It probably should not be surprising that Kathryn Bigelow’s directorial style in Detroit fails in practice to meet what it hopes in theory. One need only go back to one of her earliest directorial efforts to understand that this was almost entirely predictable. While Bigelow probably cannot be blamed for the misguided concept behind New Order’s video for their “Touched by the Hand of God” single, she most certainly bears the brunt of blame for its spectacular failure. While there was little point in turning the synth pop legends into a hair metal band for the video, if that is going to be the premise, then at least run with it. New Order’s video ultimately fails both as satire and as hair-band video; it may be the worst ever made and that is really saying something.
Fast-forward from the late 80’s when Bigelow was an unknown struggling to make a name for herself to the middle of 2010’s when she was still the only woman to ever win the Oscar for Best Director. That award came—inexplicably—courtesy of The Hurt Locker. While a technically competent film, any number of other movies released in 2009 were more impressively directed—Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to mention just one of the more unlikely among them. As has been proven time and again, however, nothing beats a marketing blitz and word of mouth when it comes to claiming Oscar gold. Bigelow teaches that lesson twice: The Hurt Locker enjoyed it and it paid off while Detroit did not and the Oscars rightly passed Bigelow by.
It is not that Detroit is an example of bad directing any more than The Hurt Locker is. Both movies are very well-made and obviously benefit from a technologically competent craftsman behind the camera. But don’t confuse craftsmanship with artistry. That was the mistake made by Oscar voters casting ballots for The Hurt Locker. The problem with Detroit is exactly the same as that with the New Order music video. What may have seemed like a good idea in theory simple is not in practice.
The theory here is to utilize what has become Bigelow’s standard operating procedure: shooting with multiple cameras at once to allow the editing room to become a place where a sense of immediacy is attained. The theory—one supposes—is that the idea is to make the events clearly taking place in the 1960’s seem as though they are taking place today. The point behind that concept is that nothing has changed: police violence against black Americans are now routinely witness though the immediacy of private video cameras being operated by non-professionals.
It is a promising idea in theory. By giving her film a sense that it is being watched as it is taking place without infringement of professional editing, the connection is much more easily made than if the style of the film were to treat it as period piece by shooting it like a film from it time. Perhaps Bigelow does succeed in making the events seem more immediately and less entrenched in another time that might as well be the 1920’s as the 1960’s for all that it resembles society today. The distancing effect of purposely making Detroit clearly a film taking place in another time has it advantages. But that advantage is almost immediately undone by its single most unnerving disadvantage.
Ultimately, the “YouTube-esque” sense of amateurs capturing history as it happens is not really what Detroit feels like. Indeed, the directorial influence here transports Bigelow’s directing right back to the period in which she was making music videos for New Order. If Detroit recalls anything at all most clearly, it is not the immediacy of home video footage, but of that most irritating legacy of early 1990’s television: the relentlessly moving shaky camera that characterized police dramas like Homicide: Life on the Street and NYPD Blue.
