing, schooling, and policing. That omission matters as the movie shortcuts to an outbreak of black anger that arguably feels outsized to the “blind pig” after-hours raid that opens the film.
The only real black mobility and agency ever evidenced in Detroit is athletic and superhuman. In Detroit, black rioters run nonstop, break windows, and steal goods in one motion, upend cars, run after being beaten and shot. And they sing: One of the film’s central figures is Larry Reed, a member of the Detroit group the Dramatics, and Detroit has a significant number of scenes with Reed singing his way into sex, out of trouble, and into work.
When Detroit examines the black community beyond its suffering, the representations are unflattering. Black men are repeatedly shown as lustful, violent, and beaten; black women are virtually nonexistent, aside from a brief, empty appearance by Samira Wiley, suggesting they were only around to answer phone calls, greet motel guests, and console the bereaved.
While Detroit’s premise would suggest it’s broaching another segment of our generations-long conversation about race, its scenes of black people suffering detached from scenes of black people also working, laughing, loving, and living — as they still managed to do over decades of systemic oppression — makes it feel like a one-dimensional conversation that prioritizes pain over humanity.
Ultimately, Detroit doesn’t feel like a productive film entry about our racial past, like 12 Years A Slave, because it can’t connect with anything other than itself. Instead, it ends up feeling contrived by filmmakers driven more by provocative imagery than inspiring a reflective conversation.
The reaction of all this has at times been damning. While the film has high critical approval (review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes has it at 84 percent fresh), there has been justifiable consternation about Bigelow’s approach to the city of Detroit, the events at the Algiers, and blackness. Critic Angelica Jade Bastien called the film’s depiction of race, violence, and brutality “soulless” in her review, while outlets like the popular black culture/politics/entertainment site Very Smart Brothers essentially called the film unwatchable on a second viewing. Other outlets have referred to it as “numbing” and “unbearable.”
In a July interview with the Detroit News, Bigelow asserts that the film “speaks to the necessity for a dialogue” that’s not about “isolated events” but rather that’s “about this country” and says the film’s purpose is to serve as “an indictment against the lack of conversation about race in this country.” Those are laudatory sentiments that mirror the movie’s flaws, because Detroit doesn’t seem clear or consistent about what conversations about race it’s seeking to instigate. Is it about racialized police states? Police brutality? Interracial dating? Poverty? Citing Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote that riots are the “language of the unheard,” she says that the rioters in Detroit “were heard,” but if so, Detroit seems confused about both what they were saying and how it was received.
In the context of Bigelow’s statements, Detroit’s pastiche of racial imagery in service of shedding light on our culture’s contradictory conscience ends up coming off as a painfully performative attempt to be “down.” That impression is especially strong in the wake of another successful 2017 film that helped form a vocabulary around well-intentioned white liberal attempts at race conversations with a fixation on tortured black bodies: Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Taken at her word, Bigelow has noble intentions for wanting to tackle this film. Acknowledging that she had a “long conversation with myself” as a white woman directing the film, she ultimately decided to tell the story, particularly after a grand jury declined to pursue prosecuting Darren Wilson. It’s an ironic inspiration for a film that fails to make a convincing connection between the events of 1967 and those happening in 2017. It operates under the assumption that graphic retelling of a historical moment is sufficient inspiration for thinking about the injustices that are happening today.
The movie’s closing credits showcase Bigelow and Boal’s research, sharing the current whereabouts of many of the core officers and civilians involved, but doesn’t take a moment to highlight the dark irony of the Detroit police department’s ongoing issues with race and police accountability. If Detroit were truly interested in indictments, it might have also used the closing credits to footnote that after the Algiers trial, in 1971, the city created STRESS, an undercover police task force that only further escalated the tensions between police and black citizens.
Fortunately, audiences have the option of a more responsible, nuanced, and human story set against a similar backdrop of police brutality and racial violence in Whose Streets? The film’s street-level observations told via camera-phone recordings and documentary video footage offers a more convincing and telling portrait of the intersections of police brutality, state-sanctioned law and order, and activism — and maintains its subjects’ humanity while indicting a system that routinely dehumanizes them.
Whose Streets?: an exercise in empowerment and humanity
Where Detroit conflates truth and power with “unflinching” looks at the riots that rived the city for days, Whose Streets? understands the power in looking away.
Filmed during the height of the Ferguson unrest in the wake of Michael Brown being shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson, the documentary is a close, intimate look at everyone involved, from protestors to everyday citizens to Ferguson authorities to President Barack Obama. It examines moments of peaceful, strategized resistance by local activist leaders like Brittany Ferrell, a single mother with designs to be a nurse who is activated by the injustice around Brown’s death, or David Whitt, another local Ferguson resident-turned-activist who dedicates his time to vigilant surveillance of police activity after Brown (who was Whitt’s neighbor) is killed.
Though it’s over an hour shorter, Whose Streets? takes the time Detroit doesn’t to flesh out its subjects and the ongoing reality of their daily lives, from the mundanity of dropping kids off at school to restoring, again and again, the memorial where Brown’s slain body lay for hours to attending town-hall meetings and convening with other protesters and friends. The documentary also gives voice to other residents who are involved in the locally led grassroots movement, taking care to show how active, concerned, and resourceful these citizens are.
This attentiveness to the three-dimensional nature of its subjects and central conflict means that when Whose Streets? makes use of the type of imagery Detroit employs — heavily armored legions of state and federal law enforcement roaming the streets to enforce curfews and decorum, using an array of “suppression tactics” — it manages to evoke the tragedy, terror, and controversy of these images, where Bigelow and Boal make them feel wooden and exploitative.
In the hands of director Sabaah Folayan (with co-director Damon Davis), an activist and a black woman, Whose Streets? exhibits respect for nuance in both telling a fuller story and evoking a fuller range of emotions. Whose Streets? cares about the aftermath of its conflict, highlighting the physical and emotional cost that accompanies resistance and activism by detailing not only the effects of tear gas and rubber bullets, but also the mental, emotional, and financial wear and tear on activists buried under bureaucratic attacks in the form of court summons and eviction notices.
It also includes a brief but powerful scene where protestors directly engage a black female officer, asking her if she’s tired of upholding the “blue code of silence” in the wake of another injustice at the hands of law enforcement. As her steely, dutiful gaze breaks and tears roll down her eyes, Whose Streets? evokes far more efficiently the inherent conflict of a black person serving in a law and order capacity during black unrest than Bigelow ever manages to do with John Boyega’s character in Detroit.
This is why Whose Streets is better positioned to provoke a productive conversation about race in the country: It’s interested in indicting the country for what’s been done to the black community for generations, not just a handful of officers. In comparison, most of Detroit’s big-picture scenes are fixated on property and appearances, as the movie repeatedly shows black-owned businesses in the rioted areas spray-painted with “Soul Brother/Sister,” pleading for protection. It uses archival footage of black people talking about restoring buildings and homes, and countless scenes of community wreckage. It never once makes the connection to actual suffering so much as savagery.
A question of whose story and whose perspective
In tandem, Detroit and Whose Streets? should theoretically propel deeper, more meaningful conversations about America’s racial stain, but the chasm between the two films’ points of view is too vast. Whose Streets? exhibits a conviction that not only takes seriously social justice challenges and strides, but also takes them past the point of exhaustion, providing a blueprint for not only how to heal post-trauma, but how to battle something bigger than yourself. Detroit never reaches these depths or heights, because its story is too mired in despair, presenting history as inherently episodic, hopelessly stuck in bloody amber.
We need stories that carry the torch of how humanity moves forward in the face of racism and the systems it festers in, but Hollywood still seems ill-equipped for telling these stories. The stories are there, but the white mainstream imagination isn’t. Charitably speaking, that could be because of ignorance, but skeptically, it could be a reflection of something more sinister.
This past weekend, as white supremacists marched down the streets of Charlottesville with torches in hand, they presented a story that felt like a shock to many, but was despairingly familiar to those who have been following, involved in, and impacted by this country’s racial dialogue and trauma over the generations. White nationalist Richard Spencer called Donald Trump’s denouncement of the hate groups that converged in Charlottesville “not serious,” and Trump later seemed to validate that by hosting a press conference where he claimed “both sides” are accountable for what happened in Charlottesville. That sort of creative retelling, which likely satisfied Spencer and similar ideologues while increasing the skepticism in people who feel that Trump is beholden to those groups, is a dizzying reminder that we have to always be vigilant about who is telling our history, and how.
That vigilance is at the root of the recent outcry surrounding HBO’s upcoming series Confederate, which dances on the fine line of fascination with alt-histories and slavery in a story that no one seems to be asking for. Before it’s even begun production, Confederate has been torched by audiences and critics who not only wonder if the Game of Thrones showrunners can tell such a story as two white men, but also whether they should. The strong backlash to Confederate had HBO and the creators scrambling to the show’s defense, essentially asking their critics to give it a chance before casting too many aspersions on it.
But those rebuttals illuminate the chasm that opens when we try to grapple with racism, history, and representation in entertainment. They underscore what studies have shown about our country’s attitudes about racial justice then and now, what many have argued, and perhaps what is the true conversation to be had regarding Detroit and Whose Streets: that progress is not a matter of time and policy, but rather of understanding. That chasm persists because we still need honest, authentic stories to give us what policies and time can’t always provide: empathy and perspective.