Ozymandias in the Rust Belt

One day, as the impressive if jumbled documentary Requiem for Detroit (BBC2 Saturday) told us, all industrial cities may go this way. Because of Detroit’s devil-take-the-hindmost rush into car manufacturing – “the birth of the modern arguably takes place here” says the film, and it would be an argument, since Manchester, Pittsburgh and Baku could all qualify – the heights scaled were the highest, the post-industrial gulch the deepest. But its fate will be a common one.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” intoned the commentary over shots of a vast, deserted, neo-Gothic industrial palace. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is much pressed into service these days. It is the foreword to the geographer Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse. If there are obvious differences between a colossal piece of statuary and a car plant, the sense of limitless rule over endless time – which all the film’s interviewees attest was the unexamined mindset of the manufacturers who followed Ford into Detroit’s furnaces – still shares something with the Egyptian god-king.

The images – of Ford, Cadillac and Chrysler lines rusting slowly back to the earth, covered by detritus and luxuriant weeds and shrubs – were insistent but never tedious, and the words used by the commentary and the interviewees were spare and vivid. Detroit’s centre went black, the suburbs white and, in the 1960s, the centre revolted and the city burned. But the car companies churned on, surviving in recent years by producing the 4x4s with which they enjoyed a last regal sweep before scuttling to the state for bail-outs. Detroit’s decline accelerates: 29 schools closed last year; the city’s firefighters are called out to an average of 70 fires each night.

Not all is dark. Among its ruins, a new spirit – how strong, the impressionist approach of the film could not tell us – seeks out the old. “You can look at Detroit and see desolation,” says one tough and humorous old resident, “or you can look at Detroit and see the future.” The future, according to young pioneers round a bonfire, is farming. Maybe so – but, unmentioned by the film, Detroit’s modest renaissance in the 1990s owed much to yuppie condos in a revitalised waterfront, and the building of casinos: it’s now one of the world’s major gambling centres. But the prairie’s return makes a better story, and far better visuals.

One day, all politics may go the way of Silvio Berlusconi. Mark Franchetti’s Berlusconi Show (BBC2 Wednesday) intelligently mixed interview and the “shows” of the Italian prime minister to paint a portrait of one whose vast energies, appetites, talent, ruthlessness, insouciance for civic norms and great wealth have made him, in the words of a Rolling Stone cover, a rock star: a politician who is less a tribune of the people, more an absolver of their sins through example. “He loves women,” Patrizia d’Addario, the escort who slept with Berlusconi in his Rome palace, said simply, speaking of the 20-girl party he (with one male aide) hosted. “So he likes women,” said a 90-year-old in a barber’s shop. “We all do that.” Franchetti’s portrait concludes, in part, that the trouble with Italy’s politics is the Italians, and that Berlusconi is inescapably an Italian political creation.

This is only partly true: postwar Italians have mainly had grey, even anonymous, leaders. Hinted at but not explored is the model Berlusconi presents – one that has found strong echoes in French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian premier Vladimir Putin. That model is of one who can successfully project himself through mastery of the media and, to be sure, Berlusconi’s mastery is the more easily achieved since he owns or controls six of the seven main channels.

But state patronage and private understandings with media owners can achieve some of the same effect, and although democratic choice can still cut against that – Sarkozy, a great media manipulator, is falling in the polls – the card media give to a manipulating incumbent is often an ace. Italy pioneered fascism, Christian democracy and Eurocommunism in the 20th century; it may now be pioneering media populism.

And one day, all crimes may be solved as they are in The Mentalist (Five Friday). Now in its second series, the show was created by Bruno Heller, a producer/writer behind the HBO/BBC epic Rome. The Mentalist is more modest in scale, if large in its premise – which is that Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), a psychic whose wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer, can solve crimes by divination. He has attached himself as an adviser to the California Bureau of Investigations, in part to track down the killer, but is pressed into service on more routine incidents. He works through close observation of witnesses and suspects, displaying all but psychic powers.

It’s been a big hit in the US and it’s skilfully constructed, pushing the cop series envelope out a bit but keeping it within the constraints of an ad-broken hour show, with a cast of semi-goofy agents who blunder about saying, “Huh?” Jane is a kind of third millennium, Californian Sherlock Holmes (and the agents a collective Dr Watson), with some of the attributes Hollywood thinks are English: he wears a waistcoat and he’s arrogant. It’s a bit better than OK as vacant viewing – Baker is a relaxed and attractive actor, who keeps his irony in check. But, otherwise, it’s mental.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd