[On April 29th, 1992,
civil unrest erupted
in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video
were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and
other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special
weekend post on the narrative
of “race riots” itself.]
On the problems
and possibilities of shoehorning historical footage into historical fictions.
Probably the
most surprising thing for this AmericanStudier about the TV series The People vs. O.J. Simpson:
American Crime Story (2016) was that the show’s heart and soul was David Schwimmer’s multi-layered
and moving performance as Robert Kardashian. But a close second was the way
that the show’s creators chose to open the first episode: with
news footage from the Rodney King beating, trial, and riots. Of course this
was another famous and divisive trial (and especially verdict) from the same
city, just two years before the Nicole
Brown Simpson/Ron Goldman murders and three years before the O.J. trial and
verdict. And of course both historical events featured the Los Angeles police
department in prominent and controversial (to
put in mildly) ways. But at the same time, for a TV show focused so fully
on offering fictional interpretations of a very particular set of historical
figures and events, in a very specific time frame (from the first discovery of
Simpson and Goldman’s bodies through to the immediate aftermath of the O.J.
verdict), opening with distinct events from 2-3 years prior was far from an
obvious or inevitable choice, and one that demands our attention and analyses.
In at least some
important ways, I would say that that choice reflects problems with historical fiction
as a genre. I’ve written elsewhere
in this space about director Oliver Stone’s controversial and somewhat
underhanded choice to intersperse actual historical footage of and around the
JFK assassination into his conspiracy theory-promoting historical fiction film JFK (1991), without in any way clarifying
which footage is which. People separates
its initial historical footage from the remainder of its fictional storytelling
more clearly and fully, so I’m not suggesting that it blurs the lines between
these media anywhere near as overtly as did Stone’s film. But nonetheless,
opening a show based so closely on real figures with media footage from 1991
and 1992 does indeed intertwine more than just these two disparate historical
moments and events; it seems to position its subsequent fictional
representations as similarly authentic. Of course historical fiction is always
subject to these kinds of questions, and the
best historical fiction overtly forces us to think about the various ways
in which “history” and “fiction” are not nearly as distinct as we like to
believe. But to me there’s still something a bit sketchy about using 1991-2
footage to open a 2016 fictional show about 1994-5 events.
Yet I do
understand the reasons why the creators opened with this footage, and indeed
would argue that whatever its limitations, doing so does offer an interesting lens
on both the King and O.J. histories. The show’s overt focus is of course on
O.J., and one of its central through-lines, one closely linked to both Courtney B. Vance’s Johnnie
Cochran and Sterling
K. Brown’s Christopher Darden (among other characters, but most especially those
two), is an argument that issues of race, racial profiling, and police prejudice
and brutality were among the most paramount in the developing narratives and
debates around the O.J. trial. But at the same time, the show also focuses at
length on themes of
celebrity, of the idea of a
televised trial and all of its effects, on how these late 20th
century media stories could impact issues of race and justice among many
others. And it’s worth considering whether and how those kinds of celebrity and
media threads were likewise part of the Rodney King histories—of course King
was not a celebrity like O.J. at the start of his unfolding public story, but to
some degree he became one as the events unfolded; and in any case those
events themselves were undoubtedly televised and covered in distinctly late 20th
century ways. One more complex layer to the King story, and one that this
fictional TV drama helps us consider.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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