How do you start a riot!?!?

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2017)

How do you start a riot? Detroit gives the answer, literally, when a small group of evicted partiers toss rocks through a storefront window. And it's on. We're in the middle of the riots of 1967, where many were killed including 3 innocent black teenagers, who I think were the intended focus of the movie. It's awkward though, as a stone through a window may start a riot, but it's hardly the spark of one. Perhaps emotional fury in the wake of torture and injustice is? But you wouldn't know it. Beneath all the jolts, the looting and the foreign objects, the streets are a personality vacuum, bereft of conflicts or occurrences non-physical. The effect is amniotic. At roughly 30 minutes, chaos' persistence becomes droll.
It's reenactment footage you might see if you canceled your cable and started watching antenna TV murder mystery channels (Like Escape, channel 68-4).
So aloft is the riot sequence that it refuses to get bogged down in establishing a protagonist (A bro or chick to identify with in the story). It's pretty phenomenal. But not in a good '96 Travolta way.
Then it happens: we are introduced to a person. He's a young guy (who looks like evil Matt Damon) in a difficult job, with his city on fire, facing intense pressure from the powers that be. He's frustrated, he wants order, he wants advancement, and he's not that great at his job. In short, he's identifiable. He's got a plight! He's also a homicidal racist. And his job is Police Officer. This is the only discernible character created within the narrative, and I noticed a perverse thing happening: within the confines of fiction, brains are exceedingly vulnerable to traces of humanity, however thin, whether it be Tony Soprano (a racist criminal serial killer), or Phil Krauss, the racist cop in Detroit, we default to whatever character is available.
During the major incident of the film, inside the Algiers hotel where the police held the innocents captive, an officer, an apparent idiot, mistakenly shoots and kills a victim who he was instructed only to scare. The pickle that the filmmakers create – him being unfunctionally dumb, unable to effectively absorb instruction, then taking decisive action with potentially enormous consequences, both moral and legal – is attractive in terms of it being a lone sprout of observable conflict within the story. I could feel an insipid grain of pity growing in me for this murderous racist. The filmmakers enliven the point-of-view, however unintentionally, of the police. It's hard to overstate how big of a moral failure that is.
By pairing an unflinching, literal depiction of the "Action," as it's portrayed, with the police perspective, the movie weaponizes the binary structure of film against its own audience. Black characters and, indeed, the actors portraying them, are turned into dart boards in a prolonged torture-porn sequence reminiscent of The Passion of the Christ, the end result of which felt disturbing for all the wrong reasons.
As a consolation, Detroit did reaffirm the awful power of the cinema – perhaps the last bastion of binary visual storytelling wherein people actually voluntarily admit themselves into a black hole where cell phones and chatting are forbidden, even shamed (how long can this last?). Without ability to swipe the screen or fall into a Youtube sinkholes, or meander through Netflix, we are at the mercy of what's in our face. I can almost hear Alex Delarge, bound and wailing for it to stop, trapped inside of a film that itself wonders: why do some people get off on violence?