Notes from Sundance, Part 3: Documentary, Po’sploitation, and the Fall of Detroit

A Michigan-dwelling friend of mine pointed out to me, when the bottom went thundering out of the American economy in 2008, that her state had been in a recession for the past seven years. Welcome to the party. Detropia, the latest film from Jesus Camp directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, posits the city of Detroit as a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the country. So why is the film so gorgeous? Why is it built like a tone poem and not another forehead-slapping compilation of statistics?

In fact there are statistics in Detropia, and its structure is more traditional than it might seem. But Ewing and Grady have found a unique balance between lyrical observation and narrative intrusion that sets even their more hackneyed allusions and analogies into the background.

Last year’s Sundance documentary darling, Bombay Beach, elicited hive-like levels of buzz for its portrayal of a California community in steep but aesthetically stimulating decline. By the time I saw Detropia another film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, was already attracting the same kind of attention in the wake of its premiere. Beasts is an allegorical feature set in the southern delta of the United States, another impoverished part of the country, and features the kind of storytelling aesthetic one critic has dubbed “po’sploitation.” It’s one of those perfect coinages that calls up the exact idea of something that is otherwise fairly difficult to describe.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was made under the auspices of the Sundance Institute’s film lab—more and more a kind of feeder to the festival itself—and Grady and Ewing are Sundance veterans. Detropia is a film acutely aware of the perils of po’sploitation, however: one painful scene depicts a local barista attempting to engage with a stuffy hipster Swiss who came all the way to Detroit to gawk at its charming ruins. That barista, a charismatic young woman with a sentimental attachment to her hometown’s illustrious past, spends her free time spelunking through those ruins, including the legendary art deco train station and an abandoned theater.

The feeling of abandonment runs deep in Detropia: for decades a manufacturing base for America’s “big three” automakers, in recent years plant after plant has been relocated to Mexico or China, where workers toil for four dollars an hour. Those jobs that remain have absorbed massive pay cuts. Part of the film follows a tavern-owner who derived much of his business from an auto plant; part of it depicts the agony of a union leader trying to motivate members with very little to lose. The population of Detroit is half of what it once was, although even with 700,000 people, not a single grocery chain will set up shop in the city. Meeting basic needs is a constant challenge, and it becomes clear that those who have stuck around have done so out of a sorely tested love for the city.

Though they follow two young artists who moved to Detroit to partake of absurdly cheap housing and its plentiful vibe of decay, Ewing and Grady don’t try to persuade us that the bohemians can save Detroit. Nor do they get too close to the city’s famous racial divide, though the mayor’s attempt to move those living in empty neighborhoods (up to ten thousand homes are abandoned and dozens are demolished every week; only the demolition and scavenger economies are thriving) to “better” parts of town spikes tension. As intimate as some of the film’s portraits are, Detropia keeps its focus on the larger picture: When the tavern-owner gets wind of the Chinese competitor for GM’s new electric car—a car he hoped would help revitalize his local plant—at an auto show, the consequences of a global economy come into view.

The directors spent two years shooting in Detroit—Ewing’s hometown—and have said that their hope of telling a story of rejuvenation eventually faded. To be hopeful would be dishonest, Grady said, a testament both to the singular vision of this film and the frightening things it portends.