Documentaries are the new black. At a time when reporting is dominated by the rolling bulletin and breaking news, we need documentary-makers to take the long view, to get behind the headlines, to tell the stories that can change our view of the world forever. On BBC2 last night, Julien Temple’s film ‘Requiem for Detroit’ achieved just such a paradigm shift.

Detroit, it turns out, has been subject to a level of devastation comparable to that of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But because the destruction has happened over years, not days, we know next to nothing about it.

Detroit, home of Henry Ford and the motor car, and of Motown and punk, was once the US’s fourth biggest city, but its population has now declined from two million to less than 800,000. Freeways are eerily empty. The great temples to the motor car—the iconic factories of Ford, General Motors, Packard—lie in ruins. Whole areas of the city are either reverting to prairie, or have become urban war zones as bleak as anything in John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’.

In fact, and I’m sure deliberately, Temple’s wonderfully artful and knowing film kept echoing such images from culture. I thought of the accounts of Rome at the start of the Renaissance, with a population of just 30,000 eking out an existence amid the remnants of imperial grandeur, or of Gustave Doré’s final illustration to his 1872 book ‘London’ which depicts a future New Zealander, as imagined by the historian Macauley, meditating on the ruins of the great Victorian metropolis, with trees growing around the shattered dome of St Paul’s.

Temple’s film shows us that the apocalypse is indeed ‘now’. This is a world in which civil society seems barely to exist. Many of the city’s largest buildings are now beyond saving because they’re being progressively dismantled by illegal wrecking crews for what scrap they can scavenge. 47% of the population are illiterate. The resonance for the rest of the world is almost too obvious to need pointing: this is the end result when rampant capitalism is allowed its head, this is what happens when greed and short-termism rule over all other human concerns.

But are there also lessons closer to home? The most obvious is a warning of the dangers of relying on mono-industries. That’s a familiar trope for the Highlands—look at Fort William, Kinlochleven, Invergordon, and look also at the social problems resulting, as in Detroit, from transplanting a labour force from elsewhere and then leaving them with no alternative employment opportunities. It’s taken a generation to tackle those problems in the Highlands. Shetland was facing a similar prospect back in the 60s with the decline of fish processing, and was saved by the advent of the oil industry. Now, sensibly, people in Shetland are beginning to look at how the creative industries need to be built up to be ready to take up some of the slack as the oil bonanza leaks away.

One single comment in the film had a particularly chilling resonance. As white families moved to the suburbs the city’s tax revenues declined. First to go in the schools were the arts and music schemes and teachers. With nothing to distract them, it was said, was it any wonder that the young people turned to drugs and crime? As current campaigns are highlighting, are we in danger of making the same mistake here? If anyone doubts the beneficial effects of a lively music scene, they should go and talk to young people in Stornoway.

It was also very telling that, as Judith pointed out as we watched, almost everyone interviewed in the film was a writer, a musician or an artist. These were the tale-bearers. They were holding the collective memory of Detroit in their care—quite literally in the case of one black artist who had turned an entire city block into an ongoing installation. But they could also see the glimmers of hope for the future, they could envisage a different way of living.

And this was, despite its Gothic bleakness, a film that ended on a note of hope. Throughout the film Temple kept cutting to a group of black men wearing identical ‘fatigues’ and sitting in an obviously institutional setting. As they talked, with great articulacy and insight, about the follies they had committed in their youth, including drug-dealing and fire-raising, the kneejerk assumption was that they were all convicts. But at the end of the film Temple pulls off his coup de théâtre. Far from being confined at the State’s pleasure, these men, it turns out, are all working for a social enterprise, Goodwill Industries, and they’re beating the scavengers at their own game, systematically dismantling buildings, recycling everything they can, and making dangerous ruins safe. One guy said he was earning as much at this work as he had on the car assembly line.

Social enterprises are very much flavour of the month in the UK, and particularly in the Highlands and Islands. For those who are sceptical that the idea is no more than a mask on a failing system, it’s worth bearing in mind that Goodwill Industries have been going since 1921, and so are no flash in the pan. On the contrary, in Detroit GI are taking over from GM as a major employer.

The final images were the most telling of all. Former car workers, whose parents and grandparents moved to work in Detroit’s factories from the rural South, are now reverting to subsistence farming. The centre of what was once the cradle of mass production, of what became known, in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and elsewhere, as ‘Fordism’, is being given over to crofting.

In researching this blog I was interested to discover that it was an American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, who coined the famous phrase ‘I’ve seen the future, and it works’, after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921. Steffens was an early campaigner against the corporate corruption that already dominated America’s cities, and in his enthusiasm for what he thought was a valid alternative, he failed to spot that the Soviet system was adopting the worst and most dehumanising aspects of Fordism. Well, ‘Requiem for Detroit’ shows a future that certainly isn’t working, but it also gives a new, and very immediate, meaning to the phrase ‘the green shoots of recovery’. As Voltaire said, we all need to cultivate our gardens.

© Robert Livingston, 2010