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 Bill Bradley, a Democratic senator from New Jersey. Bradley speaks about how the law still treats different people differently. The LA riots made him think about something that happened to his African American friend during an internship with a big LA law firm in the 1970s. The firm’s partners traditionally invited the interns to their homes for Sunday brunch. One Sunday, the friend was driving with a white woman intern to a partner’s house in a wealthy neighborhood. Suddenly, the police apprehended the pair, apparently believing that the woman was “being held against [her] will.” It took 20 minutes to convince the police that the woman was not being held against her will. The officers refused to apologize to Bradley’s friend, acting as though nothing had happened as they left the scene. Bradley shares this story to show how the Rodney King incident isn’t anything new.
Bradley represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate from 1979 to1997. The story he shares about his friend’s experience being racially profiled shows how widespread systemic racism is in police departments. This is a common method the play employs, interspersing personal anecdotes between statements about the structural flaws that caused the situations described anecdotally. The effect is a nuanced portrayal of racial tensions in 20th-century Los Angeles that shows how systemic flaws harm, terrify, and oppress people.
Themes
The riots also make Bill Bradley think back to his friend’s story and speak out about the fact that the law partner did nothing when he heard about the intern’s unjustified harassment by law enforcement. This causes Bradley to wonder who is responsible for eliciting change. He believes everyone has a responsibility, making comparisons to a teen mother who realizes that having more children diminishes the opportunities for her other children, or the gang member who realizes he is responsible for pulling the trigger of his gun. He argues that institutions, too, have a moral responsibility to use their power to affect change.
Bradley believes that people who are in a position to change things have a moral obligation to do so. People with the protection and reach of powerful institutions, such as the lawyer in the big LA firm, are in a particularly capable position to set change into motion. This offers support for people like Maxine Waters, whom the play showed advocating for change. But it also condemns those like Daryl Gates, who refuses to accept that the LAPD is at all corrupt.
Themes
