No one plans to spend their holidays in a city in ruins, with explosive unemployment, proven insecurity and whose ex-mayor has gone to prison. Detroit is bankrupt, in the most legal sense of the term, since in 2013, the city, riddled with a debt of 18.5 billion dollars, filed for bankruptcy.
However, the city fascinates. Young people settle there, thanks to its inexpensive real estate (and for good reason) and also thanks to its lunar decor. As explained by one of the witnesses interviewed by Florent Tillon in his documentary Detroit Wild City, “What will the end of the world look like, when industry has completely disappeared and men with it? » In Detroit of course.
The filmmaker filmed the capital of Michigan at the height of the consequences of the 2008 crisis, and it was no longer, at that time, just an industrial wasteland, with these huge buildings, stations and theaters abandoned, or one no longer even imagines that one might work there, applaud there or buy a train ticket.
A crisis ? What crisis? Detroit has seen so many. For 55 years, the city has been nothing but convulsions. Starting with the race riots that shook the city in 1967. Riots, and especially their terrible repressions, which Kathryn Bigelow denounces in 2017, in her film Detroitbrilliantly, and very violently, filmed.
These riots were followed by industrial and social crises that lasted two decades, gradually emptying the factories of Flint, then Detroit, then all of Michigan. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, himself the son of a General Motors worker, devoted a film to these closures. In Roger and mehe stages himself in his quest: to meet Roger Smith, the CEO of GM at the time, to convince him, in vain, to go and see the damage caused by the layoffs and the relocation of factories to Mexico which he ordered.
From Clint Eastwood to Eminem
The steamroller of the crisis crushed Detroit and the cinema also bears witness to the survivors. From old timers like Clint Eastwood in his pavilion in a lost suburb of the city who lovingly keeps the Ford Gran Torino he helped build in the brand’s factory, to young rappers.
Because Detroit is also music, that of the flamboyant days, with Berry Gordy’s Motown where the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye hatched, but also that of darker days and rap.
Eminem, one of his best representatives, risked himself in front of the camera of Curtis Hanson in 8 mille. This almost biopic of the singer owes its title to the 8 mille roada kind of ring road that separates downtown Detroit, where the black population often lives, from the suburbs where a majority of whites reside.
Today Detroit is better. Developers and start-ups sniff out good deals from inexpensive real estate. It’s not there yet Silicon Valley, but who knows? Maybe a future David Fincher will direct a new Social network (on the rise of Mark Suckerberg) in a Motown that has become Digitaltown?