"TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992" (ANNA DEVEARE SMITH).   Term Paper ID:24665 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines three vignettes on hope & despair in play about city's riots after first Rodney King beating trial.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines three vignettes on hope & despair in play about city's riots after first Rodney King beating trial. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this research is to examine voices of hope and despair articulated in Anna Deveare Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which is made up of vignettes that were performed in Smith's one-woman show and that, more significantly, function as commentary on the consequences of the Los Angeles riot of 1992. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Twilight was written and then to discuss how the selected monologues convey the emotional content of social, economic, and political realities--or perceptions thereof--of the contemporary Los Angeles experience. When on a spring afternoon in 1992 the policemen who were filmed on videotape beating a black motorist, Rodney King, Los Angeles gradually became a city under seige. Smith's play title, Twilight, refers to the hours after the verdict, when events of viole Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. That Smith sharesthis sense of irony is suggested in her introduction to Garcetti'sstatement, which was given in his office: The seal of the state of California is behind his desk as well as the American flag and the flag of the state of California. The very fact of the 1992 riot is evidence of despair enacted. BibliographySmith, Anna Deveare. . The situation begs severalquestions: Was the prosecutor worried about what the facts were or werenot, or about something else--that the defendants and jurors were white orthat Rodney King was black or that Morales was not white or that she wasLatina? Next, shedoes not have the social status attached to a high-powered career; i.e.,she has the status of a job (clerk typist, or member of a support staff). For the highly charged nature of the response of theblack community can also be seen as a metaphor for a whole range ofcircumstances that affect the Los Angeles experience, and the condition ofsome individuals and groups within that experience, which point in thedirection of hope and despair together, separately, or in tension with eachother. Over lunch at Los Angeles's pricey BiltmoreHotel, Davis, who is white, articulates his observed understanding of hopeand despair in the city. . Morales explains that she told her husband at the time of the beatingitself, "We have to stay here and watch because this is wrong," even thoughhe had urged her to come away from the window: "he grew up in anothercountry where this is prevalent, police abuse is prevalent in Mexico" (67).The well-documented political realities of Mexico appear to have inuredMorales's husband to the spectacle of violence and cruelty, as if hope thatthe wrong could be righted had been abandoned. And if the result is not despair, it is surely, at minimum,cynicism. And another wretched-excess triallater taught everybody in Los Angeles that, against Garcetti's declarationto the contrary, a professionally dressed cop on the stand exudes "magic .. verdict, the fact is that it had theeffect of obliging the district attorney's office to eat Garcetti's words.To put it another way, the impulse to despair at the jury systemexperienced by Los Angeles's minority community in Simi Valley turned outto be contagious by the time O.J. Both she and Mr. Garcetti were very upbeat, friendly people (74).It seems important to recognize that here are not only the trappings ofhigh office and a public persona of geniality but also the very symbols ofconfidence and integrity in the American system, itself a symbol of hope toas it were the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to breathe freethroughout the world. Thus Garcetti's statementtakes on a savage irony, of which, one suspects, he was not remotely aware.He begins by describing jurors, policemen, and prosecutors as taking theirrespective oaths very seriously, as if there is a uniform political realityto which they all adhere. In other words, what wassupposedly a message of hope is inadvertently exposed as grounds fordespair. But as the prosecutor declined to do so--apparently topreserve the integrity of other testimony and apparently with confidence inthe power of the videotape--Morales's hope was transformed into a beliefthat the officers would be acquitted. Accordingly, the focus of this research is on monologues fromnonblacks, and principally on the subtext of what is said. First, the hope embedded in the civil rightsmovement, which urged that the "core of freedoms and opportunities andpleasures" routinely available to white kids become available to nonwhites,appears to have been transformed into disappointment precisely because thenonwhites attempted to take advantage of those freedoms. This, much more than concern aboutdowntown (= inner-city proximity) population reaction to a trial at the LosAngeles County Courthouse, would explain setting the venue in suburban SimiValley, and it places a social construction on the prosecutor's decisionnot to call Morales to testify. In other words, the economic realities hadaffected the structure of social experience and access to myriad benefitsassociated with the golden myth of Southern California. In one sense, Morales may seem like an unreliable narrator of socialhistory, given her statement that she had a prophetic dream that theacquittal would happen. One couldeven speculate whether class was a factor in the prosecution's failure tocall Morales as a witness to the beating. trials as social documents demonstrate that socialcontext means everything to political behavior and that participants in thepolitical process bring their personal histories to bear on it. Southern California's economy more generally was in disarray, andof course California's college and junior college students had been obligedto pay increasing tuition and fees since the time of the Reagangovernorship of the state. For it appearsthat certain statements convey more about the content of hope and despairin Los Angeles than their surface words would indicate. an aura . In otherwords, a negative social construction is being placed on minorities whenthey are configured as a critical mass. The benefit of Davis's analysis is that he can point toevidence of deterioration in an ethos of equality; what is more disquietingabout it is that his complaint about suffering white kids can beinterpreted, not as an open-hearted sympathy for the special disdain forminorities but rather as disappointment that, whatever the perception ofminority children, white entitlements are the real loss to the SouthernCalifornia lifestyle. .comes in with a raid jacket and guns bulging out he'll wipe himself outvery quickly, because he'll look like he's a cowboy" (75). And yet the hard reality is that had not hope and confidence in theAmerican political system been dashed by the Simi Valley verdict, Twilightwould never have been written in the first place. Young people had access to jobs and free juniorcollege education, and they could afford to have a car and cruise theSouthern California boulevards because, generally speaking, times weregood. . This appears to be particularly true of personsaffected by (or supposedly affected by) the King verdict. One wonders at the prosecution's political motives and whetherthey were informed by his social attitudes. As Smith puts it, she searched "for thecharacter of Los Angeles in the wake of the initial Rodney King verdict"(xvii). But when thishappened, "the beaches are patrolled by helicopters . This might come as a surprise to Rodney King,but Garcetti addresses "you" as if "you" were a unitary mass. . This fact points toward subtle and pernicious social andpolitical dynamics in the environment of official Los Angeles. But that title can be seen as more than just metaphor for the hoursafter the verdict. Thebehavior of the juries in each case belies Garcetti's declaration, andwhatever one may think about the O.J. . . Althoughhe does not frame his statement this way it can be inferred that white kidscruising the boulevards were perceived as having high spirits, whileminority kids cruising the boulevards are perceived as a threat. those officers were going to be acquitted" (68). He attributesthis to perceptions of boulevard-cruising youth as menacing gangs. There is a surreal quality to his assertion that "if a cop . One extremely pernicious social/political inference from the apparentfact that the prosecutor seemed opaque to the need of Morales's supportingtestimony is that those who prosecuted the police officers were notparticularly serious about accomplishing a guilty verdict. . Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. . The purpose of this research is to examine voices of hope and despairarticulated in Anna Deveare Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, whichis made up of vignettes that were performed in Smith's one-woman show andthat, more significantly, function as commentary on the consequences of theLos Angeles riot of 1992. In other words,the prosecutor's statement that Morales's testimony would contradicttestimony already on the record could be interpreted as a screen for thefact that the prosecution did not really want to support with third-partywitnesses the evidence of the videotape. But it turnsout that Morales was an "uncalled witness" (66) in the notorious SimiValley trial. As a set piece, Davis's monologue shows a transformation of socialexperience in two ways. To put it another way, where confidence and hope in the politicalstructures of civil society appear to have been betrayed, the loss is notonly to the integrity of those structures but to confidence and hopeitself. As a matter of fact, taken together, theRodney King and O.J. Both cynicism and despair can be concluded from one of the mostextraordinarily consistent expressions of hope in Twilight, from no othersource than the Los Angeles District Attorney himself, Mr. Gil Garcetti.The irony is palpable, inasmuch as reading, and then rereading again,Garcetti's manifest statement has the consequence of producing a latentsubtext whose rhetoric is diametrically opposed to it. And the wholeethos of the civil rights struggle and movement for equality inCalifornia's history was to make this available to everyone" (3 -1). Davis implies by negative reference that "generally" refers to theopportunities available mainly to white youngsters when he cites the"irony" that "even white privileged kids are losing these things," i.e.,"freedom of movement or right of assembly for youth" (31). The head of public relations, Suzanne Childs, sat in on the interview. Second, the monologue suggests thatenforcing despair upon minorities has the effect of making mainstreampopulations suffer as well, as indicated by the idea that "even" the whitekids are suffering. We begin with the statement of Mike Davis, whom Smith describes as awriter and urban critic (28). Thisdescription of a political movement informed by hope is accompanied byrecollections that economic realities of the 196 s were more hopeful thanthey were by the 199 s. Smith says that beneath the verdict, which is for her a "surfaceexplanation" of the term "riot" or "uprising" lies a "sea of associatedcauses" (xviii). But thecontent of despair and hope alike can be so subtle as to convey theopposite of what it seems. Having come of age in the city in the 196 s, achild of the working class, Davis explains, he appreciates the attempt ofthe civil rights movement to alter for the better the political realitiesof minorities, so that "black kids can be surfers too. It would be consistent, too, with the factthat in usual circumstances prosecutors and policemen are colleagues in thejustice system, working the same side of the political table; consequently,a prosecutor might not be motivated to obtain a conviction of accusedofficers. All of this is in thebackground of the words of people whom Smith interviewed when compilingTwilight. After all, what is she? In fact, however, such a statement entirelyignores political context and subtext, attributed to everything from an all-white jury to the affluent-suburban trial location and the distance--physical, social, econnomic--of that context from the sad and squalidintersection of Florence and Manchester, the heart of the black community. Now the obviouschoice for analysis in this regard might seem to be members of the blackcommunity, but there is a danger of making too much of black-whitediscrepancies of perception in this kind of analysis--not because they arenot true and important; they are. In the same manner, Davis alludesto the phenomenon of white flight from the city to armed compounds in thedesert, which he takes to mean the flight of the white working class. . A portrait of hope and confidence turned to despair and regret--notonly in Southern California opportunities but in the American legal systemas a whole as well--can be seen in the statement of Josie Morales, a LosAngeles city employee who, independent of the famed Rodney King videotape,had witnessed the beating of King from her apartment window. . that is conveyed to the jury: 'I am telling the truth andI'm here to help you'" (76-7). Garcetti neverthess acknowledges that police credibility has sufferedin recent years (not in Los Angeles alone but elsewhere in the country).But the evidence of popular culture is that the he-man image of a cop is apoliceman's cultural stock-in-trade. it's illegal tosleep in the, the beach anymore" (31). An ethnicminority, or at least married to a Latino immigrant, for a start. New York: Dell, 1993. When he saysthat confidence in police protection is "what we've been sold all ourlives," one almost suspects that he has misspoken, that he meant to say"told" but that he inadvertently let slip the fact that politicalexpediency demands a marketing strategy. It isleft to the reader to infer that this is a flight specifically away fromthe proximity to racial minorities that predominate in urban population.And meanwhile, the real economic benefits of an earlier generation haveindeed disappeared from the landscape: In 1992, the unemployment picture insouthern California was grim, and minority youth unemployment was settingrecords. The plan of the research will be to set forth thecontext in which Twilight was written and then to discuss how the selectedmonologues convey the emotional content of social, economic, and politicalrealities--or perceptions thereof--of the contemporary Los Angelesexperience. Morales's characterizationof the beating as wrong was an indirect confirmation of hope and confidencethat it could be punished by the legal system, as was her persistence incalling and writing the prosecutor and urging him to put her on the standto tell her story. . When on a spring afternoon in 1992 the policemen who were filmed onvideotape beating a black motorist, Rodney King, Los Angeles graduallybecame a city under seige. She was an elegant, simply dressed attractive blond woman. "You want to believe the officers," Garcetti says, "because they arethere to help you" (74-5). . The danger is that they could fall preyto a peculiar ordinariness, despite Maxine Waters's impassioned referenceto "the unheard" (162) of American society in general and Los Angeles inparticular, to whom expectations of police brutality in the midst ofisolation from mainstream opportunities and benefits have become a way oflife. . However, in another sense, the dream itself is anegative metaphor for the fact that Morales's perceptions of politicalreality (itself a consequence of certain social realities of white-dominant, police-dominant Simi Valley) became clearer as the prosecutionbehaved against her expectations of the justice system. went to court in downtown Los Angeles. That is why twilight is metaphorical for the condition ofLos Angeles itself, poised between the day of hope, symbolized by greatwealth and opportunity for some, and the night of despair, symbolized bygreat poverty and lack of opportunity for others. . Smith's play title, Twilight, refers to thehours after the verdict, when events of violence and property theft anddestruction began to unfold. Her analysis,indeed, seems on the money, when she cautioned the prosecutor: "If you donot put witnesses, if you don't put one resident and testify to say whatthey saw . 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