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 Chris Oh, Walter Park’s stepson. Oh explains how a witness stated that Walter pressed on the accelerator after he was shot, ramming his car into a telephone pole. The shooter, a Black man, approached Walter’s car when he was at a stoplight, broke the window, and fired at him at close range, “execution style.”
With each new victim testimony, Smith further complicates the audience’s sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Just as she concludes an account that validates and the frustrations of rioters and seems to justify their violence, she presents a new account that renders the violence senseless, brutal, and unjustified.
Themes
