Detroit

This film propels Kathryn Bigelow to the forefront of American directors. It is a powerful, superbly constructed, insightful and circumspect demonstration of today’s most tragic truth — what we hoped was Obama’s America turned out to be not post-racist but neo-racist.

Though it centers on the 1967 Detroit riot and police abuse of African-Americans, seeing it after Charlottesville makes the film sadly prophetic.

As Christopher Nolan did in Dunkirk, Bigelow thrusts us into the action pell-mell, shooting everything in frenzy and close-up, not pausing to explain or reframe. She allows no rest, no detachment, no relief. Again we feel the impossible confusion and suffocation of war, this one however urban. What the dialogue tells us is less important than our visceral experience of the victims under siege and the police scared into brutishness.  

The film frames that tumultuous action with calm stills. The prologue is artistic renderings of the history — paintings of the southern blacks’ movement north for civil rights and jobs and the whites’ consequent evacuation of the cities for the ostensibly purer suburbs. If they escaped Jim Crow the blacks couldn’t escape the prejudiced legal and social systems, endemically systematized. 

The epilogue states the fates of the various characters. The whites escaped conviction. That’s what white privilege is all about — they win the loopholes. The blacks found what compromises their conviction allowed, like the brilliant singer who skips out on his group’s Motown success to sing in a neighbourhood church choir. His experience prevents him from entertaining whites again. The civil courts give token acknowledgment of the guilt and justice the white legal system denied. 

None of those consequences erase or forgive the arrogant and sadistic bigotry of the white cop Krauss. He is just a boy, trigger happy, but with centuries of racism in his veins and culture — and the confidence the colour gap bequeathes him. In an early conversation in the police car he seems to understand and sympathize with the blacks’ predicament — but then he gets the chance to shoot one. The die is cast. 

To Krauss the torture of his prisoners is a game. Sadistic and brutal but a game, the way a toy gun in the minds of the frightened National Guard and police swells into a mortally dangerous sniper, to be caught and punished at all costs — especially to the innocent blacks. One cop hasn’t learned the “game,” though, so he kills instead of just pretending to. That’s what happens when a game is played on people to whom it is far from a game. So too the white girls' playful flirtation leads them into a horror. 
      When the National Guard knowingly withdraws from the abusive police scene Bigelow makes an important point. Civil rights has to be a national concern and not abandoned to the local politics and prejudice of the states and municipal authorities. That was the source of Lyndon Johnson's success -- and its reversal part of Trump's current project. More correctly, one National Guardsman releases a black captive. There are here also good cops and bad cops, good blacks and bad blacks, though the battle is clearly between white power and black subservience.

So far this is the best American film of the year — and by far the most important. I would say that even if Charlottesville had not happened last weekend and President Trump had not been exposed as the personification of American racism, hypocrisy and ignorance. All that only validates Bigelow’s vision. 
But all the Oscars of the eve won’t amend America’s racist history and its continuing  choke-hold on the nation. That will take a wide and profound social reform of which America has yet to prove itself capable — or even willing.