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 Elaine Young, a real estate agent. Whose clients are mostly rich movie stars. Young’s face is disfigured from plastic surgery. She’s written about her injuries in a number of magazines. She’s an outgoing woman whose phone is always ringing. Elaine tells Smith about something she said that got her into trouble on the second day of the riots. She explains how her date cancelled on her. Newly separated, she didn’t want to be alone. However, all the news alerts were telling everyone not to leave their homes or travel on the freeway. She called her date, who arrived to pick her up.
Elaine Young’s testimony may be grouped with that of the anonymous Hollywood Agent or Judith Tur—both offer a glimpse of the riots through the perspective of LA’s upper class. Smith includes a description of Young’s plastic surgery-altered face in her stage directions, perhaps, to highlight Young’s wealth—though it’s also impossible to tell at this point if the plastic surgery is purely cosmetic, or whether it corrects injuries sustained during the riots.
Themes
When Elaine’s date arrived, they wondered where they would eat, since everything was closed. Elaine suggested they try the Beverly Hills Hotel. When they arrived, Elaine encountered swarms of “picture-business people” gathered at the hotel, lamenting the recent unrest. Elaine and her date joined them and everyone commiserated, asking themselves how something like this “could happen in California.” Elaine joined the people who gathered in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, staying until late in the night to avoid being alone. After they talked about hardship for long enough, they shifted to happier subjects to lift their moods.
What’s remarkable about Elaine’s testimony about the riots is the absence of the riots. In this way, Elaine’s experience is similar to the Hollywood Agent’s—both of their days were remarkably normal, with the exception of a slight sense of unease in the atmosphere. However, they experience no direct threats to their lives or livelihood, which is far removed from the experiences of people like the Parks, for instance.
Themes
When a news crew later interviewed Elaine to discuss the closing of the Polo Lounge, Elaine talked to them about happier times when she and her daughter would pack a bag and drive a few minutes down the road to the Beverly Hills Hotel to pretend they were on vacation—Elaine never had enough time off work to go on a real vacation. After the interview aired, a man wrote to her, berating her for making light of the riots and criticizing her affluent companions for partying while many others suffered. She wishes he had left his number so she could explain herself to him. In reality, she was just reacting in the moment to feeling safe and like she belonged with the people who were gathered at the Beverley Hills Hotel, where “no one can hurt us […] ‘cause it was like a fortress.”
Elaine seems genuinely unaware of how glib her comments to the reporter sounded to people whose lives were directly impacted by the riots. Again, Smith shows how out of touch the upper classes are. To Elaine, the Beverly Hills Hotel—and, by extension, her class privilege—is “like a fortress” that separates her and protects her from the lives of LA’s underprivileged communities. It shields her from experiencing and sympathizing with their systemic oppression and despair.
Themes
