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 Anonymous Man #2, a Hollywood Agent. They sit in a chic office in Beverly Hills as the man describes the “uneasiness” that brewed in the air of the ritzy restaurant where he and other Hollywood people were eating lunch on the day the riots began. All the white, upper-middle- and upper-class people who frequented the restaurant were gossiping about what was happening in South Central, though it was still “business as usual” in their part of the city. The agent guesses it was “generic guilt” that caused “these people’s” unrest.
The Hollywood agent offers another privileged perspective on the riots. Unlike Menjivar and Evers, who both sustained psychological and physical trauma from their close proximity to the riots, the Hollywood Agent and his cohort remained safely tucked away in wealthy neighborhoods untouched by the immediate effects of the riots.
Themes
As the Hollywood Agent and his group returned to their office, they saw people running around. They decided to close the office for the day, which was unprecedented for the business—it never shuts down. Someone announced that “they” were burning down the Beverly Center, though nobody would say who “they” were. All that was important, the agent notes, was that “they” were not “us.”
The Hollywood Agent’s monologue reaffirms the “us vs. them” dichotomy present throughout the play. In this instance, us vs. them designates those who fear becoming victims (like the Agent) and those demonstrating lawlessness.
Themes
The agent recalls watching as the office hurriedly emptied out. He describes hordes of middle-aged “yuppies” in their expensive suits “fleeing like / wild-eyed… / All you needed was Godzilla behind them.” He laughs, since at this point nothing had happened. The agent was the last to leave the building.
Even the threat that the riots could hypothetically disrupt their privileged lives sends the entitled upper-class “fleeing” […] as though “Godzilla [was] behind them.” The Hollywood Agent’s testimony sheds additional light on the class tensions that contributed to LA’s state of unrest preceding the riots. In the Agent’s terrified peers, he describes a class of people for whom the mere threat of having their sheltered lives disrupted is as terrifying as a monster movie.
Themes
The agent remembers having a lot of conflicted thoughts when he feared for his and his family’s lives. He thought, “I deserve it,” then decided that it wasn’t his fault. Rather, it was the verdict that provoked the violence. Then he decided that the verdict “was just the spark,” and that tensions had been brewing for years; they were the product of a system that allows for unequal pay. He realized that all the rioters were “victims of the system.” Knowing this made him realize he did feel some guilt. He saw how “heartbreaking” it was so see so much “devastation” in the burned neighborhood.
The agent seems genuinely conflicted about his complicity in the oppression of LA’s disadvantaged communities. He acknowledges how the riots were about more than the LAPD officers’ not guilty verdicts at the first Rodney King trial—they originate from deep-seated racial and class tensions. Still, the man’s concern doesn’t seem to transform into action, and at the end of the day, his remorse at the “devastation” that wreaks havoc on a distant part of the city does little to improve the situation.
Themes
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