62 pages • 2 hours read
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
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Symbols & Motifs
The Civil Rights Movement and Black Pride
One thing the play clearly establishes is that it is part of a long and extensive timeline of race struggle. The memory of the race riots of the 1960s (Anonymous College Student; Maxine Waters; Otis Chandler) crops up throughout the play. So, too, does the legacy of a retreating, unfulfilled Civil Rights Movement. This is read directly in the words spoken as well as the visual and verbal symbols which form the backdrop: the “bloodstained banner” of black struggle and its many “vestments”: Martin Luther King iconography, Malcolm X hats, Black Panther berets, the Roots TV series. On the stage, where all these monologues were intended to be performed, these symbols would have been visible statements in their own right, casting their own allusions and influencing audience reception.
This is instructive on many levels. Most simply, it places the Los Angeles riots in a long historical frame of black struggle within and against systematic racial injustice. Police brutality and disproportionate response—from lynch mobs to forced sterilization to mass incarceration—has been a part of that legacy. In this sense, Rodney King, as “Big Al” claims, was “nothing new” and he makes the point clearly by suggesting it happens every day within the county jails, which are disproportionately filled with black men. By focusing on the movement toward civil rights, however, rather than simply on the sequence of patent injustices, these witnesses announce they will not be taken for mere victims but remain committed to change, progress, and, above all, justice for a renewed and ongoing civil rights movement.
The pertinent point is that the Los Angeles riots are seen not as the white-dominated, mainstream media depicted them (as “anarchy” in the streets) but as, in effect, a protest, organized and targeted in its fashion—not purely in the “by any means necessary” approach celebrated by Malcolm X in his early career but rather by an “any means available” approach. As Maxine Waters notes, the riot must be regarded as expressing “the voice of the unheard”; it is perhaps the only way of claiming a voice and what its hearers must do is to look beyond the words themselves and to listen closely to what that voice is ultimately trying to say.
One other thing worth considering, and which Smith conveys in her deft culling of interviews, is how different the meaning and uses of the “civil rights movement” are depending on who is employing it. It is a touchstone for successful white figures like Mike Davis, Otis Chandler, and Paula Weinstein just as it is for black leaders and activists like Maxine Waters, Elaine Brown, Cornel West, Michael Zinzun, and Paul Parker. The civil rights movement might be about allowing blacks to surf with the blond-haired, blue-eyed boys (Mike Davis) or it might mean the chance to tote a gun like any white gunslinger of Hollywood vintage (Paul Parker, Allen “Big Al” Cooper). It might be represented by Martin Luther King’s peaceful civil disobedience (as Mrs. Soon-Young Han asserts) or by the militancy of the Black Panthers or by a joint union of both (Elaine Brown, who quite facilely lumps MLK with Malcolm X).
One of the most pressing points is that even perceptibly militant factions like the Panthers had both a broad vision and a precise program of action (as both Cornel West and Elaine Brown emphasize) that too often get lost in the mere symbols of black berets, leather jackets, and Malcolm X caps. If the Panthers’ notion of elevating black pride was as much about international solidarity and humanity—and focused as much on local milk drives, educational initiatives, and public safety—as it was about wielding guns in the face of white authority, it is possible that the violence and disorder of the Los Angeles riots might yield a broader vision and precise, incremental changes as well. The “bloodstained banner” is not just a symbol to be waved, or an artifact to be dusted off, but amounts to a renewed rallying cry for unmet justice and repositions the Los Angeles mayhem within a positive context of political struggle and social change.
Cosmic and Supernatural Forces
Throughout the play, a number of figures draw on cosmic and supernatural forces in the attempt to make sense of the King trial and subsequent riots. We see this, quite nakedly, in “Lightning but No Rain,” “Magic 1 and 2,” “An Indelible Substance,” and, of course, “Twilight 1 and 2.” There are even elements of it in young Rodney King’s almost mystical ability to catch fish with his bare handsand in Mike Davis’s comparison of the civil rights movement to “sunshine” and “fresh air” and to “freedom” as something located in “surf” and “the desert” (28, 30-31).
This constant reference to cosmic, climatological, and supernatural forcesgoes beyond mere colloquialism; essentially, it demonstrates that, on an emotional and perceptive level, racial injustice and its responses are so large and overwhelming, so beyond the grasp of individual experience, that they seem almost cosmic in nature. The idea of “race,”and the social constructions and systems which serve to create, naturalize, and reify this idea, seems to be so much a part of the natural order of things that it can be read in the weather and discerned only by reference to the movement of the stars, indelible substances, and magic. If these are forces largely beyond our comprehension, they are almost entirely beyond our ability to control (Betye Saar is quick to acknowledge that while “magic” may be something fun and pleasurable, it can also be demonic and destructive)(236).
Yet, as both Homi Bhabha and Twilight Bey suggest, there is genuine opportunity to be found in this apparent loss of control. With our reliable political and social moorings stripped, we have an opportunity to examine the efficacy of those systems of control which bind us, and at least in part define us. In twilight, that hour of recognition and reinterpretation, there is a chance to renegotiate what it means to be human, what is the nature of our social compacts, and how we mean to go on living.
Guns
The prevalence of guns, and the fear and worship of their power, is one of Twilight’s most striking motifs. Depending on who’s talking,guns represent either the promise of protection or theperil of sudden death. In either case, guns are everywhere in the conversation, in the incidents depicted, and in the mindset of what it means to be an American.
Cornel West fleshes out Americans’ Wild West ideal of gun-slinging machismo, an image shared by blacks and whites alike. Otis Chandler characterizes Los Angeles as an urban “jungle,” riven with violence, and Lieutenant Dean Gilmour confirms the fact, reporting gun deaths to be a daily part of L.A. life, riot or no riot. Police train their guns on helpless blacks in the accounts of Theresa Allison and Bill Bradley, while guns are an indelible part of the black ghetto, whether one is a gang member (“Broad Daylight”) or merely a common vending machine supplier.
As the riot unfolds, this prior culture of guns and violence simply explodes. Judith Tur, Chung Lee, and the Anonymous Hollywood Agent all depict the L.A. of the riots as nothing short of a war zone,and guns are seen, used, and fantasized about. The play is flush with gunshot victims, those who narrowly escape the crossfire, and those threatened at gunpoint. The son of a leading white attorney, an upstanding Korean-American businessman, and a Stanford student are as vulnerable as a Panamanian cashier or a black gang member in an American rife with guns.
With such a momentarily inordinate and universalizing threat of violence, the riot has had an alarming effect on peoples’ attitudes toward guns. While affluent whites are suddenly hysterical to arm themselves, inner-city black men have reinvested in their reverence for gun culture as a means of reasserting control and meeting fire with fire.
After the riot, one large and unasked question hangs over the play: what is to be done about all these guns—in the hands of police, gangs, and private citizens alike—within a society of distrust and anxiety, where even those assigned to “protect and serve” are susceptible to death and destruction?
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