Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Owen Smet of the Culver City Police Department. Smet is also a former range manager for the Beverly Hills Gun Club. Smet relates how business at the Gun Club went up drastically after the riots. He attributes this to the collective sense of danger the riots created in the city, as well as to people’s desire to protect themselves at any cost. Smet describes himself as “a very good shot,” attributing this to his years in Vietnam.
The higher sales at the Gun Club illustrates one of the major consequences of the riots: a heightened sense of fear among LA’s more privileged communities, who perceived the violence of the riots and the Black community’s call for justice as threats to their livelihood.
Themes
Smet explains the guns they keep at the shop: smaller-caliber guns at the top, the most powerful guns at the bottom. Most gangs use nine-millimeter guns for drive-by shootings. Smet feels confident that the gangs are better armed than anyone else.
Smet’s comment about gangs draws an implicit comparison between gang violence and the efforts at self-defense undergone by the Gun Club’s members. He implies that members are privileged, given the wealth of the Beverly Hills neighborhood. The comparison unintentionally unites Los Angeles’s citizens from disparate walks of life, suggesting that what the wealthy and the gang members have in common is a shared desire for self-preservation and a shared sense of fear.
Themes
