by Leila Taylor
While the Rebellion was a defining moment in the city’s history, there is no single reason for the downturn of Detroit, but multiple: white flight, corrupt politicians, the economic downturn in the Seventies, and rising crime rates. But the biggest factor was the decline of the American auto industry. “The city began to fall apart the minute Henry Ford began to build it. The car made Detroit and the car unmade Detroit. Detroit was built in some ways to be disposable.” The city has seen a relentless decline in population, from 1,800,000 in 1950 to 713,000 in 2010. As of 2016, the number was 672,795. Nearly one in three properties in Detroit are considered blighted (blight is defined as properties that are exposed to the elements, not structurally sound, in need of major repairs, have suffered fire damage, or have become dumping grounds), leaving behind a landscape peppered with empty lots and houses swallowed up by vegetation. Pastoral vistas appear where lines of sturdy middle-class homes once stood side-by-side. Houses that were once flanked by other houses are left abandoned, turning the neatly planned grid of the city into an irregularly gapped patchwork. Every erasure used to be a habitat, each with their own collection of knick-knacks, their own indelible crayon scribbles on the walls, their own holes in the roofs and doorknobs that need replacing, secret hiding places and treasures hidden under floorboards. These rectangular vestiges, as Georges Perec says, “are in a sense monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.”
Only Lovers Left Alive
If someone asked fourteen-year-old me what the perfect movie would be, I’d say Jim Jarmusch making a vampire movie set in Detroit, with Tilda Swinton in it (I saw Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio in the theater at fourteen so I’ve been a fan of her for a while). In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam, a reclusive melancholic vampire, lives in a large decrepit Queen Anne house in Brush Park. Like the Livingstone House, it is flanked by nothingness. The empty, overgrown lots and the bare spaces on either side are palpable absences, and there seems to be nothing across the street. It’s not the things in the landscape that are ominous, it is the emptiness, the lack of things, the fact that there is a landscape here at all. The isolation of Adam’s house is both ominous and vulnerable, a location abandoned by society. Instead of the treacherous road to Dracula’s castle on a hill, Adam’s house is just down the street, yet it is just as eerie.
The interior of Adam’s home is rich and full. There are layers of patterned rugs and drapery in warm jewel tones, a well-worn sofa, and walls covered in photographs and paintings of philosophers, poets, and scientists. There are musical instruments and recording equipment in every corner. It is a well-lived-in space. By contrast, the exterior is barren, eerily isolated, and if not dead, it’s certainly dying. Adam, who is contemplating suicide, is psychologically in sync with the diminishing spirit of the city. But having lived well beyond the scope of a human lifespan, he experiences the world on a scale closer to geological than anthropological. Adam’s depression stems from the “zombies” (what he calls human beings) and our blatant disregard for the Earth. The film is peppered with references to climate change. While the Livingstone House seems at the mercy of the elements, in Only Lovers Left Alive, it is us people who are wrecking the joint.
Adam takes Eve (his partner of eons) on a tour of the city, and she notes, “So this is your wilderness. Detroit.” They go past the deserted Packard Plant and the Michigan Theater, a majestic, French Renaissance showplace now used as a parking garage. Hitsville USA, the birthplace of Motown, isn’t so interesting at night, but they do drive by Jack White’s house. The streets are barren and dimly lit as if every other light on the block had been knocked out, a detail that is unfortunately accurate. In 2012, without the budget to repair eighty-eight thousand broken streetlights, the city proposed to reduce the number to forty-six thousand, plunging already crime-ridden and impoverished neighborhoods into darkness. In the film, everything is always hidden in the shadows and it seems to be perpetually three o’clock in the morning. There are never any pedestrians or cars on the streets and the only sounds are the occasional howl of some mysterious creature of the night in concert with a distant police siren.
It Follows
While the city has become a ready-made mise-en-scene for horror movies, It Follows, directed by David Robert Mitchell, takes place in the suburbs. As much as I would like to say that I am from Detroit, full stop, I can’t. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, then after a year we moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, and from there to Michigan. When I tell people the long answer to the question “where are you from?” I go directly from Amherst to Detroit, skipping over Southfield, the suburb just outside of the city where we lived for two years. I remember little of that time, only that there was an eerie, flat, beigeness to the place. When I picture it now I see vast office parks and a subdivision with a perpetually empty playground. I remember being in a circle of other kids looking down at a dead bird, someone poking it with a stick. I remember a kid getting hit in the head with a baseball bat and the trail of blood down the school hallway as the gym teacher carried him away. I remember there was a girl I wanted desperately to be friends with, but I wouldn’t go to her house because I was afraid of her dog (I assumed it was racist). While Detroit has arson, store clerks hidden behind bullet-proof glass, and hookers on the corner, it never creeped me out like Southfield did.
Filmmakers routinely use the suburbs as a location for horror — Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity. The invasion of the monstrous becomes even more terrifying against the background of perceived security. Detroit, “an overwhelmingly black city [is framed as] the ‘dark other,’ a city to be isolated, feared, and cut off from the body of the nation.”3
In It Follows, Jamie is the victim of a sexually transmitted curse in the form of a relentless, silent, shape-shifting entity. Jamie and her friends live in a middle-class, white, neighborhood and as her story begins, we see a chalk hopscotch grid on the sidewalk, a man mowing his lawn, and a handsome teenager washing his car. It’s not a wealthy neighborhood, but it is comfortably normal. The time-frame is ambiguous. The decor of Jamie’s house seems to be from the Seventies or Eighties, yet her friend reads a book from some electronic device not yet invented. For her date with Hugh, the couple go to a silent movie accompanied by an organ.
The scene in which Jamie becomes infected with the curse was shot in the parking lot of the abandoned Northville Psychiatric Hospital, a massive, oppressive building. The area is desolate and dark, except for a streetlamp spotlighting their car. Northville opened in 1952 but fell victim to the recession in the Seventies, resulting in significant overcrowding and neglected patients. The hospital eventually closed in 2003, becoming a popular destination for intrepid ghost hunters. The forest surrounding the hospital is known as the “Evil Woods.”
After they have sex, Hugh knocks her out and ties her to a wheelchair, forcing her to witness the creature that will now be pursuing her. This scene is shot inside the abandoned Packard Plant. It’s a vast and empty space of crumbling concrete and exposed rebar. The windows have long been broken out and the border between the inside and out is blurred. The Packard Plant opened in 1903, and at the time was considered the most modern automobile manufacturing factory in the world. Its forty-three-acre campus closed in 1956, and it is now known as the largest abandoned building in the world. Jamie and Hugh’s relationship begins in a charming movie theater on a suburban main street. The attack occurs in the desolation of a failed state institution and an industrial wasteland.
Throughout the film, there is a contrast between the monster’s spaces and the victim’s spaces. If Jamie doesn’t pass the curse on by having sex with someone else, the entity will kill her and resume its pursuit of Hugh. He leaves the safety of the suburbs and flees into the city, hiding out in a decrepit abandoned house, one of many such houses on his street. Jamie and her friends decide to find Hugh, and as they drive into the city, they pass row after row of boarded-up shops, run-down
houses and empty lots.
In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam and Eve’s drive through Detroit is portrayed with philosophical contemplation and historical perspective, much like tourists visiting the ruins of Ancient Rome. In It Follows, the trip into the city is depicted as a dangerous journey, marked with dread. As the group marches back into the city to kill the entity, it is with defiant gravitas and the atmosphere of an epic quest. Unlike their suburb, the people on the street are all Black. The city represents “unplanned obsolescence, crime, and, of course, unchecked blackness,” and euphemisms like “inner city” and “urban” are known codes for African American. As they walk past boarded-up houses and into a distinctly impoverished Black neighborhood, one character says:
When I was a little girl my parents never let me go south of 8 Mile and I never knew what that meant until I got a little older and I realized that’s where the city started and the suburbs ended.
In stalking its prey, the entity follows Jamie and her friends into their territory — their neighborhood, their homes, and their school — but the dirty work of disposing of the monster happens in Detroit. It Follows is a “not in my backyard” battle framed as a horror story.
The sublimity of the modern ruin lies in its relative newness, the purpose and life of the former building are familiar and recognizable, creating the dichotomy between the attraction and repulsion of our world gone to dust. We see ourselves in a state of decay. We are watching our own death and in the photographs, ruin-porn websites, documentaries, and horror movies we become mourners at our own funeral. There is dark pleasure in this glimpse of the end of civilization, a taste of life after the apocalypse. Eugene Thacker calls this nebulous zone the “world-without-us.” It is a glimpse at what our world would be like without people, a place in which human beings are inconsequential. It’s not that nature doesn’t care about us, or is purposely exhibiting its domination. The world doesn’t even know we’re here. In ruined spaces, nature, the original master builder, takes over, defying gravity and eschewing structural integrity, reminding us of what we once were and how small we really are.
I have an uneasy relationship with ruin porn. There is a guilty pleasure in these images (hence the “porn” connotation), but having grown up in Detroit, it’s uncomfortable seeing my hometown perceived as sociological experiment, an art project, or a bargain-basement real-estate deal. There is a dissonance between my fascination with these images and the circumstances of their making. The ability to delight in the ruin is a privileged position. The spectacle of annihilation is only pleasurable when you’re not the one being annihilated and the aesthetics of decay can fall into the trap of romanticizing poverty. It’s easy to gape at the remains, but these images are the result of economic decline, political corruption, systemic racism, violence, and apathy.
In Only Lovers Left Alive, Adam and Eve drive past the Fox Theater (where I saw the Smiths), and in the film, it looks ominous and desolate. But the Fox Theater has since been renovated and is now absolutely glorious. Eve sees the desolation of the city as an interesting moment in the life of a place, just another sliver along the spectrum of time. She tells Adam, “This place will rise again. There’s water here. When the cities in the south are burning, this place will bloom.” As of January 2017, eighty-eight thousand dead streetlights were replaced with sixty-five thousand brand new LED lights. Brush Park, where Slumpy once stood and where Adam the vampire made his home, is currently undergoing a massive redevelopment, filling in the awkward gaps of abandoned lots with restaurants, shops, and sustainable LEED certified houses. In 2018, Detroit was voted “one of the hottest cities to visit” by the travel guide, Lonely Planet. Anthony Bourdain filmed an episode of “Parts Unknown” there, and the home of Adam the vampire was, for a while, available to rent as an Airbnb.
If southern gothic was about Postbellum America, Detroit certainly represents a post-Industrial American gothic. It is a revenant city — its motto is “Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus:” “We hope for better days; it shall rise from the ashes” — burning and rising from the flames over and over and over again.
FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe: nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
we are deathlessness
awakening
from a deep deep sleep
— M. Lamar, Funeral Doom Spiritual
The assumption that goths are categorically depressed misanthropes has always bothered me. It’s a lazy judgment based on a very narrow definition of what happiness is supposed to look like. When this occurs I point people to Morticia and Gomez Addams, one of the most blissfully romantic couples in popular culture. It’s for these same reasons why we don’t consider the blues a morbid or bleak form of music. It’s a glorification of sentiment.
It may use horror, death, melancholy, and the macabre in its methodology, but the gothic (and goth) is above all else romanticism. Both the gothic and the romantic have the issue of being nebulous things to define, but they both “privilege the imagination” over reason, and resist bourgeois social norms for what is internal and emotional.1 The Gothic is an anathema to order and rationality, forgoing restraint for excess. It will always choose the fanciful over the pragmatic, the numinous over the tangible. It is a black-velvet-in-the-summer kind of culture and if you are Black, to willingly succumb to a life of whimsey is foolish at the least and dangerous at the worst. Colonialism comes with vigilance (both from the colonists and the colonizers), with the exhausting strain of disaster preparedness, and this frivolous pursuit is a belly exposing vulnerability.
The Privilege of Frivolity
A video circling around my social media feeds show a group of goth guys in front of a nondescript office building. Dressed in long black skirts, black zippered pants, and black t-shirts, they stand out against the drab grey/beige building, chosen perhaps for its strikingly paradoxical blandness. There’s no sound, but from the frenetic yet precise dance moves and the outfits, they resemble a post-apocalyptic cheerleading team, and I can guess that the genre of music they’re dancing to is industrial. They are an unabashedly misfit collective, taking their fun seriously.
Expertly Photoshopped into the foreground is a Black boy, around eight or nine years old, in a yellow t-shirt, creating a stark contrast to the white skin and black clothes behind him. He’s standing stock still, holding a beverage and staring straight ahead. Then with perfect comedic timing, his eyes shift toward the camera with a deadpan look that can best be described as WTF — what Margo Jefferson calls the “survival side eye.”
This phenomenon is known as “digital blackface.” There is a library online of snippets of videos capturing a smug smirk and eyeroll plucked from television shows, movies or personal videos to be copied and pasted when words fail or are too cruel for language. The fed-up Black woman smirking as she grabs her purse to go, the old Black woman fainting in church overcome with the spirit, the dramatic sassy entrance of a reality TV show contestant; they are all removed from context to become human emojis symbolizing disgust, excitement, or confidence. The affective currency of Black people is traded back and forth all day on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook.
I get it. I give the video a digital thumbs up and respond with an unenthusiastic LOL, but like most memes, the joke is usually at someone else’s expense, and by the third or fourth time someone sent it to me, it stopped being funny. The Black kid in the yellow shirt represents the straight man, the seasoned foil to this spooky suburban weirdness. The punch-line relies on a construct of Blackness, in which there is an expectation of gravitas and wisdom, and a burden of cool. Goth lies in that realm of “crazy shit white people do,” along with Burning Man and Renaissance Fairs and things that are ostentatiou
sly frivolous — attributes contradictory to the Black veneer of skepticism and street savvy. This “coolness coat of arms” is a clever way of avoiding vulnerability by using a bulwark of dignity to protect oneself from the danger of racism. It also strips away authenticity, subjectivity, and play, leaving little room for velvet top-hats and black-lace parasols.
In the video, the dancers do not acknowledge the kid because he was never there. The kid never saw those goth dancers. He wasn’t passing judgment on anyone. Someone clipped him out and expertly edited him in, using him to judge by proxy, speaking for everyone who thought they were lame or ridiculous or geeky but were too afraid to say so. His presence is not just saying, “Look at these weirdos,” it’s saying, “Look at these white folks,” with a confounded shake of the head. What bothered me the most about the use of the judgmental Black kid in the video is that it falls into that tired old gag of “white folks do this / black folks to that” mentality, and puts the clothes, the music, the dancing into another category of things Black people don’t do.
In the original video, the boy is standing in line at a fast-food restaurant. Next to him is a little girl and his shifting glance reads more like the nervous confusion of a first crush. It’s a boring moment in comparison. In the original he is not representing anything but himself, just pudgy sweetness, but when re-purposed in the other context, he is superior coolness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me is a letter to his son, warning him about the world he’s been born into, in which he is made suspect just by existing. He warns his son about the dangers of falling for the “American Dream,” a promise that was never intended for him, which as a Black man can be a distracting and disarming pipe dream, a dangling carrot. He says: