Victims, victimizers, and viewers: roles in conflict dynamics

Anna Devere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles: Similarities And Differences Between Victims, Victimizers, And Viewers

After reading and reflecting on Anna Devere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles (1992), I find that I both agree and disagree with the critic Robert Brustein's comment, in The New Republic (Vol. 210, no. 18, May 2,1994, pp 29- 31) that within Twilight: Los Angeles: "Smith's subjects divide essentially into victims, victimizers, and viewers, although it is sometimes difficult to determine which is which." Brustein also suggests, within that review, that Smith might be better thought of "as a sociologist than artist." I disagree with that second comment, since sociology is, after all, an academic study of groups within society, and Twilight: Los Angeles is an artistic rather than an academic text (despite Smith's having used interview research methods similar to those of a sociologist. Instead, I suggest that, as the author of Twilight: Los Angeles, Anna Devere Smith is more of a social observer/artist. Several characters in the play could be considered either victims; victimizers, or viewers, and in some cases, could arguably be considered to be all three. In this essay, I will analyze the inherent overlapping, of these three categories identified by Brustein, in terms of the contents of the monologues of three separate characters in the play. I will also explore the background, and the apparent artistic intentions, of Anna Devere Smith in Twilight: Los Angeles

First, Anna Devere Smith is, apparently, a long-term social observer, not just of the Rodney King trial and its aftermath, but of other national ethnic and cultural conflicts as well. Smith has also written various other plays that similarly explore interrelationships between personal and group identity; race, and culture within the United States. An earlier play of hers, Fires In the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, And Other Identities, for example, focused on the clash that took place in 1991 between the Orthodox Jewish and African-American Brooklyn communities. According to Stage and Screen, moreover:

As playwright and performer, Anna Devere Smith has created a body of theatrical works that she calls "On the Road: A Search for American

Character." Based on actual events in recent American history, and evolving from the many interviews she conducts, each play explores the language of racial and cultural differences. Her verbatim portrayals, interwoven with documentary footage, are performed as one-woman shows in which Smith

gives voice to characters as diverse as the American experience.

Further, as "Twilight Los Angeles, 1992: Introduction" states:

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is the fourteenth part of Anna Devere Smith's work in progress, On the Road: A Search for American Character, begun in

1983. The play's unifying focus is the civil unrest in Los Angeles following the April, 1992, verdict in the first Rodney King trial, presented from the perspective [sic] of the wide range of persons that Smith interviewed.

Several characters within Twilight: Los Angeles, including Josie Morales; Elvira Evers; and the Anonymous Young Woman Student, arguably fit into the category of either victim; victimizer, or viewer, and sometimes in fact, fit into more than one of these categories simultaneously, or even all three.

One character, Josie Morales, who works as a clerk-typist in the city of Los Angeles, is described as an uncalled witness [for reasons the prosecution refuses to make clear to Josie Morales) in the Rodney King case. As she states, in the part of the play called "Indelible Substance," speaking from "a conference room at her workplace, downtown Los Angeles":

We lived in Apartment A6

right next to A8,

which is where George Holliday lived.

And, um the next thing we know is, um ten or twelve officers made a circle around him and they started to hit him.

I remember that they just not only hit him with stick, they also kicked him, and one guy, one police officer, even pummeled his fist into his face, and they were kicking him. (Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, p. 282)

Here, Josie Morales functions mainly, and obviously, as a viewer who describes what she has seen in her neighborhood, where her very own neighbor (George Holliday) was a victim of police brutality. Josie is arguably herself a victim as well, though, in the sense that she, too, must live in fear within such a neighborhood, not only of being herself a possible future victim of crime, but of being abused, or witnessing someone else she knows being abused, by the police as well. Later, Josie's would-be, much-anticipated testimony in the Rodney King trial falls 'victim', so-to-speak, to the prosecutor's manipulations of the case toward his own ends; he informs Josie that she will not testifying after all, since her testimony apparently "contradicts what Melanie Singer said" (p. 282), even though, as Josie states:

I just knew in my heart this is wrong-you know they can't do that.... (Smith)

The prosecutor in the Rodney King case, then, will keep Josie from 'victimizing' the white police officers by telling the truth about how they, and officers like them, have brutalized not just Rodney King, but others like him as well. Josie herself is both a victim and a viewer as well: of the prosecutor's manipulations and the brutality within her neighborhood itself.

On the night of the Rodney King verdict, another character, Elvira Evers ("To Look Like Girls from Little") and her friend Frances are (it seems) outside in a crowd, where everyone is looting various stores and businesses as a reaction to the verdict (Elvira and Frances may also be taking part in the looting; if so they are victimizers of the businesses being looted). Elvira sees someone throw a bottle (probably through a shop window, to break it), which momentarily distracts Elvira from the fact that she herself has just been shot in the abdomen.

Frances, who is pregnant, is bleeding badly, too badly, Elvira knows, to wait fifteen minutes for an ambulance to arrive. So Elvira manages to drive herself and Frances quickly to the hospital, where Elvira is immediately treated in the emergency room. Later learns that the bullet had lodged in her baby's arm, making both Elvira and her unborn baby victims of tonight's violence. Frances, Elvira's friend, is mystified as to why anyone would shoot Elvira. She states: "Why have they shot you?" (p. 283). Much is left unsaid within this narrative; it is possible that Elvira herself is a looter (victimizer), as well as a wounded victim, and an observer (viewer) of all that has transpired that night.

A third character in Twilight: Los Angeles, The Anonymous Young Woman, a USC student and sorority member ("I Was Scared") feels very afraid, after the Rodney King verdict is announced, that angry blacks may storm her sorority house in protest, since upper-middle class USC students like herself and her peers may represent the "victimizers" of blacks and other oppressed minority groups. However, she herself "was scared to death" (p. 285), i.e., frightened of becoming a victim. She is a viewer of the fright of her sorority sisters, as everyone sits, terrified, in their hallways, planning what they will do if anyone dangerous (angry blacks) knocks on the door.