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 Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles. They sit in his City Hall office. A woman from the public relations department sits in on the interview. Bradley sits in an armchair, his long legs outstretched. He remembers how he and his department had drafted statements to release to the press in advance of the Rodney King trial verdicts. They drafted different messages for a guilty verdict, a partial verdict, and verdict of acquittal on all counts, though Bradley drafted the latter as “a precautionary measure,” doubting acquittal would happen.
Bradley’s recollection about how caught off-guard his department was by the jury’s not guilty verdicts provides additional context for the atmosphere of the city on the eve of the riots. Most people were certain that the jury would reach a guilty verdict, or, at least, that the involved officers would be held responsible for their abuse of power in one way or another.
Themes
When they received news of the acquittal, Bradley addressed the public directly to express his outrage. However, he urged people not to erase the progress society had made by responding to the injustice with violence—even if the jury’s verdict was “completely / disconnected with the TV shots that you saw.”
Bradley recognizes the disingenuousness of telling people not to respond radically to what the majority believed was a radical miscarriage of justice. His remark about the jury’s verdict being “completely / disconnected with the TV shots that [the public] saw” reaffirms the ideas presented in the anonymous juror’s monologue: that the judicial system can be “completely disconnected” from a moral understanding of right and wrong.
Themes
