Review: Detroit

Recently I listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s incredible podcast Revisionist History and in the very first episode he discussed a fascinating sociological concept called Moral Licensing. Moral Licensing is in essence doing something that is right and then using that right action, essentially a good deed, to justify bad behavior. Gladwell’s example was a painter in 19th Century England, Elizabeth Thompson, whose painting, titled Roll Call, became the first by a female artist to take a respected placement in the Royal Academy of Art. Unfortunately, the good deed by the male dominated Royal Academy of featuring the remarkable painting gave them, in their minds, the bona fides to justify not electing Thompson to become a member of the Royal Academy. They’d done their good deed and had nothing, in their minds left to prove.

I thought a great deal about Moral Licensing as I watched Kathryn Bigelow’s remarkable new film Detroit. This story about the riots that raged in Detroit, Michigan in 1967 and more specifically about an incident of police brutality that resulted in the deaths of three innocent black men, at the Algiers Hotel, led me to wonder if just becoming a police officer—a peace officer, someone whose job in the world is to protect people—gives some lesser officers the notion that they have moral license to do as they please. They’ve proven their bona fides as a good person by offering to protect the innocent, thus how they do their jobs is justified by virtue of having accepted the position.

I am not generalizing here; I respect police officers and the remarkable difficulty of their job. Scientifically and psychologically, however, there is a kernel of truth here. It could happen to anyone in such a position: a doctor, a politician, even a film critic who uses his position as a writer to espouse a point of view and then, if his point of view is well-viewed, he or she can take license to go further and espouse further and potentially do harm because they feel they have a moral high ground that doesn’t really exist.

It’s natural for power to go to people’s heads. The legendary Stanford Experiment is the greatest example of human nature in this regard. Students, when given power over other students, went to remarkable and dangerous extremes because they felt they had the license to do so. Their position, in their minds, justified their actions. They had badges and a duty and the leverage to use those badges to justify whatever moral or immoral decision that they made.

This is not meant, in any way to explain why the Detroit Police officers who attacked and murdered people at The Algiers Hotel did what they did. There is no simple answer as to why these men did what they did. The power of Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s work in Detroit is recognizing and making use of the fact that we don’t know why this happened. Racism is the very simple and quite true answer but it’s more complex than that.

John Boyega plays Melvin Desmukes, a local security guard who was guarding a grocery store when he heard what he believed to be shots being fired in the direction of National Guardsman. Being familiar with the area, Desmukes leaped to help the National Guardsman locate the shooter and, like the white Guardsman and police officers, he believed the shots had come from The Algiers. Desmukes, on foot, arrived at The Algiers after three white Detroit Police officers had arrived and had already killed one supposed suspect.

Here again is another perplexing example of Moral Licensing. While the officers were terrorizing several Black hotel guests and a pair of young white women who were also guests at the annex, the officers welcome Desmukes with his badge and shotgun as if he were one of their own. When he eagerly volunteers to search for the weapon the cops believe is in the annex, they are excited to make him part of their team. In accepting Desmukes as one of their own, the officers unknowingly exercised moral licensing, as if having a black man on their side made what they did to the innocent men and women at The Algiers acceptable.

Director Bigelow shot Detroit in a very similar and visceral fashion to her previous film Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the tracking down and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Both films employ an urgent, handheld camera that doesn’t shake about and make you sick à la many modern horror movies but rather, acts more as a relatively still fly on the wall. The look of the film is sweaty, bloody, gritty; your heart beats fast because you feel like you are watching the tragedy unfold in real time.

One scene in particular that evoked memories of Zero Dark Thirty takes place when a pair of the young hostages attempts to make a break for it. Someone has begun firing a gun outside the Hotel and the police have run off in the direction of the shots. Alone in the hallway of the annex for the moment, the two men begin searching for a way out only to find themselves surrounded on all sides by National Guardsmen and Police Officers searching for the new shooters. It’s a scene right out of a horror movie but more effective for the innocence and desperation of the victims.

Style-wise however, the scene mirrors the search for Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty inside of a compound in Pakistan. The handheld camera is right in the thick of Seal Team Six and our perspective is their perspective and as they move the camera moves and their peripheral vision is our peripheral vision. It’s terrifyingly real with the same urgency if not emotional stakes of Detroit. The tension in both of these scenes is breathtaking and is a hallmark of Bigelow’s directorial style since her Academy Award-winning work The Hurt Locker.

Detroit has received criticism for being a film about a Black experience made by a white writer and a white director. This is a minefield that I cannot navigate. Interestingly, one of the lessons I took away from Detroit is how I will never be able to understand what life then and now is like for a black person. I can empathize and I can stand shoulder to shoulder with those who've been persecuted but not being black it will never feel as real for me. I don't lament that fact or take comfort in it in any way; it's a mere intractable fact of life.

I will never understand why people choose to hate others because of their race. On the very base level of "that person looks different than me," I understand why someone would notice race but I have never understood the choice to hate. And let’s be clear, racism is a choice. You choose to hate people based on their race. It’s not bred into you; you didn’t inherit it like a trait. Even if you were raised by racist parents, you chose to continue to hate and that is a choice that I cannot understand. The police officers at The Algiers Hotel in 1968 decided to hate and decided to kill.

It boggles the mind that someone cannot find the empathy needed to just be a decent person. Basic human decency is all that would have been required to keep this from happening and yet it was exactly what was lacking, what was absent. Each scene stacks one horrific justification on top of another as the racist police officers acted to make their actions seem legitimate and not the actions of racists, criminals, and murderers.

Detroit captures the chaotic, dizzying horror of these cops’ terrible decisions in a fashion that lingers in your soul like an awful stench. The horror is inescapable and never ending even after The Algiers Hotel incident, when the cops went on trial and were found not guilty of the murders they so blatantly committed. Again here, Melvin Desmukes is the prop, the moral license. Desmukes was charged alongside the guilty police officers and was sat next to them in the courtroom as a way of saying that this couldn’t have been about race because Melvin was on our side. He really wasn’t but in a move that haunted Desmukes, he went along for the ride to save himself from having the cops pin the whole incident on him.

The hopelessness of Desmukes’ character is defining. While some have called him an Uncle Tom, a term used to describe Blacks who willingly served white slave owners and betrayed their fellow blacks, Desmukes was truly just an average man in an unwinnable situation. He tried to tell his side of the story only to have white Police Detectives attempt to pin it all on him. Feeling that he could not get a fair trial from a white jury, Desmukes rolled the dice and allowed himself to be used as a prop. John Boyega beautifully portrays the dichotomy of Desmukes who seemed to know he was betraying not only his people but himself in going along with the charade.

Despite some misgivings I have regarding the film’s depiction of events— white people telling an essentially black story, attempting to mimic the black experience without having the actual experience—I can’t help but say that I was deeply moved by Detroit. Kathryn Bigelow’s stylish direction and the powerhouse cast, of whom I have shortchanged includes Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore and Will Poulter, are enough for me to say that Detroit is among the best-made movies of 2017.

That said, I want to urge you to read Angelica Jade Bastien’s review of Detroit at RogerEbert.com. Bastien writes powerfully about why she opposes Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s directing and writing of Detroit. Bastien writes that she found the film to have a hollow center where the meaning behind the violence should have been and she writes beautifully and impactfully about it. I don't disagree with her and yet I still found the film haunting and powerful in a much different way than she did, one that highlights further how the black experience is different in way I will never be able to comprehend.