All the signs were there, and the violent beat-down film has made an early move to the lead for possible white guilt film of the year. Of course official announcements of the voters will be announced at our 2017 MMM and JP Film Critics Awards late late in the year.
To date, neither MMM or JP has even seen this udder piece of junk, but we do reckon watching this film will only finalize our current position so no rush.
This article supports this early thrust to the top for the film DETROIT:
The film ‘Detroit’ has good intentions. We all know how that tends to work out.
Fifty years ago this summer an urban rebellion took place.
159 riots erupted in African-American cities across the country. The
civil unrest took place in cities like
New York,
Atlanta,
Chicago, Birmingham, and
Boston. The worst riots that summer were in Newark,
New Jersey and Detroit,
Michigan.
The movie “Detroit” attempts to capture the eponymous riot of 1967.
“Detroit” shows how the past is present or as
novelist William Faulkner has said “In fact, it’s not even past” in
terms of the killing of unarmed African-American males and the
unflinching impunity bestowed to police officers by focusing on
the brutal confrontation at the Algiers Motel the evening of the riot.
While summer flicks are known fondly as “popcorn movie season” the film “Detroit” is difficult to digest.
The dynamic duo – filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter
Mark Boal – who brought us the 2008 Oscar winning action-filled war
film “The Hurt Locker” has once again collaborated in transforming a
real life event into high art with “Detroit.” However, with raw
depictions of street violence, inexplicable scenes of an aggregation of
law enforcement – Detroit police, Michigan state troopers, national
guardsmen, and private guards – descending on the Algiers Motel, and the
constant images of the racial tropes, ” Detroit,” critics have rightly
stated, is “disappointingly one-dimensional” and “unnuanced.”
More vocal critics have posed this question: Who was the film’s intended viewing audience?
“Detroit” is “a movie for white people. For some white
viewers, Bigelow’s film may invoke horror, even righteous anger. But
with a white audience so firmly at its core, the images of violence in
the film, designed to be visceral, in your face, and to inspire outrage
and disbelief, inspired nothing in me but pessimism and spiritual
exhaustion. The violence isn’t shocking. It’s just sadly familiar, and
that isn’t interesting or illuminating to me as a black viewer in 2017,”
Huffington Post senior culture writer Zeba Blay stated.
I, too, was spent after viewing the film. My spouse left
the theater shaking and crying, conveying how demoralized she felt.
Reverend Emmett Price, my co-commentator on our weekly Monday segment
“ALL REVVED UP” on WGBH Boston Public Radio stated, “It was two hours
and 23 minutes of the muting, maiming, torturing and
murder of black bodies. That’s the movie.”
Because both Bigelow and Boal are white queries abound about
cultural appropriation and exploitation, asking whether white artists
can sensitively and appropriately depict black pain and oppression.
Bigelow, knowing she didn’t have the cultural heft, asked
herself that question, too. “I’m white, am I the right person to do
it? I thought, ‘Am I the perfect person to tell this story? No’,” she
told
Variety. “However, I’m able to tell this story, and it’s been 50 years since it’s been told.”
With good intentions (and I convey that without sarcasm) as a
way to leverage her white privilege Bigelow wanted to expose today’s
indiscriminate death sentence black men (
Michael Brown,
Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, etc.) encounter too often
with white cops that’s hauntingly similar to what black males
encountered with white law enforcement officers five decades ago in the
1967 riot. Bigelow’s high hopes was that the film would spark our
country’s needed dialogue on race; therefore, emphatically stating to
The New York Times, that ”to do nothing was not an answer.”
Bigelow felt given her filmmaking crops and a top-notch all
white crew with one renowned black consultant (Detroiter and scholar
Michael Eric Dyson) she was equipped to tell the story.
Sadly, she wasn’t. The balance between depicting the horrors
of racism without valorizing or
demeaning black trauma was eclipsed in “Detroit”, inviting
an avalanche of African-American movie and cultural critics to chime in.
New York Times critic John Eligon, for
example, stated that “Bigelow found herself engaging in another basic
journalistic practice: immersing herself in unfamiliar lives and
experiences, and trying to make sense of them.”
It’s too simplistic to say that stories of people of color
should only be the province of people of color. Wasn’t a similar polemic
once expressed about Shakespearean plays having only white actors back
in the day?
Bigelow’s problem, for me, is that she didn’t tell a good
story, because she did not have the complete history of the riot, but
told the story, nonetheless.
Perhaps, had Bigelow had access to John Hersey’s book
The Algiers Motel Incident
– which has police records, series of interviews from survivors,
witnesses and families of the slain men – she might have presented a
better narrative.
Instead, Bigelow did what she does best – an auteur-driven
film – displaying her vast cinematic skills to obfuscate her lack of
knowledge and absence of a plausible narrative arc.
With graphic images of white barbaric cruelty inflicted on
black bodies, the main character is -unquestionably – violence. The
emotional arc of “Detroit” being black helplessness, the film evokes
anger rather than thought, political action, and coalition building in
this era of “Black Lives Matter.” Bigelow not only fails at Screenplay
101 she tanked her efforts to make a difference.
How much of Bigelow’s passion to tell the story of the 1967
Detroit riot – especially in the way she did – was out of white
privilege, white guilt, arrogance, or ignorance, I’ll leave it up to the
viewer to decide.
12:58 AM
