Abstract

This video essay explores Kathryn Bigelow’s 2017 film Detroit from the perspective of heightened genericity. While the film is overtly docudramatic, the essay explores the various fictional genres which it tends not merely to deploy but rather to explicitly cite, with varying degrees of self-awareness. It argues that embracing artificial storytelling offers an ideal means to stage the film’s central concern with how highly constructed narratives inform everyday behaviours. This conviction plays out here first and foremost in the domain of excessively violent white masculinity – state-endorsed and vigilante – which is situated in a long history of US representations. At the same time, the essay demonstrates that the generic self-consciousness of Detroit instantiates rather than eliding Bigelow as director, which has ideological implications when it comes to a white woman representing Black suffering. It finally suggests that the deliberate emphasis on both identities apparent both in Detroit’s narrative and meta-textually works to model and invite empathy and communion across identity categories.